This essay is an afterward in the book The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics, a collection of anarchist essays edited by Deric Shannon, Anthony J. Nocella, and John Asimakopoulos, and published by AK Press.

 

Any distinctive political perspective strongly favors particular visionary and strategic claims though people of contrary perspectives reject or at least largely doubt those claims. 

 

I claim participatory economics and participatory society provide a worthy, viable, and even necessary and potentially sufficient anarchist revolutionary vision. I also claim that proposing anarchist strategy is a much more complex and delicate undertaking. 

 

Along the way, I centerpiece two central anarchist themes: (1) the need to strategically plant the seeds of the future in the present, and (2) the seemingly contrary need to recognize that future people should freely and diversely decide their own future lives rather than today’s activists arrogantly and intrusively deciding future peoples’ lives for them. 

 

 

Anarchist Vision

 

Anarchism is about reducing to a minimum fixed hierarchies that systematically privilege some people over others. Men should not enjoy advantages as compared to women, nor heterosexuals as compared to lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, nor members of any one racial, ethnic, or cultural community as compared to members of some other, nor members of any political party or group as compared to members of some other political party or group, nor members of any one class in the economy as compared to members of some other class in the economy. 

 

Anarchism doesn’t require that we all do the same things, which would be a ludicrously unattainable and boring condition. Nor does anarchism require that we all enjoy the same levels of happiness, which would be an impossibly intrusive and repressive condition. But anarchism does forbid society from systematically privileging some people materially or socially over others. In an anarchist society citizens should freely fulfill themselves without being systematically subordinate to or systematically superior to other citizens. We should each benefit from the same structural opportunities. We should each gain from the gains others enjoy.

 

Simultaneously, however, anarchism also favors future people deciding their own future lives. Some anarchists think this entails rejecting the idea of anarchist institutional vision. They feel anarchism should seek classlessness, solidarity, equity, justice, diversity, self-management, and other general values – but not specific institutional arrangements for attaining these values. Anarchism should recognize that all institutional choices are contextual so that future citizens will decide in a myriad of ways whatever they themselves determine.

 

In other words, some anarchists favor a “values yes, institutions no,” approach to vision. They urge that no particular specific institutional aims are necessary to anarchism. Instead, anarchism asserts only that future citizens themselves, by whatever institutional means they choose, should diversely implement the values all anarchists favor. Let a thousand institutions bloom!

 

I believe that while a “values yes, institutions no” stance is well motivated and in considerable degree insightful, still, it goes too far. 

 

First, trivially, anarchism is not “anything goes.” The freedom of anarchist future citizens should not include the freedom to own slaves or the freedom to hire wage slaves, as but two of countless conditions anarchism should obviously rule out. 

 

But second, and more subtly, must anarchism rule anything in? Are there social components that a future society must incorporate to be deemed anarchist? 

 

In other words, even as we want to currently advocate and aggressively seek only the most minimal array of future features lest we trample the freedom of future citizens to make their own choices, do we have to unrelentingly seek some centrally important visionary features right from the outset lest future citizens never enjoy that option? Are some features not merely contextual, but unavoidably central if there is to be freedom? 

 

We shouldn’t say, for example, that in the future people must eat these foods, wear those clothes, or settle on this  size for workplaces or that mix of products to produce in amounts and patterns we prescribe – because for us to now make such determinations would manifest our current tastes, current preferences, and current thinking as developed in conditions we are currently familiar with but that will not pertain in the future – as well as because such choices of course would rarely be intrinsically and unavoidably essential to attaining the values of anarchism. 

 

But while we can all rightly agree that blueprinting the future would inappropriately overreach, I do believe that enabling future citizens to freely, diversely, creatively, and knowledgeably decide their own social lives requires that we advocate some institutional vision. We can now know based on history’s accumulated insights that future people will operate in accord with at least some social relations we can specify now or that future people will not operate freely. More, due to their being necessary for freedom, we should ourselves now begin seeking these particular centrally important social relations so that future people will be able to freely experiment with and make diverse choices about all other aspects of society and free to adapt these central structures as they decide, as well.

 

In other words, current anarchist institutional vision should be limited to precisely those relatively few positive institutional commitments we are confident future people must have enjoy if they are to have the information, circumstances, inclinations, opportunity, and even the responsibility to creatively and knowledgeably self manage their own situations. Positive institutional vision should not extend further than that minimum, but nor should positive institutional vision stop short of that minimum. 

 

Anarchists should strongly advocate and tirelessly seek the minimum necessary institutional vision to overcome cynicism, inspire hope and creativity, and inform strategy sufficiently to establish the basis for future self managed outcomes – all without extending our claims and actions into domains that we can’t know or that transcend our right to currently decide.

 

As an example, consider the economy. 

 

When I claim that participatory economics (or parecon for short) is an anarchist economic vision, I mean parecon includes the minimum economic attributes a future economy must embody if future actors are to equitably self manage their own lives, fulfill their own desires, mutually aid one another, etc. 

 

Pareconish self-management, for example, is the idea that people should have a say in decisions proportionate to the degree those decisions affect them. This is an ideal, of course, but in any event there should be no systematic and snowballing divergences. There should be no condition of some people enjoying more than proportionate say and of others suffering less, as a fixed or even steadily worsening condition, and thus of some people repeatedly and systematically dominating other people’s life choices and conditions. It isn’t that we should all always get our way, an obvious impossibility given the diversity of human interests. Rather, over time, it is that we should all have a just and fair say. 

 

Equity, a second central value of parecon, is the idea that citizens should have a claim on society’s economic product that increases if they do socially valued work longer or more intensely or under worse conditions. We should not receive income for property, bargaining power, or even output, but we should receive income only for the intensity, duration, and onerousness of our socially valued labor. 

 

This remunerative norm accords with anarchism’s respect for human rights and responsibilities and its conception of solidarity. The norm promotes work that meets real needs even as it also establishes socially self managed levels of labor and leisure.

 

Solidarity, Parecon’s third central value, is the idea that people should care about one another’s well being rather than each of us trampling the rest or at the least turning the other cheek to others’ difficulties. 

 

Now “nice guys finishing last” because society’s institutions guarantee that economics is a war of each against all where callousness is a prerequisite for success. In an anarchist economy each of us succeeding should require that we each also aid others. Our own gains and other people’s gains should be mutually supportive, not mutually exclusive.

 

Diversity, a fourth central Parecon value, is the idea that people should have a wide range of options available and that when making choices, diverse paths forward should be kept available or experimented with. This provides unexpected benefits from paths we might otherwise have arrogantly ignored, as well as insurance against unexpected difficulties on paths we wrongly thought optimal.

 

Finally, as the fifth and sixth parecon values, environmental husbandry is the idea that humans and the rest of the environment ultimately constitute an entwined community in which humans have to take responsibility for the impact of our choices on ourselves but also on the rest of nature’s domain – and, in turn, efficiency is the related idea that economic activity should produce what people seek for fulfillment and development without wasting assets we value, while furthering self management, equity, solidarity, diversity, and husbandry.

 

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