SOCIAL ORGANIZATION:

THE MINISTRY OF ANARCHY ???

Every once in awhile those in authority suffer from an attack of either conscience or absent-mindedness. In other words they get around to admitting the obvious. The latest example that I have seen is in the March 10 edition of Time Magazine which just recently plunked down in Molly's mailbox. You can read the full article online at the website above. The article entitled 'Citizen Soldiers', under the 'Briefing' section of the magazine hardly lives up to its title. It has nothing whatsoever to do with any military adventures. rather it concerns a belated recognition on the part of at least the State of California that their "official" disaster planning actually provides only a tiny fraction of the help that comes forward during times of natural disaster. The article reports about how Governor Schwarzenegger was "impressed" by the fact that the majority of help in recent disasters in that state was provided unofficially by ad-hoc groups and individuals who responded outside of the State's response system.

The article goes on to say why this is true, though it hardly mentions the efforts of government to hide this fact in the past. As they say...

"After Hurricane Katrina, the secret was out that government alone would never be able to manage big disasters. first responders like firefighters and police make up less than 1% of the population. They cannot be everywhere-or even most (!!!-MOLLY) places. So the vast majority (!!!-MOLLY) of rescues are done by regular people. "

It is nice that the Governor has recognized this obvious fact. His response, however, is hardly productive. His decision is to establish a "cabinet level post to manage volunteers". Yes !!! As if voluntary actions of mutual aid can be centralized and controlled. On the ground the record of recent natural disasters in the USA has been that agents of the government have very often impeded ad-hoc voluntary efforts rather than assisted them. the same was demonstrated here in Winnipeg some years ago during the flood of 1997. The natural response of those who enforce authority is to confront those who seem to be acting outside of that authority.

The very nature of such mutual aid responses says that they are ad-hoc and cannot be planned, despite the illusions of governmentalists that they can. In normal times such government initiatives will result, at best, in minor improvements such as a slightly elevated rate of people taking first aid courses. The great majority of people who suddenly spring into action during crisis periods will simply ignore the propaganda of a state agency to sign up and be directed for an hypothetical future emergency. many will be (justly) suspicious of such an attempt to register them and keep track of them. Given how government has impeded voluntary efforts in the recent past such suspicion is fully justified. But even without this it should be obvious to anyone who thinks for a minute (rather than "thinking magically" that passing a law solves a problem) that the great, great, great majority of people who do respond in emergencies will simply respond with apathy to such a "Ministry of Anarchy".

But there is an even more serious objection that one can raise to such efforts to "officialize" such volunteer initiatives. They may be not just useless, or close to it. They may in fact be destructive. Molly refers the interested reader to an academic paper here: 'Social Resiliance: The Forgotten Dimension of Disaster Risk Reduction' (the reference is to a pdf by one Guy Sapirstein). This makes pretty well the same points that Molly will give below, in different language of course:

1)The "resilience" of a society is determined by its "redundancy". In other words when a social order breaks down there are other groups that can step into the breach. When the state attempts to exert its control over such groups it undermines the vitality of such groups by making them dependent on state direction. No doubt the state, and many believers in statism, think that there is no better way to order things than via government. Even if this was true, however, pruning the "second best" options makes a society less resilient in conditions of disaster. Trying to subsume them under a central plan is one way that such "pruning" is accomplished.

2)The "resilience" of a society is also determined by the proportion of people in that society who have experience of actually "initiating" action on their own rather than existing in a dependency relationship where they "wait for help from others". In normal times such "help" comes in its usual dribs and drabs, following its usual bureaucratic rules. In times of disaster such help is unavailable. Fostering relations of and expectations of dependency inhibits the unofficial responses that people have to adopt when systems break down

3)The relationship of "dependency" is a two way street. Not only do "victims" wait until someone else comes to their aid and not initiate actions themselves. "Helpers" are also trained by bureaucratic structures to "wait for orders", thinking that someone else will be responsible for their altruism. Bureaucratizing the mutual aid impulses of people very much goes against everything that evolutionary psychology has discovered about human behavior. It is a recipe for reducing such altruism rather than increasing it.

How does this differ from an anarchist response ? First of all there are many types of anarchism. There are those such as the primitivists and "post-leftists" whose vision of society resembles ground zero after a nuclear bomb, denuded of all the rich social interactions and organization that humans naturally build up. To say the least this is an unrealistic, totalitarian, and naturally unstable vision, resembling a religious cult more than it does traditional anarchism. The vast majority of anarchists, however, have favoured a much more pluralistic vision where society is actually organized in a much richer sense than it is under our present system. It will be covered by networks of union federations, local communes, coops, cultural and practical organizations that would provide for human needs in a much more rational way (informed by better information because such organizations would be immediate and democratically controlled) than statist or corporate bureaucracies can achieve, no matter what technology they depend upon to acquire such information.

Yes, many rational anarchists have too often become entranced by a "single vision". Anarchist communists, advocates of the "commune", anarcho-syndicalists, advocates of the "union federation", individualists, advocates of "market anarchism", mutualists, advocates of the "cooperative" have often spoken as if they could march on one leg, by hopping along with only one way of organizing society. Yet, in its broadest majoritarian sense anarchism has always gravitated to a "pluralistic vision" where the variety of social organization is superior to the state for the simple reason of its variety. Yes, this will inevitably involve conflict as different groups content for their own ideas and interests. Anarchy is not an utopia. It is not a changeless society wrapped in an eternal harmony resembling death more than life. It is a practical alternative that is different from any ideological vision whether it be "left-wing" or merely our present superstitious dependence on government and law. The anarchist alternative is naturally more resilient because its very nature decentralizes power and increases the number of groups that are social actors. Such a society would be far better able to handle disaster than our present society can.

In recent years anarchism has finally achieved the weight of numbers to begin to put its ideas into practice. These practical efforts have been, so far, baby steps, but they hold great promise for the future if the movement isn't diverted by anti-organizational totalitarians or by romantic true-believers in militancy and violence. For instance the Food Not Bombs group organized great efforts at providing meals to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Their efforts were so effective that the Red Cross and government agencies were forced to refer people in need to them even as the local authorities attempted to chase them out of the places where they set up their meal distribution. Food Not Bombs has great potential providing it can overcome its ideological preconceptions about "veganism" and other subcultural irrelevancies and become what its detractors have often called it: the anarchist soup-kitchen. Many people in the network have made this transition already. To a large extent it is merely a matter of maturity as activists shed subcultural mores and become ordinary people themselves. Speaking of maturity, the Northeast Anarchist Network in the USA has a speakers' bureau, and one of the topics on which they are able to provide facilitators/speakers is 'Grassroots Disaster Relief'.

As I said, all these are baby steps. as anarchism continues to grow such initiatives will undoubtedly become more and more common. By themselves they don't substitute for an active and self-governing citizenry, but they do show the way forward in contrast to attempts of government to destroy the initiative of ordinary people during disasters by attempting to control it.