Rough draft for a post elsewhere

Anarchism and the World of Things.

I've written a few posts describing the meaning of anarchism, some of its assumptions and implications, and pointed to a few instances when it lurched into the pages of written history.

In my next post, I'm going to describe some organizations in the current world that embody anarchistic principles and have some self-conscious affinity to anarchism.

But first I want to explain some of the appeal this mode of thinking and being has for me, why I am drawn to it. I think I need to mix this discussion in with more objective exegesis out of sheer honesty.

I am drawn to anarchism because it presupposes and cultivates a relationship to the world that is often palpably different from the dull habituation we are pushed towards in life.

I'll explain with an example. I've worked in several bookstores. I've worked at Monkeywrench, and I've also been employed at a corporate retail bookstore that will remain nameless. The corporate retail job paid $7.50/hr, which is exactly $7.50/hr more than I make working at Monkeywrench. Clearly, I am willing to work at Monkeywrench for nothing yet was ultimately worn down by working at a corporate bookstore for (relatively) much more. Why?

It wasn't the managers, I'll say that much. My bosses in the corporate stores were great. Never any problems, always friendly. I did my job adequately, they were clear, helpful, responsive and flexible. I have a leftist's automatic contempt for bosses, but mine have always been perfectly acceptable.

It wasn't the work itself, the toil of it. Working retail in a bookstore is undoubtedly one of the more pleasant examples of wage slavery one can live through. The work is light, the people are generally friendly and unrushed, the staff are intelligent and a bit eccentric, and often enough you can read at the register while business is slow (the more you know your product, after all, the better a salesperson you can be). I have no complaints about the job.

So what's the difference? To be perfectly honest, it was the way the job made me start feeling about books.

I've been a bookworm since I could first crawl to a shelf, and to me the well-written word is damn close to holy. I don't want to simply read books, I want to venerate them. And that ultimately made working a corporate bookstore job wretched for me. The stores were always clean and tidy, with that fake plastic wood everywhere, that office building carpet, that soft consumer-oriented music playing overhead. The books became tedious, piles of bound paper covered in irrelevant colors to stack in their appropriate places. They started to become meaningless to me. No longer were they packets of treasure, the voice of the Divine rendered in small digestible doses. Instead they were piles of commodities, as dead to me as a toaster oven or bottle of coke.

And so I got a different job, because I'd rather starve in the street than let books turn into ash on my lips.

When I sell books at Monkeywrench, they don't feel like commodities. I don't see the store as a retail establishment so much as a bank of tools. And therein lies the difference, the perspective that for me opens up through anarchism. The things in the world aren't dead, they aren't cut off from me or my friends and neighbors by lines of property or the habits of consumption, by the regulation of production and consumption. They are constellations of meaning and potential use, open to anyone, restricted only by the imperative to create. Their meaning isn't determined by a professional department four states away, it is open-ended.

I can walk into our store and think, today I might give someone a tool for constructing something new in the world. It might be something directly instructional, so they can learn how to grow their own food or make biodiesel or fix a bike. It might more social, teaching them to start a co-op or a union, or an independent business. It might be a tool for self-transformation via art or poetry or literature. It might be a tool for understanding the chaos of the social world, the many moments of desolation and redemption that characterize our society. But it will be a tool, not a trinket, not a commodity. It will be used to build, to change, to fight. As such these things I sell aren't alien, dead things to me, I care about them, their potential and possibilities, I care about what ideas and actions they will provoke in their readers. I see my own actions and ideas as they might relate to the texts and their future use, and feel connected to them and their readers through a web of potential use, of possible creation and co-creation.

I think most people have a sensation like this sometimes, a connection to a practice or a thing that opens up the world for them a little bit, that makes them feel free, human. If we're lucky that can become a calling, and we can make a career out of it.

For me, anarchism is less an ideology than a set of broad principles to live by and to use in forming relationships, associations, and organizations; principles that serve as the conditions of possibility for seeing the world in this free and open light, in seeing things in terms of their possible connections instead of their limitations. So I will always be drawn to it, because for me anarchism is simply the way to think and act that allows for a joyful life.