One of anarchism’s shortcomings is its unwillingness to consider new and radical ideas outside the rather narrow field of political philosophy. Even feminism had a hard time “breaking in,” though it is essentially political. The movement has now incorporated a sincere ecological outlook, thanks to the untiring work of Murray Bookchin and a few others, but this is only a beginning. Anarchists tend to ignore or denounce vast regions of human endeavor — the hard sciences, mysticism and religion; many are not even very comfortable with literature and the arts. Such parochialism would be a problem even if Western civilization were not heading into a terminal crisis. But all signs say that it is, and very little of the old order can be expected to weather the transformation. It is not possible, and probably not desirable, to make predictions about the shape of human culture a century from now. It will be largely unrecognizable to us, but not entirely so. The new is already a-building within the shell of the old. Anarchists have always claimed that we have a coherent and humanistic vision for the future of humanity; but if we do not start paying attention to the other streams of consciousness that are running parallel to ours, we may not have the opportunity to help shape that future. The intent of this essay is to suggest a few of the tentative steps that should be taken, with a view to encouraging further research and bridge-building. What follows will be unfamiliar to many anarchists, and may even seem a bit incoherent, but that is in the nature of first steps.
The post-Western world, whatever it may look like, will not be a clean break with the past; history after all is dialectical. New systems structure themselves out of their predecessors. We can assume that the anarchist critique, addressing as it does the constitutional flaws in Western civilization, will carry over in some form. This essay will hazard some predictions about what that form might be. As the shift is still in its early stages, and as futurology is notoriously inaccurate, these predictions will probably be wrong. But we have to start somewhere.
What I propose is that anarchists begin to re-think at least some of our positions in light of current ideas and research in the areas of post-Einstein physics and general systems theory. Plenty has been written in the last decade or two about both these cutting-edge fields. Much of it is New Age garbage, or (at the other extreme) is accessible only to specialists; but some of it speaks directly to radicalism. What physics and systems theory now suggest about the nature of reality is so totally outside the everyday experience of Western thinking that we should not be surprised if it sounds like nonsense. Some of it probably is nonsense. But there can no longer be any doubt that the Western worldview, in which anarchism is embedded, is based on an outrageously false set of premises. The fact is that the physicists and cosmologists are dragging us willy-nilly across a frontier that few people really want to cross. By now Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is well known as the paradigmatic description of “paradigm shifts”—those periodic transformations of worldview that punctuate history, installing new fundamental premises that are “incommensurable” with the old. The word “paradigm” has become a buzzword, and its arrogation by the multinational capitalists to describe the next stage of their global conquest is especially galling. Still, it is the right word, and we radicals need to take it back. What Kuhn describes are actually secondary shifts: the fall of the Roman Empire, the collapse of the medieval synthesis, the eponymous Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. They were profound, but not fundamental; they all happened within the basic context of Western culture as established in the Fertile Crescent some thousands of years ago. In systems language, they were “confirmatory” rather than “innovative,” meaning that they strengthened rather than weakened the underlying worldview. What we are looking at today, however, is perhaps the beginning of the first primary paradigm shift since the Neolithic Revolution. Not many fundamental paradigms have existed in human history. That of China is more persistent and stable than ours; the holistic-animistic paradigm shared by indigenous peoples all over the world may yet help save us, if we don’t obliterate it first. Paradigms are dynamic systems of human consciousness, inherently conservative and self-sufficient; when we find one that works, we stick with it. In fact our sanity, our very survival, depends upon our particular paradigm being true. This is why paradigms are so hard to dislodge, even when they are patently unwholesome. The crises of the twentieth century— most notably the ecocidal compulsions of late capitalism — have pushed the Western paradigm to the very brink. Everything is about to tumble over, including anarchism. Assuming that we survive to forge a new paradigm, anarchism as we know it will seem as antiquated and useless as cuneiform.
The first step toward a post-Western mindset is the study of physics as it has developed since Albert Einstein opened a most unexpected door. More than one observer has noted that physics, religion, psychology and even linguistics are converging toward a general explanation of the universe that will little resemble the model we all still learn in school — the worldview crafted centuries ago by that unholy trinity of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. The ingredients are holism and process philosophy, as developed by Bergson, Whitehead and many others; quantum mechanics, with its eerie paradoxes — Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Pauli’s exclusion principles; and a few other models so radical as to defy classification: especially the work of Gregory Bateson, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ilya Prigogine. A few anarchists have already begun to address the implications. Murray Bookchin stands far above the crowd, not least because he ferrets out the anti-libertarian potentials in the work of scientists who are not much interested in political theory.
A full discussion of quantum mechanics, systems theory and their dialectic is not obligatory here. The radical implications can be glimpsed in the work of Fritjof Capra, Morris Berman, Timothy Ferris and others. We can go straight to the cutting edge, the recent theories of David Bohm and Geoffrey Chew and their implications for post-Western anarchism. The idea that reality can be reduced to a “field” of some kind (in which objects shape, and are shaped by, their surroundings) is not new, but David Bohm has suggested that the field is “holographic”— that is, any sector of it contains the whole of the field. Our idea (drawn from classical mathematics) that everything can be located at a “point” in space and time thus becomes meaningless. According to Bohm the order and chaos we perceive in the physical realm are epiphenomena of the “implicate order,” a structure that underlies all structures and systems and is not directly accessible to our minds. The implicate order is transcendent, holographic, and inclusive of all potential objects and events. Above all it is real, whereas our own “real world” is only the surface effect of that reality: objects are abstractions, “relatively independent subtotalities,” like eddies in a stream. The twin great and deadly errors, which anarchism shares with all other Western philosophies, is what I will for convenience call “dichotomy”—the chopping-up of the world into pieces that exist only in our minds, and “reification”—believing that those pieces have a fundamental reality. Our habit of seeing discrete entities where there is only unbroken wholeness is the source of many of Western civilization’s problems and may indeed be the death of us all.
Geoffrey Chew’s bootstrap theory is so revolutionary that we may place it over the paradigmatic line as the first post-Western model of physics, rather than the last Western one. It is based on S-matrix theory, a mathematical model of the universe first proposed by Heisenberg in 1943 to explain the strong interaction of hadrons at the subatomic level. S-matrix suggests that the patterns exhibited by particles aren’t really fundamental; they arise from tendencies of those particles to act in certain ways. The only possible explanation for the success of S-matrix theory, Chew said, is that matter does not exist at all: the universe is “a dynamic web of interrelated events. None of the properties of any part of this web is fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their mutual interrelations determines the structure of the entire web.” In this model all laws — of physics, of chemistry, of history — are purely human constructs imposed by our minds on a reality beyond our comprehension. Structures and processes must be “self-consistent” and consistent with one another, but not with any fundamental principles that lie “outside” the processes themselves. The bootstrap hypothesis destroys the entire project of Western philosophy, whose purpose is to reveal underlying principles for how and why things work as they do. Such an inquiry is now exposed as a dive into a bottomless well. Rather than waste our time trying to figure out “fundamental” postulates, we would be better off following the lead of the mystics, who strive for direct intuition rather than rational understanding. This insight must be adopted by post-Western anarchism: to grasp directly and intuitively the place which we occupy in the world.
The new physics is, as everyone knows by now, far more in tune with the “primitive” opinions of indigenous people than with anything that ever came out of a university seminar or a particle accelerator. The Pueblo shaman in his dusty kiva knew more about the world’s workings than did Oppenheimer in his Los Alamos laboratory a few miles away. The Western obsession with murdering, dispossessing, converting, and otherwise obliterating native peoples is now easier to understand: they knew the truth, and we were determined to live a lie; we could not look them in the face. The post-Western world, whatever shape it may take, will have to go humbly as a supplicant to that mescal-eating, painted savage it once despised. Most anarchists rightly scorn New Age “philosophy” as a confused and shallow babble of late-capitalist egocentrism, but we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Indigenous people do indeed have something profound to teach us, but it isn’t quite what the channelers and the Celestinomaniacs want to hear.
All these assorted ideas come together in a compelling fashion in general systems theory, a consensus product of cybernetics, quantum physics, chaos theory and several other new disciplines. Systems theory is not new, but has only very slowly won acceptance, for reasons that are more political than scientific. A “system” is an aggregate of related elements which takes its identity, not from the nature of the components, but from the nature of the dynamic relationship among them. The theory also assumes that no element of a system is autonomous; all are “holons” (the word is Arthur Koestler’s), phenomena that are simultaneously parts and wholes. This is another way of saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, a very ancient concept. It will be objected by many anarchists that systems theory is inherently flawed by its habit of describing interconnections in terms of hierarchy. The point is well taken, though it is based on a conflation of two rather different phenomena that share the same name. A social or political hierarchy is an artificial human creation, doing violence to the natural order of things. Systems hierarchies are natural by definition, but probably it would be better to think of them as networks or webs. They can be visualized as horizontal rather than vertical — eliminating the values implied in terms like “higher” and “lower”—without compromising the substance of the theory. Another valid objection arises from the origins of systems theory as a mechanical, cybernetic viewpoint. Systems language still tends to talk of social and cultural phenomena as though they behaved like chemical or physical structures. It reminds us of the reductionism and mechanization that we are supposed to be fighting. Unfortunately, systems theory is largely a product of World War II weapons research. Like computers and game theory, it was invented to facilitate the more efficient killing of larger and larger numbers of people. The idea is now in the process of escaping its unsavory childhood, but in the popular mind the word “system” still carries this scientific and capitalist connotation. Both these criticisms can probably be overcome with a careful attention to terminology and an awareness that systems theory, like so much else, can be used for good or for evil.
General systems theory began to take shape in the 1920s, when physicists proved that the Newtonian view of the universe as a collection of discrete objects is false. The inauguration of the “quantum age” was the first great crack in the foundation of the Western paradigm. It required philosophers, mathematicians, biologists, and many other scientists to reconsider their view of the world as a great machine which could be understood by analysis into its constituent parts. What had once been absolute dogma became mere “mechanism” and “reductionism” as we grasped a deeper truth: phenomena must be apprehended as dynamic wholes; when we reduce them to their constituent parts we cannot get an accurate picture of them. All traditional sciences were now seen to be useful only in describing the structure of phe nomena; a new methodology was required to explain their function. We have had to replace the “world as machine” with the “world as system.” From this preliminary shift grew a cluster of new disciplines which fit only with some discomfort into the old categories: semiotics, various forms of structuralism, game and decision theory, cybernetics, fuzzy logic, and the like. Perennial philosophical questions now ceased to have meaning: the mind/body problem, objectivity, determinism versus free will, mechanism versus organicism. We are coming to understand that when no suitable answer can be found, there is probably something wrong with the question.
Without belaboring the point any further, it is by now obvious that our entire worldview is based on a stupendously bogus answer to the question, “What is reality?” How could Western philosophy, grounded as it is in a successful and all-consuming science and technology, have made such a profound error? And how could primitive indigenous people — shamans, dancing about bonfires and wearing silly masks — be so right about the way physics and cosmology work? The answer is not difficult or arcane. A proper understanding of the nature of the universe— its systems, its indeterminacy, its holism— is an adaptive trait, a concomitant of the successful evolution of the human race. If our ancestors hadn’t understood such things, we would never have swung down out of the trees. By the same token, our modern civilization has established its hierarchies and learned to control nature (including people) precisely because some humans forgot what evolution taught them. Thanks to the remarkable flexibility of our brains (and hands) we have been able to make this aberration work for several thousand years now. But like everything else in physics and evolution, a countervalence of some kind is required, a redressing of the balance. Syntropy is paid for by an increase in entropy. We took out a loan, and the mortgage is now due.
The price could be very high indeed: the annihilation of our species. The first installments have already been paid, in the form of this century’s totalitarian systems with their policies of genocide and ecocide, not to mention the most destructive wars in human history and the current unprecedented extinction rate. Anarchists have not adequately confronted the meaning of twentieth-century history. Based on new understandings of how the world works, however, we can now come to some decision about what anarchists must embrace — and abandon —if we are to move forward. The Western worldview has left us with a great deal of unnecessary baggage; we are very attached to some of it. Nevertheless it will have to go.
So what is it, exactly, that anarchists need to re-think in light of the new physics and general systems theory? The list is already very long, and promises to get longer. Here we will consider just two of the Western delusions that need correcting: dichotomy and reification. They are, I think, the two most significant, and they are connected. “Dichotomy” comes from Greek words meaning “cutting in two,” and is now often used to denote the drawing of false boundaries to separate two or more things that are really unitary. The most dangerous Western dichotomy, already identified by the social ecologists, is that between physis and nomos. Western thought separates human beings (at least the better sort) from the rest of nature. This convention probably goes back to the invention of agriculture and domestication, but it was not described in philosophical or theoretical terms until the late pre-Socratic period in Greece. In Sophocles’ Antigone, the theme concerns a conflict between human law and the demands of the gods. The sophist Antiphon, sometimes claimed as a proto-anarchist, declared that self-interest was the basic law of nature. The laws of society require us to submit to the good of the community, and are therefore against nature. Plato took up this interesting dichotomy in the Republic and in several of his dialogues, making it a permanent and central feature of Western philosophy. We are not sure who first used the terms physis (nature, physical reality) and nomos (law, human-established order) in opposition to one another, but all the great philosophers of the classical age had something to say about it. One set of rules (nomos) applies to us, another (physis) to the rest of the cosmos. This is a good example of what the Greeks called hubris, though they did not understand the irony. The pre-Socratic dichotomy of physis and nomos was probably the first major confirmatory shift within the Western paradigm, and the strongest. By setting itself apart from the world, Western culture took on the right to command, manipulate, exploit, and perhaps ultimately destroy that world. In science, it produced Newton’s clockwork universe. The end result was Robert Oppenheimer’s famous remark: “The hell with your ethics. The thing is superb physics!” In religion, it created Augustine’s ethereal City of God alongside the cesspool called the City of Man. In fact it took God right outside the universe, though before he left he gave Adam and Eve (who were of course white Europeans) permission to do what they liked with it. Until very recently, no Western ethical system seriously questioned this basic dichotomy. Even the classical anarchists believed “man” must conquer “nature.” The biocentrism (or better yet, the ecocentrism) of deep ecology is the first clear sign that the physis/nomos assumption is undergoing reversal.
To argue that all dichotomies are false immediately involves one in all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions. If we say, “all dichotomies,” we imply the opposite of dichotomy (holism, unity?) and that is a dichotomy. And “false” presumes “true”—yet another dichotomy. It is not difficult to see why these incongruities arise. The structure of Western logic and reason, embedded in our Indo-European languages (Greek and Latin, especially), leaves us unable to talk or think about anything in a manner that is not dichotomizing. This logical structure is one of the prime ingredients of our cultural paradigm, perhaps even its foundation stone. Trying to operate without it is nearly impossible for us. So far only the quantum physicists, some mystics and a handful of remarkable philosophers employing dialectical reasoning have been able to do so, and even they cannot convey their thoughts to the rest of us in language that everyone can understand. This writer is not so vain as to think he can do any better.
The hopelessness of the task is no excuse, however. We must reject dichotomy and all its works. We could opt to be pure philosophers, and talk about this on a cosmological level; but it might be more worthwhile to forget that for the time being and focus on our own planet and species. The ecosphere is One, and that’s all there is to it. No social or political system that fails to recognize this can be genuinely libertarian. All dichotomies are false, including the dichotomy between dichotomy and holism. Here again anarchism has an advantage: it is inherently dialectical, opposed to boundaries and barriers, and it is flexible. As with all Western philosophies there is a tendency to dogmatism, but anarchists at least recognize the dangers. We must begin to take seriously what Tolstoy meant when he said that the Golden Rule is the only law humanity needs. We must listen to Kropotkin about the advantages of cooperation over competition; to Bookchin about the unity of humans with nature. We have already absorbed much from ecology, feminism, and the non-Western traditions; this trend must continue. What we have not yet done is to look at new developments in the “hard” sciences, and in the realm of psychology. We do not have to fall into the traps of New Ageism or ecofascism. The strategy is to keep the falseness of all dichotomies firmly in mind.
Next, and more difficult from a theoretical standpoint, is noncompliance with the central Western project of reification. The world consists of processes, not things; let’s get used to it, and adjust our anarchist strategies accordingly. I suggest that a thoroughgoing anarchist analysis of language is the place to start. We should all learn something about non-Western languages and how they organize reality in the minds of their speakers. This is not to say that anarchism will save the world if we all learn Nootka, but an awareness of the primary role of language in cognition and consciousness is essential. We will not change the world until we change the way people think, and this will not happen unless we change the language they think in. At the simplest level, much work has already been done: we now understand the sexism inherent in English and its cousins. We know that the negative connotations of the word “black” have contributed to racism. At the other end of the scale, Noam Chomsky has explored the deep grammar common to all linguistic expression; it is no coincidence that the world’s leading philosopher of language is also an anarchist. But there are many other avenues to explore. Etymology is relatively accessible to everyone. An example: the word “consciousness” has a great variety of contradictory uses, both everyday and technical. The root is Latin scire, “know,” which doesn’t help much until we look further back to the IE skei-, “to cut, split”. This verb appears to concern objects that are cut off from some larger parent body. Irish scían “knife” is cognate, but so are schism, schizoid, shed, ski, shield, sheaf, and even shit. If skei- is related to sek-, as paleolinguists believe it is, then some other cognates include scythe, sword, skin, and the large family of Latin words from secare, as well as Saxon, a “warrior with a knife.” The deep unconscious connection between “knowing” and “cutting” is of vast significance for Western thought: from the very beginning, to “know” something was to “cut it off” from the undifferentiated mass of reality, to separate it, isolate it, tear it from its place in the holistic order. Given this deep unconscious connotation of knowing, how could our culture have avoided dichotomy and reification?
In short, the banishment of reification will be promoted if we all become more aware of the great fluidity and power of language. I need to be able to look at the coffee mug on my desk and realize that its discrete object-ness is largely a product of the fact that I employ a reifying noun to describe it. Failure to properly understand reification is perhaps one of the prime reasons for the failure of anarchism to catch the world’s attention. Our ideology opposes exploitation and domination, the putting of price tags on everything, generalization and stereotyping. It supports cooperation and interconnection, respect and acceptance. However, it is largely unable to explain why it holds these values. If it is our purpose to end the domination of one person by another, or of nature by humans, we must demonstrate the fallacy of reification. By snatching a handful of process out of the great flux and naming it, we create the Other. Reification is the error of pointing to “that” or “him” or “her,” by which we imply that the Other is not Us. Here is the foundation of all ideology, all dichotomy, all our false beliefs that We are Not-Them. Here is also the justification for all forms of domination.
What are the implications for anarchism as a living, dynamic project? Even in its present very early stages the post-Western paradigm implies some very difficult concessions. First, and most painful, is the concept of individual autonomy and all its accoutrements. What we once thought of as individual rights will have to be recognized as ecosystemic rights, owned by us because we are participants in a holistic universe, not because we are individuals. Anarchism is better equipped to handle this change than other systems arising from nineteenth-century liberalism or socialism. Other ideologies focus either on the autonomous individual or on the undifferentiated community; only anarchism comes close to a model that allows for a free individual within an authentic community. We can improve this model, both in theory and praxis, if we incorporate post-Western concepts. At present the most promising approach is that of philosophers like Kenneth Goodpaster, Christopher Stone, Tom Regan, and Peter Singer, whose primary interest is the “rights” of animals and other entities in non-human nature. The idea that individuals have certain indefeasible rights is clearly a human notion, both incomprehensible and irrelevant to cows, sea slugs and petunias. Yet it is equally clear that all living things share certain interests with us — survival, reproduction, freedom from pain — and that we base our definition of rights on those interests. The resulting conundrum has no solution within the limits of Western thought, and we are beginning to look elsewhere for radically new answers. Where this will lead is unpredictable, but anarchists had better pay close attention.
Second, we must strive to make anarchism post-ideological as well as post-Western. A large body of literature already exists to address the question of what it means to be post-ideological, and we can begin with that. Most of it stems from deconstructionism, and is therefore highly opaque and pretentious, but it is still perhaps on the right track. We can also consider the principles of bioregionalism, mediation and conflict resolution, cooperatives, identity politics, holistic medicine, even computer hacking and other such concepts aimed at improving the quality of life in practical everyday ways without the “help” of government. The most promising non-ideological strategy, however, already has deep roots in the history of anarchism. This is the principle of scale. If we think of human societies (whether neighborhood food co-ops or empires) as systems in dynamic equilibrium, it quickly becomes apparent that for their long-term survival, the way in which they are organized is less critical than their size. The Diggers and William Godwin understood this principle, and so did most classical anarchists. Even today we give much thought to the ideal size of a commune, or collective, or whatever we choose to call the basic unit of anarchist society. If you have to raise your hand to speak, is the group too large? One of the basic rules of Western civilization is that “bigger is better,” and we anarchists long ago rejected that rule. But anarchism is itself an ideology, and it has always tackled the question of scale as an ideological problem. That is, we worry more about whether the political unit is capitalist or Marxist or fascist than we do about whether it is too big or small. In a post-Western world we may well find communities of Nazis or Satanists or Republicans— and where’s the harm in it, as long as no one is coerced into membership and they are too small and decentralized to threaten the rest of us? Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) has even suggested that monarchy is not necessarily incompatible with anarchism. This sort of talk will no doubt set off alarm bells in most anarchists, but we have to be open-minded. General systems theory will help. All systems are embedded in and interconnected with other systems, in a dizzyingly complex network that stretches unbroken from the ecology of a tidal pool to the furthest boundaries of the universe. Individual or primary systems, however, tend to be quite simple. If they consist of too few elements they do not last long; if too many, they eventually collapse under their own weight, often doing considerable damage. There is an optimum size that produces the greatest possible stability and longevity. Systems are destabilized by the presence of “chaotic attractors,” wild-card elements that do not harmonize with the rest of the system and tend to throw it off balance. A sufficient number of such attractors can destroy the system altogether. The larger and more complex a single system is, the more prone to this sort of disruption. The current disintegration of Western civilization is a prime example. This is not an argument against diversity or in favor of uniformity. In fact the more diverse a system is, the more stable — this insight is the great contribution of the science of ecology to political theory. We are talking here about quantity, not quality. The next generation of anarchists will have to sort out this rather perplexing set of ideas. We are puzzled because we cannot help thinking in terms of dichotomy and reification; perhaps they will do better.
Third, we must start taking seriously the idea of equality. This means opposing any tactic or movement aimed at separating or alienating people from one another — racism, sexism and bigotry in all their guises, both male and female chauvinism, all forms of elitism from executive washrooms to college fraternities. Even to distinguish anarchists from non-anarchists must be recognized as a fallacy. Governments and power elites know they would vanish like dew on a summer morning if we all suddenly started thinking of ourselves as truly equal. “Divide and conquer” is Rule Number One in the Establish ment’s handbook. We must see through and challenge all class distinctions, and eschew whatever artificially sets one person apart from another. Ask a Cadillac owner why he drives such an uneconomical and pretentious car in a world of poverty and dwindling energy supplies, and he will probably answer “comfort” or “dependability,” as the advertisements have instructed him to say. Bringing the real motive to everyone’s consciousness is our challenge. Going to Harvard is great, but don’t get to thinking it makes you “better” than a freshman at Podunk State. Read Thorstein Veblen on the “leisure class.” His style is turgid and his wit too subtle for most, but he was right.
Of course many other issues must be addressed. How can post-Western anarchism incorporate systems thinking into its practice of education, sexuality, art and music, direct action, grassroots democracy, alternative states of consciousness? It can be done, if anarchism will accept the task of explaining why the nature of reality and consciousness do not allow for the domination and oppression of one human being by another. Its praxis will be to define human relationships so as to ensure cooperation, productivity and growth without the exercise of power and authority. In order to achieve its purpose, anarchism will need to adapt to and integrate with other fields — not just ecology, but also physics and psychology. Complex dynamic systems work better when the whole choir is singing from the same hymn book. This does not mean grey conformity, as it would under the hierarchic, mechanistic Western paradigm. Rather, it means a vigorous dialectic of ideas on a level playing field. To this end anarchists must support the breakdown of traditional boundaries among intellectual disciplines; this is already happening, and we have lagged behind. The anarchism of the future will be, as Kropotkin envisioned, a complete and coherent ecological and scientific world-view, not just a political ideology. Let us make sure that it is we, and not the physicists and ecologists, who establish what this means.
Although much of the work of anarchists is centered about the building of alternative and oppositional movements, relatively little attention is given to the evaluation of such movements, in part because such research is difficult for even the trained social scientist. In this report, Gelderloos sets his sights on a food co-op in a relatively small community. The research focused on three dimensions of anarchist organization: the equality of roles, mutual aid, and decentralization.
Originally published in issue 39.