Pandemics, Coercion, and the current limits of Anarchism
COVID-19, which at the time of this writing has so far infected almost 57 million people and killed 1.36 million, has proven itself to be a crisis for every government in the world, particularly for Liberal Democracies. In fact, the more “liberal” the society, the harder hit the population.
The United States, for example, which for all its countless faults maintains some rather “progressive” stances on human rights not seen elsewhere (the complete freedom of movement, for example, and its lack of a national identification requirement), accounts for almost 20% of the world’s cases (despite having only 4% of the world’s population). And though much of this unbalanced infection rate will no doubt be scapegoated on the outgoing President rather than something core to the United States, other Liberal Democracies with more social programs and better leadership haven’t really done much better. France, for example, with only 0.8% percent of the world’s population makes up almost 4% of the world’s infections. The United Kingdom (also with 0.8% of the world’s population) has had 2.7% of the world’s infections.
On the other hand, China, which has 18% of the world’s population and where the first cases of the virus were reported, comprises less than 1/7th of one percent of the world’s cases. China is not a Liberal Democracy at all: in fact, its one-party, top-down system is quite authoritarian, with many restrictions on personal freedoms and intricate surveillance systems to keep the population in check.
China’s heavy-handed actions to suppress the spread of the coronovirus—including quarantines, mass confinement and testing, and harsh penalties for those who tried to travel outside of quarantined areas—are absolutely terrifying to the liberal, anarchist, or progressive mind. Unfortunately, they also worked.
The Chinese government’s response echoes the response of Communist Cuba to the HIV/AIDS crisis in previous decades. Cuba managed to control the spread of HIV better than any country in the world by building walled communities and forcing HIV+ people into them and forbidding them to leave. (As terrifying as such an obvious violation of human rights is, however, it’s important to note some people willingly infected themselves to get in.)
As a leftist (an “anarcho-communist,” or more properly an “autonomous Marxist”), I must admit that my first inclination upon looking at the successes of authoritarianism in combating disease is to look quickly away. I’m sure most others reading this are feeling something similar, or perhaps already searching for counter-evidence to these paragraphs. I already did, by the way, but go ahead if you need to. I can wait.
Anarchism, Coercion, and Power-Over
Open borders, freedom of movement, individual rights, de-centralization, democracy: these are all supposed to be the “good values,” values which build not just more tolerant societies but safer and healthier societies. Especially for leftists of the anarchist variety, these ideals serve as articles of faith in a kind of political religion, a belief in the right of humans not to be forced into behaviors, the ability of humans to survive without authority and hierarchy, and the utopian world-to-come without rulers, masters, laws, or leaders. For those brave enough to look at the evidence, however, COVID-19 seems to prove all these beliefs ultimately just faith.
Marxists, or anarchists who temper their anarchism with Marxist critique, tend to have an easier time grappling with this apparent paradox, since within both tendencies it is permissible to consider authority and rulership as a potential good. Whether that is the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or more indigenous, pre-Christian European, and other forms of hierarchy, the need for authority as an intervention in times of crisis presents no problem nor crisis of faith.
The problem for anarchism (of the “pure” variety, that is: anti-hierarchy, anti-state) is that the success of authoritarian measures to save people’s lives (and not just the economy or political regimes) cannot be merely dismissed. More so, it’s difficult to come up with an alternative solution to this recent crisis from an anarchist framework that does not replicate authoritarian state measures.
Excluding the more blind-faith answers (“COVID-19 would not happen in an anarchist world,” etc), or the very common reaction during the crisis by anarchists arguing that people must “obey the law,” one solution I have seen suggested by anarchist friends is that a pandemic could be managed through social pressure and coercion, rather than central law and police actions.
However, social pressure and coercion are exactly the purpose of laws: they cause people to avoid doing certain actions in order to avoid becoming seen in the eyes of others as a criminal or wrong-doer. That is, laws have a hegemonic affect on the actions of people on the social level (because it causes them to restrain from actions) in order to avoid societal punishment. Whether that punishment is carceral (prison, fines) or social (ostracism, exile, shame), the goal and affect is still coercion: that is, “power-over.”
We see how this repetition of power-over plays out in online “cancel culture,” where shaming, guilt, insults, and mass social pressure are used against a person deemed to have acted or spoken wrongly. While no guns or prisons are employed in such events, they are nevertheless fully manifestations of coercion, and often times (at least in every case I have ever witnessed) appear more similar to schoolyard ganging or “popular girl” or “jock” hazing events. At best they force the target into hegemonic submission to the collective will, but more often leave a traumatized and resentful victim eager to seek later vengeance on their oppressors.
The obscured aesthetic turn
That is to say, the anarchist solution isn’t actually all that different from more authoritarian paradigms, with the exception that the acceptance of power-over is obscured by an aesthetic turn. In such an aesthetic turn, power-over, coercion, and authority are still core needs of humanity, but they are no longer admitted to being those things. Instead, they become justified as manifestations of collective will, democratic processes, self-governance, community responsibility, social contracts, or other nicer and more beautiful ways of speaking about coercion of the few by the majority.
The danger of the obscurity of this aesthetic turn is that anarchism then becomes mere repetition of the state. Hierarchy, authority, and coercion continue, but they now manifest veiled behind social capital, charisma, or privileged oppression identity traits. Instead of clear rulers and heads-of-state making decrees about what is best for society and directing punishment for those who transgress, it becomes popular or identity-correct writers, bloggers, or activists organizing the masses towards coercion, “right action,” and punishment.
That is, anarchism increasingly repeats not just the structure, discipline, and punishment of the state, but also repeats the same trick of obscurity that Liberal Democracy itself affects. As a “progress” or “advancement” over earlier feudal and aristocratic modes of government, Liberal Democracy claims to be less hierarchical and exploitative specifically because of its enshrinement of human and civil rights. Yet, anyone with half an eye can notice that for all its claims of enlightenment, Liberal Democratic nations start an awful lot of wars, imprison an awful lot of people, and yet despite all this seem to do a really poor job of preventing needless deaths from pandemics.
Saving Anarchism From Itself
Just because anarchism repeats the same obscurantist aesthetic turn as Liberal Democracy doesn’t mean that anarchism should be abandoned. Rather, it just needs to be a bit more honest with itself and its shortcomings. Coercion is still coercion, whether or not that is affected with guns and prisons or mass shaming or ostracization of undesirables (or put in a more aesthetically-anarchist way, “people whose behavior harms the community”). And belief is still belief, whether or not that belief is faith in an invisible one-God who is the source of all goodness or the capacity of humans to accurately and justly govern their own behavior.
Being honest that anarchism doesn’t actually offer any non-coercive solutions to global crises like pandemics, climate change, and ideological violence doesn’t need to invalidate anarchism. Rather, admitting that much of the current anarchist thinking embraces coercion and power-over will allow anarchists to have more mature and broader conversations about what kind of power-over and coercion is best in times of crisis.
To do so, though, anarchists will probably need to give more sober attention to some of their declared enemies, including Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, and especially autonomous Marxists. All three traditions have already grappled deeply with the problems of power-over, coercion, and the non-exploitative uses of naturally-arising hierarchies (not the hierarchies of divine right of kings, but rather the hierarchies of “who is responsible for this? or “who is best capable of dealing with this situation?”).
And beyond these sources, there is a stronger current that anarchists would do well to look at: those of religious communities. While the Enlightenment conceit of “no gods no masters” is deeply inscribed into anarchism, anarchism itself was born of magical lodges in Europe and forged in the romanticist pagan revivals. While it has since abandoned most of its original curiosity for spiritual traditions, it is no hypocrisy to look again in these directions not just for less exploitative uses of hierarchy and authority, but also for cultural, moral, and spiritual frameworks that would help affect the sorts of “non-coercive” coercion it posits as key to utopian society.
The question anarchists should probably be asking—and one that they might only be able to answer after consulting such sources—is “how do we compel humans to act responsibly towards each other and the earth?” Liberal Democracy answers this question through laws, education, and the prison system. Authoritarian states answer this question through direct violence, even more prisons, and state control of human activity. Anarchism currently answers this question through shaming, ostracizing, cancelling, and social and sometimes physical violence (often directed upward, but just as often directed laterally and sometimes down).
Missing in all these solutions is the question of religion. Religion is not merely the worship of gods, spirits, saints, or prayer and rituals, but also the entire cosmological framework by which people see the world. From such cosmologies comes value sets, moralities, taboos, and entire codes of action which define for individuals and groups what is acceptable behavior in society and what is transgressive. A religion which believes one gender is superior to another, for instance, will create completely different behavior in its adherents than one that believes genders are equal. The same goes of course for skin color or sexuality, but also for non-human questions, such as “how should trees and rivers be treated?” An animist or a pagan religion, for instance, in which the world is full of persons that are not just humans, will compel in its adherents a completely different set of behaviors than one which believes the earth and all within it was created by God for humans to use.
In a pandemic situation, for example, or any of the other inevitable natural crises which are increasing on account of climate change and industrial society, a religious framework such as animism which treats infections and diseases as entities, not just invisible inconveniences, might compel people to treat viruses as sacred entities whose will to destroy must be countered by personal rituals (hand washing, wearing masks) rather than shaming others or shouting at politicians and capitalist pharmaceutical giants to save us. If that religious framework also holds sacred the health of others—even strangers—it might discourage in individuals the kind of behavior which authoritarian governments fought by means of state violence, Liberal Democracies fought ineffectively with staggered restrictions, and anarchists tried to fight with shame, guilt, and general moralizing about “community responsibility.”
If it seems strange or somehow dishonest to look towards religious frameworks and engage in the work of creating a new one, I can only here remind anarchists (as well as atheist Marxists reading this, who should remember that the creation of the Worker bears mystical trappings) that anarchism is itself a created philosophy. There was no anarchism before the 19th century, though like many other modern ideas (for instance, identity, capitalism, race, homosexuality) we tend to project our current political co-ordinates back into history and find therein evidence that they are eternal. Not only was there no anarchism, but there was no Marxism either, and both were consciously created as a means of offering liberatory systems to govern humanity better than what was on offer.
To create a new religious-political framework, then, is merely to do exactly the same thing, except this time in an even more conscious effort to avoid the need for coercion, violence, and hopefully also the state.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, an autonomous Marxist, and the director of publishing for Gods&Radicals Press. His weekly druid video journals are available to subscribers on Patreon.