It Starts Here

We live with unfulfilled desires in an undesirable world. This is where we begin.

Here we are constantly faced with relationships based on exploitation or alienation; we are constantly faced with a condition of domination that prevents us from realizing the world that we do desire. We live with a painful number of day-to-day interactions that are based on exchange, the disempowerment associated with wage labor, and the infuriating moments when we are forced to disingenuously thank an authority for going easy on us (as if these relationships wern't already a death sentence!). Where this system of domination and submission is not able to seduce us with promises of an increase in wages or 0% financing on a new flat-screen TV, it is ready to step on our throats. Here it is, both a silently infectious condition and a whirling maelstrom of oppression.

When it's so rare that we are afforded the opportunity to really be ourselves, it's an ardous task to make sense of ourselves and our lives in this condition -- especially when this system of domination is always ready to recuperate our dreams and sell them back to us as the shadow of what they once were. When these difficulties are so pervasive in our lives and our relationships, sometimes we can end up feeling like cogs in a machine that is so large, we don't even know where to set the explosives.

Ideology Is The Opposite Of Life

On our way out of this mess, we can't stop at ideology -- that snake oil of so many revolutions. Political programs and ideological solutions have nothing to offer us, because these are only abstractions that separate us from, and make us servants to, our desires. Ideology has nothing to offer us because we know that there is nothing larger than ourselves, and that we've lost if we find ourselves subjugated once again -- even if this time it's to The Cause. In dealing with the difficulties of domination and submission that are so prevalent in this undesirable world, we can not turn to Marxism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Anarchism, or even Crimethinc (!). We can only turn to ourselves and our desires. This is where we begin.

Historically, anarchists have a long tradition of shaking their heads in disbelief at those who are caught up in this ideological swindle: Marxists who go through an endless series of contortions to filter everything through the rubric of economic determinism, Socialists who continue to claim that North Korea is actually a socialist state that's run by The People, or Maoists who -- almost beyond belief -- still claim that Maoism is a liberatory force. All of these groups represent tragic expressions of discontent that were blinded by ideology. The labor theory of value, economic determinism, and class immiseration all emerged from interesting questions based on the desires of individuals, but those questions were smothered by answers.

There is an important distinction here. The mistakes of these groups were not the ideologies that they chose, but the fact that they chose ideologies at all. The questions, not the answers, are what's important; and rather than coming up with answers, we need to hold the questions with us, interact with them, be informed by them, and use them to continually re-evaluate our actions. Our answers need to be our questions.

Anarchy Is Not A Franchise; Anarchy Is Not A Recipe

Ideology is so insidious because it's easy. In this confusing, alienating world, sometimes it feels like we are flailing against an unstoppable monster unless we have an answer. A political program can make us feel safe because it pretends to offer us a solution. But that solution is a swindle, because if we are not taking action as an expression of our immediate desires, we are only reinforcing the domination of ourselves. Where should we set the explosives? Right here, right now, where we are in our lives.

We can not franchise our actions. Projects like Food Not Bombs, IndyMedia, The Infoshop, Critical Mass, etc... sometimes seem to exist as automatic answers to the problems that stymie our desires for freedom. These are all projects that may have started out as a response by individuals to specific situations, but have increasingly become institutionalized frameworks for revolution. They have become franchised solutions to the difficulties we face. Are we taking action in response to our desires? Or are we taking action as the anarchist thing to do? If it's the latter, then these projects have lost their meaning, and we're nothing but cogs in the revolution machine. There is no real Anarchist Solution, there is only us.

Thousands of people have met and connected through these projects, which is an amazing feat in this lonely world. So this isn't to say that these projects are hopeless -- but we should interact with them by throwing the handbooks out the window and taking action based on our lives. If we find that the Food Not Bombs serving is not the community gathering that we hoped for ("nobody comes!"), it is probably because the handbook was written specifically for a town with a very large homeless population. Instead of relying on persistence, it might be possible to change things and cultivate community in other ways. This could include getting rid of the five-gallon buckets and radically departing from the proscribed Food Not Bombs model to find something closer to our town, our lives, and our desires.

Even names like 'Homes Not Jails' or 'Critical Mass' can be limiting. The advantages are the same as with any type of franchise: instant name recognition and familiarity. But this can also work against us, since that recognition and familiarity carries a set of expectations. It carries a protocol for action that we did not develop, a history we had no part of, and a spate of literature that we did not write. Our action is suddenly part of a tradition, and it becomes something larger than us, something that we are acting in service of rather than something we are creating.

It is also necessary to investigate where our definitions of "success" can come from in this context. When we do institutionalize our desires, then success usually begins to mean more about protecting those institutions than anything else. If the purpose of the anarchist bookstore is to perpetuate the existence of the anarchist bookstore, then we've lost.

All of this brings the concept of an anarchist cookbook into question. The danger is that in trying to reclaim that title from a book with poor advice on building bombs and cooking drugs, we'll accidentally turn anarchy into a mere recipe. That remains a danger. It's up to us, though, to use the information as a way to inform our actions -- not out of an obligation to do something -- but as a manifestation of our individual hopes and dreams.

From Our Desires To The Barricades

This is not to say that while we begin with ourselves, we should stop with partial solutions that meet our individual needs. When we talk of dreams, we're talking about dreaming big. We're talking about analysing our individual desires with a scope that's large enough to encompass the world we live in. We're talking about a tension towards freedom which confronts this lumbering monster where we are. We're talking about liberating ourselves from ideologies that have us waiting on historical forces, or only thinking as far as the next demonstration, the next summit, the next Critical Mass ride, the next Crimethinc recipe, the next Food Not Bombs serving.

We're talking about giving up on the proscribed solutions, dreaming big again, reconnecting with our desires, and jumping into the unknown.