Confession: I’m an erratic anarchist
A cringeworthily self-indulgent piece about my political journey from sprout wearer to wobbly
When I was about 16 I thought I was vaguely a marxist. But I hadn’t done the reading and had only the vaguest of ideas as to what that meant. What I did know was that I was passionately opposed to the war on terror, which had just begun, and so inevitably (and slightly reluctantly) I became peripherally involved with the SWP; they being the only show in town (the town being York) when it came to such things.
The best day’s work I ever did as a cadre was to raise about £90 to send an activist to Brussels to protest outside of the NATO HQ. Being incapable of resisting a pun I had entitled my fundraising drive “Brussels for Brussels” (subtitle: “wear your sprout with pride”) and had purchased a large bag of brussels sprouts, sellotaped one of them to my jumper, and offered my fellow pupils the chance to similarly stick vegetables on themselves for £1 a pop. Generally speaking my eccentricities were met with hostility and occasionally violence but for whatever reason on this occasion the playground chose to find me charming and harmless and people chipped in with gusto. Albeit few took their sprout, the bag of which quickly turned brown and slimy until I was ultimately implored to throw it away. My own sprout, mummified in Sellotape, held up surprisingly well until, about a month in, I made the mistake of poking it and discovered it had completely liquefied within its polypropylene sarcophagus. I suppose I should be grateful it didn’t explode.
It was shortly afterwards, I think possibly when handing over the £90 I’d raised, that I asked my SWP handler (ok he was just a mate who was in the SWP, but I was 16 and wanted to make wearing a putrid sprout sound cooler than it was) what the difference was between communism and anarchism.
With the arrogant confidence of the hardened cadre he explained to me that there was no intellectual difference at all but that certain people with personality disorders or other kinds of impediment to making social connections were attracted to outsider causes like ours but, due to their own inability to make friends, were incapable of believing that organisational processes were possible. That’s what anarchism was.
If you remember being 16 you’ll remember the incredible power that the opinions of people who were just one or two years older than you can have on you. Also being socially precarious and insecure myself (once again: I had spent the better part of the past month wearing a vegetable) I was thrilled to hear that there were others lower down the social pecking order than me. And so I took his explanation as gospel, and didn’t really think about anarchism seriously again for about another 15 years.
Shortly afterwards I started a politics A level, and started to do some of the reading, but not enough, and ingested the received wisdom that politics outside of the mainstream was a self indulgent triviality that Real People with Real Problems, could scarce afford. (I should note that while this is absolutely an example of Althusser’s ideological state apparatus at work, I did have one teacher who helped ensure my anti-imperialism didn’t disappear, encouraging me to read Pilger and economic analyses of the Vietnam war. Thanks Mr Klays). I moved to the centre, because not being in the centre meant you weren’t sensible or serious and it is very very important to be sensible and serious when you are in your early 20s.
I became a Liberal Democrat because it was the early ‘00s so they were the only sensible and serious political party in England that weren’t actively racist or pursuing a war of imperial aggression. While I was never entirely ideologically at home they did give me a job that I was bloody good at and which allowed me to make Blairites cry and so it took me the better part of a decade to extract myself. I spent that decade seeped in classic liberalism, and of course some of it sank in, particularly because I still hadn’t done the reading and so didn’t have the theoretical understanding to articulate why those ideas felt wrong to me. What was left of my early marxism turned into a sort of Rawlsean social democracy by way of left liberalism. Or put simply, while my beliefs might have been slightly syncretic (who’s aren’t?) I was fairly mainstream centre-left.
But something about all that never sat right, and it took me a very long time to work out what. One can pathologize my gradual transformation variously, but ultimately it was about becoming old enough to be confident enough to stop taking myself so seriously. Once I did that I was free to think more radical thoughts again.
This idea I had ingested that radicalism is an indulgence presupposes that the serious politics you could be doing instead is terribly important. I now know from experience that it isn’t; and that insofar as it is others can do it just as well as you can, particularly as without radical ideology politics is largely management anyway — and the world is full of more competent managers than me.
Radicalism is inherently impractical: it looks beyond what can actually be achieved here and now. As Gary Younge so beautifully put it: “if politics is the art of the possible, then radicalism must be the capacity to imagine new possibilities”. And there’s nothing wrong with that; being impractical is only a sin if you are in charge, and as I grew older I realised that I neither was, nor ever will be, nor ever want to be, in charge. And that I’m therefore free to be as impractical as I like.
I think this is one of the most insidious parts of hegemony: this way it causes us to relate to politics almost exclusively through the mechanism of roleplaying as a head of state; encumbering our thought processes with limitations and responsibilities that are in no way proportionate to the infinitesimally tiny degree of agency and influence we have, but which nevertheless close down our range of acceptable opinions to the narrow and the predictable.
In about 2010 I started to seriously study how political power is wielded and how political change happens (in the urban Pakistani Punjab as it happens, but it could honestly have been anywhere) and quickly became a “history from below” person. I feel our collective sea of interactions (arguments, conversations, and actions) creates an ecosystem of sorts, and the emergent behaviour of that ecosystem pushes our leaders — who have far less agency than we or they care to admit — to make the decisions they make.
Understanding the power that I did have, as a participant in that process, gave me a new found appreciation for the utility of radicalism in nudging that ecosystem in the direction of my values. Meanwhile understanding the power I didn’t have, to make choices, freed me from all sorts of logistical concerns about how any perfect system I might prefer could operate in practice. When we talk about new political possibilities we are not designing new systems in the hope of imposing them in their entirety upon a society (or at least we should not be: that’s messianic and megalomaniacal nonsense), we are simply shaping the direction in which our current political ecosystem evolves: what we’d like it to do more of. Or less of. Or do in another way.
I have absolutely no idea how a society organised according to my values could possibly function, but the dinosaurs had no idea how a kestrel could hover and that didn’t stop some of them from thinking “hopping is fun and allows us to catch things, let’s do more of that” so setting an evolutionary process in train. Likewise I think: inequality is bad and prevents many of us from achieving stuff, let’s have less of that. I have no idea how that particular kestrel of an idea is going to evolve, but I don’t need to because no one is asking me to design the kestrel.
I also realised, and again this is about confidence, that one can walk and chew gum at the same time: one can engage with the politics of the here and now in pragmatic ways but still dream of and work towards a different politics. The way one interacts with the challenges of the day does not need to become an all encompassing political identity — that’s another lie hegemony tells us.
Another part of all this of course was that I finally, belatedly, did do the reading. Not all the reading of course, I’m still hopelessly poorly read compared to many. But in my thirties I read orders of magnitude more political theory than I ever had before. It’s strange to think I didn’t really start doing this until several years after my frontline political career had ended, but I doubt that makes me unique. For a while I thought it was simply because I did a maths degree rather than a politics degree, but I’m told that people who do politics degrees don’t read much radical political theory either.
Anyway it turns out theory is useful, who knew? There hasn’t been an original thought in the last several paragraphs. It’s all basically watered down Gramsci by way of Hall, Laclau and Mouffe, and the rest of that New Left gang (I’m now several years behind on my NLRs — keeping up is pretty much a full time job — but I’m forever grateful to them for my providing the starting point for my much delayed political education).
So I was reconciled with radicalism and became, once again, vaguely a marxist. And yet still something didn’t sit right. Partly it was a historical weariness. While I completely agree that relitigating the 20th century is pointless and has minimal relevance to anything pertaining to now; as both a reader of history and a practitioner working in accountability and reconciliation following atrocities it was hard to feel comfortable surrounded by the language and symbology that had also been used by red fascists, genocidaires, tyrants, and other assorted psychopaths. (In contrast, while one shouldn’t sugar-coat the history of anarchism it is, generally speaking, pretty cool).
But mostly it was interacting with the state and seeing its cruelty. The British state was cruel, particularly to those it could get away with being cruel to: refugees and anyone suspected of terrorism. The states in the global south I worked with were cruel too, unspeakably so in the case of the various atrocities that became my specialism. And the common factor was not ideology or geopolitical faction or democracy or dictatorship or economic development. That was the mistake in analysis I witnessed so many on both left and right making, leading to endless enemy-of-my-enemy fallacies and the heart-breaking sight of members of the ostensible left far too often taking the side of political elite actors from the global south against the people they were oppressing out of a warped notion of anticolonial solidarity. The common factor was the state, and behind the state it was power and it was hierarchy.
(This is not to say that all states are equally cruel, either qualitatively or quantitatively, but that the cruelty directly stems from the power imbalance that exists between the state and the public).
This hostility to nation states first took me in the direction of internationalism and the UN. But while I did, and still do, find some comfort there I also find much of the same desire to use coercive force, reinforce power imbalances and create hierarchies — just on a broader canvass.
And finally it also has to be said that I am not much of a collectivist. I’ve always had what I’m sure is a deeply bourgeoise but utterly unshakeable belief in the importance of individual rights. I am a quasi-marxist precisely because I believe in the maximisation of individual freedoms, and the removal of all encumbrances, particularly the encumbrance that is poverty, to the full enjoyment of those freedoms.
And so I became an opponent of hierarchy in all its forms and a critic of the concentration of power in any hands be they public or private. In short I became an anarchist.
At this point, arguably long before this point, I should also probably mention that thirteen years ago I married an anarchist. That probably had something to do with it too. In truth though, while we talk about politics all the time and agree about almost everything, and while that likely did have an effect, it also led to me thinking that since anarchism was her thing I should probably read other stuff, since she had that bit covered.
However, when she found out she was pregnant she ordered a copy of God and the State for the nursery and framed Sacco’s letter to his son above our crib.
I wanted to make sure I stayed ahead of my son’s political education, so it was then that I decided to actually read some anarchist theory. And of course as soon as I did, I wondered what had taken me so long. Like the novels of Banks or Le Guin (incidentally both anarchists) or the guitar solo in Maggot Brain, I was left wondering why it had taken me until I was nearly 40 to discover something I would have absolutely adored in my early twenties. And of course there were reasons, but they were stupid reasons: I had hated Atonement and so I refused to read the Culture series because I thought that they were by the same guy; I had assumed Funkadelic would sound like James Brown without the charisma and so had never listened to any; and I didn’t read Le Guin sooner because I am an idiot.
As for anarchism: it was because of a liquified sprout and a conversation I had when I was 16.
Of course, I’m not very much of an anarchist. I am the most passive of revolutionaries. I’m very wet, deeply conventional, and painfully moderate (it even pains me) in all things, much as I try on occasion to push myself (you can take the intellectual coward out of the Lib Dems etc…). I also invariably find that in policy conversations I am on the side of wanting a larger and stronger state, even if I equally invariably justify this in terms of only needing such an institution as a bulwark and mitigator against the otherwise unfettered and even less accountable power of an even more hierarchical corporate oligarchy. Perhaps naively, I do hope that at some future stage such bulwarks will be less needed and can be rolled back.
It’s hard to recall now but in the brief interlude between being the sweetly nerdish in-house economist for Valve, and being the insufferably pretentious parody of a leftist public intellectual he is now (actual verbatim quote when promoting his new novel on the Verb last year: “my heroine rejects her epiphany through an epiphany, her conundrum is quite delicious, or at least I have tried to make it so”) there was a time when Yanis Varoufakis wrote utterly brilliantly and accessibly about politics. It was during this phase that he coined the wonderfully useful phrase “erratic marxist” without which describing ones political identity involves apologetically mumbling the terms post- and neo- for a solid five minutes until your conversant is satisfied you are not Stalin but has equally decided you are incredibly boring. Following his example, I’d call myself an erratic anarchist.
Anyway aside from my needing to procrastinate, why do I now feel the need to tell you, patient reader, any of this? I started to think I should last summer when David Graeber and Stuart Christie died in swift succession, and UK anarchism suddenly started to feel a lot smaller. While of course nothing I could say or do could compensate for those monumental losses, I do think the bare minimum I could do, and which I’m conscious I haven’t really done until now, is be open about having anarchist leanings.
I think it’s particularly important to do so because I can. Unlike many people who doubtless have similar views I don’t think my career will be particularly harmed by openly saying such things, and even if it is it’s strong enough to wear it.
Indeed about a year ago I went freelance and while there were several reasons for that one of the main ones was a feeling that being in a position of both professional and financial strength where I am able to say some things that other people — one way or another — can not afford to say or would not be listened to if they did say, I’m pretty much morally obliged to say them. Being freelance allows me to do so without fear of embarrassing any of my mostly very nice and very tolerant former employers.
Anyway this isn’t really an announcement, I’ve been openly an anarchist for about 18 months now — albeit even a close observer (of which I have none, that would be weird) would be forgiven for not noticing. I wrote an anarchist short story. I moved my IWW badge onto my work coat, and wore it around Whitehall (an act of praxis which, even without lockdown, is about as ineffective as any, perhaps on a par with another thing I did when I was 16: placing copies of the Revolutionary Communist Group newsletter into the bookrack of a luxury yacht for hire). And I started to more aggressively weave a conceptual critique of, and hostility to, the state into my work (you still have to squint a bit to see it: as I mentioned boldness does not come naturally to me whereas nuance does, and even as a freelancer I am never entirely writing for myself — except here).
But it’s all a bit pathetic and minimal, and while this deeply self indulgent blog post is scarcely less so, it is at least something. And I do think it’s important to try to say something.
