"The means are the ends and there is no other end apart from how we treat each other right now."
{note: author does not claim to identify with, nor faithfully represent, tenets of anarchism. Philosophy is merely personal.}
Originally written: Oct ‘20 Lightly edited: July '24
[NYT original piece: here]
[Anarchist representative group Crimethinc’s response: here]
Generalization in commentary is a tricky beast: half necessary, necessarily unwhole. When we comment, so must we go. And so goes the New York Times editorial board with a recent something titled the ‘truth about today’s anarchists.’ Charting the role anarchists have played in violent disruption across the country at protests against the Trump administration and the American police state, they tell a story of the unsavory tactics of ‘black bloc anarchists in half a dozen cities’. The protagonist of the story, a photojournalist who joined the group on some marches to observe up close, ‘respects the idealistic goal of a hierarchy free-society, but grew increasingly uncomfortable with the tactics used by some anarchists.’
Throughout, we learn that the ‘mayhem that unfolded in the wake of the police killing <re: murder> of George Floyd…wasn’t mayhem at all,’ but ‘strategically planned, facilitated, and advertised on social media by anarchists who believed that their actions advanced the cause of racial justice.’ In some cities, the Pacific Northwest basically, we’re told that they’ve attracted a ‘cultlike energy’ and the reader is directed to Crimethinc, an anarchist publication advocating a strategy where ‘black-clad figures break windows, set fires, vandalize police cars, then melt back into the crowd of peaceful protestors <and> when the police respond by brutalizing innocent demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets and rough arrests, the public’s disdain for law enforcement grows. It’s Asymmetric Warfare 101.’
Within the common perception of anarchism as a dirty word, a negative tactic aimed at turning orderly society into an unmaintained dumpster fire, this destruction is alarming, but no surprise. With some awareness of the problem of generalization and a vague pass at neutrality, the editorial board makes sure to let us know that an anarchist podcast called ‘the ex-worker’ ‘explains that while some anarchists believe in pacifist civil disobedience inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, others advocate using crimes like arson and shoplifting to wear down the capitalist system.’ A counterposed pair is always chosen with a view to emphasize the latter.
Given that both the subtitle and the second paragraph call it ‘insurrectionary anarchism’ instead of just anarchism as the catchy title implies, it quickly emerges that we’re not actually focusing on anarchism itself but a wing, or particular school of thought, within anarchism, despite the titular lumping together. To identify anarchists as a homogenous group highlights the difficulty with labeling. It’s as ill-founded as the notion that Islam equals jihad or that an interest in basic social support systems is full blown communism. The nature of –isms, be they capital, social, commun, anarch, catholic, islam, ad infinitum, is to have at least one school of thought that mistranslates and then misapplies (where it is not co-opting outright) a philosophy that otherwise offers, in a different translation, a productive strategy for impacting the world positively. Truth is truth the world over, and we find its exposition to varying degrees in each –ism, just as the naming of the –ism and the dross inevitably littered to other degrees across that philosophy does truth a co-opted disservice.
Little matter what the official canon of an –ism is supposed to be and what its supposed tenets are. Quality is quality, across the board. So, too, its lack. Labeling can elucidate, yet it is often a limitation, and only ever tells us what a thing is not. What does matter is when a word, anarchism in this case, nurtures within it a host of valuable propositions that find themselves obscured by negative propaganda attacking (usually false) totems prescribed to that word by an attacking virus, in this case capitalistic journalism. Those propositions need to see the light of day and, in an attempt at approximating truth or goodness, combined with valuable tenets ascribed to other worldviews with a view to building our elusive more perfect union. ‘Insurrection’ translated and then applied toward its angry cousin, destruction, has serious drawbacks. But, if softened into its intelligent cousins, disobedience and disruption, the ethos behind the idea becomes critical for humanity’s evolution out of the morass of deadly bullshit commonly called modern discourse and trafficked in this and other cases by the NYT. The harm of a headline decrying anarchism, immediately linking the whole of anarchism to insurrectionary anarchism, and then finding within insurrectionary anarchism a host of problems mischaracterized to belong to the whole of anarchism itself takes the form of triple obscuration: we miss the opportunity to find out whether, where, and how insurrectionary anarchism disengages from the core of anarchism, to find out if the actors engaged in the insurrectionary anarchism at hand are reasonably interpreting the philosophy and applying it correctly, and whether or not they even represent a philosophy. Further, we can find out the merits of anarchism, of insurrection, and examine whether they ought not be better applied in a modern context to something that looks more like civil disobedience or civil disruption and less like a group of angry teenagers who’ve stumbled upon their first real Idea.
§
Before we get to the positive, what is ‘insurrectionary anarchism’?
The opinion piece has already pitted Gandhian civil disobedience against arson and shoplifting as methods to wear down the capitalist system, and we learn that the term ‘dates back at least to the Spanish Civil War, when opponents of the fascist leader Francisco Franco took ‘direct action’ against his regime, including assassinating policemen and robbing banks.’ The piece quickly aims to convince us of a ‘method to the madness’ with a Rutgers report documenting ‘systematic, online mobilization of violence that was planned, coordinated (in real time) and celebrated by explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks that rode on the coattails of peaceful protest.’ Neverminding that this is very much not the Spanish Civil War and that the times have thoroughly changed, ‘explicitly violent anarcho-socialist networks’ hiding among peaceful protest is the kind of parasitism that actual anarchism has from the outset identified as the primary feature of predatory capitalism.
Among those sensitive to the challenges of modern life, the little doubt that wearing down the structures of dominance that currently bind us is a critical goal for sentient thriving withers ever closer to extinction with each new dawn. But those ends are where the consensus finishes. That the means are still up for debate speaks to the stupefaction of modern liberality after four decades of persistent attack. Since we lost Gandhi’s primary nonviolence student, the Reverend Doctor King, proactive non-violence has been in freefall while reactive violent protest is increasingly mainlined. No surprise for, as revered Yoga teacher B. K. S. Iyengar observes, ‘Mind is mercurial by nature, elusive and hard to grasp. It is the one organ which reflects both the internal and external worlds. Though it has the faculty of seeing things within and without, its more natural tendency is to involve itself with objects of the visible, rather than the inner world.’ It’s so much easier to look out and give blame than look inward and take responsibility. It’s so much easier to teach fear and aggression than it is to experientially learn love. Resorting to the tactics of the oppressor, wanting to ‘burn this motherfucker down’ instead of use reason to appeal to humanity, is the easy response. It’s also a sign of the material and spiritual crises that afflict us in this most urgent century. The far-right relies on separatist violence. The left cannot afford to stoop to the same decrepitude.
Nothing is completely black and white and there are levels to violence. Acritically justifiable, lazy, easy, and understandable, physical violence, especially wanton, is nevertheless the dirt track below the low road. Looting, burning, and crippling locally-owned small business is the epitome of spineless aggression, similar to the sucker punch game where young teens punch random people on the street. If one must loot and burn, try a Bank of America. Still not condoned by the best of progressive thought and a false solution riddled with problems, it better approximates the (structural/ corporate) locus of the violence done to our citizenry, even as its flaccidity inflicts more harm to individual workers than the ownership. An eye for an eye is the low road and the hints of where it leads are found in Monica Sharma’s critical warning about ‘the false dichotomy between being and doing.’
In the final analysis, the universe produces itself. War begets war and love begets love. Violence, violence and peace, peace. Our own evolution shows that we are, as Sagan put it, the universe evolving in an attempt to know itself and it is wholly likely that subsequently evolved forms of consciousness will develop Harari’s God Complex and go on to do the only thing that they know, create experimental universes of their own. It’s no coincidence that the primary and most lasting critique of Marxism comes from anarchism’s most adept theorist, Mikhail Bakunin, who argued that a working class attempt to take over the means of production is doomed from the outset to devolve into the same abuse of power it set out to destroy. We see this repetition phenomenon throughout nature, not least in the way a pervasive worldview like capitalism commodifies everything it touches. If we think negatively, if we look to destroy, if we resort to physical violence, we dive headfirst into the Trumpian swamp. The means are the ends and there is no other end apart from how we treat each other right now. Such basics are impossible to overstress.
In 1962, at the height of the Cold War amid existential fears about nuclear annihilation, Rajendra Prasad illuminated the fundamental weakness of this low road and in the same sentence the merit of the unassailable high road when he noted that there is no moral equivalent to nonviolence. If the great psychological emancipator of the 20th Century, Jiddu Krishnamurti, is correct in defining violence as separation and separation means building walls, then we can say that the direct opposite to violence is freedom. Taking nonviolence as equitable to creating conditions of freedom for the whole of sentience, constrained only by the laws of the very same nature which provide for the evolution of that sentience, we find nonviolence precisely embodied by what has in the last two centuries been called, by many, anarchism. Luminaries like David Graeber, Noam Chomsky, and George Monbiot are just a few of those expressing philosophical affinity. Incidentally, creating the conditions of creative freedom for sentience within only elemental confines is also the job description of a universe creator. Proper anarchism is universal alignment, and we humans do not have the omniscience to be responsible for violence.
Misunderstanding of the importance of those functional rules of the universe, the inability to see the fabric of Indra’s Net, and the hyper-connectivity, or synergistic reliance, of all phenomena hinders both conceptions of anarchism and its possible application. The adequate amount and strength of government is not no government. That simply cannot be, if we are to live together in any significant size. Rather, what we ask of any governmental structure is that it align with intelligence, be responsive and accountable to those it represents, and justify its authority by making intelligent choices, admitting eagerly when it learns that it has failed to do so. A far cry from the limited government of the failed Tory and Republican experiments with budgeting and governance.
An insightful way to look at a societal body and imagine its functioning is to look at a physical body. A physical body has at least a dozen aspects that are critical to its functioning; sufficient damage to most organs leads to catastrophic failure, whereas damage to the electrical, or nervous, system greatly alters the functional capacity of the organism if not enough to cause death, and damage to appendages heavily hinders leverage capacities like movement and strength. Of the societal body, we could see in government the nervous system, in institutions the organs, and in infrastructure the appendages.
Regarding nervous systems, Yogic philosophy intertwines psychological and emotional health to spinal flexibility. One can live a total human life with a damaged spine, but only partially and specifically damaged and it then takes a powerful sense of will and beautiful mind to overcome the challenge. Endowed with a robust neurological system is about the last way one would define nation-state governance in the past half century, even as conservatives the world over have battled hysterically against the boogeyman of ‘big government’. Flickers of flexible social freedom in Germany and Scandinavia, under an assassinated Salvador Allende in Chile, and held in the widespread ordinary citizen’s belief in democracy are ravaged by fundamentalist free-market capitalist free radicals pillaging the public sector while masquerading under freedom’s banner. (The Chinese government may be lithe, it’s infrastructure the stuff of legend, but its institutions are hollow, a robotic consciousness.) The UN is supposed to offer a globalized governance yet, hampered by executive veto, still waits to exist in its stated capacity, robbed of any responsive flexibility, one full average human life after its inception. Which is to say that our global, social body is attempting to function without a nervous system.
A well-functioning brain consumes about 20% of a body’s energy supply. In the United States, our military alone consumes around 13.3% of our financial capacity (2023 figures) and the richest 1% hoard around 43% of global financial assets, erroneously deviating the flow of critical resources. Leaving aside the incredible waste and loss in the military’s leaky budget, how is the rest of government supposed to function? What of education, cultural intelligence? With its state-of-the-art evolutionary design, the human body manages to function improbably well with such a distribution. To imagine that we can’t create a government that determines the flow of resources while taking only one-fifth to maintain itself and building a powerful, well-balanced societal machine that spends it’s time functioning on an entirely different plane than worried about government-cared-for banalities of self-sustenance is to court cynical absurdity. That we can have government strong, lithe, ethical, responsive, and invisible where not needed, maintained by selfless public servants educated in the art of humane love and the philosophy of real freedom, is a dream deferred only by uncreative cynicism under a centuries long stupor of illusory self-orientation and theistic fear-fantasy. Government at its best, never before seen on this planet, functions always with an effort to give its citizenry increasing modicums of freedom. Quick to respond to threats to that freedom and as quick to disappear into the background when all is well, the government needed to steer ourselves away from the icebergs ahead is precisely the opposite of the bloated, deregulated cancer we have today.
§
Historically, a sufficient understanding of anarchism is nearly synonymous with its adoption, at least with those of us truly interested in freedom for both ourselves and others. It takes a great degree of faith in the human spirit to believe in the value of letting others be free and a hefty amount of ego and fear dissolution to combat the covetousness of power or the refuge of religion. <See: Ibram X. Kendi on freedom to and freedom from>
An ironic, and deeply hopeful, point in socio-political considerations is that we can be relatively sure that a significant majority of our species wants generally the same thing out of life. Our genetic similarities make the opposite simply impossible. Lining up all the individual bits of humans that are different, those bits we are able to see so well exactly because of our sameness, might take one, say, from LA to New York. On that scale, lining up each bit of our sameness might take one around the globe nearly a thousand times. On the one hand, subtleties are of critical importance. Nuance is one of the beautiful aspects of the human mind, and a sensitivity to the profound effects of slight variations helps us to tease out the specifics of what is going on with humanity and how we ought to think about solutions to our woes. On the other hand, too much specialization can obscure the fundamental slightness of those variations. When we zoom in, two bits that were side by side become further and further apart, whereas zooming out fuses those same two bits into a whole of their own. In a vacuum, neither method is more correct than the other and each thought-tool offers valuable information. We need to be very aware of both our hyper-similarity and our differences, of our oneness and twoness, the fact that I am you and you are me, but that you are also you and I, me. We cannot exist without our brethren of life, such as the pollinating bee, and we also do exist as not bees. Importantly, that recognition has to be held simultaneously. The danger is an over-reliance on either technique; zoom out too far for too long and the mind becomes unable to differentiate important aspects of day-to-day life, but zoom in too close for too long and we forget about what is outside of the frame. Disassociation on the one hand, scientific reductionism on the other. In both cases, otherness is lost, and our connective tissues are weakened. That’s why the middle way has always been the answer to nearly every psychological, philosophical, spiritual, social, or cultural question. Buddhism famously recommends the middle way, ‘everything in moderation’ is perhaps the ultimate guide to how to approach a life, and Martin Luther King found his political road on the high road ridge line between the excesses of socialism and capitalism.
So it must go for any worldview wishing to be associated with intelligence, as anarchism tends to be. Intelligence simply doesn’t correlate with any kind of violence, especially wanton, beyond as a very last measure of protective life sustenance. This is The Way of the Bodhisattva. The truth that institutional structures of capitalist society violate the tenets of life sustenance is beyond doubt. Massive multi-national corporations, buffeted by prostrate politicians and a deregulated banking system have shredded the middle class, dehumanizing ever larger portions of society—the ultra rich and the ultra poor increasingly disconnected from what can even be called a human existence—while the sixth extinction is our legacy for the natural world. Any who doubts that police departments across the country routinely engage in domestic terrorism needs only to listen to Kenneth Walker’s tale of the murder of his girlfriend, Breonna Taylor. That the police officer Walker shot in the leg is suing him for emotional distress instead of being charged with negligent homicide is the hallmark of a system that does not give a fuck about you, Walker, or even the police officer. So, make serious arguments about recalibrating police departments and re-enacting regulation for banks, and place serious pressure on critical status quo points. Stop business ‘as it is’, block traffic, blockade banks, disrupt everything that has to do with the toxic flow of capitalism. Argue for the justification of defensive violence, if you must, against those that make violence against us. That does not include burning Migizi, ‘a Native American nonprofit in Minneapolis, <that> raised more than $1 million to buy and renovate a place where Native American teenagers could learn about their culture—only to watch it go up in flames.’ If we’re unable to tell the difference between Migizi and JP Morgan, we’re fucked. If we don’t have the wherewithal to defend the former, what are we doing? If we don’t categorically reject and vociferously condemn every actor engaged in ‘insurrection for insurrection’s sake’, as the article's final point argues, we have no moral high ground from which to suggest anything. (Happily, three years on from destruction, Migizi has reopened.)
§
Some of the trouble with the perspective of the editorial board might be found in Amber A’lee Frost’s 2019 exposition. She identifies the NYT as ‘the flagship for liberal triumphalism,’ noting that ‘it holds the line of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”—the notion that all serious ideological conflict crashed to a halt with the suspension of the Cold War, with very little at stake in future political disputes beyond regional trade accords and fine tuning of currency regimes.’ If she appears a bit hyperbolic, that is tempered by consideration of liberalism’s utter collapse under the ideological leadership of the publication in question. Her point is elucidated by any of the myriad of current events that together make the crumbling of the old American project and its legacies of mass inequality, an utter lack of culture, and the sixth extinction. She notes that even Fukuyama has retracted his claim, arguing that ‘socialism ought to come back’.
No one doubts that the mainstream media played a significant part in Trump’s 2016 election, with the amount of free ad time a shocking mountain to the climate crisis’ molehill, and CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin exemplifying the sentiment with a half-hearted ‘oops’ mostly drowned out by the sound of the wealth class gulping in their ever-growing riches as they watch, slurpee in hand and profoundly unbothered by events that barely affect them, the film of mainstream society scorching in exactly that dumpster fire we’re supposed to believe it is anarchists who lit. She notes accordingly that ‘the NYT compulsively analyzes and scrutinizes everything Trump ad nauseam because it pays the bills by cultivating an audience, flattering them, and keeping them stimulated.’ For her, the decline in standards at the Times is endemic among all of mainstream journalism, an inevitable result of capitalist commodification.
As Frost points out, “The paper’s collective decision to dedicate space—even in the infinite arena of Web content—and resources to such utterly meaningless and unnewsworthy trivialities indicates an editorial commitment not to journalism, but to educated-middle-class dinner party talking points.” She’s talking about gossip masquerading as news, though it’s further notable that what is newsworthy about much of Times news is less the news and more the supbar quality of the perspective framing it. Bret Stephens boring everyone to death with talk about the spiritual hemorrhoids that Nikole Hannah-Jones’s fantastic 1619 project (a NYT gem, it must be said) has given him, and Tom Cotton’s in-ink meltdown over the anti-racism protests that Ibram X. Kendi reminds us are the largest ever (93%) peaceful mobilization of American citizens in our history are both part of this year’s journalism Darwin Award finalists. That Cotton imagines he’s defending some great American dream by advising his government to ‘send in the troops’ on protestors brings a host of questions: what he thinks is un-American about American citizens expressing their desires for justice, what he thinks the role of government is, how stupid he thinks everyone else is, and how upset he is about his still winless record in a lifetime of dick-measuring contests. That some aspect of the Times believes it is sharing with us important thought, the words of a perspective that we may not agree with but are undeniably useful in an appraisal of modern American philosophy, leaves one dumbfounded. Are we really so stupid? So banal? So irrelevant?
The crux of Frost’s argument is simple, “the greatest factor in the decline of liberal journalism, however, is the decline of the Left itself.” She knows, as does the Times, that it's not really bothered with transmitting important thought. It might like to, as an aside if it’s fortunate and thriving on all cylinders, but it’s main focus is money. It has already been commodified and, as Chomsky noted nearly a half century ago, the self-interest of the organism called market fundamentalism is to pre-select, through cultural ostracizing, those who will rise to it’s loci of influence—including big-time, mainstream, barely left-of-center, news organizations. Those who speak the lingo, are willing to play the game, and enforce its invented rule structure are the only ones who could ever, say, become the CEO of Boeing and accept a massive multi-million dollar severance package after cutting corners so heavily that two full plane loads of civilians die on your watch. It is unimportant whether they are true acolytes of the system as long as they are willing to surrender their energy to its will, either for actual belief or simple self-enrichment. Chomsky famously lacked the ‘concision’ to be interviewed on mainstream American television about anything socio-political despite his critically insightful perspective, and those billions of us who don’t find it within our ethics to crush others for the sake of personal self-enhancement will never become CEO, or Senator. Only now, with folks like Cori Bush and Pramila Jayapal joining the Squad, do we find humans without major self-enhancement motivation increasingly elected to positions of power. That they are not capitalists is precisely the point.
“With the rise of internet “content,” major news outlets have now expanded their op-ed and opinion sections into a stupefying ne plus ultra of BuzzFeed-style clickbait. The result is a vast pool of pseudo-political content, wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle.”
Pseudo-political or not, this piece joins a long line of shallow Times opinion. It tries to highlight an aspect of today’s modern political landscape and succeeds only in obscuring the reality of the landscape in purports to illuminate. A group of people that are burdened either by an incomplete grasp or a woeful interpretation of the philosophy they have written on their masthead are going around wreaking havoc in its name? And that’s news? Perhaps in the same way that—spoiler alert—not all muslims are jihadists, or that not everyone with a PhD is to be trusted as an expert, or that not all lawyers will follow the law. Or, perhaps more pointedly, that a news outlet is faithfully trafficking in the news. But surely this is not real news. Just as these poor excuses for insurrectionists are going around believing themselves to be actually furthering any cause associated with cultural justice, does the organization or institution tasked with bringing us perspective on our culture believe it manages to describe accurately for us the landscape in question?