Cindy Milstein Quotes

Anarchists design modest experiments with grand goals to allow people to meet their needs and desires, be ecological, craft new social relations, set up spaces and organizations, and make decisions together—all in nonhierarchical ways. These are partial experiments, sometimes short-lived, especially given the force of the current systems of domination. Yet they form a tangible fabric of horizontalist innovation. [...] The idea is that people establish counterinstitutions as well as lifeways that gain enough force—because they capture the hearts, minds, and participation of enough people—to ultimately exist on a level with, or finally in victorious contestation to, centralized power.

Capitalism has indicated that humans might be able to achieve a postscarcity society—a world in which everyone has enough of what they need to sustain life. But despite grocery stores and dumpsters overflowing with food, billions of people go hungry; despite labor-saving technologies, most people work more for less; despite breakthroughs in health care, many die needlessly. Meanwhile, consumption has been transformed into a barometer of one's worth, a never-ending quest for happiness via commodity choices. And it's always premised on what one has to exchange for that abundance, or else it's denied.

The anarchist hope to transform life translates into a shared, holistic approach to living life. Embracing anarchism is a process of reevaluating every assumption, everything one thinks about and does, and indeed who one is, and then basically turning one's life upside-down. Upending coercive relations is a journey of remaking oneself, as part of the project of remaking the world. But becoming an anarchist is also a process—without end—of applying an ethical compass to the whole of what one (and everyone) is and could be individually and socially. Anarchists aren't necessarily any better, or worse, than anyone else. They are just as damaged by the intricate web of hierarchies, hatreds, and commodified relationships that malform everybody. Within anarchist circles, though, valiant attempts are at least made to be open and self-reflective about this damage, and from there to develop humane ways of addressing it. Anarchism entails working hard at reshaping oneself as well as one's society.

Anarchism doesn't concentrate on just the economic, political, cultural, psychological, or other spheres. Nor does it separate any single issue from its relation to other issues, even if one personally places emphasis on a particular area. It concerns itself with everything that makes people human, including the nonhuman world. The work of anarchism takes place everywhere, every day, from within the body politic to the body itself.

Coming to anarchism, taking up the mantle of imagining a world beyond hierarchy, is like a lightbulb going off inside one's head. It first offers a sense of one's own empowerment and liberation, and then, hopefully, a sense of collective social power and freedom. There is something euphoric in casting off, even if only on the level of personal beliefs initially, the idea that hierarchy is somehow a given, and that one has to abide by its rules. It's a life-altering leap when one truly uproots the belief within oneself that, say, racism or states are normal and necessary. The move toward increasingly nonhierarchical mind-sets, relations, and institutions opens up a whole world of possibility—at least as a start, within oneself. The first act might be critical thought, a less estranged relationship with oneself and others, or the reappropriation of imagination as a step toward a nonalienated society.

Implementing anarchism as a lived political project can seem a daunting task. It takes seriously the notion that hierarchy and domination in their many manifestations need to be torn apart, and that society needs to be restructured along fundamentally different lines. It means transforming the whole of life. It means overcoming alienation, countering humanity's estrangement from the world and each other with nonalienated relationships and organizations. This must be an ongoing quest, with better (and worse) approximations of freedom appearing in various times and places, only to seemingly disappear or greatly diminish again. Still, with each approximation, the very idea of freedom expands along with the notion of what it means to be human and humane. Remnants of freedom remain, in fact or in memory. Vestiges of experiments linger. People are transformed and pass their sense of potentiality along to others.

Hierarchy and domination serve as the prism through which to see various phenomena as both distinct in their own right and deeply interconnected. They can produce, structure, or sustain each other, or operate relatively independently, yet always serve to restrain a consensual, egalitarian world. Anarchists strive to dismantle forms of social relations and social organization that allow some people to exercise mastery over other people and things. They contrast the use of power for gaining something from others, for money or status, or out of privilege or hatred, with the use of power to collectively achieve individual and social development, mutual respect, and the meeting of everyone's needs. Anarchism's generalized critique of hierarchy and domination, even more than its anticapitalism and antistatism, sets it apart from any other political philosophy. It asserts that every instance of vertical and/or centralized power over others should be reconstituted to enact horizontal and/or decentralized power together. This grand vision serves as a yardstick for attempts to reduce hierarchy and domination while improving the quality of life, materially and otherwise, in the here and now.

Anarchism is distinguished as a political philosophy by its clear, uncompromising position against both capitalism and states. There are many ways within anarchism to explain specifically what's wrong with capitalism or states, and even more ways to approach ridding the world of them. But anarchists maintain that the pair has to go because they each have power over the vast majority of the human and nonhuman world. At its heart, political philosophy is about power: who has it, what they do with it, and toward what ends. Anarchism, more sweepingly than any other political philosophy, responds that power should be made horizontal, should be held in common.

The point here is that anarchists agree on the necessity of a world without capital and states, precisely to allow everyone to make good on their lives, liberties, and happiness—to be able to continually define as well as take part in the quality of these categories. In relation to the state specifically, anarchists contend that everyone is thoroughly capable and deserving of self-determining their lives. Anarchists believe that together, people will likely envision, deliberate over, and settle on more creative, multidimensional social organization. Here again, anarchists offer a revolutionary praxis that both improves current conditions and points past them.

The state, though distinct from capitalism in its form and methods, must also become a thing of the past if freedom has any chance of reigning. It's not a matter of trying to make the state kinder, more multicultural, more benign, or to follow the letter of its own law. The state's very logic asserts that a few people are better suited than everyone else to determine, as the U.S. Constitution says, "." It's not just that the state has (or increasingly doesn't) a monopoly on violence but that regardless of how it compels people to give up their power—with guns, ballots, or pacification through forms of already-circumscribed participation—it is always engaged in a variety of social control and social engineering. Statecraft, at its essence, is about a small body of people legislating, administering, and policing social policy. In this way, it also sustains other types of domination, such as institutionalized racism or heteronormativity. Increasingly, "the state" is doing this as part of a networked structure of states collaborating in blocs or global institutions. Thus, fewer and fewer people get to determine policies ranging from warfare to health care to immigration. Even the notion of representative democracy under this global regime is almost anachronistic, given that layers of nonrepresentative statecraft now work hand in hand with equally undemocratic international NGOs and multinational financial bodies.

Whereas many in the global and now movements focus on corporations as key, anarchists see these entities as only one piece of capitalism, and a piece that if removed, wouldn't destroy capitalism—bad as corporations may be. One can have capitalism without corporations. Capitalism's essence—ensuring that society is forged around compulsory social relations along with inequities in power and material conditions—would remain in place. And given capitalism's grow-or-die logic, small-scale capitalism would by definition unfold into a larger scale again. Or as contemporary networked and informational capitalistic structures indicate, allegedly localized capitalism can be a way to hide an increasing concentration of social control and injustice. Capitalism itself, in its totality, and because it strives toward totality, is the root problem. Anarchists, then, look to wholly undo the hegemony of capitalist economic structures and values, or the many components that mark capitalism as a system—from corporations, banks, and private property, to profit, bosses, and wage labor, to alienation and commodification.

Anarchism from the start focused on what appeared as the two biggest stumbling blocks to a libertarian society: capitalism and the state. This pair, sadly, are still the predominant forms of social immiseration and control. Capitalism and statecraft loom large in terms of naturalizing—and thereby being at the root of—this immiseration and control. Their separate yet often-interrelated internal logics consolidate power monopolies for a few, always at the expense of the many. This demands that each system must both continually expand and mask its dominion. To survive, they have to make it seem normal that most people are materially impoverished and disenfranchised as economic actors, and socially impoverished and disenfranchised as political actors. They have to restructure social relations in their own image—as unthinkingly assumed ways of being and acting. The world that most of humanity produces is, as a result, denied to the vast majority, and a relative handful get to make binding decisions over all of life. Anarchism is therefore staunchly anticapitalist and antistatist, which ensures that it is a revolutionary politics, since battling such primary systems necessarily means getting to the root of them. Moving beyond capitalism and states would entail nothing less than turning the world upside down, breaking up all monopolies, and reconstituting everything in common—from institutions to ethics to everyday life.

Anarchism is not satisfied with remaining on the surface, merely tinkering to make a damaged world a little less damaging. It is a thoroughgoing critique aimed at a thoroughgoing reimagining and restructuring of society. It views this as essential if everyone is to be free, and if humanity is to harmonize itself with the nonhuman world.

Despite the difficulties, anarchists never advocate a purely reformist attitude. They try their best never to participate in reform as an end in itself, or to bring about improvements that also make the present social order look attractive. Their efforts to move from "here" to "there" intentionally highlight how current social arrangements cannot, by their own raison d'être, meet everyone's needs and desires.

First and foremost, anarchism is a revolutionary political philosophy. That is, anarchism is thoroughly radical in the true sense of the word: to get at the root or origin of phenomena, and from there to make dramatic changes in the existing conditions. Anarchism aspires to fundamentally transform society, toward expansive notions of individual and social freedom.