Everything Wrong with Meta-Anarchism (In Its Current Form)

It’s been half a year since Meta-Anarchism has established its online presence. Within that time period, some amount of theoretical content has been produced as a part of this project.

Fortunately, this content has attracted criticism.

In this text, I try to compile — from my perspective — the most worthy parts of that criticism into several distinct points. Yes, some of those points stand in notable negation to certain theses from my previous publications. But that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. I’m willing to spotlight my own previous theoretical weaknesses — which became evident to me through the criticism I received.

The meta-anarchist project needs to grow through critique. It needs to be able to withhold partial negation of some of its previous structures, with gradual evolution towards more sustainable and potent theoretical assemblages.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t reduce everything to a singular line of critique; to only one definition of meta-anarchism. If some concepts or ideas are subject to negation in this particular text, this doesn’t mean that they’re “officially cancelled” or something. You can still be a meta-anarchist if you don’t agree with the criticisms below. Remember the principles of free open-source development; remember the principles of fragmentation. We need meta-anarchism to be able to contain numerous theoretical forks, which can be, in some ways, contrary to each other.

We’re talking about multiple parallel meta-anarchies here, connected within a broader meta-anarchy — each of those meta-anarchies comprised of people which voluntarily consider and adopt different ideas proposed by numerous lines of critique.

It’s fractal politics. This kind of stuff is what makes meta-anarchism ‘meta’, after all.

With that said…

What is wrong with meta-anarchism, after all?

1. Meta-anarchism encourages ideological rigidity and inhibits critique

Within the current meta-anarchist milieu, you’re incentivized to stick to your own ideological preconceptions. In a way, current meta-anarchism tells you: whatever you identify yourself with, this identity is 100% valid and shouldn’t be questioned. It’s the result of your voluntary desire, after all. Grab a colored flair of your preference and settle in.

What’s the problem with that? Well, while this situation deterritorializes the community in general — it creates micro-territorializations within the identities of individual people. This potentially prompts those people to be more rigid, to stay in their ideological comfort zones.

While this situation may be mentally comforting to some people, it has a risk of creating huge drawbacks in the long run. If we want meta-anarchism to be a productive political endeavor, we need to acknowledge the following: as soon as it’ll come to implementing meta-anarchist ambitions into physical actuality, inevitable conflicts between frameworks will start to arise. And when they do, we’ll need to be able to handle those conflicts productively. Rigid, unresponsive beliefs are not what’ll be of use here.

This doesn’t mean I’m suggesting to devolve into structural fascism and try to achieve obligatory universal consensus, though. Meta-anarchy still relies on multiplicity of perspectives and systems. It’s just that for this multiplicity to not become stagnant itself — to not become an empty body-without-organs — we need to be ready to consider and explore newer, unexpected propositions. Even the propositions which are in some way contrary to our current ideological affiliations.

Engage in critical dialogue with other people from the meta-anarchist milieu. Don’t compel yourself to completely abandon your political preferences — but be open to discourse. Express and explore each other’s beliefs and desires. Be amicably provocative. Negotiate boundaries and potential models of coexistence. Discuss possible lines of fragmentation between various proposed systems.

Contemplate on different propositions. Deconstruct and reconstruct concepts. Be more playful towards ideas, treat them less as inherent parts of who you are — and more as “LEGO blocks” to build something unexpected out of. Liberate your lines of thought. Be meta.

2. Meta-anarchism is essentialist in its opposition to “the State”

In my text about the Collage — the hypothetical meta-anarchist political system — I seem to have somewhat reduced anarchism to its opposition to “the State”. While this broad definition might certainly be effective in attracting anarchists from all parts of the spectrum, it’s certainly not the best in terms of long-term theoretical efficacy.

Reducing all forms of potential despotic power to the construct of “the State” blinds us towards the existence of other, less explicit despotisms. It’s not big news. Practically all the critical theory of the previous and the current century is dedicated specifically to this issue.

If we define anarchism exclusively as “pure anti-statism”, we essentialize anarchism. Within this essentialization, everything that is not formally classified as a “state” — is not of any danger to autonomy and liberty. This oversimplification seems to be the opposite of what meta-anarchism strives to achieve.

So, ignoring the unreliability of “pure anti-statism” in favor of achieving an illusory unsustainable expression of “libertarian unity” wouldn’t be a wise move. Instead of doing that, I believe we need to adopt more precise, more molecular approaches to analyzing social relations— and potential ways in which those relations may be coercive.

What meta-anarchism can really bring into the discourse about power relations is further molecularization: by that I mean further departure from established preconceptions about which relations are voluntary and which are not.

In some sense, critical theory suffers from essentialism itself: it often posits that certain forms of relations are inherently tyrannical, in whatever circumstances they are observed. For example, nuclear families; or private property; or heteronormativity. Meta-anarchism may, to some degree, orient itself around exploring in what specific, molecular circumstances those forms of relations may instead be an expression of autonomy and self-determination.

This would allow for a theorized meta-anarchist socius — for a Collage — to be able to contain within itself many differing forms of such autonomy and self-determination, expressed in consensually sustained values and preferences which vary from one autonomous community to another. By molecularizing our analysis of social relations in such a way, we significantly widen the range of societal alternatives.

This is where meta-anarchism can borrow from assemblage theory, which gives us tools to analyze interactions not so much in terms of power relations and hierarchies, but more in terms of social complexity and intertwining expressions of desire and agency.

So, in this article, David W. Robinson demonstrates how the academically conventional “critical theory”-based approach can actually limit our understanding of interpersonal relationships, and how assemblage theory can offer a methodological alternative. To quote:

As I mentioned in the beginning, archaeologists looking at Chumash complexity have mostly been interested in inequalities of power relationships primarily enacted through the control of specialized craft production, such as canoe and bead making. Less attention has been given to the dynamic range and subtleties of identity within more heterarchical contexts in the Chumash world, such as at the level of household craft production of basketry and other textile practices (see Robinson 2007). <…>

…The case study presented here, looking at the technical design of basketry and other capacities of the assemblages at Cache Cave, illustrates how assemblage theory enables teasing out heterarchical dynamics of Chumash material practice which works alongside more conventional notions of complexity.

I’ve tried to outline a framework for such further molecularization in the so-called Meta-anarchist Ethical Anticode. It conceptually divides processes between impositionary and propositionary ones, and proposes to address and analyze dynamics of any given societal interaction through their relative “impositionarity” or “propositionarity”. So, it doesn’t focus on whether any given relation is hierarchical or not; rather, it focuses on whether it’s an imposition or a proposition; subsequently suggesting to reduce impositionarity and induce propositionarity in societal processes. Give it a read if you haven’t already.

From this basic framework, non-essentialist anarchist methodologies could be furtherly grown, not trapping overall meta-anarchist thought within the reductionist approach of “pure anti-statism”.

3. Meta-anarchism lacks actual anarchy

So, I’m throwing around all those buzzwords — “voluntary”, “liberatory”, “anarchic”, “bottom-up”, “direct-democratic” — but often I do not provide a sufficient description of what they actually entail. They seem to be, once again, essentialist reductions of actual societal complexities; or, even worse, they’re just virtue-signalling platitudes to merely sell the concept of “meta-anarchism” to unsuspecting anarchists and libertarians, without really offering any intellectual value.

Well… I wouldn’t say that I do not provide examples and criteria of voluntarity at all. I’ve mentioned consensus a couple of times, which is explicitly a method of achieving voluntary agreements between all participants of an interaction. Fragmentation is also described by me in terms of voluntarity; as it allows to avoid coercive imposition of a singular order when there are non-consenting actors.

Nevertheless, this criticism bears some legitimacy. My texts often lack sufficient descriptions of experiences and decision-making of individual people, and how such experiences and decision-making may constitute anarchic relations. Once again, we need to molecularize our analysis: we need to talk about concrete relations, concrete situations and concrete social tendencies. Staying in the realm of pure abstractions will only cause us all to endlessly babble about semantics — especially if those abstractions are assumed to have predetermined, indisputable definitions.

4. Meta-anarchism retains the “polity-form”, thus restraining the free flow of political desire

In the already mentioned article about the Collage, I’ve used the word “polity” to describe societal assemblages within the Collage. Through such wording, unwillingly, I invoked an undesirable implication— that only established polities are considered actors within the Collage. And for an assemblage to act autonomously, it needs to be a polity: i.e., it needs to have some form of institutionalized social relations and explicit juridicial conventions. This requirement of institutionalization actually restrains the flow of political desire: what if I don’t want to create political institutions and formulate rules; but yet, I want to act autonomously within the Collage?

This also seems to be in contradiction with other statements from the article: for example, that fragmentation “can happen all the way down to individuals (or even subpersonalities)”. Can an individual be a polity? Well, in some sense, yes. But at this point, semantics of the word “polity” become too fuzzy.

So, I’d just like to say that in my vision of the Collage, organizational fragmentation can happen all the way down to individuals or subpersonalities. Autonomy doesn’t have some kind of scale limit. By the word “polity” I meant simply any kind of societal assemblage capable of political self-determination. This goes for individuals and subindividuals as well. So, an “interpolity protocol”, in the context of my text about the Collage, may as well be an agreement between two self-sovereign individuals.

I do think, though, that meta-anarchism should focus more on molecular fluidity between different assemblages and on non-institutional forms of autonomy — and not only on explicitly political forms of organization such as decentralized virtual jurisdictions or self-governing localities. I’ll try to do that in my further meta-anarchist content.

What do we do now?

With all that said, we’re planning on a project that seems to solve at least some of the issues with the current meta-anarchist milieu that I’ve brought up here. I’m talking about the Playing Collage collaborative storytelling game.

It’s planned as a wiki-based text roleplaying game about facilitating a meta-anarchist Collage. It is currently in very early stages of development; but when launched, it will hopefully serve as a platform for playful discourse and interaction between all kinds of people within the meta-anarchist community. As it aims to put players into a fictional material environment, various systems and ideas are expected to collide and possibly come into conflict with each other. That way, a certain degree of critical dialogue may be achieved, the deficiency of which I’ve discussed in this text.

Also, the game implies comprehensive descriptions of systems and relations within the in-game world, so this will actualize the molecular level of social interactions: we will be able to actually observe down-to-earth descriptions of various anarchies coexisting in a shared environment.

Finally, to go beyond the “polity-form”, the game’s setting will allow to submit any kind of assemblages: from elusive nomadic caravans to rebellious autarchistic enclaves. You can go as non-institutional as you desire.

But besides that, you’re welcome to propose and practice your own solutions to the problems posited above — if you consider them problems, of course.

I’m grateful for everyone who provided criticism towards the meta-anarchist project. I’m hoping for this — and any — critique to be invigorating rather than demobilizing, so far as the critique itself is adequate.

See you in the Collage.