Freedom is not an endless meeting

Anarchists do not generally join massive meeting-filled organizations. We form small affinity groups. A ‘large’ group might have around a dozen members. Anything larger than that ends up breaking into factions, or being infiltrated and busted by the police, or — at best — becoming an endless and alienating meeting-filled nightmare. Not only do we not do it for practical reasons, most of us do it for ideological reasons. Insurrectionism is hegemonic in North American anarchism, and so are it’s anti-organizational ideas.

Obviously, I am not against intellectualism, or against education. I am certainly not against writing, or against theory! What a hypocrite I would be. But I am against only reading, and never doing. I wrote an essay (partially) on that very subject.

In his essay The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All, David Graeber said:

…the experience of operating within a system of formalized rules and regulations, under hierarchies of impersonal officials, actually does hold — for many of us much of the time, for all of us at least some of the time — a kind of covert appeal… …bureaucracy does not just make itself indispensable to rulers, but holds a genuine appeal to those it administers as well… …The simplest explanation for the appeal of bureaucratic procedures lies in their impersonality. Cold, impersonal, bureaucratic relations are much like cash transactions, and both offer similar advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand they are soulless. On the other, they are simple, predictable, and — within certain parameters, at least — treat everyone more or less the same. And anyway, who really wants to live in a world where everything is soul? Bureaucracy holds out at least the possibility of dealing with other human beings in ways that do not demand either party has to engage in all those complex and exhausting forms of interpretive labor described in the first essay in this book, where just as you can simply place your money on the counter and not have to worry about what the cashier thinks of how you’re dressed, you can also pull out your validated photo ID card without having to explain to the librarian why you are so keen to read about homoerotic themes in eighteenth century British verse. Surely this is part of the appeal. In fact, if one really ponders the matter, it’s hard to imagine how, even if we do achieve some utopian communal society, some impersonal (dare I say, bureaucratic?) institutions would not still be necessary, and for just this reason. …Organized violence… as… a form of communication, is one that radically strips down, simplifies, and ultimately prevents communication; insofar as it as a form of action, it is really a form of anti-action, because its ultimate purpose is to prevent others from being able to act (either to act in certain ways, or, if one kills them, to ever act in any way ever again.) Yet here we have a way of taking those very stripped-down, minimalistic forms of action and communication… and turning them into the invisible base on which everything they are not can be constructed: dreams, projects, declarations of love and passion, artistic effusions, subversive manifestos, or pretty much anything else. They allow for the creation and maintenance of social relations that could never have existed otherwise… this… implies that bureaucracy appeals to us… precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted… [bolding is my own]

The issue here (or, at least, an issue) is that there really isn’t a way to have a non-statist bureaucracy. As David Graeber says in Dead Zones of the Imagination, an earlier essay within the same book:

…what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant. It is true that the effects one can have by disabling or killing someone are very limited. But they are real enough — and critically, it is possible to know in advance exactly what they are going to be. Any alternative form of action cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or understandings, have any predictable effects at all. What’s more, while attempts to influence others by the threat of violence do require some level of shared understandings, these can be pretty minimal. Most human relations — particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view. This is what I’ve already referred to as “interpretive labor.” Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind (“cross this line and I will shoot you,” “one more word out of any of you and you’re going to jail”). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. One might even call it the trump card of the stupid, since (and this is surely one of the tragedies of human existence) it is the one form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with an intelligent response.

A nexus of centralized, massively over-scaled violence — what we usually call ‘the state’ — is absolutely necessary to get anything recognizable as bureaucracy. If you want to have four-hour, six-hour, or fourteen-hour meetings to decide every little detail of society… very well. It’s certainly an odd thing to try to do, but ultimately it’s your time to waste. What, though, will you do when I laugh off all your rules, all your forms, all your procedures — every single way that you would strive to constrain me, to intervene in my interactions with others?

It seems that you are then faced with two possibilities. You can shrug and admit that you don’t intend to actually do anything to me if I laugh in the face of everything that has been decided in your infinite meetings… or you can bring out your billyclubs, and tell me that you’ll start hitting me if I don’t fill out the right forms, or follow the right procedures.

The first possibility raises the question of what, exactly, the meetings were for. Are you all just meetings-enthusiasts? If so, very well. You’re all very boring people, but you’re also hardly immoral.

The second possibility, though, raises the question of what, exactly, is the difference between you and a state. You’re an organization. You’re making decisions together. You’re exerting violence to enforce those decisions. You would, presumably, object (with violence) to my attempting to make my own rules (such as, for example, no meetings) and enforce them with violence. And, presumably, there is a given geographical area within which you will do this. You are an organization exerting a monopoly on violence within a geographical area. You are a state.

Every mass-meeting contains within itself the threat of a state, ready and waiting to be born.

There are safeguards against this, amongst anarchists. Even filthy platformists aren’t all bad. Anarchists usually operate on consensus, after all. Within that, there are certain checks on tyranny. Most anarchists, though, have consensus all wrong. It has become reflexive, received wisdom.

In my first months as an active anarchist, I had no understanding of why we did consensus. I just accepted it as an inexplicable element of the subculture, like wearing black, or pretending that punk music doesn’t sound awful. It wasn’t until I watched some or another of David Graeber’s interviews off of youtube that I understood: we do consensus because consensus is what happens what people can’t actually force anyone to do anything. If anyone can walk away from anything that they want, then whatever happens with the people that stick around will be consensus. It will be a thing that everyone remaining will have said yes to. Or, if not “yes”, they’ll at least have said ‘oh alright, I guess that’s fine’. When you ‘block’, you’re not really forcing those around you to deal with you — you’re saying ‘if you do this, I will leave’… and they may say back ‘alright, then’.

“Consensus” is not, itself, a moral principle. It is an emergent property of groups of people acting on anarchist moral principles. However, it is often treated as one by newer anarchists. Anarchists don’t tend to come from cultures that practice consensus natively. Instead, they tend to come from cultures that practice representative democracy — which is treated as a moral principle, in and of itself. And so some anarchists try to transfer that worldview to anarchism, and treat consensus as though it were a set of rules and procedures, and as though we might actually someday form one big meeting and manage the affairs of all humanity with the simultaneous consent of every human.

This is, of course, ridiculous. You will probably never find anything that every human being will agree to. Groups that have consensus tend to be small, and that’s a feature. Anarchist groups are always splitting and recombining, and that is good.

Treating consensus as an iron law is absolute nonsense. It is not a command to let the hardest-to-please asshole dictate everything. A block is not an exertion of force. When you ‘block’, you’re not really forcing those around you to deal with you — you’re saying ‘if you do this, I will leave’… and they may say back ‘alright, then’.

That lack of coercive force, that constant splitting, that lack of procedure — that is what protects groups practicing proper consensus from taking on the statist character of a Meeting. But most anarchists practice pretty bad consensus, and they don’t even really understand why they practice consensus in the first place.

It seems as though even good consensus can suffer from the cliquish, tribalistic effects of community-identification and -dependence. Who, after all, wants to block or be blocked? Who wants to split from everyone they know? And what might a group “running on consensus” take exclusive control over? Might we feel the tyranny of the commune?

2. Alien, Strange… and Productive

All of that is well and good, but this leaves certain complications for autistic people. Many autistic people find special pleasure and use for the simplification and increased legibility of bureaucratic procedure. As such, my friend feared that a movement of affinity groups — as opposed to a more platformist configuration — might have no place for him or people like him.

If we was right, it wouldn’t change my mind about insurrectionism. It is possible that a more moral world might leave some small amount of good people worse off. But I don’t think that my friend is right.

I think that a less bureaucratic and less constrained world would likely have more to offer autistics than the world we find ourselves in. To illustrate my point, let me tell you about a man named Darius McCollum.

Darius is autistic, and Darius is Black. Both are important factors in understanding how he has been treated in America — a white supremacist, NT supremacist place. Still, though: it’s his autism, not his Blackness, that I want to focus on. Darius absolutely and completely loves the New York subway system. He loves it so much that he’ll spend hours riding it, just for pure joy of it. He’s memorized the daily schedule of every train in NYC. He knows all their procedures. He’s a train fanboy.

But, the issue is that he likes trains so much that sometimes he steals them. He then operates them in exact accordance with their schedule and procedure. According to all reports, he’s actually better at driving the trains than most of the actual conductors. The dude’s *always* on time, always follows full procedure, etc.. He just loves doing this. He’s very dedicated:

…his interest with the New York City Subway system started in his youth, when subway motormen permitted him to drive trains. McCollum was first arrested in 1980, at age 15, when he drove an in-service New York City Subway E train for six stops… Occasionally, McCollum would appear as transit employees named “Morning” or “Manning”, who riders invariably experienced as friendly and helpful. By 2000, McCollum had been jailed 19 times for transit-related crimes. That year he pleaded guilty to charges of forgery and burglary for signing out a train according to proper MTA procedure to perform customary duties (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance), and then signing it back in. He was sentenced to a minimum of ​21⁄2 to 5 years in prison.[8] In 2005, McCollum was apprehended at a Long Island Rail Road yard with the keys to an M-7 railcar in his pocket. They had been given to him by his MTA friends who had given him their shifts, but he… was sentenced to three years in prison… he was reimprisoned… after he was found in possession of railroad property. On June 13, 2008, McCollum, now 43, was arrested again. He was wearing a hardhat and carrying a knapsack, flashlight and gloves with an MTA logo. He was dressed in the blue T-shirt and work pants typically worn by track workers and was arrested as he tried to enter a restricted area of a midtown station… He was arrested at Penn Station on October 5, 2008, for impersonating a Long Island Rail Road employee and answering passengers’ questions. On August 31, 2010, McCollum was arrested for the 27th time… [for] the theft of a private bus… Police stated McCollum is “very smart, he’s not a dumb guy” and that he was a “gentleman” during arrest and processing. At the time of his arrest, he had spent 18 years — more than a third of his life — in jail for transit-related offenses. In 2013, McCollum pleaded guilty to stealing the Trailways bus… McCollum was arrested for stealing a Greyhound bus… …In January 2018, McCollum took a plea bargain in which he agreed to go to a psychiatric institution for an “indefinite” period of time.

Darius McCollum has never hurt anyone in his life, as far as I can tell. Not even in self-defense. In fact, many of his “crimes” took a while to discover — because when Mr. McCollum “hijacks” a transit vehicle, it is never immediately apparent that anything is amiss. Many of his “crimes” were only discovered after the fact. I’m sure that the majority of his “crimes” have gone unrecorded, and forever will. Mr. McCollum is something of a cypher to us. It is a little bit hard to comprehend his motivations.

But I don’t need to understand every detail of my driver’s inner world. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that I don’t really care to do so. What I care about, what I need to know, is whether or not the trains will run on time. Darius seems like he would accomplish that. As such, I have no issue with him driving any vehicle I ride. Further, I don’t think any reasonable person should object to him driving a public transit vehicle. Taking the converse, I think that any person who does object to him driving is unreasonable.

Worse than unreasonable, though, they’re joyless. Joyless, and stupid. It’s this sort of joyless stupidity that bureaucracy excels at. That you, quite likely, need bureaucracy for. A world of bureaucratic forms and procedures is a world that has no room for a man who wants a job so badly that he got a criminal record trying to do it. It’s an NT-supremacist world, one that makes no allowances for individual differences — and that recoils in horror from minds too different from NT.

As Vikky Storm said in their essay Mad Anarchy:

As someone diagnosed with [ADHD], it’s easy to see the way that the structuring of society hurts me and makes me unable to function properly. Work and school are set up to favor neurotypical people. They require me to hold my attention on specific, tedious tasks for long periods of time, while simultaneously punishing me when I hyperfocus on things unrelated to those tasks. I’m often required to sit still or do nothing silently — sometimes for hours on end — but my need for constant movement hinders my ability to do so effectively, requiring me to find ways to avoid sitting still that won’t get me punished. These are all things that cause stress and create an environment that is hostile to me. Similarly, other forms of neurodivergence face problems due to the way that capitalism and the state affect society. People with autism… often have problems with sitting still: they need to “stim.” People with schizophrenia or related forms of neurodivergence may have problems understanding instructions or will put people off with their reactions to their hallucinations. This interferes with their ability to work. But none of these are problems inherent to our neurodivergence. If I were able to focus in a way that was more suited to people like me, or if autistic people were given ways to stim, or if schizophrenic people were able to live off their own labor without requiring a boss, none of these would be problems. …Lines, endless paperwork, and the constant need to deal with bureaucrats serve as walls to us, whereas they tend to be surmountable road bumps for others… …In a stateless society without the necessity of capitalist work, a lot of the aforementioned societal problems for neurodivergent people will dissipate… By allowing for worker control over industry, we allow neurodivergent people to determine our own way of laboring. Smaller workplaces and decentralized industry would give us more autonomy and more self-control.

I would argue that this isn’t the all or nothing proposition that Vikky Storm implies it as. This is not about “…in a stateless society…”. This is about right here, right now. Any sort of ability to interact with each other that is freed from hierarchies of power (i.e., a less bureaucratic form of interaction — after all, the full development of power is bureaucracy) is always a negotiation. Take-it-or-leave-it deals are always a product of unequal power. When no one can call the cops, every exchange has to have some give to it. Or, put another way: the natural limit to the price of every good is always related to danger of stealing that item.

If we can push out the bureaucrats and the cops, etc., even a little… well, what replaces the space ruled by them is a space ruled (at least temporarily, at least a little) by no one. In the absence of power, there is the autonomous zone. In the mere lessening of power, there is a ‘more autonomous zone’. When we can interact with each other through black- and grey-market agorism, the freed market trickles in.

The freed market is full of accommodations, and every exchange is potentially unique.

Within a freed market, non-NT attributes could make non-NT people more suitable for certain jobs than NT people are — if the stumbling blocks of being non-NT are removed by environmental changes, it is entirely possible to be left with significant unlocked positives. As an example, Vikky Storm (or, me — I also have ADHD) might be made better at security work by their ADHD — supposedly, ADHD is an adaptation that makes one a better hunter and/or warrior. Alternatively, Darius McCollum (within a freed market) could easily find work in railway co-operative.

3. Who’s a Person?

All this talk of alien-strangeness seems to raise a question: exactly how far could you take this alien-strangeness before you were no longer confident that you were dealing with a person? How much further could you take it before you were sure you weren’t — and, instead, thought of yourself as dealing with an inanimate object, an animal, a machine, a natural process, something else familiar, or a thing unfamiliar but still definitely not-a-person?

Well, all this talk of freed markets and accommodations seems to suggest an answer.

Returning to a David Graeber quote of before:

Cold, impersonal, bureaucratic relations are much like cash transactions, and both offer similar advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand they are soulless…

There was something that David Graeber was wrong about. Cash transactions aren’t “soulless”. Anyone who has ever tipped someone can tell you that. Anyone who has intentionally paid a friend a fair (or more than fair) amount for their labor can tell you that. Cash is just as much a conveyor of human relationships as anything else is. Because the stain of communism lies over much of the splendor of the modern anarchist movement, David Graeber can get away with such off-handed unsupported statements. Since there is no imagination in the way that communists (or, for the most part, capitalists) view the market it is easy for David Graeber to claim something so ridiculous. Most of our market exchanges happen between us and large, bureaucratic, faceless organizations — i.e., they happen outside the freed market. They happen between us and people with much more power than us, people who can and will call the police on us rather than entering into a negotiation.

And it’s there, in the negotiation with others, that I think we experience them as people — and, in fact, experience ourselves as such.

It is only when we meet other people that we know them to be people — this is tautologically true. When we meet other people, we most commonly find ourselves cooperating with them in some way — we come to mutually beneficial agreements, we make deals, we give gifts and gain regard, we signal this and that attribute about ourselves. Meaningful interactions are almost never simply a discussion, an exchange of ideas. Meaningful interactions are ones in which both participants get something more than that. Even charitable or familial interactions end up giving us some sustained feeling about ourselves that we value, even if we (in, perhaps, only the immediate sense) give something more material up.

Further — I would take it that we only know ourselves to exist and to experience something ‘real’ when we experience ourselves, or external stimuli, in the presence of others. The near-universal reaction to seeing something alien or strange is to look to the nearest person and say some variation on ‘you seein’ this shit?’. But, if there is no nearby person to share the unbelievable with, the reaction is one of disorientation and frustration — without social confirmation of stimuli, how can one treat the stimuli as real?

We recognize others as others through our deals with them, and we come to recognize ourselves through other people recognizing us.

The converse of this is that (given that we know that people are people by making deals with them) a person is a being that we are capable of engaging in non-hierarchical (i.e., freed market) deals with. This has several consequences that are both somewhat shocking and rather satisfying.

This means that, of course, rocks, animals, machines, the braindead, fetuses, etc.. are not people. We cannot engage with them non-hierarchically. It might be possible to do something with an animal that one might call a ‘deal’, but it is almost certain that you could easily trick the animal — your superior intellect means that, even if you are currently acting as though you were engaging with them as an equal, you always have the option of dropping the act. Non-materially enforced equality is always just that: an act. You cannot really have an “equal” relationship where one of the participants can decide (at any given moment) whether or not the relationship will be equal.

But, this also means that you cannot really regard authority figures as people, either. After all, they are similarly incapable of engaging with you non-hierarchical. In practical terms, you can’t really negotiate (in a freed manner) with a cop. They can always simply arrest you for something or other, and that would be that. Or, as unionists frequently remind us, the boss is still a bastard even when he pretends to be your friend. And that is the operative word: pretend. Social relationships maintained by those with power over you are always full of lies and pretensions — they are methods of softer control, not true forms of friendship. The boss and the cop are, to you, not actually people: they are authority figures, and not people.

That is one of the more shocking parts of my definition: who is and who isn’t a person is subjective. Just as morality is subjective, just as value is subjective, so is personhood.

This extends even into the realm of the theoretical, which is often reserved for science-fiction. We must consider this, too. Some day, humans will be modified, or modify themselves. Completely synthetic intelligences may be created. Animals may be genetically modified into something that is not a mere animal anymore. The coming technological singularity may very well create intelligences that are to me (now) as I am to a dog.

We must be ready to answer the question: are these people? And if so, why?

The answer seems to be that if we can make non-hierarchical (which rules out post-human super-intelligences as being ‘people’ to us, but seems to include the rest) deals with us, then yes — they will be people, regardless of how “alien and strange” they otherwise might be. And this alienness and strangeness will be bridged within the freed market.

Frank Miloslav, in his review of The People’s Republic of Walmart, said:

Prices let us compress the complexity of our subjectivity and knowledge into a single number that helps us interact with others, allowing the distances between our capabilities to be bridged by assumptions… The capacity for prices to enable autonomous positive-sum relations between individuals is what has made capitalism capable of overcoming hurdles and challenges that would have destroyed any other system. However at the same time the current system must restrict our freedom of action so as to maintain the disparities of power… Capable of compressing a vast amount of information into a single value, money allows for the negotiation of preferences at a level that no other technology has achieved to date… Its capacity for enabling distributed, stigmergic action and it’s flexibility in how it can be created and used makes it one of the most impactful technologies we’ve ever uncovered, worthy of sitting alongside such inventions as language in terms of expanding our capacity for action. So, while democracy may give us warm fuzzies when it comes to making collective decisions, it’s currency that lets individuals of radically different backgrounds work together, find common ground, and develop positive sum relations, or at the very least respect their differences.

I hold that this isn’t just true for prices, but for deals in general — though, of course, prices are features of some of the most refined and easiest to navigate deals; I don’t need to share a language, just the ability to point, grunt, and write legible numbers in reference to a common currency. All our differences whether small or incomprehensibly vast, don’t matter if we can work together — and who we can work together with varies from individual.

The boss and the cop are not people to us, but they may very well (by my same definition) be people to each other. Similarly, while we cannot see the post-human super-intelligences as people, they will likely see each other as such. From the perspective of this unusual conclusion, a certain similarity emerges between the freed market and anarcho-transhumanism: both are prospective projects with the ultimate aim of putting everyone in a position to recognize anyone’s personhood.