In a recent impassioned
speech, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren used the word “anarchy”
repeatedly to describe the tea party’s role in the ongoing government shutdown.
So did Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid, who said on the Senate floor that “anarchists have taken over.”
If only that were true.
The figure of the anarchist has long dominated our national
imagination. It’s a word that conjures up the lawless, the nihilistic and even
the violent. It’s the image Senators Reid and Warren invoked in their talking
points against the Republicans, and it’s the image law enforcement officials
use over and over again to break up protests and illegally surveil social
movements.
But political hooligans like those in the tea party are
giving anarchism a bad name. In fact, they’re not really anarchists at all.
Real anarchist communities operate according to radically
democratic principles. They theorize, and even organize, with egalitarian
political and social visions in mind. Unlike tea party obstinacy, anarchism
promotes cooperative forms of decision-making—not only in political life, but
in social and economic institutions as well. Co-op book and grocery stores,
community gardens, employee-owned businesses, land trusts and cooperative
housing projects, as well as grassroots relief efforts like Occupy Sandy, are
just a few examples of anarchist praxis at work in our society.
Anarchism is not lawless, but it does involve a critique of
the state. Anarchists encourage us to place a burden of proof on existing
authority structures, and push us to limit, or even dismantle, the power of
institutions, regulations and individuals whose authority proves to be
illegitimate.
That might sound at first like the tea party’s rallying cry,
but there are important distinctions. Anarchists want to prefigure, within
their own communities, the egalitarian societies they seek to create. In a
political system like ours, which is dominated by money interests, they do not
acknowledge institutions like the U.S. Congress as legitimate representatives
of everyday people, nor as agents of a truly free, democratic society.
The tea party is trying to diffuse the power of centralized
government, but, paradoxically, they’re using big corporate heads and political
figures within centralized government to get there. When billionaire
conservatives like David
and Charles Koch are able to use the tea party as a fig leaf for promoting
corporate deregulation, that does not anarchism make.
Despite their anti-authoritarianism, some of today’s
anarchists concede that states can serve socially important functions like
ensuring sound infrastructure, basic consumer protections and comprehensive
social welfare (though they believe such services are better executed with
decentralized communities). But they do not support coercive aspects of state
sovereignty, such as those operative in our military and criminal justice
systems, and institutions like the NSA. The tea party claims to be for small
government, but it calls for a strong centralized military and highly
militarized law enforcement, especially with regard to undocumented immigrants.
Anarchists seek to promote autonomy and challenge forms of
control in other realms of social life as well, such as the family, religion
and our education system. Tea partiers, by contrast, support highly
conservative efforts that seek to restrain sexual freedom, impose the denial of
climate change in our schools, and privilege Judeo-Christian values.
So if the tea party is not anarchist, what is? It’s closer
to what we’ve seen with pro-democracy movements around the world—in Brazil,
Turkey, Spain, Egypt and here at home—where large segments of society lost
faith in their elected leadership and refused to recognize their authority. In
all of these countries, activists rejected formal political organization, and
instead created all-inclusive, leaderless movements to test the potential for
social and political change from below.
In Egypt, they ousted a dictator. In Turkey and Brazil, they
advocated for policy change. In Europe, they scored a financial transactions
tax and, in some countries, a curb on CEO
pay. In the United States, they highlighted the problem of the “1 percent.”
And in each case, they did this without ceding their grassroots social movement
power to political elites.
Anarchists believe, ultimately, in the power of people, not
the people in power. The truth is, our top political and economic institutions
are not really structured as representative bodies. The idea of representation
is being used today to legitimize the vast decision-making powers of a ruling
elite, of which tea party politicians are a part, who exercise an inordinate
level of influence in our political and social system.
The ongoing government shutdown is putting the problem of
American democracy and its relationship to social inequality back on the table.
The real source of this governmental impasse is the fundamental marginalization
of everyday Americans from political life—from the circles of power in which
key decisions are being made (or not being made) about our well-being and
future.
Reid and Warren’s misuse of the term “anarchism” thus
presents us with a terrific irony: If anarchists had indeed taken over
Congress, then the American people might be invited to collectively decide our
fate, rather than entrust it to representatives of a powerful few. But a
government by all, and leadership by many, is precisely what our politicians
fear—on both sides of the aisle. Anarchism seeks to diffuse power based on
hubris, superiority and the conceited pursuit of wealth, and re-root it in
democratic principles and egalitarian ethics. Given our current situation, that
doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.
Heather Gautney is author of “Protest
and Organization in the Alternative Globalization Era“ (Palgrave). She
is an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University.
Note: This post has been updated. The original version said
that many anarchists think the state is sometimes better equipped than
decentralized communities to provide certain social services. The language has
since been refined for accuracy.
(Source)
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