The Normalization of the Multiplicity
Brief Thoughts on Anarchist Prefiguration
Characteristic of modernist thought is its tendency to believe that it has arrived at the Truth, hence turning the coercive apparatuses of the state to the task of holding things in place.1 Claiming the imprimatur of science and progress, the state imposes an hegemony of thought and a pyramidal socio-economic pattern. Nothing in society may exist without its blessing, and nothing is strong enough to escape its gravitational field. To the modern mind, to question this hegemony and this pattern is to set oneself in opposition to science and progress. Progressing is, by definition, developing steeper hierarchies and more consolidated power, with fewer questions to the point of total social and ideological monoculture.
Challenging this socially and environmentally destructive pathology is among anarchism’s distinctive reasons for being. Anarchists imagine a far flatter and more polycentric future, premised on the kind of antipathy to certainty that ought to be at the heart of a scientific approach to the world. An anarchist future would not be perfect, nor should we regard such a future as a terminal point, stable and permanent. Anarchism provides us a way of thinking about social, ethical, political and economic issues, a set of methods and tools. An anarchist society is one engaged in a ceaseless process of reflection and self-improvement, which is to say that each of its members must be engaged in that process. Of anarchism, Albert R. Parsons remarks that it considers nothing so true or certain that it should be set in place as a fixed dogma. He writes,
Other schools of thought are composed of crystallized ideas—principles that are caught and impaled between the planks of long platforms, and considered too sacred to be disturbed by a close investigation. In all other “issues” there is always a limit; some imaginary line beyond which the searching mind dare not penetrate, lest some pet idea melt into a myth.
Anarchists hope to cultivate an attitude more than a particular set of social plans or institutions that cannot be changed or challenged—an attitude that forever subjects expressions of power and privilege, old and new, to rigorous scrutiny. Horizontalism is central to this attitude as “the normalization of the multiplicity,” that is, as a way of developing a level of comfort with the fact “that there are no models.”2 Echoing Parsons, many contemporary anarchists see horizontalism as “an anti-ideology ideology composed of a fluid mixture of flexible, participatory, non-dogmatic values.”3 Such ideas provide a flexible framework for our path toward genuine liberation, for building a dynamic network of overlapping bodies that protect against social breakdown (be it war, violent crime, or economic exploitation).
Insofar as we as sentient beings do not exist outside of the system of reality, as objective, external observers, we have to take seriously the fact that our theories and predictions about the future will themselves cause that future, at least in part.4 Anarchists take this responsibly quite seriously, committed to a process of imagination and creation that searches for and deracinates insidious power dynamics.5 “[T]he goal of horizontal power-sharing, consensus decision-making, participatory direct democracy, and affinity group organizing is prefiguratively to ‘cultivate the habits of freedom so that we constantly experience it in our everyday lives.’”6 As I’ve written elsewhere, In a society like the one in which we live, one of the most meaningful, transformative things we can do is undermine authority, thumb our noses at those in authority, disobey the law, and love the people who are supposed to disgust us: prisoners, the poor, the homeless, etc. This is one way we create the everyday experience of freedom for ourselves and others, weakening the psychological chokehold of arbitrary power. Though an anarchist society can still be a global one, it will be a “network of self-sufficient, self-regulating communities,”7 as against a coercively-imposed and rigid hierarchical structure.
Anarchists are thus deeply skeptical of the notion, accepted by both left and right, that today’s wealth and power asymmetries can be decoupled from one another as a practical matter. Capitalist libertarians insist that it is possible for a society to be at once free and deeply asymmetrical in terms of wealth and income levels, that such inequalities do not necessarily lead to or entail inequalities of other kinds—e.g., social or political. The centralist Jacobin left, on the other hand, believes that it is possible to concentrate political power in the state, creating an extreme asymmetry of such power, without thereby creating an economic ruling class. Both of these ideologies have absorbed the deeply ahistorical notion that it is possible to separate the political aspects of power and domination from their economic aspects. As political and economic freedom are intertwined, so are political and economic power.
Politics and political power are fundamentally about telling other people how to behave—more accurately, using physical violence and threats thereof to forbid behaviors one dislikes and compel behaviors one likes. We are driven by our ignorance to fear, and by our fear to hatred and violence, craving power over others, that we might reshape reality in accordance with our desires. Unable to be at peace with others, we cause both our own suffering and that of others. Politics is merely one institutionalization of this cycle of craving, violence, and suffering, encouraging people in vicious intolerance rather than leading them to wisdom and compassion. Thus is politics a form of psychological and emotional resignation in that it exalts the very opposite of introspection, giving its faithful permission to indulge their most unenlightened impulses. Why should one reflect on himself and his place in the world when mindless, vitriolic partisanship seems to offer the chance to forcibly remake the world and the people in it? Politics frees us from having to think carefully and empathetically. Anarchism, by contrast, counsels respect for the personal dignity and autonomy of others, which allows its practitioners to accept both difference and change with equanimity. In anarchism, then, there is an imperative of personal responsibility and transformation. A free, fair, nonviolent society requires people who truly believe in and consciously live freedom, fairness, and nonviolence—a tall order, particularly for the most destructive species ever to live on earth.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State, 255.
Mark Bray, “Horizontalism” in Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach.
Ibid.
See Lex Fridman Podcast, “Sara Walker: The Origin of Life on Earth and Alien Worlds.”
Sandra Jeppesen, “Toward an anarchist-feminist analytics of power” in The Anarchist Imagination, 121.
Ibid.
Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action.