Going Public -By Cindy MilsteinSeptember 01, 2001If antiauthoritarians have helped catalyze a new New Left in the United States, and I believe they have, they now have a responsibility: to provide direction. This sits uncomfortably with anarchists—and not entirely without justification. Movements aimed at liberating humanity have often ended up forcing people to be “free.” But advancing reconstructive notions isn't inherently authoritarian, nor does it have to be coercive. Indeed without visions and strategies, movements have historically left themselves open to co-optation or, worse, been the exclusive project of an enlightened few. The point is not to shy away from sketching alternatives or keep ideas cloistered in a counterculture; instead, radicals need to patiently work out their conceptions of social change and hold them up to the light of public scrutiny. If such visions do in fact offer greater freedom, more and more people will come to them of their own choosing. To build a majoritarian movement, then, where social transformation is voluntarily embraced rather than imposed, any political perspective needs to be developed and presented in a way that prefigures “the good society” in the very process of moving toward it. Getting from a comfy subculture to culture at large is tricky. Yet past and present experiments with anarchist confederations — such as the Youth Greens, Love & Rage, and today's NorthEastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists — offer a glimpse of a noncoercive politics even as they hint at political institutions that might replace statecraft. These confederated organizations all spent months and even years describing themselves in writing, and from this basis of ongoing self-definition, went public with their principles and projects. Stepping back from these specific confederations, two factors bear emphasis: Looking Inward. Through the slow process of establishing a confederation — drafting, discussing, revising, and deciding on principles, bylaws, and even constitutions in a directly democratic manner — confederation members have to take seriously the question, What ought society look like? For the group is practicing in private would it might be like to someday publicly gather with everyone in constituting a body politic qualitatively “of, for, and by the people.” This necessitates shaping an organization from the ground up: capturing the aspirations, no matter how grandiose, of this voluntary conjoining in a founding document; detailing the internal structures that will ensure substantive and egalitarian participation; and promulgating rights and duties, backed by methods of accountability and conflict resolution. Such structures allow members to always reflect on the organization and its values, and when needed, make modifications. Thus the ethical focus, the “ought,” stays front and center. Anarchist confederations are probably not directly applicable as institutions of a self-governed society in that their raison d'ętre is the attempt to articulate relatively cohesive political beliefs — frequently reflected in the organization's name — and draw in members on that basis. In a future confederal direct democracy, while there would have to be some shared foundation, the primary thrust would likely be the balancing of the greater political differentiation generally found in society with efforts to determine a common good. Turning Outward. Confederations have been committed in the best of cases to bringing a political vision out into the public sphere. This almost behooves an organization to carefully craft its values; its ideas have, after all, no power beyond that of persuasion. It cannot coerce, so it must convince — by writing position papers, holding conferences, publishing periodicals, and perhaps most important, making its internal structure/principles an open book. In this way, a confederation enters the public sphere with a strong and transparent stance. Such a proactive maneuver sets the terms of a debate by creating one in the first place; through such debates, various radical perspectives may be welcomed or challenged, but at least they get a hearing outside leftist circles. When groups engage in political struggles in their own communities explicitly as confederation members, they simultaneously promote utopia and struggle with the reality of approximating it with others who aren't like them. The freer society may look quite different from the portraits offered by confederations, but the best hope for persuading people of the worth of antiauthoritarian principles seems to lie in the highly democratic act of putting visions on the table for public deliberation.
This column, called “Outside the Circle,” is a regular feature of Arsenal: A Magazine of Anarchist Strategy and Culture and is reprinted with that periodical's permission from issue 4, fall 2001. Posted by rob at September 1, 2001 02:26 PMComments
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The Free Society Collective
Formed in 2002, the Free Society Collective is a small,
radical Left tendency based in central Vermont. We seek the abolition
of capitalism, the state, and all other social relations built on
coercion, hierarchy, and oppression. To that end, we engage in a
politics of resistance that simultaneously highlights a reconstructive vision.
In critical solidarity with anti-authoritarian social movements around
the globe, we work toward a free and ecological society premised on
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