On old maps, it is common to see areas populated by mythological creatures, mermaids and Amazons, dragons and unicorns. The beings that inhabit the most remote and unexplored regions – those known or presumed to exist, but which are not yet understood – are depicted in great detail. The accounts of the few travellers who have reached these places are passed on by word of mouth and become distorted as they are retold; they are magnified and exaggerated, until from a narrative—presumed to be more or less reliable—an entire imaginary topography emerges, which serves at the same time to prove the existence of the mythical creatures whose territory it delineates. The circular reasoning is evident. Dragons exist because they live there, at the edge of the world. This places them on the map. And they live there because they exist and must be somewhere. That is why they can feature in the depiction of the world.
Similarly, in the nineteenth century, with the fantastical excesses of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance now a thing of the past, Victorian explorers – salacot hats on their heads and rifles at the ready – set about methodically filling in the gaps that still remained on the maps. Particularly on the African continent, these blank spaces acted as magnets for the colonial powers, which meticulously mapped out the coastline, yet still knew nothing of what lay inland. This presented a seemingly irresistible invitation to minds imbued with evangelising and imperialist fantasies. After all, as Kipling reminds us, it is the white man’s burden. Something similar occurs in politics too. Most of us grow up virtually as functionally illiterate in this sphere, which is not normally considered necessary for adult education. Generally speaking, the education system and society as a whole take the view that a country’s inhabitants must acquire a body of knowledge that will equip them as future workers and productive members of society, but this does not extend to the civic skills essential for political engagement.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that current democratic models restrict effective participation to a caste of professionals, which means that the rest of the population need only possess a bare inkling of how the system works – just enough to cast a vote in a ballot box and accept that the direct management of their affairs is no longer, if you’ll pardon the redundancy, their concern. But it seems that the tendency to invent what one does not know is a constant feature of human psychology. Just like the monsters on medieval maps, the political landscape is riddled with dark and unknown zones – grey areas of which one usually has only vague notions – from which a fantastical image is constructed that replaces more detailed knowledge and makes the latter seem unnecessary. On the basis of these vague notions, the political landscape is divided up, associating certain elements of the ideological spectrum with distant cardinal points and populating it with the corresponding mythological creatures that inhabit it. Evidently, these beings are not a spontaneous product of the imagination, but are often supplied by interested parties, through channels suited to the level of representation being sought. Cinema, television and, above all, the mainstream media supplant formal political education (in the broadest sense), and disseminate prejudices and preconceived images across a mental map that is intuited rather than drawn. Thus, most people (though not all) know that National Socialism lies somewhere to the right (the east?) of the conservatives, but not exactly why, or what the differences between them are. Similarly, the Marxist left lies to the west, in a zone populated by enemies of private property, although nobody knows how they got there, or why. And the anarchists? That’s where the dragons are…
If our knowledge of, shall we say, conventional political options is generally sketchy and vague, our understanding of those that transcend the conventions of the civic common sense of an era enters the realm of the nebulous. We find ourselves on fertile ground for the mythical. Any notion that goes beyond the parameters accepted as unquestionable in the foundations of the current democratic system is perceived as nonsense, difficult to take on board or even to conceive of as possible. Everyone knows that someone has to be in charge, and if not, things descend into chaos. Everyone knows that every person counts as one vote, but in a company the boss is in charge, and that’s that. Everyone knows that one’s freedom ends where another’s begins. And it makes no sense to consider, for example, that freedom—or the lack thereof—is a social and historical phenomenon that is collectively constructed, and that each individual’s freedom arises from that of everyone else. Much less that there are effective forms of collective decision-making, or that political dictatorship—even if it is called democracy—is based on economic dictatorship, and that this is largely the cause of the perpetuation of the class structure and wage labour. In truth, there are areas on our map that lie beyond the confines of the world—not just the known world, but even the imaginable one.
In this realm of undefined shadows dwell the anarchists, creatures who might be said to lack a voice of their own, who cannot explain themselves, because their plight comes up against a barrier of incomprehension and ignorance. Instead, the powers of the established economic and political system colonise this mist-shrouded region and populate it with their own inventions. The propagandist by default becomes the indiscriminate terrorist driven by criminal and anti-social zeal; the naturist who promotes free love, a promiscuous satyr; the atheist rationalist, a fanatic who devours priests; the libertarian educator, a corrupter of children’s minds. And more recently, the counterculture has become hippie-ism; anarcho-syndicalist workers’ demands, idleness or cronyism; and active abstention, utopian short-sightedness, which fails to see that the only path to social transformation is the novel method—never tried before—of voting for some tiny party, the true champion of revolutionary aspirations.
This defines a peculiar topography of anarchism, colonised by its opponents on the right and left, which distorts its proposals and presents a region inhabited by monsters where no human being with half a brain would venture to enter. As a fantasy, it may well be fine, but, it must be emphasised, the true political project lies elsewhere. The worst part of it all is that, just as in colonised populations, which change to adapt to the image the coloniser has of them, some anarchists sometimes adapt, consciously or not, to this distorted image. In fact, there are those who are precisely drawn to that false image of irrational radicalism, that nihilism devoid of proposals which the Sex Pistols sang about so well, even though it has little to do with historical or consistent anarchism. Or they are simply comrades who have not moved beyond the vague perception of the “Idea” that is common in the bourgeois interpretation of anarchism. For it is not enough to hate the police or to wear a hood at every demonstration to be a consistent anarchist, just as shouting loudly at assemblies does not make anyone more radical. What these comrades fail to realise is that they are taking the distorted image and bourgeois prejudices against anarchism at face value, even though it is precisely these that they find appealing. They get lost in questions of form, unable to get to the heart of the matter. And in this way, the cycle is reinforced. Anarchists exist to the extent that they conform to the stereotype and validate all the clichés from the moment they come into being. Otherwise, they are not perceived as such and therefore do not disprove what the map depicts. The window of the bank or McDonald’s is smashed because that is what anarchists do, and one is an anarchist to the extent that one smashes the window. And hundreds of camera flashes immortalise the moment, much to the delight of the front pages and prime-time news programmes.
Just as peoples free themselves from the yoke of colonialism, we anarchists must learn to look at ourselves and see ourselves through our own eyes; our specific history, told by ourselves, with all its successes and grave mistakes; our ideas, conceived not anew, but once more; what makes us who we are, brought to light and rescued from the mist. Let us draw our own maps and reconstruct our own topography, to decolonise and recolonise ourselves, and conquer our own frontiers, without blank spaces or foreign mythologies. To emerge from the night and the mist that conceals the confines of the political world and conquers it. We want it all… we are dragons!
Gladys P.
Source: “La topografía política del anarquismo”, acracia.org, 15/08/2016. Originally published in the magazine Des-Bordes #1, Madrid, Fall 2014.
The political topography of anarchism
On old maps, it is common to see areas populated by mythological creatures, mermaids and Amazons, dragons and unicorns. The beings that inhabit the most remote and unexplored regions – those known or presumed to exist, but which are not yet understood – are depicted in great detail. The accounts of the few travellers who have reached these places are passed on by word of mouth and become distorted as they are retold; they are magnified and exaggerated, until from a narrative—presumed to be more or less reliable—an entire imaginary topography emerges, which serves at the same time to prove the existence of the mythical creatures whose territory it delineates. The circular reasoning is evident. Dragons exist because they live there, at the edge of the world. This places them on the map. And they live there because they exist and must be somewhere. That is why they can feature in the depiction of the world.
Similarly, in the nineteenth century, with the fantastical excesses of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance now a thing of the past, Victorian explorers – salacot hats on their heads and rifles at the ready – set about methodically filling in the gaps that still remained on the maps. Particularly on the African continent, these blank spaces acted as magnets for the colonial powers, which meticulously mapped out the coastline, yet still knew nothing of what lay inland. This presented a seemingly irresistible invitation to minds imbued with evangelising and imperialist fantasies. After all, as Kipling reminds us, it is the white man’s burden. Something similar occurs in politics too. Most of us grow up virtually as functionally illiterate in this sphere, which is not normally considered necessary for adult education. Generally speaking, the education system and society as a whole take the view that a country’s inhabitants must acquire a body of knowledge that will equip them as future workers and productive members of society, but this does not extend to the civic skills essential for political engagement.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that current democratic models restrict effective participation to a caste of professionals, which means that the rest of the population need only possess a bare inkling of how the system works – just enough to cast a vote in a ballot box and accept that the direct management of their affairs is no longer, if you’ll pardon the redundancy, their concern. But it seems that the tendency to invent what one does not know is a constant feature of human psychology. Just like the monsters on medieval maps, the political landscape is riddled with dark and unknown zones – grey areas of which one usually has only vague notions – from which a fantastical image is constructed that replaces more detailed knowledge and makes the latter seem unnecessary. On the basis of these vague notions, the political landscape is divided up, associating certain elements of the ideological spectrum with distant cardinal points and populating it with the corresponding mythological creatures that inhabit it. Evidently, these beings are not a spontaneous product of the imagination, but are often supplied by interested parties, through channels suited to the level of representation being sought. Cinema, television and, above all, the mainstream media supplant formal political education (in the broadest sense), and disseminate prejudices and preconceived images across a mental map that is intuited rather than drawn. Thus, most people (though not all) know that National Socialism lies somewhere to the right (the east?) of the conservatives, but not exactly why, or what the differences between them are. Similarly, the Marxist left lies to the west, in a zone populated by enemies of private property, although nobody knows how they got there, or why. And the anarchists? That’s where the dragons are…
If our knowledge of, shall we say, conventional political options is generally sketchy and vague, our understanding of those that transcend the conventions of the civic common sense of an era enters the realm of the nebulous. We find ourselves on fertile ground for the mythical. Any notion that goes beyond the parameters accepted as unquestionable in the foundations of the current democratic system is perceived as nonsense, difficult to take on board or even to conceive of as possible. Everyone knows that someone has to be in charge, and if not, things descend into chaos. Everyone knows that every person counts as one vote, but in a company the boss is in charge, and that’s that. Everyone knows that one’s freedom ends where another’s begins. And it makes no sense to consider, for example, that freedom—or the lack thereof—is a social and historical phenomenon that is collectively constructed, and that each individual’s freedom arises from that of everyone else. Much less that there are effective forms of collective decision-making, or that political dictatorship—even if it is called democracy—is based on economic dictatorship, and that this is largely the cause of the perpetuation of the class structure and wage labour. In truth, there are areas on our map that lie beyond the confines of the world—not just the known world, but even the imaginable one.
In this realm of undefined shadows dwell the anarchists, creatures who might be said to lack a voice of their own, who cannot explain themselves, because their plight comes up against a barrier of incomprehension and ignorance. Instead, the powers of the established economic and political system colonise this mist-shrouded region and populate it with their own inventions. The propagandist by default becomes the indiscriminate terrorist driven by criminal and anti-social zeal; the naturist who promotes free love, a promiscuous satyr; the atheist rationalist, a fanatic who devours priests; the libertarian educator, a corrupter of children’s minds. And more recently, the counterculture has become hippie-ism; anarcho-syndicalist workers’ demands, idleness or cronyism; and active abstention, utopian short-sightedness, which fails to see that the only path to social transformation is the novel method—never tried before—of voting for some tiny party, the true champion of revolutionary aspirations.
This defines a peculiar topography of anarchism, colonised by its opponents on the right and left, which distorts its proposals and presents a region inhabited by monsters where no human being with half a brain would venture to enter. As a fantasy, it may well be fine, but, it must be emphasised, the true political project lies elsewhere. The worst part of it all is that, just as in colonised populations, which change to adapt to the image the coloniser has of them, some anarchists sometimes adapt, consciously or not, to this distorted image. In fact, there are those who are precisely drawn to that false image of irrational radicalism, that nihilism devoid of proposals which the Sex Pistols sang about so well, even though it has little to do with historical or consistent anarchism. Or they are simply comrades who have not moved beyond the vague perception of the “Idea” that is common in the bourgeois interpretation of anarchism. For it is not enough to hate the police or to wear a hood at every demonstration to be a consistent anarchist, just as shouting loudly at assemblies does not make anyone more radical. What these comrades fail to realise is that they are taking the distorted image and bourgeois prejudices against anarchism at face value, even though it is precisely these that they find appealing. They get lost in questions of form, unable to get to the heart of the matter. And in this way, the cycle is reinforced. Anarchists exist to the extent that they conform to the stereotype and validate all the clichés from the moment they come into being. Otherwise, they are not perceived as such and therefore do not disprove what the map depicts. The window of the bank or McDonald’s is smashed because that is what anarchists do, and one is an anarchist to the extent that one smashes the window. And hundreds of camera flashes immortalise the moment, much to the delight of the front pages and prime-time news programmes.
Just as peoples free themselves from the yoke of colonialism, we anarchists must learn to look at ourselves and see ourselves through our own eyes; our specific history, told by ourselves, with all its successes and grave mistakes; our ideas, conceived not anew, but once more; what makes us who we are, brought to light and rescued from the mist. Let us draw our own maps and reconstruct our own topography, to decolonise and recolonise ourselves, and conquer our own frontiers, without blank spaces or foreign mythologies. To emerge from the night and the mist that conceals the confines of the political world and conquers it. We want it all… we are dragons!
Gladys P.
Source: “La topografía política del anarquismo”, acracia.org, 15/08/2016. Originally published in the magazine Des-Bordes #1, Madrid, Fall 2014.