Alternative Editorial: Can Anarchy Be A Force For Good?
It’s week 2 of 2022 and anarchy – the friendly kind - lurks. In Bristol, four people faced prison sentences for pulling down and rolling into the water a statue of slave trader Edward Colston. They were acquitted by the jury - despite direction from the judge.
The TV historian Prof. David Olusoga, who supported the defendants and gave expert evidence on the history of slavery, told the Guardian: “This verdict is a milestone in the journey that Bristol and Britain are on, to come to terms with the totality of our history.”
He added: “For 300 years Edward Colston was remembered as a philanthropist, his role in the slave trade and his many thousands of victims were airbrushed out of the story… The toppling of the statue and the passionate defence made in court by the Colston Four makes that deliberate policy of historical myopia now an impossibility.”
For those who think it is unusual – and maybe unacceptable – that a jury contradicts the law, they should note that it is becoming a common occurrence in trials of protestors from the social justice movement, particularly on climate issues. In April last year, six Extinction Rebellion activists who sprayed graffiti and smashed windows at the Shell HQ in central London - claiming the oil firm was directly contributing to climate change – were on trial.
Judge Gregory Perrins said that even if their actions were ‘morally justified’ that did not provide a lawful excuse and directed the jury to find them guilty. After deliberating for just over seven hours, the jury of seven women and five men cleared the defendants of all charges.
And again, in December six XR protestors who obstructed a Docklands Light Railway train at Canary Wharf in December 2021, were acquitted by the jury.
In each of these cases, those accused confessed to the crime but defended their right to break the law to bring attention to imminent climate breakdown and ecological collapse. So likely is it that the jury will agree with their rationale, that (according to the Daily Mail) activists are now deliberately causing over £5,000 of damage in their protests to ensure they will get a jury trial.
This spirit of autonomy is not restricted to jurors. For example, despite Downing Street’s decision to prioritise business over safety, holding back on further restrictions on peoples’ movement over Christmas and New Year, people are electing to stay at home. While you might read about the ‘mad dash’ to go on holiday or ‘spotting the best buys in the sales’ – more proof that our mainstream media is too closely connected to the old economy – counter-evidence (here and here) suggests something different.
Some will say this is the net result of the fear mongering from government – people are now too afraid to move out of their homes. Others will say it is precisely the government’s loss of authority that has emboldened more of us to make our own decisions about what is optimum for our health. Which is it?
There’s a danger in the quest for ‘the truth’ about our shared reality. We can move too quickly from making distinctions between perspectives – I see it differently from you – to polarising and setting it up as the new divide. “Polarising” here means moving too quickly from subtle shifts to conjurinsg yawning gaps between the two positions - and then populating the territory with assumptions about the people who differ. For example, two members of the same family having different memories of a holiday in Europe could be interesting. But when, as was often reported happening, these differences are polarised by social media during the Brexit campaign – Remainers are elitist, Leavers are racist - the siblings have often became utterly estranged.
Networks of autonomy are gaining power
When there is growing autonomy within the British public sphere, one that faces a government with a 73-seat majority, some will smile, others will tremble. Rather than welcome this development as a growing, healthy plurality, the temptation on both sides will be to polarise the differences. An obvious example would be to judge all those who don’t have a Covid vaccine as ‘antisocial’ or ‘conspiracy theorist’ - whereas, in reality, there is a broad continuum of reactivity, allowing a variety of standpoints.
The corollary is to judge all those who are vaccinated as fearful or unaware of the power of elites. Again, some patience would reveal a huge diversity of perspectives. Where do any of us stand on this broad spectrum? Only we can know the complexity of our own individual positions. At the same time, as a society we must come to collective decisions that impact us all.
With no democratic mechanisms or architecture for citizens to bring their nuanced positions into play, we are doomed to persistent and draining dichotomising of the public sphere. With evermore friendly and reasonably like-minded people being divided against each other, this in itself is a recipe for the deterioration of society. We have less rather than more energy to come together, as we face our planetary crises.
What kinds of structures and tools are available to overcome this impasse? For a while now we have been inquiring into the possibility of the broader society self-organising at the community level (see Community Agency Networks aka CANs). This isn’t so much about contradicting government on principle: that’s better described as (literally) reactionary. It’s more about reclaiming our own ability to make decisions as people living together in the face of very confusing headlines. To hear each other out, to be open to refining our decisions (see Flatpack Democracy on new ‘ways of working’ when you move beyond party politics).
We need to be able to get away from the ruling institutions, mainstream news and reactionary social media - the overwhelm keeps us in thrall to the growth economy (ref).
A growing possibility is a system of CANs that are reconnecting the needs and resources of the fullest possible diversity of citizens - participating in decision making – to each other, and to the solutions already available to face our multiple crises. To move into the kind of regenerative system now needed to protect the planet, this growing body of cosmolocal action has to preserve its autonomy inside the wider society. This is less the ‘freedom’ to do whatever we want, more the ‘freedom’ to act on the axis that connects the health of the individual to the health of the planet, via healthy community. In A/UK, we’ve named that axis I-We-World.
As described in earlier blogs we think of this rising autonomous body as lying within a parallel polis. See this week’s blog on Masha Gessen’s helpful video exposition of an idea made popular by Vaclav Benda and Vaclav Havel.
The lecture invites a few important distinctions. For some, evoking autonomy, anarchy and even a parallel polis is dangerous, because it suggests a departure from a system underpinned by familiar democratic mechanisms. In the kinds of networked, bottom-up activisms that we see potential in, that danger is real and to be kept constantly in mind. An easy example would be self-organising groups that are explicitly anti-government and anti-authority – from QAnon to any form of conspiracy theorists that knowingly spread fake or uncorroborated news.
However, there are more subtle forms of network activisms too, many of which rely upon technology and blockchain to keep the outside world at bay. Their goal is to be ‘free’ of the limitations of our dysfunctional system. However, they don’t sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which every citizen is permanently entangled in that system (for more on this, see Anthea Lawson’s important book The Entangled Activist). Too often, these initiatives – Bitcoin is a great example - end up replicating the old cultures of control, creating new elites
Not so much ‘new’, as ‘previously ignored’
As we observe what may be emerging within the CANs phenomenon, what’s interesting is the parallel nature of this autonomous activity. It keeps its sights on the old system, constantly improving upon it and aiming to develop partnership with it. This is not entirely captured by the phrase ‘partner state’, where the state is a constant and the wider society is forever changing. A more meaningful concept would see both constantly co-evolving: radicality arises from the state giving way to other forms of self-determination, a new autonomy that operates in parallel. Two legs, one body.
It is not (for the foreseeable future anyway) a “dual-power” strategy, with ambitions to overthrow the government. But it is a growing ‘alternative’ rationale, ways of working and being, that we believe will influence the mainstream significantly.
The long-term goal is to distribute power better, in an era of growing individual and collective agency. In the time-honoured ways, that process would deliver greater justice and equality. But we may need to think of power itself in new ways: understanding the distinction between hard and soft power. Or the difference between “power to”, instead of “power over”, which leads to more creative energy in society.
A distinctive quality of these CANs is their circular, regenerative design, as well as the greater visibility of female leaders. What they’re bringing is not so much new as ‘previously ignored’. Their leadership carries a feminine intelligence – often enthusiastically championed by men - that used to be confined to the domestic or the internal workings of communities. This is a more relational culture, which has as its goal flourishing, rather than growth. They champion the visions of Elinor Ostrom, Rianne Eisler, Kate Raworth - all economists who prize diversity and wholism as the route out of our threatened demise.
Many of us will read this and identify the logic as a strand within the current mainstream – carried, for example by the environmental lobby within government. In the UK this would include the work of the Green Party or the All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change. They will argue for staying with the current system and winning the argument from inside the power structures we have, that is described as democratic. That is a legitimate position that must be included in any bigger picture of change.
At the same time, without a parallel polis, setting precedents and doing prefigurations, transformation is unlikely to occur. We need places – both actual and virtual - where the long-suppressed energy and creativity of a much more diverse population, committed to the I-We-World axis, can be fully explored. This might well take the form of newly independent, network-literate nations – Catalonia, Scotland – yet to be seen. But it is already taking shape in CANs emerging worldwide.
As described in our first editorial of the year, A/UK is committed to serving this emergence as it moves into greater self-consciousness, through the CAN of CANs and an enabling media system. Is it already happening in your community?
For a whole picture outline of these arguments, see the findings of five years of The Alternative UK in The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age on Perspectiva Press.