Being "free" to associate as one wishes avoids the question of one's inclinations or unexamined instincts, and those inclinations CAN have a huge impact on the success or failure of projects and broader movements, cultures, even societies.
One of the biggest failure modes in contemporary anarchist organizing is thinking in terms of The Organization and being disinclined or unprepared for fluid disassociation by individuals. This leads people chained in dysfunctional projects without good/smooth exit opportunities.
Consider also the all-or-nothing Communes handwavingly described by Kropotkin and implemented in Aragon. Every individual had the Right of exit, but in practical reality / structure there was pretty much no option besides joining what were often essentially Company Towns.
CNT officials *bragged* about the monopsony power that rural collectives wielded, such that while individuals *could* opt out of their village's collective, they were basically completely fucked if they did, with no options, no one else they could exchange with.
Suffice to say that merely having "the right of exit" is not structuring your entire society to center individual agency and resist the emergence of collectivist cancers.
Because The Commune or The Organization can quickly gain state like powers and tyranny:
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It's weird to be decades into libertarians discovering left market anarchists and still fielding these kinds of critiques. Anarchism isn't "remove the state and whatever might come is good" it's a deep critique of power and thus *obliges* cultural and institutional changes.
Yes, we frequently highlight the systematic and dispersed impact of sustained state violence on shaping our present capitalist world and its economic and social norms. But we are not "come what may" advocates. As Charles emphasized endlessly: *we* are the market. We get choices.
So libertarians tend to miss that we are obliged not only to rip out the continued impacts of state violence that prop up bosses, corporations, etc, but also to work to *undo* the centuries of distortions and lasting impact upon the distributions and *norms* of our society.
"Lifestyle anarchism" continues to signify whatever one personally finds frustratingly illegible about a *movement* rather than a *Party.*
You don't know the local prison support crew? Then they're lifestylists. You don't get why some friends are brewing kombucha? Lifestylists!
Movements are fluid ecosystems. They grow projects & networks that defy easy mapping. They accrue tacit knowledge from praxis & argumentation that can't be codified into a single FAQ or onboarding document.
This is frustrating to newbies and infuriating to would-be bureaucrats.
Pretty much no one in the entire fucking history of the anarchist movement said "let's just squat and ride bikes; fuck all struggle and strategy." You're tilting at a crimethinc zine that doesn't even really exist and that they repudiate with their every publication for decades.
Love the inane "trump voters are just a product of material conditions" re-tread of 2016's "it's just economic anxiety." Same sort of reactionaries saying it, but they've swapped from identifying as libs to marxists.
People love Trump because 1) our epistemic ecosystems are toxic sludge, 2) many people have intense investments in the (often non-material) benefits of patriarchy and racism, 3) fear of ratcheting cancelation has scared every type of amoral bastard into mobilizing together...
4) transphobia is intense and rabidly popular rn as a blowback to progress, 5) mild personal inconveniences and changes to every day life during COVID radicalized people for life, 6) the left keeps pratfalling with horrifically bad analysis, and yes 7) inflation sucks.
Like don't get me wrong, I have my critiques and deviances from some of the movement's tendencies, but for better or worse modern anarchism is a mixture of radical feminism, quaker consensus, fourth generation warfare theory, 70s anthropology, and some of the autonomists.
It's cringe to look at direct action cells and be like "ah yes, I know this, Bakuninist terrorism." Stirner is more of an online meme than a popular influence. Virtually no one reads Nietzsche and Aragorn said he was of zero inspiration to his attempt to make "nihilism" a thing.
Well yeah, obviously. *Specific* revolutions will be won. Insurgencies will erode the ability of power everywhere to function. Prefigurative experimentation will spread more liberatory norms. Technologies will be contested and shifted.
Our forever walk towards anarchy -- as Malatesta described it -- is not a single hop on a single day. It's a gradual process of erosion and catalyzing strength.
Such evolution can be violent and punctuated, but there is no magical day after which we finish and rest.
When I was a young anarchist in the 90s and early 00s, the entire movement used "After The Revolution" as an ironic meme to emphasize the absurdity and the ignorance of anyone in that frame. We were also steadfastly hostile to nihilism. Because progress is possible without magic.
An underexamined problem is that the most noxious reactionary shit emerges in radical spaces during the downturn.
2008-20010 was horrible. 2015-2018 was likewise the worst. Say what you will about the grifters and monsters flooding in during the peaks, the lean years are nasty. t.co/WKGmJQ8aeu
When the tide comes in there's a feeding frenzy, everyone eats well but new monsters arrive. Then the new monsters are slowly and painfully eliminated and the children spawned mature. Then there's no resources, contests feel zero-sum, and power floods into non-radical lefty shit.
Like we got nihilists at the bottom of the first downturn during Obama's ascension, and tankies at the bottom of the last one, when Bernie became a thing.
These were both permanent massive injuries to the struggle for liberation that continue to poison shit.