The Martlet

Jessy Anna sits in a quiet corner of the urban farm where she is a volunteer, sipping herbal tea. Cooped chickens cluck under a plum tree. This idyllic little farm sits just two blocks from one of downtown Victoria’s soup kitchens. Her cat, Kody, strolls out of the growing leeks, rubs her way by Anna and climbs the nearby tree. A ladybug lands on Anna’s wrist, rests briefly beside a ladybug tattoo before flying off. Anna, a single mom in her mid-30s, happens to be an anarchist.

Anarchists, according to stereotypes, wear black masks, fight the police and smash windows. Portrayed as kids with mohawks, tattooed necks and ripped t-shirts, they are dismissed by mainstream media for their actions and their appearance. Furthermore, they are seen as chaos-seeking individuals looking to slash the cords that bind society together.

Anna, like many of her peers, disproves the mainstream notion that anarchy is nothing more than organized chaos.

Redefining chaos

“I think chaos is usually represented as a total lack of order. And that implies that order comes from the presence of a central unifying thing,” said Noah Ross, an anarchist pursuing a masters degree through UVic’s political science department.

“When we think of the lack of that, we think of chaos, all these individuals doing what they want, throwing rocks, shitting in the street, and so forth. [But] . . . individuals actually have within themselves the ability to order society on their own.”

Anarchist thought began to emerge in the 17th century, but it was the writings of authors like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Michael Bakunin in the 1800s that allowed anarchy to take root as a political ideology.

Even for the earliest proponents, anarchy was never intended to be a free-for-all.

“Going right back to the 19th century founding thinkers, they didn’t believe anarchy meant that you can do whatever the hell you wanted. Anarchy meant that, instead of authority being delegated or usurped elsewhere, that authority was vested in everyone and everyone had to take responsibility for exercising the authority,” explained Dennis Pilon, a UVic political science professor.

According to this classic interpretation, anarchy puts the onus on interactions between individuals to create harmony within society, rather than a top-down structure determining right actions.

But a focus on the individual is not unique to anarchism. In fact, the liberal individual, an individual with the right to do what they want up to the point that their actions interfere with another’s freedom, is the foundation of Western society.

“Working through the idea of the individual gets a lot more interesting in anarchist thought and action, in that it comes down to a lot of responsibilities and relationships, and that you are constituted by your relationships,” said Mark Wilson, a political science PhD candidate at UVic.

Instead of individuals relating in hierarchical ways — boss/employee; police/protestor; legislator/citizen — they become a community of equals, equally participating in governing their community.

“Order is developed in relation to the context individuals find themselves in, not necessarily as individuals, but as a group,” said Ross.

“You’re developing affinity among other individuals and groups also, things that aren’t humans as well, plants and animals, and finding some sort of responsible balance . . . The individual is not constructed before the relational context,” Ross explained.

Responses to a given context are not predetermined. In our society, the law determines how a group of individuals ought to act in a given circumstance, and law develops through centralized structures that maintain the status quo of power and wealth distribution.

“We see [anarchy] as a kind of organization that, rather than going vertically, it connects laterally like in a peer-to-peer network. So it’s a bit more free-flowing,” said Dick Martin. Martin has been part of the anarchist movement for over 30 years and “irregularly” publishes Ahimsazine, an online anarchist newsletter that looks to incite peaceful social change.

“We have a network system of mutual respect . . . That’s what we are looking for as anarchists, trying to organize the appropriate social context that gives people the most freedom in a social way,” said Martin.

Working together

Eventually, anarchists believe, reforming personal interactions will reform societal structures that produce conformity to the liberal state. But this requires a different world view.

“Start with an ethic of attempting to counter oppression,” said Ross. “And also, try to achieve as much sustainability within those relations, trying to develop the capacity within them to provide for community and other entities.”

But our ideal of government involves hierarchical power. We’re taught that society requires figures of authority to run smoothly; that top-down government is not only the way it is, but also the only way it could be. Changing that belief requires challenging concepts many wouldn’t consider challengeable.

“For anarchists, the key problem is the state. And the solution for anarchists is to abolish the state,” Pilon explained. “But the state is not just going to go away because you don’t want it; the state has this enormously powerful coercive ability.”

This ability to coerce allows the state to reinforce its way of doing things, and to exclude any discourses that threaten it.

“Human nature . . . evolves out of the relationships it is embedded in,” said Ross.

Relationships within communities not under the surveillance and regulation of a state will develop differently than ones formulated by prescribed governance. This difference allows for self-regulation at all levels of society, said Martin.

“We are not talking about national domains or things like the United Nations. We’re talking about organizing around working processes,” Martin said. “ So you might have a network of people that do a certain kind of work, like health workers, and that network would have its own organization. It would have local and national and continental and world-wide organizations of health workers, and they would control the policies of how they did their work and their commitment to each other.”

The system Martin described does necessitate active participation on the part of the population though. Considering that voter participation across Canada has dropped from over 70 per cent in 1992 to less than 60 per cent in 2008, one might question whether citizens have grown apathetic about the governing of their society.

But Ross and Wilson feel this results from a political system that detaches rather than unites.

“So part of the anarchist critique of our conventional society is that it denies people the ability to meaningfully participate in their own lives,” Pilon said.

“If people were allowed to more meaningfully participate they might be better integrated into the society,” Pilon added, “whereas our [current] society is characterized by widespread alienation and various things that prevent people from becoming actively involved.”

Rather than voting for a politician who claims he will fight to alleviate poverty, despite the politician maintaining the very system that produces the poverty in the first place, anarchists put the responsibility for social improvement onto themselves. This creates networks of individuals who care, rather than disinterested bureaucracies.

“We have our own interests that we’re drawn to,” said Anna. “For me, the environment has always been very important. For other people, it’s gender issues; for other people its animal rights.”

Paradoxically, taking on social causes puts individuals opposed to the state in the role of providing services promised by the state, thus propping up the current system. The alternatives are no more appealing for an anarchist.

“It’s about trying to work on your daily practices of everyday life,” Wilson said, “What you do every day matters. It’s not about working towards a long-term ideal and doing nothing in the meantime.”

Black bloc diplomacy

One area where anarchism comes under scrutiny is the “black bloc” tactics that have been used during protests such as the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and the G-20 summit in Toronto. Such events saw people, labelled anarchists by the mainstream media, who hid their faces and committed acts of vandalism.

“The difficulty . . . is that we really don’t know who these people are. When you hide behind a mask nobody knows if you really are who you say you are. And we’ve seen in the past 20 years various people posing as so-called anarchists who then turn out to be agents of the state,” said Pilon, referring to the 2007 protests in Montebello, Que. as a time when police played the part of “agent provocateur.”

And, aside from that not all protestors who claim to be anarchists actually are, some anarchists see window smashing as detrimental to the anarchist movement.

“It does misdirect the image of what we’re doing and we have to be more conscious about displaying a better image,” said Martin. “The press plays these things up so much . . .

it’s best not to be involved with these things if that’s going to happen because we lose so much credibility.”

That’s a sentiment Anna shares, although she accepts the necessity of direct action in the anarchist scene. To her, direct action means directly intervening to protest or to stop a form of oppression from occurring. Anna is not convinced that smashing some windows really constitutes violence.

“The essence of anarchy is not to be violent, but it’s also to not allow yourself to be oppressed,” she said. “But I am bothered, because I don’t see throwing a rock at a window as direct action, really. It doesn’t stop something from continuing to happen and it bothers me that that’s the attention that the anarchist movement gets. I really want people to see that it is about trying to live as a community that has balance.”

Finding that balance means getting everyone involved in running their community. Which returns us to individual responsibility.

“Anarchism is maximally democratic; it says that everyone must participate in the governing of our society,” Pilon said, adding the ancient Greek democracies were conceptually similar to an anarchist society, although the Greeks used representation, something anarchies reject. “The Greek civil idea of democracy was that every citizen had the capacity to govern.”

Anarchist desires

The idea is for decisions to be made through consensus. Unlike the modern politics of division and “motivating the base” through populist American movements like the Moral Majority or the Tea Party, anarchists desire decisions be made on what best suits society as a whole, rather than what returns the highest return on investment.

“We work a lot through a consensual process . . . when there is a difference of opinion or different viewpoint, we really try to honestly understand each other and work for both sides,” explained Martin. “It’s a process that protects the rights of the individual to hold their opinion, so it might end up that two parties go separate ways, which they are free to do if they can’t collaborate on an issue.”

Anna experiences this first-hand through some of the collectives she belongs to. She meets weekly with the Victoria Coalition Against Poverty to discuss strategies. It is an anarchical group, with no ultimate decision maker, just a facilitator who ensures all topics on the agenda get addressed, and in a manner respectful of all opinions. She also works one day a week at Camas, an anarchist bookstore on Quadra Street. Camas has a meeting every couple of weeks to discuss business matters.

“There’s tension at times, some debate, but the idea of course is to find a way to work through it because you just can’t avoid some things,” Anna said, admitting that emotions are sometimes difficult to keep balanced.

“[Anarchy] is about consensus and caring for our resources. Not being dominant over anything, not being dominant over people and not being dominant over the environment. It’s about living a little bit differently, and I think the average person would agree with that,” Anna said.

Although he also believes that anarchy is about living differently, Martin worries about the speed of change in the face of the social and environmental challenges of the day.

“The question is whether people can organize alternative social patterns that will come to fruition before there is, whether social or ecological, a catastrophe.”