Build community where you are. Politics needs to be forgotten in this process. It doesn’t matter if your neighbors know what anarchism is; what matters is whether they trust you enough to cooperate with you when the state apparatus collapses [1].
If we build community, anarchy will flow naturally when the state collapses — if we do this right. But if we keep squawking about politics and theory to people who don’t understand (or care about) any of it, we’re killing the movement and proving it’s own demise.
Save that for your activist group, collectives, the Internationale, etc., where it can bear real fruit in coordinated action, educational outreach, mutual aid and support… you get the idea.
But you still need to build community locally and more broadly than just among anarchists. Your neighbors need to trust you and you need to be able to trust them [2].
Along the way, you reach out to areas around you, and other communities of different scopes and structures, as either of your needs may dictate. If they need help, or want to cooperate and collaborate (as most will want to do), you build mutual networks of communities. And the word starts to spread…
“We don’t need anyone to do it for us. Look. We did it; so can you.”
It doesn’t cost any money. It just takes time and effort. And everyone benefits [3].
Now, we need this to spread far and wide. Everywhere. Not to the edges of the state; not to the limits of the nation; but across the whole world.
Whatever community you’re in, you can help other communities directly [4]. That’s the whole point of mutualism as a philosophical principle. Build those bridges… now.
If we are diligent, when the state apparatus that has driven society for the last few centuries crumbles under the weight of its own hubris, society itself may continue on, regardless [5].
These are not just possibilities anymore. We crossed that Rubicon about ten years ago, and society as it is will collapse sometime around 2040 [6].
But we can be prepared for what that means, and use it to our advantage. Build the world we want to live in so when infrastructure starts to crumble, it’s already established. In fact, large enough transitions towards mutualist communities in some areas may help expedite the collapse of capitalism and state infrastructure — if we’re lucky!
This is not anarchy as an objective end goal. This is anarchy as an active lifestyle, a way of being in and cooperating with the world, that facilitates social organization without hierarchy, law, and force.
And if anyone asks what your principle or philosophy is, you can tell them…
Via mea est modus mutuus: mine is the way of mutualism.
Footnotes
- An MIT study (you can read the actual study here), backed up by a 25-year review that confirms its accuracy, are fairly conclusive. Society will, in fact, collapse by around 2040, if a natural disaster or global insurrection doesn’t do so, first.
- This boils down to learning basic conflict resolution — which is a dialectic, and you’ll see that word a lot but I’m using it a bit differently — that, when unsuccessful, can simple result in a neutral agreement-to-disagree. This doesn’t come naturally to people anymore — we need to cultivate and nurture relationships because we’ve become hostile to each other, but for 112,000 years, we were pretty cooperative. It’s going to take effort, but we can absolutely recover that. And what’s anyone else got to lose, anyway? All you’re doing is agreeing to cooperate when you have shared stake in something, even if that’s just to show up and say you’re not interested in participating in this one.
- …to the extent that they’re willing and able to participate. Although most will probably find more beneficence than they expect, as people’s kindness tends to win out when they realize that scarcity is fabricated and desperation is no longer their modus vitus. motivating force — suddenly sports participation is at an all time high because competition is reduced to friendly sport as the only option in a post-war society)
- Don’t be content to just “get yours” — or to just stop when your community has reached its goals — at the very least, give others the respect of acknowledging your shared struggle even if you won’t be able or willing to help, but whenever you are able, help people and their communities. And at all costs, avoid judging others and their struggles, no matter what you think you know about them — because you don’t know them.
- Economic collapse does not have to mean anyone goes without food and medicine. State collapse doesn’t have to mean we are left unprotected or without utilities. And we don’t need to have leaders and bosses and bankers and billionaires to make it work. We do it every day — keeping the wheels of society turning — and literally all they do is use our efforts to manipulate the economy for their benefit — both economically and to reinforce the wage slavery and consumerism narratives — while we do what needs to be done, either way. The only thing we’re going to lose is the illusion of scarcity and the stress of corporate interest
- This is, again, a reference to the MIT Limits to Growth study (see footnote #1 above), but with the allowance of variance because even the science can’t be so exact.