Attack the System

by Keith Preston

  A number of local and regionalist movements have emerged in the United States in recent years. The ideological and cultural content of these is quite diverse. Some from the Left have suggested secession by the city of San Francisco, the Northeast corridor, and other bastions of “liberal” cultural values. The libertarian-capitalist Free State Project is working to become politically dominant in New Hampshire and radically scale back that state’s government. Similar independence, separatist, or autonomist movements exist in the South, Texas, Alaska, Hawaii, New England, the Northwest, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere, including many localities. Some within the patriot/ constitutionalist milieu have sought to set up an alternative infrastructure, usually based on local or populist themes that can be put into place once central power is eradicated. Anarchists should get involved with these kinds of tendencies, and seek to influence the intellectual content and ideological orientation of such movements. It is of the utmost importance to recognize the need for authentic cultural and ideological diversity within the ranks of such resistance efforts. In the tradition of Voltairine de Cleyre, Larry Gambone calls for an unhyphenated anarchism where particular cultural, economic, or theoretical differences are subordinated to the struggle against the common enemy:

  Read even the most superficial book on anarchism and you will discover that many forms of anarchism exist— anarchist-communism, individualist-anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism,free-market anarchism,anarcho-feminism and green-anarchism. This division results from people taking their favorite economic system or extrapolating from what they see as the most important social struggle and linking this to anarchism. . . . The hyphenation presents a danger.

  Like it or not, everyone, without exception, compromises, modifies or softens their beliefs at some point. Where they compromise is what is important. Do they give up on the anarchism of the other aspect? You can be sure that most hyphenated anarchists will prefer to drop the libertarian side of the hyphen. There are plenty examples of this occurring.[138]

  Most existing anarchist tendencies tend to promote their preferred set of sociocultural, economic, or issue-based views over the broader struggle against the state. For example, anarchists with leftist cultural views to be more interested in anti-racism, feminism, and “gay liberation” than anarchism. At the other end, anarchists with nationalist or racialist tendencies are often likely to emphasize the latter rather than the former. Eco-anarchists are typically environmentalists first and anarchists second, or last. Anarcho-socialists and anarcho-capitalists usually put socialism or capitalism before anarchism. To some degree, this is understandable. Most people, including anarchists, tend to identify more strongly with their own culture and others who share their personal values than with ideological abstractions. One anarchist tendency, the national-anarchists, has attempted to deal with this problem. David Michael distinguishes between “core” issues and “peripheral” issues. Core issues involve the common struggle against the New World Order global superstate and the regional/national elites who are its benefactors and beneficiaries. Peripheral issues involve one’s preferred cultural, intellectual, economic, or lifestyle interests.[139] These could include communism, capitalism, black nationalism, white nationalism, environmentalism, socialism, feminism, Christianity, Islam, monarchism, Satanism, injecting heroin, or whatever. Divisions of this type are certainly important, and cannot merely be swept under the rug for the sake of some fractious “unity,” yet nothing will ever be achieved if these sorts of differences allow the opposition forces to be divided, conquered, or co-opted by the international ruling class. David Michael provides us with one poignant example after another of how the NWO imperialists have done just this to nations, cultures, and religions all over the world, including the communist countries of Eastern Europe, the Islamic nations of the Middle East, and the peoples (both white and black) of southern Africa.[140] As Larry Gambone says:

  . . . try as much as you like, you can’t ignore the big one— Leviathan—the central state. Eventually it must be tackled head on and this can only be done by a nation-wide mass movement [or a global movement in the case of the NWO]. This does not mean an opposition between local organizations and the larger movement, on the contrary, the latter must be based upon the former. This must be a single issue movement, uniting everyone with a grievance against the state into a movement for the decentralization of power. It must not be allowed to be bogged down by secondary and therefore divisive issues. These can be dealt with by other groups.[141]

  Indeed, domestic American politics tends to be driven by single-issue movements and organizations rather than ideological ones. Raw ideology pushers tend to find little success in US politics. With this consideration in mind, the question becomes one of how to best formulate a successful single-issue anti-state movement. Several possible constituents for such a movement have already been discussed. The emergence of a single-issue anti-state party or organization that included the agendas of each of the various local and regionalist movements would likely be a good start. There is no reason why there cannot be a party, or alliance of parties, that simultaneously favors the independence of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Texas, the South, numerous local communities, and religion/ethnicity based separatists like the Nation of Islam, Christian Identity, Aztlán, indigenous peoples, and others. Such advocacy of regional/local autonomy should be accompanied by an emphasis on populist structural changes. Norman Mailer’s suggestion of decentralizing the governments of large metropolitan areas down to the neighborhood level coincides nicely with the objective of sovereign townships or county supremacy found in the patriot/constitutionalist milieu.

  The efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union to defend the civil rights of all sorts of groups which come under attack from the state, ranging from neo-Nazis to pornographers, might be emulated. There are many such groups who are currently ignored by mainstream political organizations. These include home schoolers, “cults” or marginal religious denominations, intentional communities, so-called “hate” groups, prisoners and their families, opponents of the war on drugs, gun rights militants, tax resisters, and many others. It is important to remember that a movement for political decentralization should employ a decentralized strategy. This means that the same tactics will not be appropriate in all situations. For example, anarchists working in urban or metropolitan areas should naturally take a political line that is considerable further to the left than anarchists working in rural areas or among more conservative population groups. The cultural paradigm of anti-racism, feminism, and gay rights that dominates the modern left might well be applicable in those communities that it is suited for, such as large cities with huge minority populations and where the prevailing values are cosmopolitan in nature. However, this would clearly not be an appropriate model for rural Kansas. For anarchists to persistently push “the right to bear arms” in liberal Connecticut would probably be a waste of time. For anarchists to agitate for gay causes in small Tennessee towns would likewise be rather futile.

  So-called “extremists” from all points on the political spectrum might be rallied as the core constituents of the anti-System forces. It is essential to remember that the anarchist movement itself (properly and constructively organized) is not necessarily a mass movement per se but only the intellectual and activist vanguard of a broader populist movement containing many different tendencies. The role of the anarchists is to serve as the coordinating mediators conceived of by Mark Gillespie or the principled militants envisioned by Mikhail Bakunin. The decentralized organizational efforts of the anarchists would necessarily involve a scenario where the character of the anti-System movement varied considerably in its specific ideological, cultural, religious, or ethnic orientation on a geographical or institutional basis. Across the American heartland, in the Deep South and in the mountainous regions, the anarchists might assemble a coalition of tax resisters, home schoolers, gun nuts, conspiracy theorists, pro-lifers, Christian fundamentalists, common law enthusiasts, farmers rights advoc
ates, land rights advocates, “cults,” racists, libertarians, militiamen, and other elements common to the political culture of right-wing populism. In large metropolitan centers, inner cities, border areas, and coastal regions, a similar coalition might include militants and separatists from the various minority groups, advocates for all sorts of class-based social issues (gentrification, housing, environment), gays and other sexual minorities, all sorts of countercultural groups, students, street gangs and other official outlaws, communists, left-wing “anarchists,” and others.

  Among the affluent elements of American society, such as the realm of suburbia, it is probably best if the ranks of the revolutionaries draw heavily from the youth population. Opposition to the great oppressor of youth—the state’s school systems—may well be the key issue. It is also important to note that class distinctions in modern liberal democratic states are somewhat more blurred than they may have been in previous times. Any authentic populist revolutionary movement would naturally have to include persons from all classes. The task of the genuine anarchists, who will always be a small minority, even in Official Anarchist circles, is to coordinate and guide formal and informal alliances among such disparate groups. The kinds of issue and ideology based constituent groups being described here would provide the grassroots base for the broader anarchist agenda. But there remains the question of how to appeal to the broader public. A party/organization that combined local and regional autonomy, defended social groups under attack by the state, recruited disparate elements from the cultural fringes as its activist/support base, and maintained a decentralized infrastructure would also have to develop a populist program for the masses.

  Popular Front Anarchism and the Defense of Culture and Civilization Against Nihilism

  It is essential to remember that not everything the state does is equally pernicious or equally in need of abolition. The most important issue is the need to defeat the New World Order internationally and the creeping police state domestically. All other considerations should be subordinated to these concerns. The ultimate objective is to bring down the corrupt, tyrannical US regime and to consequently implode the New World Order. The issues that motivate those on the margins— radical environmentalism, gun rights absolutism, racial nationalism, socialism, radical feminism, queer power, religious fundamentalism—mean nothing to most people. The ordinary citizen is concerned only with his own day-to-day business. His issues are unemployment, housing, taxes, health care, provisions for old age, and education.[142] Some people may also have one or two social issues like abortion or the environment that they are interested in or have strong opinions about. Most Americans have received something of a libertarian education from the Jeffersonian strand of traditional American politics. For this reason, populist rhetoric denouncing “big government” resonates well with the commoner. A populist movement that combined both libertarian and socialist themes, without explicitly describing itself as such, would likely go over well with the broad American working class.

  Populist structural changes with a libertarian bent might be the first item on the agenda. Larry Gambone comments:

  In order to make significant structural changes to society, one must have a program consisting of, say, half a dozen or so key items which the majority of the population might support. The most important point, and the point upon which all populists agree, is the need to empower the ordinary person and their communities and the concurrent weakening of the authority of the politico-economic elite. This can be done by combining the traditional populist structural political reforms of proportional ballot, referenda, initiative and recall with radical decentralization of political power down to the natural community. The power of the economic elite can be clipped by the abolition of corporate welfare and all other government-granted privileges. All populist groups either do or would agree with these principles. Once empowered, the people and their communities could then seek any other social, political or economic reforms they chose, since they would now have the ability to make those decisions.[143]

  This proposal seems to be as cogent as any. As the recent recall of the governor of California illustrates, populist fiscal reforms are also quite popular, even in havens of leftward-leaning politics. As taxes are the lifeblood of the state, and as the average American is familiar with the partial origins of the American Revolution in anti-taxation protest, a radical assault upon the state’s taxing system seems warranted. Depicting Establishment politicians as corrupt squanderers of the public treasury is a tried and true American political tactic, and could almost certainly be utilized to the advantage of anarchists.

  Kevin Carson provides us with a possible economic program.[144] On economic matters, an anarcho-populist, libertarian-decentralist, left-right, radical-center alliance should assert itself as a populist alternative to both the neoliberal economics of the Anglo-American New Right (as opposed to the more populist New Right of the European continent) and the New Class welfare statism of the reactionary left. Carson offers three principal targets for such an alliance: the state’s monopolistic currency and banking legislation, the monopoly privilege imposed by patent laws, and the concentration of control over land through the enforcement of absentee ownership. Elimination of barriers to the formation of credit unions, organization of tenants of public and private rental housing into unions organized on the old anarcho-syndicalist model, demands for the recognition of squatters rights, establishment of the right of local and regional political units and “private” groupings to issue alternative units of exchange, and the establishment of mutual aid societies for the provision of unemployment, medical, and old-age insurance might be a first step. These can be followed by the elimination of licensing regulations designed to prevent competition with established corporate or professional monopolies from small businesses and the self-employed and to concentrate control over the media.

  The elimination of all corporate welfare and the establishment of worker cooperatives as an antidote to corporatism and the conversion of social or municipal services to consumer cooperatives should accompany the dismantling of the corporate-social democratic welfare state.[145] Measures such as these have been proposed by a wide variety of radical thinkers and would be fairly consistent with both the ideals of the “small is beautiful” social activist left along with the “anti-big government” right. Furthermore, the emerging presence and popularity of radicals advocating such a program would have the effect of further discrediting the common left/right divide. The reactionary left would be forced to abandon any populist or decentralist pretensions it might otherwise display and position itself as the defenders of the welfare state. Likewise, the reactionary right would be forced to abandon its libertarian pretensions and become the open, unabashed defenders of corporatism. Also, the anarchist/populist forces would include a genuine cross-section of the cultural spectrum, ranging from patriarchal fundamentalists and racialists to gay, feminist, countercultural anarchists and communists, each of these seeking sovereignty within their own communities. In response, the totalitarian multicultural left would likely gravitate towards the corporatists. The ruling class enemy would be more greatly consolidated in the form of the corporate-social democratic welfare-warfare state, with reactionary multiculturalism and totalitarian progressivism as its ideological orientation, and would therefore be easier to identify and attack.

  There remains yet another consideration regarding programmatic concerns. Any movement that aims to break up ruling class coalitions needs to recognize the importance of “wedge” issues to such efforts. These involve issues for which there is a constituency but where all established parties are committed to the other side.[146] Probably the most significant wedge issues in American politics are drug prohibition and the relationship between the United States and Israel. A growing and militant opposition is brewing on both of these matters, yet the political establishment cannot budge a bit as the “war on drugs” is an essential component of the police state apparatus, and involves a
vast array of vested interests, and the Zionist lobby has a firm grip on both the center-left and the center-right. Anti-Zionism and anti-prohibition both have a considerable number of enthusiasts from across the spectrum of opinion and on the Far Left and Far Right alike. The one-time US Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill once remarked that “all politics is local.” Localism as both a means and an end seems consistent with a broader anarchist perspective. Ideological and programmatic considerations aside, there remains the immensely complicated question of how the US regime is to be effectively challenged. Most of the “third-party” formations in the United States are oriented towards some particular ideological or cultural constituency that is sizable enough to form a minor party but not large enough to actually challenge the status quo. Examples of this include the theocratic “Constitution” Party and the highly ideological “Libertarian” Party. These types of party formations ultimately fail because of their inability to transcend ordinary cultural, ideological, ethnic, or religious boundaries. For an example of how to best proceed with this task, we might look to a nation with a long tradition of authentically progressive politics, the Netherlands, and the phenomenon of Pim Fortuyn. A Dutch commentator, Tjebbe van Tijen, observes:

  The shake-up . . . had its first expression in local elections, with many locally initiated parties—often called Leefbaar (Livable) followed by the name of a village or town. The issues raised by these parties varied depending on the particular area. But in general they focused on “quality of life” issues: recurring elements were environmental, housing, and traffic problems, and sometimes also questions about “foreigners,” be it the influx of refugees or lamentations about the lack of adaptation of other nations, religions and cultures to Dutch society.