"A" Is For Anarchy
Edmund Burke cast a skeptical eye across the English Channel at the French Revolution and wrote sarcastically: "Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, they are forming plans for the good order of future society."
One might apply the same skepticism to the present-day anarchical impulse despite it being something less than a movement, let alone a revolution. Perhaps it is best regarded as a kind of formless sentiment.
Our (very first) MM 7/5/16 A People's History of the United States featured a book authored by Howard Zinn, a self-professed anarchist who, in a 2008 interview, sought to disassociate "real anarchists" from the popular conception of it as inherently violent and predisposed to disorder and chaos.
Well, maybe, but with its core belief in the individual's unbridled freedom and the rejection of any social relationship backed by a power dynamic, there have been multiple examples of militant anarchism reaching as far back as the 1886 Haymarket Riot with the uniting of a European-originated political ideology and the U.S. labor movement.
While there certainly have been modern-time examples of extremely dramatic violence -- Theodor (Unibomber) Kaczynski and Timothy (Oklahoma City bombing) McVeigh come to mind -- the data suggest there have actually been few fatalities from the thirty attacks since 1994, as the threat posed by anarchists has evolved more into attacks on symbols.
Social media has enabled anarchists to remain anonymous yet connected, often thwarting law enforcement efforts to prevent them from organizing. They organize in informal and decentralized networks called affinity groups to carry out propaganda by deed as they share tactics through resources such as The Anarchist Cookbook.
Highland has had a front row seat to one such affinity group, called SAFE (Safe Access for Everyone), originally formed as an extension of Boulder's local Democratic Socialists of America branch to further homeless rights "through direct action." They marked their territory by attempting to silence a Highland Institute-hosted event that featured a talk by a public official -- some irony in that the subject was homelessness -- followed by trespass on and destruction of Highland property. SAFE's core values seem to have broadened into an overall anti-capitalist agenda to embrace "safety" from police, from the elements, from food scarcity, etc. (click: An Interview With SAFE ).
So many grievances, so little time. The anarchical ideology is difficult to pin down as it splinters into so many sub-ideologies e.g. anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, mutualism, anarchism without adjectives, agorism, anarcho-capitalism, egoist anarchism, green anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, neo-Luddism, anarcho-pacifism, religious anarchism, anarcha-feminism, and crypto-anarchism (click: Examining Extremism: U.S. Militant Anarchists).
Such splintering suggests an ill-defined amorphous agenda, begging the question what does the term anarchy even mean? We might revisit some of our previous MM sessions for help. MM 4/1/19 Solitude (Nature) featured transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, one early anarchist prototype with his essay Civil Disobedience. The topic of another session, MM 5/22/17 Ayn Rand/Atlas Shrugged, was Ayn Rand's philosophy labeled Objectivism, centered around the rhetorical question "Who is John Galt?" signaling an anarchical impulse. Finally, many club members are enamored with the whole subject of cryptocurrency -- the nature of their interest may vary but one is freedom to escape the clutches of the perceived irresponsibility of our centralized monetary apparatus.
Meanwhile, one might argue the entire Sixties counterculture was one grand anarchical movement. The problem -- and the charm -- was that nobody in the sixties planned anything. That was the strength and ultimate weakness of the movement: it arose out of moral outrage and indignation, and grew larger precisely because it was so formless. When the production ran out of moral energy, the hallucination turned into just another of those decaying monuments among California's Vanishing Hippie Utopias.
With reference to Burke's skeptical eye and absent some cohesive plan "for the good order of future society," these anarchists simply remain garden-variety lawbreakers whose monkey-wrench tactics accomplish nothing more than harming others.