The Derivation of Anarchism

Why I think like I do

Having devoted my earlier life to diplomacy and the state-based system, it is perhaps surprising that I am now an anarchist. And not only an anarchist, but a deeply committed anarchist who, with some joy, explores the farther realms of autonomy, freedom and knowledge, and who has now devoted his life to evangelising for a philosophy that I, with passion and ferocity, believe is the answer, perhaps the only answer, to the current crises of eroding democracy, disillusionment, social division and alienation, planetary destruction and profound though rarely-admitted ennui, the product of an economic system that suffocates true meaning and purpose, love and our very humanity (as I discussed in my last post).

How in god’s name did it come to this?

My abrupt departure from working for government is, for some, familiar. My government - my colleagues - lied and dissimulated about the most important and deadly responsibility of government, war. I knew they lied because I knew more about the intelligence, policies, facts, questions and legalities of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and how to get rid of them than anyone else in the British government¹. I even set up and named the UN weapons inspection body!

So, I was just a little disillusioned by the mendacious reality I witnessed up-close of the self-proclaimed honesty, legality, transparency and accountability of what passes for democratic government in Britain and America, where I then lived. But I won’t harp on about the story, even though its aftermath still colours and shapes our world².

At the time, this episode left me bereft, my life’s expected upward path suddenly disappeared. I flailed but I also began to look. The horror of the Iraq War combined with already latent doubts about a system that left children hungry in the richest cities, carved new social divisions, destroyed the atmosphere and left almost everyone wondering, what is it all for?

Where should I look? What should be the starting point of an alternative system, indeed any political-economic system (for the two are inextricably entwined)? It was this starting point that was ultimately to lead to my belief in anarchy which some, in ignorance, assume to be subversive and radical. But there’s nothing remotely radical about the question that started it for me, what surely should be the centre of any pol-econ philosophy: what is it that humans want?

Of course, we don’t really know because we’ve never really been free to explore. I’m not sure I know myself (though I am enjoying trying to find out) and I would never presume to guess others’ ambitions or dreams. That self-restraint has unfortunately never been practiced by those whose simplistic, reductive ideas today govern our world. Neo-classical economics, ‘neo-liberalism’, capitalism are based upon exactly that presumption, that humans seek to consume until satiated, that they ceaselessly want more, a presumption that lies at the absolute epicentre of the pol-econ system that reigns today: that seemingly impregnable paradigm of capitalism and ‘representative’ democracy: ‘caprep’ for short.

How do we know that these ideologues masquerading as scientists, albeit social scientists, are wrong? Who can we ask to testify? Well, how about those who have no stake in dishonesty, who are freed of all artifice and illusion, who must see things as they really are not as they wish, and as they really feel? How about the dying? Ask them and they do not say they wish they had worked more, bought bigger houses or cars, or had more ‘success’. They say that what matters is relationships, other people, love. They say they wished that they had had more time not working, not bossing, not spending on useless objects but being themselves, being human.

Those who pursued different goals bitterly regret it. At a hospice for the dying,

One nurse described the most haunting pattern: “Successful executives, people with awards and achievements — they all had the same confused look at the end. Like they’d been chasing the wrong finish line their entire life and only realized it when there was no time left to turn around.”

This testimony is hard to refute but I still argue that it’s for everyone, in freedom, to decide for themselves and not for us, including neo-classical economists, to assume.

So, next question: What are the conditions in which we can discover what we want; if you like, what it is to be truly human?

The obvious answer is freedom. So, how can we be most free? Defenders of the current system have two related answers to this - we need government to police us and provide ‘order’ therefore enabling us to live in peace (but not freedom, one notes), and that wealth provides the necessary condition for sort-of freedom which indeed it does, at least for a few, if ‘freedom’ is only measured in material terms, the freedom to make others do things for you.

Anarchists believe something else. That we can only be free when liberated from domination by others, including the state itself and the inhuman and crude demands of an economic system (enforced by the state in myriad ways) that forces people into endless and often soul-destroying labour, impoverishes many, enriches a few and, today we realise, destroys the planet.

Domination by anyone or anything (including ideas themselves), or hierarchy by coercion not consent, destroys autonomy because it inevitably means that you are made to do something other than what you would freely choose to do. Most of us don’t even think about this, so familiar and unnoticed are the shackles of ‘the system’ into which we are born, our parents forced by law and thus fear of punishment to register our existence only days after it has begun. Most of us don’t question this because we are so often told, as I was during my economics studies at school and university, that this is what humans really want, that this economic theory (in fact ideology) reflects humankind’s ‘true’ nature, of insatiable acquisition, dog-eat-dog competition and accumulation, such an obvious and grotesque lie that one wonders why on earth we accept it, until we learn from Mark Fisher and Byung Chul-Han that these assumptions suffuse, insidiously, comprehensively yet usually imperceptibly, everything around us - culture - and indeed our very sense of self.

But how do you preserve peace without the state?, the cynics cry. First, I would say that the state doesn’t produce peace, and nor does its concomitant, capitalism. Rather the opposite. Capitalism feeds division, encourages greed and selfishness, and provokes desperation, which is only stopped from boiling over by the coercion, which is often violent, that is the sole privilege of the state, which also reserves to itself alone the right to wage war and commit massive destruction, the ‘monopoly of violence’ that is Max Weber’s definition of the state. States are responsible for far, far more death by violence than individuals and yet somehow, bizarrely, we think that state-sanctioned murder is ok and somehow morally defensible (it is only so in self-defence). States, including those who proclaim themselves law-abiding democracies, start wars, including very recently, and kill large numbers: ask the Palestinians, the Ukrainians and the Iraqis, though the dead have no voice in this debate of course.

Anarchists believe that peace is better preserved by direct negotiation between one another, in equality, without domination, based upon the authentic expression of our needs, where our common interest is very much in the absence of conflict, and instead in mutual cooperation (what Kropotkin called ‘mutual aid’). The social fabric, today so tattered, would also be rewoven by such engagement. I believe in a version of this first explored by the New York philosopher Murray Bookchin, who theorised the practicalities of bottom-up self-government - he called it ‘communalism’ - ideas which today are being practiced in, of all places, north east Syria or Rojava as the Kurds call it, and a practice that, with my friend Debbie Bookchin (Murray’s daughter), I am seeking to strengthen and spread by connecting the many who practice communalism across the world (more of this later, and I shall provide an update on Rojava soon too).

These practices are not remotely radical or subversive except in the original sense of the word, radical - a return to the root, in this case a return to the root of democracy. If you’re uncomfortable with the word anarchy, let’s call it another deserved name - real democracy.

The sceptics lazily argue that government of this kind ‘at scale’ is impossible. Well, it’s happening in 40% of Syria and rather more successfully, consensually and peacefully than the rest of the country, though you wouldn’t know it from this story’s more or less total absence from international press coverage³ .

Bookchin, and later Abdullah Ocalan, the long-imprisoned leader of the Kurdish liberation movement, the PKK, have explained in plain terms how this is done. Ocalan calls it ‘democratic confederalism’ (I recommend his booklet): in short, that local assemblies appoint recallable and temporary representatives to larger-scale forums whose decisions must be locally endorsed; it is perfectly plausible and doable - even at global scale! - and much more desirable than the inevitably under-informed and thus inescapably incompetent decision-making of a tiny few who cannot possibly know the true state of the mass, or their wishes, the amorphous, undifferentiated ‘public’, on whose behalf they arrogantly and ever less convincingly claim to make decisions, a disenfranchised mass that is today, understandably, more and more angry and disenchanted with ‘the system’, a disenchantment gleefully exploited by the odious likes of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and Britain’s very own grotesquery, Nigel Farage, who blame the system’s many ills - from failing public services, the ‘cost of living crisis’ (which is really about inequality, though is never called such) to housing shortage - on ‘immigrants’.

(By the way, I may not have mentioned before that I was at the same school as Farage and was well aware of his much-deserved reputation as a shameless and bullying racist; ‘NF’ he was called, the same initials of course as the violently racist National Front.)

Often at this point another criticism is invoked - that anarchy would merely provoke the ‘war of all against all’, the deliberately blood-chilling threat first propagated by Hobbes to justify the overbearing Leviathan of government, a myth today reinvented - entertainingly but insidiously - in the countless post-civilisational bloodbaths of zombie and ‘post-apocalypse’ films which I too very much enjoy (‘World War Z’ is my favourite, though with this caveat). I would argue that we are already fast slipping into a war of all against all. In the US, it seems to be starting. We in the UK are further away, but not much.

What would happen to the bad people, the criminals, in a stateless, self-governing system? Anarchists do not claim that everyone is good. We are all human, after all. But in anarchism, the process of justice might centre what is called in our world ‘restorative justice’, the perpetrator’s painful confrontation with the true impact of their crimes expressed often by the victims (whose voices are pretty much unheard in our current judicial system), and rehabilitation of that perpetrator, a process I have seen at work in Rojava, and which surely promises more harmony (and less crime) than the bestial and deadly savagery of American prisons or the cruelty, squalor and neglect of British ones.

In the UK today, some are beginning to propose something better, arguing that ‘citizens’ assemblies’ or a ‘house of the people’ would save our faltering democracy, where groups of ‘ordinary’ people would be gathered, supposedly representative of the whole, to take decisions rather than the much-loathed politicians⁴. But everyone should be involved in deciding their own lives not merely slightly larger or different forums than today’s parliaments. The defenders of the current order will moreover portray such assemblies as little more than fancy focus groups, pointing out that it is elections which legitimise a government, not some airy claim of speaking for ’the people’.

Agency, or lack of it, is a central if unspoken element of the current crisis, not merely the method of decision-making. Bang on doors at elections, and this is what people will say; ask young people, and this too is what they say: they feel they have no control. Things are out of control. You don’t sate this hunger for agency by minor if worthy modifications to a system that remains in its essence hierarchical and top-down, the few deciding for the many. In the despair and frustration of the many, the autocrat sees his opportunity, offering his vicious imposition of control in answer to the desperation of those who feel ignored. But there is another name for this craving for agency: the desire for freedom. There is another way to grant it: anarchism.

And there’s something more, a thing without names. Having constructed a logical and rational sequence of steps to anarchy, I’m now going to kick logic away and step into the realm that contemporary ‘caprep’ ignores and in fact disparages, the irrational.

(Indeed one of the methods of control of those who benefit from the status quo is to dismiss every critique as ‘irrational’ in contrast to the supposedly impregnable ‘rationality’ of their system, when in fact the rationale, the logic, of any system can only be proven by reference to its own terms, an intrinsic and inescapable circularity which must undermine any claim of irrefutable ‘truth’, especially so in a self-nominated ’science’ whose terms are largely spurious, if not actually invented and certainly reductive).

And of course orthodox ‘neo-classical’ or neo-liberal economics is centred on the absurd notion of the ‘rational man’ who makes logical choices to maximise his own ‘utility’ (a fake word literally invented by economists to fit into their own manufactured theorems). The rational man does not of course exist, as Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky have proven (rationally): change the framing of his choices but without changing those choices, and he will make different choices. Yet another of the really rather obvious and fundamental flaws in an orthodoxy that still remains unquestioned by so many.

We are of course, and inescapably, a mix of rational and irrational and not, it seems, very capable of distinguishing one from the other (and are they in fact separate?). But in the realm of the irrational lie the things without names, without number and without measure, the huge and perhaps infinite reality that our words and terms can barely hint at, let alone describe, the beauteous infinitude that we, with our poor little brains, must ‘murder to dissect’. This reality, this way of thinking about reality, is utterly absent in the orthodox pol-econ discourse. Yet, within this realm resides, arguably (arguable because it is not provable), what is most vital to our humanity. Call it transcendence, call it the soul, call it god, call it whatever you like or don’t call it anything⁵.

Only a fool would claim that today’s dismally materialist dispensation encourages and nourishes this non-thing or helps transport us to this fabulous and limitless territory. Most of us would confess, in our quiet, depressed moments, the very opposite, even as we must perpetrate it.

This non-thing might be found in the deepest reaches of our sense of selves, or in friendship, primal ecstasy and, of course, love. And what is the pol-econ system that might, just might, succour this non-thing? Even asking this question feels prohibited in the repressive, unimaginative theology of the current system (and that prohibition is the very problem).

Could it be a system which through its collective but mindful (very mindful) construction promotes the maximisation of human freedom, fosters relations with others that bring to abundant life what matters most, love, and fuels and celebrates the exploration and, one hopes, the fulfilment of our very selves, at last. Imagine that! Can we?

It makes me sad to write this because it feels very far away right now and even if not, I will have lived most of my life in the grey and reductive world and indeed have helped perpetuate that, in my regrettable, earlier forms (I once wrote speeches, usually in condescending terms, that propounded this philosophy, for more or less everyone else on Earth⁶).

But in fact I do often feel hope, especially when talking to young people, who are not gripped by the delusions that have anaesthetized and enfeebled my own generation (for the young, the evidence against the delusion is surely all too present). There are ways to make this happen, ways that have been tested and work (like in Rojava), ways that are available now, right now, if only we would see. This doesn’t even require a lot of imagination, though that helps, not least by firing us up with a vision of what’s possible. We need a bit of inspiration to unlock ourselves from the paralysis and inertia.

And these will be the subject of my next post on this topic which, I hope, will be soon. Until then, onwards and upwards. A luta continua!

Footnote: my book will now be published in the first quarter of next year. Its title will be, “There we are human again: a diplomat’s journey to anarchism” and it will be published by the excellent Perspectiva Press. Further news will of course appear in future posts here and on my website, now www.carneross.com. You can also sign up there for updates about my videos and video courses which will soon be available.

1. Literally anyone, even my close colleague David Kelly, the weapons scientist with whom I would make private presentations to other UN Security Council Iraq specialists about what ‘we’ knew about the WMD, and who later would be found dead in a windblown copse in Oxfordshire (which I once visited to remember him) after he committed a lonely suicide because he had dared to tell the world that the government had lied. Some say he was murdered, but to be so unbearably humiliated and viciously savaged (by his own former colleagues) that you despair of the future, as he did, is in my book just as bad. Flagrant lies, a death close to home, and a war that was eventually to cost half a million lives, almost all un-named, anonymous, needlessly killed. The word disillusionment doesn’t quite do it justice.

2. That disillusionment has barely since diminished as I watch the ‘mainstream’ media ingratiatingly embrace the guilty once more, some of whom now present election night coverage (the irony!) and a popular podcast, while Blair himself, the most culpable of course, is interviewed by sycophants and even proposed as post-colonial overlord for Gaza. Words literally fail me, though ‘vomit’ might be one. And if you think I am still bitter, you would be right, and I won’t apologise for it. But you would not perhaps expect that I am also glad - glad that one of the daggers sticking in the rotten corpse of Blair’s reputation has my name inscribed upon it, its haft wrapped with my testimony to the first official inquiry into his lies.

3. As well as the uncritical and indeed self-referential and unconsciously Orientalist (as always with the West) hero-worship of the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa (a phenomenon well skewered in this article: quote: “Sharaa taps into the West’s enduring, and often destructive, belief in its power to redeem others”.)

4. I was very pleased to see young protestors throw custard and apple crumble (!) at the Crown jewels in the Tower of London this last weekend demanding taxes on the rich and a ‘house of the people’. I very much approve of this method of protest, where the means - custard! - seem appropriate for the absurdity of those ugly baubles of royalty. However, I am worried that our ever more authoritarian government will prosecute them as terrorists, which they surely would be in the US as ‘antifa’.

5. Daoists call this thing that cannot be named, well, the Dao, a notion that points to the interesting and fruitful relationship between Daoism and anarchism, which I shall talk about in future. Rather later - in fact several millennia later - Kant termed this reality that cannot be directly described, perceived, or known in concepts as the “thing unto itself” (Ding an sich, often mistranslated as ’thing in itself’), which belongs to the “noumenal” realm, as opposed to the “phenomenal” realm of experience. These are not exactly the same ideas of course but that is a longer discussion.

6. I was once the speechwriter for the British foreign secretary.