by Dan Young
The word on everyone’s lips has been: "anarchy"...well okay, maybe I only wish that it was the word on everyone’s lips. But it has been the word on my mind almost constantly for the last month or so. It first reared its head during a phone conversation with my best friend from home. I can’t remember much of what he said, except that he was beginning to give serious attention to the political ideas of some self proclaimed "communist anarchists" and anarchists in general. And for some reason the word and the idea grabbed my attention in a way that communism and socialism never quite did. There’s something very sexy about anarchy, though often it’s seen as sexy in the same way as drugs or violence or dramatic death. But when you really get to know anarchy-well it’s still sexy, but in a basically non-harmful yet still creative, vibrant earth shattering, mind opening way.
After that word was mumbled to me over the phone and had begun to infiltrate my mind again, it popped up again when I volunteered to help Food Not Bombs during Spring Break. On a chilly Sunday morning I went to an apartment in Hi-rise to help prepare food for distribution in front of the Buttonwood Tree downtown. While I was chopping up potatoes for a massive pot of soup, a knock came at the door and I was introduced to the younger brother of the Food Not Bombs member whose apartment we were working in, who had driven down from the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts to bring his sister home for the break and come to help out too. A female friend of his who was involved with Food Not Bombs back in the Valley had come along for the ride and also to help out.
As we cooked, I noticed that these newcomers had patches on their clothing with stylized anarchy symbols and the words "Revolutionary Anarchist Youth" written around it. I was intrigued, and asked them about it, though I didn't think that it was a serious activist organization. I found out that serious and active are exactly what "Revolutionary Anarchist Youth" (RAY) is.
The organization was brought into existence through the efforts of a young man named James Creedon, who I can testify from spending only a few hours in his presence is an extremely intelligent, articulate, generous and amiable person (of course, one could surmise that just from looking at the organization which he helped create). An article printed in the Pioneer Valley Advocate (which I assume gets the facts mostly straight because Creedon wrote an angry response to it in which he pointed out no factual errors but only complained of the unctuous ageist and neo-liberal bias of the writer) paints this picture of Creedon and the founding of RAY: "Creedon, 19, grew up in a middle-class Connecticut family, a self-described ‘angry young kid’ who dropped out of high school at the urging of a physics teacher who recognized that Creedon was frustrated and unchallenged by traditional schooling. Creedon also was frustrated by the world in general. He experimented with, and then rejected, various alternative scenes...Creedon stumbled upon anarchism while studying at Goddard College, a small, experimental school in Vermont, and at the Institute for Social Ecology, a Goddard summer program. Last summer Creedon traveled to Chicago to attend the Active Resistance Conference, a national gathering of anarchists. It was there that the anarchist ideas he’d been playing with for months began to crystallize for him...Creedon returned from Chicago and called for a youth meeting. ‘Hey!’ read the fliers he posted around town. ‘Are you disgusted with the way our society is based on exploitation and greed? Are you angry about being manipulated and oppressed in school, work, at home, on the street, everywhere you go? ... Well, what are you going to do about it? ... Now is the time to get together and talk about what really needs to happen. Time to rise up, raise a fist, link arms and lock down.’"
Thus began a group which has garnered a hard-core membership of 20-30 Northampton youths, at least as many irregular members, and the interest of many folks inside and outside the Pioneer Valley area. But far, far more importantly, the group has managed to effectively further the ideals that they propose in their manifesto, which envision: "the construction of a society based on egalitarian self-governing communities, confederated together for the benefit of all." Among other things they run an increasingly large lending library of radical texts, a books-to-prisoners program, weekly showings of political and labor films, and a very professional web page. They frequently protest different forms of youth oppression, the last one being a protest held on March 22 in which they carried banners, performed street theater and handed out literature to educate people on the different forms of horrendous youth oppression taking place in the United States and elsewhere.Last Colombus Day they led a protest against the racist writing of history that made a genocidal egomaniac from Genoa a hero. Activities included "colonizing" the local Starbuck’s. They have accomplished/created all this by making decisions together through consensus in a meeting format where no one has coercive authority and everyone’s ideas and opinions are weighed equally.
Of course I didn’t learn all this from that first conversation with those two revolutionary anarchist youths in Hi-rise, but I heard enough about the activities they were engaged in, and the strong base of many members’ political views that I was now not only extremely intrigued, but beginning to be impressed. The two youths I met kept deriding themselves for having forgotten to bring pamphlets along, but they told me to check out their web page. This I did a day or so later . My impression of the intelligence and professional nature of the group grew tenfold when I saw the page.
Being relatively alone on the quiet Wesleyan campus during spring break, I went to the Wesleyan library to look for 10 or so books that were listed on the RAY web page as essential anarchist readings. I found several of them (in the extensive collection of anarchist-associated literature in Olin-hooray for the last row of the HX shelves on floor 2A!) and began reading. First I devoured an essay entitled "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For" by Emma Goldman. Reading Goldman’s essay I was struck by the intense beauty of the ideas that she was communicating. Goldman’s simplest definition of anarchism in the text is: "The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by manmade law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary." She goes on to explain the way in which, "Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, of the individual and society." These pernicious influences are: "Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct." Goldman proposes that by abandoning the pointless subjugation to perceived supernatural powers which religion creates; deprivation which perceived rules of property propagate; and restrictions which perceived hierarchies of authority create, humanity can live, love, and create, free in body and mind. Now what could be more beautiful than that?
Of course there are problems: in order for an anarchist society to be as successful as modern governmental societies have been at keeping the peace (which, if you take the U.S. as the example of the governmental society, of course, really isn’t that successful/peaceful) the citizens must be extremely responsible individuals who consider the effect on everyone of every action they commit, and who are dedicated to looking out for the welfare of others. And the people in most modern societies (at least the U.S.) don’t on the whole seem to have this sense of self responsibility or concern for others. But as I finished Goldman’s essay and began getting into a short, simple, but extraordinarily provocative text by Colin Ward entitled Anarchy In Action, I began to see how mass insensitivity is in many ways created by hierarchical, authority-based governments themselves. When you rely on the police and courts to solve your squabbles, or the unemployment agency to put food on your table, or the multinationals to tell you what’s real on the television screen, of course you don’t learn how to deal with people to solve problems or even how to really think for yourself . But when the government is nowhere to be found and things need to get done, somehow they seem to get accomplished. This has taken place throughout history following natural disasters or even violent revolutions which rent the social and physical fabric of a society. When such disasters take place, small communities (though the effect may be different in the extraordinarily alienated, isolated, post-modern era cities) tend to band together, providing bedding or food for those who have been displaced, and doing so in an amiable, ungrudging manner so that everyone is provided for. But though people provide for each other peaceably when some kind of disaster has displaced other agencies and left the responsibility in our hands, when the disaster is over and the structures of power seem to be back in place, the same people who helped during the disaster will walk by homeless people on the street with only the wish that "someone would do something about these poor people." As Colin Ward notes, these times following revolutions or disasters, when people take care of each other and the peace is maintained without any kind of police, are rarely or never examined by students of government...what are they afraid of here?
During the days following my first interactions with members of RAY my knowledge and appreciation of anarchy grew infinitely. By the next weekend I was so interested that I got on a bus to Northampton on Saturday to attend a meeting of some big-sounding organization called "The Atlantic Anarchists Circle" which was being hosted by RAY that afternoon.
The meeting, as I have told many people since, was one of the most thought-provoking experiences of my life. What happened might not have looked so spectacular : 50 to 80 people came together in the course of an afternoon (the size kept fluctuating as groups left and new ones came in)creating a ragged menagerie ranging in age from 70 to 16, who had travelled from everywhere between Vermont and Philadelphia to attend the conference. The conference began with a delicious potluck meal, and following this was a meeting which lasted 4 to 5 hours. We first spoke about various goals, tasks or problems for the anarchist movement in general, and then about the different activities and projects which the groups in attendance were involved with in their home communities. These discussions were not so productive as they might have been, probably because (as a 16-year old RAY member who had attended prior Circle meetings informed me) the 20-30 RAY members and many other people present had never been to a Circle meeting before. Our behemoth group often got side-tracked in long conversations where important ideas were repeated over and over (which did, however, emphasize their importance). However, we did manage in the course of the discussions to set up a plan for the daunting task of creating a directory which would list all members of the circle across the Atlantic coast who had skills that they could speak about or teach to groups, both activist skills and general skills of self-sufficiency-as, for some, escaping from the yoke of the modern authoritarian system means learning to provide everything possible for yourself. The meeting ended with that same 16-year old leading a discussion on youth oppression and prejudices against youth.
So what did yours truly get from the meeting? First off, I became very excited about the ability of individuals, no matter how many doors were closed to them by age or race or economic class or lack of education, to organize themselves into happy, functioning, self-sufficient communities and rule themselves while helping others to gain similar self-sufficiency. Secondly, I became very excited about all the doors of thought and behavior which anarchism opens. The completely egalitarian nature of the anarchism that these people preach and try to practice is like democracy on massive amounts of speed (but without the paranoia). It’s the idea of listening to everyone, of any age, of any race or nationality-of not dismissing anyone’s ideas for any reason. Instead you try to thoughtfully understand other’s dreams and ideals, attempt to integrate your own with them, and where this is not possible, try to negotiate for a change in both mind-sets which will allow all to co-exist harmoniously. Generalized constructs become meaningless inside of anarchism; everyone’s individual whims are suddenly far more important than one ruler’s whims or some amalgamated average of everyone’s tastes. Education, art, architecture and all else are allowed to take on an independent, unlegislated nature which will allow them to be fitted to the individual in order to further their own development and their development inside of a community. Individuals aren’t fitted into homogenous structures-heterogeneous structures are fitted for separate groups of individuals. In this way anarchists try to eventually create a society with the minimum of oppression, repression and suppression.
It’s a very beautiful dream. It may never be accomplished, or it may take a thousand more years of effort. But there are lots of important things to do now, such as figuring out what immediate actions will work best for achieving the beautiful dream of total, peaceful anarchy and self sufficiency working towards them. This will take a lot of study, and requires that everyone think and be sure to reach a clear ideal before they start, rather than simply following one man’s dream and plan. But when our nth-generation descendants can stand proud and free, they will love that we started them on that path.
Anarchy now! Anarchy later! Anarchy forever!