Anarchism Without Adjectives & the Moral Landscape

I’m generally not fond of the phrase “anarchism without adjectives” anymore because the phrase has begun to be thrown around by people on the far right to mean something quite different from what it originally meant. I like the idea of anarchism without adjectives as it was applied by anarchists in the 1880 through the early 1900s. They wanted to eliminate the in-fighting between collectivists, communists, and mutualists within the anarchist tradition. The various schools of anarchist thought all had a lot in common and it was held that anarchists should work together. There was an implicit faith in direct democracy and the ability of anarchists to reach some sort of consensus at the local level during and after the revolution. There may be differences of opinion among anarchists, but people could gather in general assemblies and discuss their differences and come to an agreement, settling for some arrangement that is mutually acceptable to everyone. The kinds of arrangements that arise under anarchism will be diverse. The general assemblies in various communities might each arrive at slightly different agreements. This is what anarchism without adjectives originally referred to—the notion that there might be room for differences of opinion among anarchists and room for various alternative anarchistic arrangements to co-exist alongside one another.

In more recent times, people like Keith Preston, Mike Shanklin, and William Schnack have been advocating a very different sort of “anarchism without adjectives.” These people have been advocating a sort of separatist tribalism without a democratic basis. In their estimation, various propertarian arrangements are equally as acceptable as democratic anarchism. Thus, pseudo-anarchist ideologies like “anarcho-capitalism,” “anarcho-monarchism,” and “anarcho-feudalism” are acceptable under their “panarchism” or “pan-anarchism.” Instead of identifying anarchism with a lack of rulers and the rejection of unjustified authority, these individuals define their “anarchism” in terms of the lack of a centralized State and the push for decentralization. These modern theorists also tend to be hostile to democracy and tend to favor the privatization of the State. They tend to be okay with all the coercive and unjust aspects of the modern State, so long as those aspects are abstracted from the State itself. Such theorists are often okay with structural racism, sexism, and capitalistic property as long as those institutions are upheld by private police and private courts rather than by any centralized justice system. I reject this new “anarchism without adjectives” in favor of the original anarchism without adjectives. All right-wing ideologies are incompatible with anarchism.

Part of the reason that I support anarchism without adjectives, instead of just advocating communist anarchism or mutualist anarchism or some other ideal conception, is that I have been influenced by Sam Harris’ notion of the moral landscape. Sam Harris’ conception of ethics is not relativistic in the ordinary sense, but neither is it absolute. Harris starts by defining good and bad in terms of suffering and happiness. A world in which everyone suffers as much as possible is obviously the worst possible word. Any other possible world is obviously better than that. The best possible world, on the other hand, would be a world in which there is the most happiness for everyone and no suffering at all. Ethics is the science of how to avoid the bad (i.e. suffering) and pursue the good (i.e. happiness). So Sam Harris thinks of ethics “in terms of a moral landscape, where the peaks correspond to the heights of human happiness and the valleys correspond to the depths of human misery.” There may be various peaks that are roughly equivalent, so there is no “one right way” to go about trying to maximize human happiness. In the moral landscape, there are various peaks and various valleys. When ethics is explained in this way, then science does have something to say here. Science can tell us how to maximize human happiness and minimize human suffering.

In terms of political and social organization, the implication of the moral landscape is that there is not necessarily just one right way to organize society. There may be various ways that communities could organize their political institution and economies in order to maximize the well-being and happiness of their members. Anarchist social democracy and communist anarchism might be about equivalent in terms of providing happiness to the citizens of an anarchist republic. Perhaps certain arrangements might provide more happiness to the members of one community than the same arrangements would to the members of another, so that there is not a “one size fits all” solution. The various alternatives should be debated and discussed until the members of each community reach a consensus within their community about what best suits their particular needs and desires.