#title 15 Ways to Practice Anarchism
#author David S. D’Amato
#date SEPTEMBER 4, 2023
#source Retrieved on 2023-10-17 from [[https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/09/04/293250/][counterpunch.org/2023/09/04/293250]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-10-17T03:49:26
#authors David S. D’Amato
#topics introductory, book review



In his book **Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life**, Scott
Branson argues that “anarchism is a name for something most of us
already do. The name itself matters less than the doing.” Anarchists are
doers who refuse to wait for a perfect moment or a political revolution
to begin the work of making a better world. Anarchists are also social
critics who challenge the status quo with facts and will not simply
accept the undemocratic rule of experts. The economists have not been
able to—although, in their defense, they don’t seem to care to
try—explain how it is that their robust, dynamic, hyper-competitive
global marketplace should be dominated by so few firms with so much
money and market power. There are so few firms in part because the
global capitalist environment in which firms operate has become
extraordinarily large and complex. We have made it that way, according
to class interests, consciously or otherwise. Navigating this complex
system requires close and very expensive relationships with state
actors, and there are many powerful state proxies in for example,
defense and aerospace, energy and oil, telecommunications, among others.
Access to the complexities is guarded and heavily curated. a system of
beliefs is required, but it is by no means a religious code—indeed, if
it includes the choreography of religious practice, it nevertheless
disdains the truly devout as unsophisticated, if we may, deplorables.
The code of the coastal elite is monopoly capitalism and American
hegemony.

Who knows what to call them really? They aren’t merely college educated
these days; they have often attended the best schools and they have
fancy graduate degrees, but much more importantly, they share a deep
cultural outlook about America’s role in the world. They may be
conservative or progressive, religious or not, black or white, gay or
straight, cisgender or transgender. The litmus test is one’s
understanding of what kind of thing the United States of America really
is, its history, its uniqueness, its moral character, its destiny. The
story of contemporary American elites is not a new one. It’s the story
of how sophisticated people who see themselves as above chauvinistic
prejudices can, nevertheless absorb the values of imperialism and
actively recreate that system.

Education plays the decisive role in creating and re-creating
generations of well healed elites who see it as America’s unquestioned
right to dominate the globe. To accomplish this distorted reality in
such sophisticated minds requires that they see it all as a matter
of **progress** and **choice**, much as the conquistadors saw their
entrance into the western hemisphere. Progress because the United States
particular corporate system is bringing us cheap new gadgets. In choice,
because of course, there is no country in the world that doesn’t want to
be a US vassal state, stripped and looted by western corporations, with
little or no real sovereignty where it matters. That the United States
plays this destructive global role seems clear to most non-Americans
with little more than a moment’s thought, and even many Americans have
steadfastly opposed the war crimes of the American Empire in both the
land theft from the global south. This is to underscore the fact that an
extraordinarily tiny group of elite Americans creates and implements a
destructive agenda that serves their class interests. This extreme
stratification is a feature of empire: the distance of the plebes from
power; democracy as a shared faith and a show rather than a functioning
practice; wealth distributed upwards to those few in power; eventual
breakdown from these contradictions—from the fundamental mistake of
making human institutions, too large, hierarchical, and bureaucratic to
sustain themselves. More importantly, they are inhumane systems, and
eventually humans join together to change their environments. Anarchists
suggest that there is no time like the present to transform our
environments, in millions of constructive revolutions. For those
interested in participating in such positive social interventions, there
are countless ways to engage in your own anarchist practice, the one
that serves with your values and makes you feel great. Here are some
suggestions:

 1.  [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Really_Really_Free_Market][**Really
Really Free Markets**]]. Really Really Free Markets has been around
for around twenty years, and it has been tremendously successful as a
real-world alternative to the toxicity of artificial scarcity, runaway
commodity fetishism, and lack of genuine community that we find today.
People new to anarchism often ask if it can work. It is certainly
working within and through the countless volunteers, spread across
thousands of miles, who have made Really Really Free Markets the radical
stronghold it is today. The hopeful anarchist would suggest that this
model is scalable to many parts of the world. It both enriches the lives
of the people who participate and offers a proof of concept for a
vibrant alternative to capitalism’s bankrupt notion of economic freedom.

 2. **Help your neighbors without homes**. With a growing housing
crisis in our country, we all have neighbors and members of our
communities who have no consistent place to live right now. Whatever we
can do, these folks need help and a little love and connection if you
can muster it. Anarchists believe that we are a human family and that
those who’ve fallen on hard times are our comrades. State governments
and municipalities have traditionally regarded people without homes as
less than human, as pests you want out of your city. As government
bodies have adopted programs, they are either underfunded or shot
through with old hatreds and prejudices. The anarchist movement has long
been a center of help for people without homes who need places to stay.
The anarchist’s ethical sensibility says that, particularly in a country
with so much vacant and unused space, no one should be sleeping on the
streets, exposed to the elements. And the anarchist’s characteristic DIY
sensibility says that people should help other people survive if they
can. As stated similarly below, in the section on land, anarchists do
not accept the dominion of a small minority of people over the land.
Anarchism is an explicit challenge to the legitimacy and authority of
the state and to the reign of capital. Anarchists will always prioritize
people—and helping people—over people-created abstractions. Thus have
anarchists historically positioned themselves at the forefront of
efforts to assist squatters; as Ruth Kinna observes, squatting is not
only “a logical solution to the insanities of the housing market,” but
it is “also a consciously politicized practice,” with a unique cultural
identity and a special place within the anarchist movement.

 3. **Support prisoners**. Prisoners are subject to some of the
world’s worst injustices, with thousands here in the “land of the free”
alone living in squalor without basic necessities. The United States has
long been infamous for imprisoning more of its population than any other
country; and when we give even a cursory look at the demographic
composition of the group we’ve decided in our wisdom to cage, we see a
direct continuity to the country’s frightening, shameful past of
race-based slavery and the train of horrors associated with it. We can
support prisoners by writing to them, and it is often possible to
arrange for gifts for inmates (but of course check with the relevant
overlords). Prisoners want and need to know that they have not been
forgotten, and many are interested to learn that there is a prison
abolition movement many of us have been fighting
for. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-black-cross-federation-abcf-guide-to-political-prisoners-prisoners-of-war-support][*For
over one-hundred years*]], anarchist organizations dedicated to
supporting prisoners have operated as chapters of the Anarchist Black
Cross. The ABC organizes for the freedom of prisoners and supports their
wellbeing. There are several important reasons that the prison question
has long been a focal point of anarchists. Prisons enforce with violence
the oppressive class and social hierarchies that dominate our lives;
more specifically, they have played and continue to play a key role in
shaping and sustaining America’s brutal racial hierarchies and relative
social positions. Slavery remains in practice on American soil today,
with the permission and protection of prisons around the country, who
have no qualms with stealing labor from people locked in
cages. [[https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers][*Hundreds
of thousands*]]of American prisoners are being forced to work, and
they’re often doing so for mere cents every hour.

 4. **Local currencies and credit systems**. Just as we challenge
global monopoly capitalism by keeping our wealth in our communities and
helping provide for each other’s needs, so do we need to divest from the
dollar; indeed, we could be a crisis or two away for this divestment to
become a matter of survival. The good news is that we have workable
models of local currencies that thrive at this moment, as they have in
the past. Keeping the management and manipulation of the currency close
to the community that uses the currency is a powerful, if
under-appreciated, policy tool. At the current scale, these important
questions of money and credit have become almost completely opaque to
all but a small group of initiates, led by witch doctors in the form of
central bank chairpersons, whom we somehow continue to take seriously.
Given the role that currencies now play in our lives, anarchists humbly
suggest that (if we cannot abolish them altogether) we make them
democratic, transparent, and available through a credit system designed
with the goal of building community and funding projects that enrich
local culture and agriculture (rather than the goal of enriching faraway
banks).

 5. **Land repatriation**. Any future society that approximates the
values of freedom and fairness will find a radically different pattern
of land ownership. As successive generations of anarchists (and others)
have pointed out, the land titles we have inherited from history were
won with methods much less staid and scrupulous than the scrolls and
seals we were taught to picture; to the extent that those existed, they
were often the symbols of murder, expulsion, and deprivation. Many
anarchists and decentralists today argue that functioning, sustainable
community for human beings means access to and connection with the land.
Perhaps no one has put it as well as Henry George did in **Progress and
Poverty**, “For the ownership of the land on which and from which a man
must live is virtually the ownership of the man himself….” Just insofar
as we’re human beings, [[https://youtu.be/6Z0zOGa6G-8][*we are people of
the land*]], and it doesn’t belong to a tiny minority of thieves. To
take a bit of liberty with the Lockean Proviso, if you take much, much
more than you need when others are in deep need, **you are a thief**.

 6. **Protect each other**. Even the Supreme Court has given us fair
warning that the cops have absolutely no obligation to us. So then what
are they there for? We know what they’re there for because we believe
our eyes and ears and friends more than government officials assuring us
that the cops are just like us, that they’re patrolling our streets with
military hand-me-downs because we need protecting. When I see tanks and
extended clips rolling around my community, I know exactly who I’m
supposed to be afraid of and intimidated by. The United States has a
hyper-militarized police culture, and our unwillingness as a society to
confront the problems with unchecked power of this kind has led to a
crisis that also has deep roots in the country’s history of racism and
sanctioned violence against Black people. Having seen that the police
are predatory rather than protective, we nonetheless have to protect
ourselves and our neighbors. An anarchist who is trained in
self-defense, for example, could pass some of that knowledge on to
members of her community, particularly the vulnerable. Recognition of
the fact that we are on our own comes with a tremendous responsibility,
as we can no longer allow our fears to turn us away from the kinds of
training we and our friends may need in order to protect ourselves.
Accepting that safety is an illusion and that our would-be protector,
the state, is actually our captor and abuser, anarchists suggest that we
protect ourselves and each other. Protecting each other means that we
are in active solidarity with each other, particularly those who face
risks and dangers others of us don’t. Coming together in community to
defend one another demonstrates to police and other agents of state
power, as well as to dangerous authoritarians, that our communities are
not places of occupation and fear, that we will not tolerate bullies’
intimidation tactics. Left-wing gun clubs have
been [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kim-kelly-meet-the-gun-club-patrolling-seattle-s-leftist-utopia][*proliferating
over the past several years*]], educating members on how to safely use
firearms, but also educating members in how to deescalate potentially
violent conflicts.

 7. **Mutual aid**. Peter Kropotkin deserves the credit for
positioning this concept as central in the group of ideas most closely
associated with anarchism.[1] Mutual
aid is not the same as charity, nor is how we’d traditionally think
about insurance. It isn’t charity because it is predicated on the idea
of solidarity, the principle of togetherness and a recognition of the
fact that we all need others at points throughout our lives. For
Kropotkin, mutual aid is, in a real sense, what defines us as a species.
He saw it as self-evident that mutual aid “is the real foundation of our
ethical concepts.” It is unlike insurance as we know in that it need not
be formalized, reduced to writing, or even ongoing. It is also very
different in that it is not a capitalist insurance contract; such
agreements, so called, do not originate from a space of mutual
understanding and equality of bargaining power. Further, mutual aid is
help when and where help is needed, without the permission or control of
the state or of capitalist charity. There are no representatives, no
administrators, no strings attached; mutual aid is accomplished
through **direct action**, and there are only the bonds of mutuality and
reciprocity that connect us to each other. This follows a leitmotif in
anarchism: the responsibility is with us, and the action emerges from
us. This lack of imposed hierarchy and centralization distinguishes
mutual aid as a human response to shared struggles rather than a system
of control imposed from above or without by a dominant class.

 8. **Food Not Bombs**. Food Not Bombs has been feeding people and
activating our friends and neighbors against war and empire for more
than four decades; they also regularly provide meals to hungry strikers
and protesters. If you’re interested in the idea that all human beings
deserve food, and you also want to raise the profile of opposition to
war and nuclear arms, get involved with Food Not Bombs.

 9. **Civil disobedience**. Henry David Thoreau said that a person
couldn’t be associated with their government without shame; perhaps
unsurprisingly, he didn’t see government’s laws as having moral force or
authority in and of themselves, independent of a human’s judgment.
Thoreau believed that all people have the right and the capacity to
exercise their consciences and govern themselves. Civil disobedience
extends from these ideas and has taught us that we can nonviolently
refuse participation in and actively disobey laws that our consciences
tell us are unjust. Like Thoreau, anarchists do not abdicate our mental
faculties or moral capacities to presidents, kings, senators, or bosses.
We observe society and act together to ensure that, as Thoreau
recommended, we have a government and social order that deserves our
respect. Until we live in a world that is free, civil disobedience is a
muscle we must exercise, much as James C. Scott counsels the practice of
“[[https://harpers.org/archive/2012/12/anarchist-calisthenics/][*anarchist
calisthenics*]].” Massive-scale oppression is possible only because
people have never been raised to cultivate their inner anarchists.
Instead, we have been raised to obey unquestioningly. Without
practicing, Scott asks, “How are you going to prepare for that day when
it really matters?” It is common to treat particularly horrible
historical events with a level of surprise: how could it have happened?
Why did people go along with it? It’s simpler than we think. People were
not ready when the time came because all of their training had been in
obedience, not moral courage.

 10. **Take to the streets**. A tested and empirically-proven program
that gets the state to respond is mass action—the retaking of public
spaces that belong to us, marches and protests, and (also related to
civil disobedience). Even as we are peaceful, we must be disruptive to
the systems of power that are eating us alive and to the representatives
of those systems. When enough people are organized, we can demand
freedom, justice, and equality, but it takes getting outside in the
streets and **showing that we are ungovernable**, because the ballot box
isn’t working for us.

 11. **Jury nullification**. Jury nullification is simply the idea
that jurors have it in their power and discretion to return a not guilty
verdict <em><em>even if </em></em>they believe the defendant committed
the crime. Jurors have an obligation to take this role seriously and use
their power wisely. They have a much better track record of fairness
than either prosecutors and judges. For example, jurors might nullify
if, consulting with their consciences and looking to their personal
values, they do not believe a criminal conviction is the just or
appropriate response to whatever the individual may have done. In many
other instances, jurors may believe that the laws at issue in the case
should not exist anyway, and therefore carry no moral force or
obligation. Many jurors are not aware of the extraordinary, potentially
life-changing power they hold—not through fault of theirs, but because
judges and prosecutors naturally want to hide the jury’s power to
nullify from both jurors and all future jurors, meaning the people. Jury
nullification nonetheless has a long history. It has been used to save
the lives of many caught in a broken, racist criminal justice system, as
well as to free activists given bogus charges on account of their
political views.

 12. **Cooperative businesses**. One of the best ways to realize a
world without hierarchy, domination, and the exploitation and
absentee-ownership of capitalism is to create that world in our
workplaces. When workers in the business own the business, there is a
level of responsibility, community, and personal investment that is
absent in the bureaucratic modern corporation. People working together
in coops relate to one another horizontally. They don’t see bossism as
necessary to productivity, quality, or any other measure—in fact,
hierarchical relationships produce stress, poor performance, and a toxic
workplace culture.

 13. **Clean up your community**. A growing body of research
demonstrates that when we live in clean and beautiful environments,
filled with walkable green spaces, we are happier and more productive,
which makes our communities safer and healthier places to live.
Organizing clean-ups can turn to picnics in the park and opportunities
to exchange ideas about local, permissionless work and play.

 14. **Community workshops and skill-sharing**. Combining a park
clean-up with a skill-share is a great way to build camaraderie and
demonstrate again the benefits of openness and cooperation. This is also
an opportunity to impart important survival skills such as self-defense,
mentioned above. Vital to anarchism, for Herbert Read, was an active
effort to “secure a revolution in the mental and emotional attitudes of
[people].” Read was wise beyond his years in recognizing that lasting
social change must have roots in mental and emotional transformation.
When we share our skills and our experiences, we not only change
attitudes, but create genuine solidarity and connection.

 15. **Try a little kindness**. Anarchism is a philosophy of respect
for the dignity and autonomy of every other person; it is the active,
living recognition of the fact that the human species is a single family
with a single shared home. This recognition rationally demands kindness
to one another, and an anarchist’s society’s rejection of domination and
rulership is a reflection of kindness and respect. Christian radicals
like Henry C. Wright based an anarchist-like non-resistance politics on
their pacifism and submission. On principle, he would not defend himself
after being assaulted, mistaken for someone else. Wright said, “The
moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by
physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder.”





-------

**David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent
researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation
and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared
in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The
Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and
scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch,
among others.**

[1] In the Introduction to the Second Edition of his own classic *<em>Anarchy
in Action </em>*(which he shares that he would’ve preferred to be called
“Anarchism as a theory of organization”), Colin Ward remarks, “In a
sense the book is simply an extended updated footnote to
Kropotkin’s **Mutual Aid**.”