Order doesn't begin with command

Anarchism, the state, and whether to live in the past or future

Hey everyone! I’m sorry it’s been several months since I last posted to my Substack. My last post was an attempt to call-in some American anarchists on how their denial of COVID was, and is, white supremacy.

That post got me pretty-well ostracized from the communities to which it was directed, which was a bummer. But, at least, helped me get a better shape of where the boundaries are between anarchism, Americanism, and COVID.

Anyway, I’m not here (just) to complain about the past. Yesterday a friend directed me to an online conversation about anarchism, suggesting I might want to contribute my perspective. I took the time to write out something, but then! Learned the rules of the platform meant I wasn’t permitted to contribute. Fair enough: moderated conversations are an important part of good discourse.

The friend suggested I use the piece as an excuse to dust off this newsletter, so, I here we go. If you enjoy this, consider “liking” the post or even leaving a comment. Right now I don’t really have any real measure of who reads these, if they like them, or if they’d prefer I write about something else. If you want more newsletters like this, just let me know! I’m a very talkative person so it is enjoyable for me to do it, I just don’t want to clutter y’all’s inboxes with Yet Another Anarchist Perspective.

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There are some things which are important to note about anarchism in philosophy and political theory.

First, there is a difference between what is usually called philosophical anarchism and what is usually called political anarchism.

Philosophical anarchists argue that the state does not have legitimacy. Legitimacy, here, means something like a right to rule. A state may be powerful enough to rule, and may even be useful in various ways, without thereby having the moral authority it claims for itself. Robert Paul Wolff is a philosophical anarchist in this sense, as is A. John Simmons. Philosophical anarchists are committed to the claim that the state lacks legitimate authority. They are not, simply by that fact, committed to the claim that the state should be immediately dismantled, or that the collapse of the state would be desirable under present conditions. Simmons, for example, thinks the state lacks legitimacy while also thinking that dismantling it under current conditions would not be advisable.

Political anarchists start somewhere else. They are philosophers, organizers, theorists, or practitioners committed to anti-state forms of political and social organization. Political anarchists often are philosophical anarchists, but political anarchism is not merely the denial of state legitimacy. It is a positive tradition of thinking and practice concerned with how people can organize life without centralized coercive rule. That tradition includes figures such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, Malatesta, Goldman, and many others. Anarcho-communism is probably the most familiar form in theoretical discussions, but there are also individualist, mutualist, syndicalist, insurrectionary, anti-colonial, Indigenous, and other anarchist tendencies.

It is also important to say that political anarchists do not usually think statelessness should be achieved by any means whatsoever, nor do they necessarily celebrate the mere fall of a government. A bombed-out state, a failed state, or a state hollowed out by debt, war, foreign intervention, and extractive markets is not thereby an anarchist society. Most serious anarchist traditions argue for revolutionary transformation: the building of different social institutions, forms of coordination, modes of care, systems of accountability, and material conditions under which the abolition of the state would actually mean liberation rather than abandonment.

This is why anarchists have historically been associated not only with anti-state critique, but also with mutual aid, syndicalism, union organization, labor struggle, cooperative infrastructure, collective self-defense, and other forms of direct social organization. The point is not simply to negate the state. The point is to ask what kinds of order people are already capable of producing without command from above.

So, with that distinction in place: Wolff’s argument is about authority. If autonomy requires that I take responsibility for my own judgment, then the state’s claim to legitimate authority is always morally suspect. That is a serious philosophical argument, but it is not the whole of anarchism.

As a political anarchist — my own politics tend to get labeled something like Indigenous insurrectionary anarcho-nihilism, which is a lot of words — I would start from a different place.

The strongest anarchist argument is not that the absence of the state automatically produces peace. That would be a weak argument. A collapsed state, a bombed-out state, a colonial state whose institutions have been hollowed out by war, debt, foreign intervention, and extractive markets, is not an anarchist society. Somalia is not a clean experiment in anarchism. It is a case of state collapse under specific historical conditions.

Serious anarchism is not a theory of vacancy. It is a theory of non-state order.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid matters here because he argued against the idea that coercive competition is the only real principle of social organization. Cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual dependence are also ordering forces. Malatesta makes the political point clearly: anarchism is not the absence of organization, but organization without government. Colin Ward says something similar in practical terms: anarchism is already present wherever people solve problems directly, through voluntary coordination, without waiting for command from above.

So the question is not “state or disorder?” The question is: what kind of order, produced by whom, and responsive to what?

This is where I think the state is not merely coercive, but metaphysically malformed.

Before any action occurs, there is a field of possible continuations. Several things could happen. A conflict could be repaired, escalated, ignored, ritualized, displaced, punished, transformed. A piece of land could be held in common, enclosed as property, treated as kin, extracted from, restored, abandoned. A person could be understood as a neighbor, a worker, a citizen, a criminal, a relative, a threat, a guest. The situation is not yet exhausted by any one of these determinations.

Once one continuation is actualized, it leaves traces. Those traces become memory, precedent, injury, title, law, debt, obligation, archive. In that basic sense, the future comes first and the past comes after: not chronologically, but metaphysically. Possibility precedes settled fact; settled fact then leaves a past.

The state reverses this order. It begins from stabilized traces: law, property title, border, office, citizenship, criminal record, jurisdiction, census, contract, precedent. It then projects those past determinations onto situations whose possibilities have not yet been exhausted. This is why James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is so important. The state makes society legible by simplifying it into categories it can administer. But those simplifications are not neutral. They cut into living situations and force them to appear as cases of already recognized forms.

That is what I mean when I say the state is disordering. Not that every state action produces immediate chaos. Rather, the state imposes the order of the already-settled onto the not-yet-settled. It governs becoming by means of archives.

This also explains why anarchists often reject the assumption that the state is the source of order. Much of what makes life livable happens before state recognition: care, kinship, repair, subsistence, neighborly coordination, informal accountability, mutual defense, shared use, customary obligation. The state often arrives after these relations already exist, redescribes them in its own terms, and then claims to have produced the order it has merely captured or distorted.

Pierre Clastres is helpful here because he refused the assumption that stateless peoples are simply societies that have failed to develop the state. In Society Against the State, he argued that some societies actively organize against the emergence of centralized coercive power. Indigenous and anti-colonial thinkers push this point further. Audra Simpson’s work on refusal, Glen Coulthard’s critique of recognition politics, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s grounded resurgence, and Klee Benally’s anti-colonial anarchism all show why being recognized by the state is not the same as being free, ordered, or repaired. Recognition can be a technique of capture.

So when someone asks, “Without the state, won’t there be violence?” I think the first answer is: there is already violence, and much of it is state-administered, state-authorized, or state-rendered invisible. The state does not abolish violence. It classifies violence. It legitimizes some of it, criminalizes some of it, hides some of it in procedure, and calls the result order.

A serious anarchist answer does not deny the problem of violence. Malatesta did not deny it. Goldman did not deny it. Gelderloos does not deny it. The question is whether centralized authority is actually the best response to violence, or whether it often preserves the conditions that make violence durable. Anarchist practice points instead toward direct accountability, mutual defense, restorative and transformative justice, federated coordination, and forms of life that reduce dependence on coercive institutions.

The strongest version of anarchism, then, is not “people are good, so abolish the state.” It is closer to this:

Human beings already produce order through relation, habit, care, conflict, custom, memory, and direct coordination. The state captures some of that activity, freezes it into administrative forms, monopolizes legitimate force, and then claims to be the source of order itself. Anarchism denies that claim. It says that order does not begin with command. Order begins in the open field of possible relations, before the state has reduced those relations to cases, files, borders, titles, and crimes.

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