An Institution, A Person, A Spirit

a Christmas letter on the failures of revolution

As the temperature outside shimmers at 20 below zero and the wind whips up snow devils in the streets and alleyways, and the exhilaration of my last foray into that beautiful violence subsides, the skin on my face still burning, my body grateful for a warm house, my mind turns again to some of the things that have been so painful these last years.

I realize how most of the people who have dedicated their lives to the building of an anarchist movement have disappointed me, some gravely, while the people who have brought an anarchist praxis to some aspect of real life and survival have inspired me the most. In the worst moments, they’ve even kept me alive.

Abandoning the movement suggests itself as a deceptively easy solution, but it’s not hard to imagine—or remember—a moment of heightened social conflict in which a competent, experienced movement would make the difference between revolution and reaction, given how a patchwork of specialized interests and skill sets would not have an easy time coalescing in the streets in the face of repression and with a pressing need to adopt a combative strategic vision.

It’s just that those who dedicate themselves to Anarchism as opposed to an anarchistic approach to healthcare or food autonomy or conflict resolution or tenant and labor organizing or forest defense do such a piss poor job of it. They try to build up a total practice of life and struggle from abstract theory, some self-unaware parthenogenesis, without realizing that there are generations of people in all the specific areas that make up life who have done it far better, or at least have the experience to know what doesn’t work.

And those who dedicate themselves to building up a Movement are either naïve activists who fancy themselves pragmatists while they enter into contracts that disarm them from the very first moment, or they are sophisticated authoritarians who develop a strategic master plan that requires them to view everyone else as sheep, and they burn the bridges of solidarity either to advance their chosen vanguard or to promote the interests of their narrow clique.

I am thinking of the many anarchists I know who have perpetuated harm through the absolutely inhuman ways they have tried to address harm. Meanwhile, right around the corner, there are so many people who have so much experience in this, who would probably shake their heads and give sad little sighs if they saw our fumbling attempts, reproducing the most elementary of errors.

If I may be so bold as to generalize, intersectional feminists and abolitionists who reject being recruited by universities and NGOs but instead do the hard work of putting transformative justice into practice, they don’t compartmentalize oppressions like theoreticians enamored of neat categories, but instead put simultaneous emphasis on the harms caused by gender and heteronormativity, by ableism and our society’s paradigm of health, by racism and anti-Blackness, by colonialism and the constant production of whiteness, by economic exploitation and precarity, by borders and surveillance, realizing that everyone is a particular map of power and oppression, of harm and healing, of potential for repair and potential for despair. As such, they promote a methodology that is not reproducible, that centers care and attentiveness to people’s stories and limitations. They reject perfectionism (and the hypocrisy and authoritarianism that always accompany it) and strive for healing, for improving one way or another from the very imperfect place where we find ourselves now.

Many people who orient themselves towards the movement, though, rather than towards survival or towards their neighbors or towards their own lives, cannot refer to these generations of experience because they don’t have the humility to seek it out, so instead they read a couple zines and whip out prefabricated solutions, brutalizing complex experiences to fit people—story-less, depersonalized—into preconceived categories and processes, and treating any criticism or resistance as blatant support for Oppression and thus a clear sign of evil. To justify this approach, they implicitly refer to a corpus of theory that has severe limitations.

Perhaps we can conceive a trinity: the institution, the person, and the spirit. Classical anarchism and much of anarchism today puts its emphasis on an analysis of the institutions and the structures of our society, how they developed historically and what they do to the possibility of life. Anarchism also put a great emphasis on the question of spirit, a spirit of domination animating the structures of oppression and a contrary spirit of rebellion and growth and freedom moving through living communities. Unlike the revolutionary ideas it coevolved with, anarchism refused to define the structure as producing the spirit or vice versa, but allowed these things to be entangled, both one and multiple.

As for the person, though, classical anarchism did not offer great insight nor did it purport to delve too deeply. After all, anarchists were reacting to the shackles of Christianity that hid questions of structural oppression with the device of individualized vice or virtue. Anarchism’s major contribution to personhood was to suggest that in fact people were capable of everything (and therefore had a duty to greatness, or at least decency). However, the theorizers and practitioners of anarchism did not claim to locate all the answers within their framework. Anarchists a hundred years ago showed a great interest in the psychological and medical movements of their day, debating which innovative frameworks showed a liberatory potential and which were an updating of oppression. They showed the same curiosity and humility towards other corpuses of knowledge that many anarchists today lack.

Their main flaw in this regard, at least among Western anarchists, was to see people through their individuality rather than through their relationships. And an individual in the shadow of institutions and Manichean spirits can only be a victim, a villain, or a hero.

That same impossibility, that same exclusion of all the complexity of real life, is present in many of our failings today. Even the way I experience it, the language I use, is colored by this framework. And so, in dramatic prose, we fail our ideals rather than neglect our needs.

My partner recently reminded me I shouldn’t see the comrades who have hurt me as betraying my trust. Rather, they haven’t met my expectations. It’s not quite so brutal to feel disappointed as to feel betrayed. It’s okay that I expect very little from the vast majority of you, just as it’s okay if you expect very little of me.

After all, we have to protect ourselves. We are constantly letting one another down; we are never enough for us. That is the very definition of life under capitalism.

If we could learn, though, if we could get better. Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise?

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Illustration by Grace Wilson