A discussion on Reddit (where you’ll find most of the below as a comment) prompted me to consider the divide between social and individual anarchism, and why both sides seem to think their ideology needs to be universalized in order for an anarchist society to be sustainable — in other words, “the revolution” should result in global anarcho-communism, or should result in global left-market anarchism, or whatever. This is absurd. And kind of antithetic to anarchism. And we’re going to find out why.
I’m going to use the two biggest “classes” of anarchist philosophy — Social Anarchism and Individualist Anarchism for this discussion, but you can find fractally-embedded microcosms of this conflict within each, and within each of their subclasses; the social-versus-individualist dichotomy has been a dividing force in anarchism since its early days. I have started to find it exhausting because it’s not only unnecessary, but irrelevant and even detrimental. Let me explain.
The real discrepancy is in the perception of anarchy. If you prioritize the individual’s subjective perception of their freedom (usually measured by negative liberty, expressed in values such as voluntary association, the no-harm principle, etc.), this becomes individualist anarchism. On the other hand, if priority is given to the objective egalitarianism of society (measured by positive liberty, expressed in values such as communalism, entitlement to equal opportunities, “from each according to ability to each according to need,” etc.), the anarchist ideal takes on a decided social disposition.
Regardless of what your predilection is, all anarchists can agree on a few basic principles. Among these, deprivatization and voluntaryism are generally non-negotiable.
When private industry (which includes the State) is eliminated and social participation becomes voluntary, it becomes impossible to establish a community that is larger than its locality. Towns and communities become the largest social organizations and they can federate and ally with each other but that doesn’t give one member of the federation the right to dictate how the others organize (lest we violate the principle of voluntaryism). So, from this, a certain guarantee of plurality arises: not all towns and communities need to follow the same organizational structure for managing their resources. How an individual community organizes itself is mostly irrelevant to the other communities it is cooperative with, and those interactions, themselves, will evolve their own dynamic.
In other words, even within a regional federation, there is nothing preventing each community from employing the ideology it is most drawn to. There can be communes, mutualist markets, syndicalism, and whatever else within that federation. Further appealing to the principle of voluntaryism, any individual in any of these communities is free to leave and go to any other community (or none at all for you primitivists and survivalists) at any time, based on what suits them.
There will never be a socio-political solution to the social-individual dichotomy because the one that suits each individual best is subjective to the individual’s social value orientation. Whether an individual prioritizes positive or negative liberty more highly will determine their disposition.
We’re really just spinning our wheels with this argument, and holding back progress. This is all stuff that can be worked out locally; it need not factor into our larger, shared fight against capitalism and the state. Of course the capitalists and statists and fascists and vanguardists love this because, as long as we’re too busy fighting each other, we’re not strong enough to fight them… so they throw gasoline on this fire and we do the work of suppressing our movement for them.