Hey folks!

Great news! We fucking did it! The anarchist tradition has been revitalized! And it only took us two and a half years or so!

Currently, the New Anarchism is still mostly an avant garde intellectual movement, but once these ideas catch on amongst artists, it will quickly become a countercultural movement. Artists are always early adopters of radical ideas.

Once artists adopt these ideas, they will become fashionable, because artists are cool, and people like to copy people they admire. This is by no means limited to insecure teenagers, by the way. The desire to be approved of by one’s peers, which sociologists call “the social desirability bias”, is an extremely powerful factor in human behaviour.

This is an area of anarchist theory that could use some work - the simple fact is that most people are conformists. Most people are followers. Their natural inclination is to adapt themselves to the group that they are part of, and they are comfortable with other people making important decisions that affect their lives. This is not necessarily a bad thing - it means people are cooperative - but it does mean that that human beings are vulnerable to bullies who take advantage of people’s tendencies towards obedience.

This all has to do with the way that children learn. The name of the game is Monkey See, Monkey Do. Simply put, humans learn by imitation. We could pretend that’s not true, buy why? Because everyone’s a unique snowflake? How does the fact that most people are followers mean that they’re not unique manifestations of the divinity bestowed with individuality and free will? Some people choose to use their free will to choose to copy others, and if you don’t like that fact, I suggest you get the fuck off planet Earth. Alternatively, you could go live with a flock of ostriches, since apparently you love burying your head in the sand.

Why is this important? Well, it means that Fashion is much more important to politics than what clothes people wear or what music they listen to. If most people form their political opinions based on what they think will be approved of by their peers, it means that politics is largely a matter of fashion.

Let me say it again, loud and clear: MOST PEOPLE WANT TO HAVE POLITICAL VIEWS THAT WILL BE APPROVED OF BY THEIR PEERS.

Think about what that means. Ideas are fashion. No matter we’re so crazy!

Most people want to believe what their peers believe, but the people who think themselves clever have a different agenda: They want the cool ideas - the latest findings, the breaking news, the ground-breaking discoveries, and the latest breakthroughs in the advanced intellectual discipline all academics are obsessed with - the study of which ideas happen to be fashionable at any given time.

Let’s fact it, most academics are much more interested in earning the approval of their peers than in advancing the knowledge of the human species or in standing up for what’s right. Most academics, therefore, are concerned with FASHION, not truth.

As Alan Watts once quipped, the basic goal of fashion was to be able to say “I have conformed sooner than you”.

The sooner the Truth Movement figures this out, the better. I probably sound cynical but really, I’m just giving it to you straight. Do you really think the Situationists didn’t notice that consumer-capitalism is based on a cynical exploitation of people’s desires to be approved of by their peers?

Anyway, so I figure that over time the ideas of the New Anarchists will be taken up by academics, and from there, some watered-down Diet Coke version of it will become mainstream.

There will be both pros and cons to this. On one hand, the movement risks being co-opted by liberals who want to have their Revolution and their Netflix too. On the other hand, when our ideas become mainstream, there will be flood of energy into the counterculture. The people who get will get it, and the movement will received a much-need infusion of vitality. Many of the people who most enthusiastically embrace it will probably be young - undergrads or even high school students.

The ven diagram between students and revolutionaries tends to overlap, due to the fact that revolutionaries need to be tremendously intellectual curious, and curious intellectuals tend to become students.

Over time, the New Anarchism will become associated with certain symbols and signifiers, and will become an identifiable identity-category that people can claim for themselves. This will be good in some ways and bad in some ways, because people are people.

By this point, it will have become a counterculture.

Once it reaches this point, there are two possibilities. Will it will be temporary, like Dadaism, surrealism, and Situationism? Will it be a subculture which lasts a certain amount of time but which ultimately melts back into the larger society?

Or will it separate itself from society successfully and become a distinct culture? I’ll point out that the word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent and culture. Those who describe permaculture as “the revolution disguised as gardening” are totally right.

My goal has been the same for a decade. My mission statement in life to help create a network of autonomous communities able to meet their own needs independent of the state and the fossil fuel economy.

Anyway, if we are to imagine a counterculture becoming permanent, we must realize that what we are talking about BECOMING A PEOPLE.

Marxists frame revolution as a matter of seizing the means of production, but I believe that we would do better to imagine it as a matter of creating a whole new culture.

This is why I’m so big on the idea of Ethnogenesis. The world we want won’t be built with violence, but with culture - that is to say, with songs, with stories, with dance, with dreams, with drums. Culture is our weapon, and may we never forget that this is so.

Darren Allen Paul Cudenec Derrick Broze Etienne de la Boetie2 Rozali Margaret Anna Alice The Last American Vagabond Kit Knightly Dave Amis CJ Hopkins Mary Harrington Diane Perlman, PhD Laura Dodsworth Celia Farber Jon Rappoport Jordan Henderson W.D. James Dr Naomi Wolf Joel Walbert Dr Mike Yeadon Dispensing Freedom Caitlin Johnstone Chris Hedges Geopolitics & Empire Daniel Pinchbeck Charles Eisenstein