On 18 January 2023, police killed an environmental activist and land defender named Tortuguita. Tortuguita had been occupying the Weelaunee forest in DeKalb County, Georgia when Georgia State Patrol officers murdered them in the midst of a multi-agency raid on the forest’s protest encampment. In the days and weeks that followed, police and news reports claimed without evidence that Tortuguita shot the police first, that their murder was justified. Police claimed that they had recovered a gun registered to Tortuguita at the scene, and upheld the gun as proof of an exchange of fire. The state’s narrative dovetailed seamlessly with what police had been claiming throughout the course of the then almost two-year occupation of the Weelaunee forest: that the occupants of the forest, living in treehouses and tents to physically prevent its destruction, were dangerous terrorists. Yet the forest defenders and their supporters saw things much differently. As bodycam footage from the Atlanta Police Department surfaced, forest defenders and their supporters raised questions about whether or not the police had shot their own officer in the hail of gunfire. Independent autopsies revealed that Tortuguita had been struck by 57 gunshots, including through their palms, which were free of gunpowder residue and positioned upwards in surrender when they were shot dead while sitting cross-legged (11Alive 2023; Anonymous 2023a; Medical Examiner’s Office 2023; Sperry 2023).

Contrary to the state’s “terrorism” narrative, the Weelaunee forest occupation comprised a collective effort to halt the terror of the state, making this forest a place where a life beyond the state and its violence had germinated. The occupation prevented deforestation by providing an antidote to what is slated to be built in lieu of the trees: a militarised police training facility. The state and the Atlanta Police Foundation, the corporate-funded nonprofit organisation leasing the land to build the facility, call it the “Atlanta Public Safety Training Center”, with police and politicians insisting that its purpose is to keep Atlantans safe and police officers trained. Forest defenders, on the other hand, call the facility “Cop City” for its mock city design—eerily resembling the mock cities established by the United States military in the wake of the 1960s race riots, where police practised using military-grade weapons against fake street protests (Pettengill 2022). Forest defenders note that Cop City resembles a similar response in the wake of the militant uprisings against deadly, racialised police violence in the summer of 2020 (Anonymous 2022a; Defend the Atlanta Forest 2022).

The movement to stop Cop City and defend the Weelaunee forest has attracted backlash from the state in the form of heavy repression. While visiting Atlanta to join the movement in May 2022, Cobb County police arrested me near a protest at the headquarters of Brasfield & Gorrie, the contractor slated to clear-cut the forest and build Cop City. The state charged me with felony property damage and terroristic threats alongside four others. The state’s crackdown only worsened; that year, the forest encampment would be raided by federal, state, and county police with increasing frequency. When the encampment refused to budge and the movement only grew in numbers and ferocity, police began to arrest whoever they could find in the forest and charge them under the Georgia domestic terrorism statute, a felony which threatens 5-35 years in prison. One of these raids resulted in police killing Tortuguita.

In March 2023, a music festival spreading awareness about the movement hosted on the public park side of the forest was raided. Festival goers were randomly mass arrested, charged with domestic terrorism, and denied bond for weeks to months. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund was the first bail fund in US history to be raided by a SWAT team and falsely charged with financial crimes. In April 2023, three forest defenders handing out flyers spreading awareness about Tortuguita’s murder were arrested and charged with felony intimidation, and kept in jail for weeks to months.

On 29 August 2023, the majority of arrestees in all of these repression incidents —myself included—were indicted on RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges on the basis of our original arrests. RICO laws were introduced in 1970 by the US federal government in its efforts to target organised crime. Rather than charging individuals for alleged crimes, RICO laws allow the state to group those crimes into one alleged organised enterprise and conspiracy. Since 1970, state RICO statutes have been introduced; Georgia’s RICO statute has accrued particular notoriety and challenges for its broad, loose, and potentially unconstitutional statutory language. It allows prosecutors to target large groups of people with nearly any level of association (Berger 2023).

Drawing on my autoethnographic research as a criminalised forest defender, I use participant observation, field notes, and document analysis to highlight two examples of “abolitionist life-worlds” (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022) forged by the Stop Cop City movement’s building and fighting strategy: the 2021–2023 Weelaunee forest encampment, and the solidarity communities created by criminalised forest defenders incarcerated in various Georgia jails. Both places represent abolition geographies which relied on an interdependence of building and fighting. In the forest, “radical place-making” (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022; Heynen and Ybarra 2021) took shape in destructive direct actions against Cop City’s construction alongside an encampment, which proliferated a wide array of mutual aid infrastructures, networks, and practices—including sharing food, water, shelter, gardens, festivals, and more. These practices worked in tandem with Stop Work orders brought by challengers within the South River Watershed Alliance. In this way, a mixture of insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist tactics worked together to defend the Weelaunee forest as a space where human and non-human life was nurtured and protected (Chua 2024; James 2005; Lang 2022).

A mixture of these approaches were also present in forest defenders’ fight for life within the jails in which we have been incarcerated. Some radical place-making practices while incarcerated included continuously demanding jail guards to meet basic needs for food, water, and healthcare; noise demonstrations which included subversive material support to prisoners; various forms of “uncivil obedience” (Bulman-Pozen and Pozen 2015), such as a collective turn-in including cheering, laughter, joy, and asserting rights; and emotional, spiritual, and material support. In these examples, I find a blend between insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist praxes, demonstrating how abolition geographies were made through a range of practices—a fight against carceral institutions which manifested abolition’s characteristic “fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently” (Gilmore 2022:351).

a: this question has thirty-second answers (host a rent party, send a mutual aid graphic around, apply for a rent fund, go to a food distro, post on a mutual aid chat, etc), but most anarchists already do these things. this is a structural question. so here’s my honest structural answer: get curious about what kind of care you and your friends need, and how to provide it to each other.

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these types of ongoing needs might be solved in the short term by Venmoing someone or making a social media post, but really taking care of them requires more sustained labor. to use your food bank example—maybe your friends in that situation would appreciate if you organized a meal train for them. maybe a regular community potluck would help give them at least one meal each week that they don’t have to pay for or prepare. maybe you all want to plug into (or start) a Food not Bombs or similar organization. maybe you want to teach each other to dumpster outside restaurants, grow your own food, or cook affordable food in bulk. maybe, for you, food autonomy looks entirely different. but you’ll never know what would support your friends around food unless you talk about it in a way that takes the long view.

similarly, when thinking about housing, it could help to build infrastructure for these needs over the long term—starting a community rent fund or tenant’s union, initiating a Signal thread for couchsurfing or short-term housing in your city, or even finding a comrade who owns a home with guest rooms and seeing if they’re able to house people (someone in my city does this and it’s a big help to our anarchist community). if your friends find it stressful to fundraise for the month’s rent, maybe someone with more capacity could adopt that fundraiser. if a lot of your friends have this problem, it might be time to start or join a co-op or other radically minded housing option.

all this advice may sound impractical, and because we’re anarchists, of course it is;) but at a certain point, building networks of care can take less energy than the daily fundraising grind. survival crowdfunding is an important part of our mutual aid spaces, but not their only dimension.

your friends need food and housing, and anything you need to do to provide that—including making use of short-term mutual aid resources—is valid and important. at the same time, creating anarchist projects that meet these needs allows us to become less reliant on nonprofits, government resources, and nuclear family for material survival. when the prefigurative crowd talks about building a new world in the shell of the old, they’re missing the part where it can be incredibly hard to stay alive and well in the old world. but there’s still a grain of truth there. you and your friends are already an affinity group; go make the organizations you need. there’s nothing an anarchist can’t do <3

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I’m excited to share that my microchapbook VOIDGAZING is OUT NOW!!

VOIDGAZING is a prose poetry collection about gender, technology, and the emotional architecture of online life. It moves through group chats, algorithmic overwhelm, queer desire, and the strange ways we build intimacy through screens that were never designed for us to survive inside of.

At its core, the book asks: what does it mean to be together in systems that constantly surviell us?

I’m deeply grateful to the early readers whose words shaped how this book is entering the world—especially , whose blurb speaks to the book’s refusal of resignation and its insistence on collective rupture and imagination.

You can read more / order here:
https://whittlemicropress.com/publications/voidgazing-mk-zariel

And explore my ongoing work here:

https://mkzariel.carrd.co/

— mk

a: what do anarchists do about technology?

Introduction

Are technology and anarchy compatible with each other? In our modern capitalist society, we live in an era of unprecedented excess; of information, of energy, and of access. Indeed, we can look no further than the development and subsequent commercialization of the open Internet to find what has wrought this massive growth in global connectivity and commerce. At the same time, however, more people have access to more information than ever.

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Generation Z, so-called "zoomers" or "internet natives," were the first generation to not only access the Internet, but be born in a world that already heavily relied on its infrastructure for meeting basic daily needs. Consequentially, they are one of the first generations of people in a long time, or perhaps ever, to excel in independent, critical thinking as a result of the relative wealth of information they grew up with. For example, most American teenagers I meet on a regular basis have some kind of complaint about capitalism, and how much the prison-industrial complex totally sucks! That's some pretty Marxist rhetoric to come from someone who has barely entered high school... and of course, we have the Internet to thank (blame?) for that.

Even still, computer networks are just one example of how technology benefits normal, everyday people, even insurrectionists like you and I. It begs the question, how one should even define technology itself as a phenomena? What do we classify as technology, and how do we relate to it? Finally, how do we use the way we think about technology to empower ourselves and our fellow revolutionaries?

The answers lie directly ahead of us... let's jump in!

What is Technology?

Technology, put simply, is anything invented by anyone, ever, to overcome a limitation of the human body. It may seem broad, but in reality that is the most general way of thinking about technology. From this perspective, anything from the flint and steel, to the wheel, to the most advanced quantum computers of our day, can be considered technology. But why should we think about it this way? Typically we consider something as simple as a zipper to be a mere tool, or daily aid, not a technology! Isn't technology these days more to do with electronics and voltages and what not, than the bare metal of our cutlery?

I like to define technology so broadly because it allows us to trace back the genesis of technology itself to not just our first human ancestors, but our first pre-human ancestors. Technology isn't some corporate buzzword of the capitalist era, it is our basic heritage as human beings. I consider that in itself to be quite empowering; people can overcome most anything if they're just clever enough to build their way around it. Our creativity and engenuity are as intrinsic to our humanity as the act of telling stories to each other. Technology is effectively the most practical day-to-day application of those traits.

How do we relate to Technology?

Given this post-humanist perspective of technology, it might make some readers wonder: "How do I relate to technology?"

There-in lies the beauty of technology, the answer to that question. Technology, in its most basic sense, helps us do things that we normally can't. So then, it really depends on what you want or need to do as a unique, self-contradictory human being, how you really relate to technology. The fact is that, technology mostly benefits all of us on a daily basis. Whether it is the wheelchair or hearing aid for our differently abled friends, or the walls of our houses that keep us warm in the winter, and cool in the summer, or even those icky toothbrushes that we use to keep our mouths healthy for years and years, technology empowers us all to not only survive, but live fulfilling, meaningful lives, regardless of the societies within which we are embedded.

A hammer will always drive a nail, a rope will always bear weight, and our clothes will always act to protect and support our bodies. Regardless of whether we live as capitalists, or anarchists, or socialists, or communists. Regardless of how we organize our societies, technology will always, first and foremost, act to benefit the common person.

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Technology as a Weapon of Revolution

These days, technology doesn't just help us do stuff, it helps us remember stuff and learn stuff. So we should therefore adapt our definition of technology into two categories, practical and informational. Practical technologies include those such as cars, sewing machines, and the like. They help us do practical things. Informational technologies, on the other hand, help us learn new information, or retain information we already know for ourselves. Note that, depending on who you are, the same piece of information could either be new, or retained, via one such technology. Informational technologies include books, vinyl records, clay tablets, and, yes, computers.

Our societies attempt to control informational technologies in an effort to guard their status, power, and resources. Additionally, they sanction certain practical technologies that they deem "too dangerous" or "too powerful" to stay in the hands of common folk. Institutions covet these technologies for themselves to stay in power, and maintain their inherently corrupt state of control over other people. But we have technology- technology makes us smart, and makes us capable.

The worst thing our nation-states could have ever done for themselves is put an Internet-connected computer in the pocket of most EVERY adult and child on planet Earth; and guess what you're likely reading this article on.... ;)

My fellow insurrectionists, we have the powerful technology, the ability to do things, to move stuff, to build communities. We also have all the knowledge in the world to arm ourselves with. Revolution is go for launch! All that remains is ignition...

This party is about to get lit :fire:

~Isabelle "Izzy" Santin

a: thankfully, because i do not participate in surveillance, i do not have the slightest idea where you live. as a result, this newsletter will be a shorter links-and-recs type of thing that anybody can use to find anarchist spaces in their city!

if you specifically want commune-style housing: ic.org is a good place to start. this site has a directory of all kinds of alternative housing options, many with an environmentalist or even explicitly anarchist mindset. this does NOT cover more informal housing options, like you might hear about through community organizers you already know in any given place, but is a jumping off point for formal housing exploration.

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if you are traveling and wonder about anarchist spaces: try Slingshot Collective. this provides a couple of anarchist, environmentalist, and/or vegan spaces in almost every US state, as well as countries outside the US. i used it to get the ball rolling on my book tour and had great results; it’s also the first resource i check when traveling.

if you want to hear about every anarchist thing in a city, including historical sites: try A Radical Guide. it’s like Slingshot Collective, but casts a wider net, including locations with some kind of historic significance in anarchist spaces.

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if you want to meet people: try an organization with chapters, such as Democratic Socialists of America or Jewish Voice for Peace. These spaces will not be explicitly anarchist, but anarchists and fellow travelers do often join in order to connect with like-minded people. In a new city, or a place where you’re traveling and don’t know anyone, this can be a good first move.

if you are specifically in search of literary spaces, or you are a touring author: the Anarchist Review of Books maintains a list of every bookshop and other community space they sell their newspaper at. this is a little more pared-down than Slingshot Collective, and gives you a view of spaces that are explicitly anarchist, not just aligned in some ways.

if you already have some community: ASK THE SIGNAL THREAD! even if you’re looking for communes or other anarchist spaces, and you aren’t on the mutual aid thread for the place you’re looking in, you can still ask people if they have community in a given city. directly asking friends works well too.

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if you’re comfortable wading through search results: searching for “anarchist spaces [your hometown]", or something more specific such as “food not bombs” or “infoshop” or “books to prisoners” or “lgbtq community spaces,” can yield some good ideas…and a whole lot of dead ends. it also obviously requires more careful vetting, as any space can self-describe as anarchist and turn out to be totally reactionary. but i’d be remiss if i didn’t bring it up.

finally, i’d like to link a piece with some broader thoughts on how to get into organizing:

do you have favorite ways to find new anarchist spaces? let me know in the comments!

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a: in philosophical anarchism, there can often be a line of thinking about anarchy as an idealized system. in the manner of an author or worldbuilder creating an idyllic future, we can speculate about how some aspect of public life might look under anarchism. we sketch out elaborate descriptions of how we’d distribute food, how we’d provide healthcare, how we’d house people, what art and theater would look like, what it would mean to be in trans community, how we’d deal with conflict and how we’d defend ourselves and how we’d defend each other. and then, inevitably, the anxieties creep in.

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it would keep any anarchist organizer up at night: what if somebody hoarded resources? what if an interpersonal conflict couldn’t be easily resolved? what if somebody wanted hierarchical power and was really convincing about it? what if somebody was homophobic, racist, sexist, and/or an all-round jerk? we freak out—because of course we do, statism is meant to frighten—and so we try to come up with an ideological solution. some of us might find anarcho-communism to be the best solution, thinking that planned systems keep people’s needs from falling through the cracks. some of us might opt for an egoist or anarchonihilist framework. some of us feel most secure in mutualistic or otherwise exchange-based settings. some of us convert to Discordianism, thinking that imposed order itself enables fascism…okay, maybe that last one is just me.

what we forget, in this doom loop, is the knowledge that, while states are top-down—deciding on systems, laws, norms to be imposed—anarchist spaces adapt. if an anarchist group had a member who pushed fascistic ideology in the vein of tech bros, the people in the group wouldn’t announce that they were prefigurative and this would never have happened if they were BashBack aligned (or vice versa). they would pursue transformative justice, and failing that, kick the individual out.

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in an anarchist society, this type of accountability would happen on a larger scale; no matter the genre of anarchism—and every anarchist space, from those as small as a friendgroup to those as large as an autonomous zone, will have people who ascribe to many different schools of anarchism—what matters most is the practice of anarchism. spaces that can provide offramps for fascists, spaces that practice community defense when transformative justice isn’t possible, and spaces that are unafraid to address conflict are more likely to be able to handle potential co-optation than those that shy away from these aspects of organizing.

when researching what informancy tends to look like in anarchist spaces, one hears a lot about tactics that can also look like standard issue social pot-stirring; informants tend to goad people toward tactics they wouldn’t usually choose, start interpersonal conflicts, unnecessarily complicate decision processes, and use drama to distract everyone from their organizing work. at the end of these day, these tactics are not specific to any one school of anarchism; libertarian socialists are just as vulnerable to provocateurs as post-leftist and egoist types are. fascist co-optation and ML entryism tactics present similarly in that any anarchist formation can experience it, regardless of their ideological leanings.

to state my own bias, i consider myself an egoist anarchist, integrating anarchonihilist, Discordian, and trans liberationist perspectives. but if you had to hold me to it, i’d say the genre of anarchism that has the fewest backdoors for fascist co-optation is probably a combination of prefigurative anarchism and insurrectionary anarchism. prefigurative approaches insist on the means of organizing, not only the ends, reflecting anarchist values—making hierarchy in an organizing space impossible to justify—and insurrectionary or BashBack aligned anarchism integrates the possibility of direct action and mutual aid focused on solving present-day injustices rather than aiming for futured ideals. that said, a space with these stated values could still allow for co-optation if their practices around transformative justice and conflict management were lacking. anarchists are people, and people can be swayed by interpersonal harm. therefore, the ability to manage interpersonal harm is more important in a functional anarchist space (or society) than a specific anarchist ideology ever will be.

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As soon as the maple leaves begin to turn red, I am stopped on my way to class by well-meaning people with clipboards asking me if I’ve registered to vote. As an anarchist, I personally do not vote (although I realize this may not be the case for every anarchist), but to avoid needing to explain this to students who devote hours of their day promoting institutional politics, I say yes and keep walking. This goes without saying, but consensus and decision-making in the western world broadly operate through democracy, a buzzword touted as the solution to every problem we face.

Cuts to government healthcare insurance? ICE invasions in schools? Systemic racism? If we all vote, we can get the right official in office to fix it all! But, of course, in order for a democracy to function, we need to respect the right of everyone to vote, even those we don’t agree with. Otherwise, things will never get better..

Anarchist organizing is a fight against the collective lack of imagination for creating change in the world. It is hard to understand what, exactly, we need to do in order to define and realize the world we want, and it is even harder to translate this vision and process to others. Reshaping the way that decisions are made and enforced is a difficult task for both anarchists and the general public to envision. In a world saturated by state-sanctioned democracy, radically reinventing decision-making is no small task.

This article will explore consensus, a prefigurative process used by many modern anarchist groups in which everybody is included in the decision-making and is satisifed with the final outcome. It is fundamentally different from democracy in that it is not a majority vote. Before discussing consensus, this article will briefly identify and describe some of the major flaws of democracy (specifically in the United States). It is important to note that there are some anarchists that advocate for a direct democracy, but this article will not delve into that topic (an exploration and evaluation of direct democracy merits its own article).

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The United States’s “democracy” is maintained through a pluralist voting model, in which the group with the most votes wins (this is technically different than a majority voting model, but due to the two party system, it is essentially majority rule). However, the president is chosen by the electoral college, which can and sometimes does effectively override the plurality vote that was determined by individual voters. Not to mention, electoral politics— to reiterate, the backbone of democracy— are infested with corporate donations and bribery, meaning that the United States’s “democracy” actively ignores what “the people” want.

Aside from the flaws manifested in the application of democracy, state-run democracy has a few inherent flaws. It is a tool used by the government to distract from the general population’s lack of power, and fundamentally serves as another system of authority. Decisions are enforced by state institutions. Democracy expects and perpetuates a power imbalance between the majority vs. minority, and the oppression that marginalized groups face is often replicated in the silencing of their voices. Furthermore, because it occurs on such a large scale, democracy equalizes everybody without ensuring equity. This lumps the powerful and the oppressed into one group and guarantees that almost nobody’s needs will be adequately met.

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Consensus is an alternative model to democratically-made decisions. Ideally, consensus follows this basic model:

1. State, define, and understand the problem/topic: This step is very important, as it can help safeguard against some of the limitations of consensus. Consensus will never be effective for a problem that isn’t clear or that those involved in the decision-making process do not understand. This step often begins before the actual consensus circle with a research team who can present the context and details of the issue with a rough description of the problem that can then be more concretely defined and fleshed out by the rest of the group. Of course questions can be asked and answered at every step, but this is when the majority of time spent clarifying things should happen.

2. Brainstorm solutions without judgment or comment: The point of census is to include and seriously consider every person’s input. Inserting judgment and premature comments on suggestions is damaging to overall trust and can quickly lead to power imbalances. For this step, it works best to designate a note-taker to write down every proposed suggestion. Relieve the pressure to come up with polished solutions by setting a timer of 5-10 minutes for everyone to shout out ideas as they think of them. Aside from also helping to promote a judgment-free zone, this provides an opportunity for ideas to build off of one another.

3. Discuss and state the proposed solutions clearly: This step serves three purposes: to remind everyone of each of the ideas that were brainstormed (this is especially helpful if there were a lot of suggestions, as it can be hard to keep track of everything that was said); to clarify what each proposed solution would involve; and to narrow, condense, and organize the list of proposed solutions. Defining ideas more clearly facilitates the elimination of certain proposals, which is helpful in decreasing the amount of time that future steps will take.

4. Identify the pros and cons of each solution: Self explanatory, but this is a matter of listing the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. If possible, this exercise should be done in a way that is visible to the entire group (ex. using a whiteboard). Some key areas to focus on include feasibility, capacity, necessity, and urgency.

   Agree on a decision: Evaluate how people feel about each proposed solution. If it seems as though a large number of people are drawn to one solution, make sure that everybody is on board with pursuing that proposal.

5. If there are major objections, return to discussing the pros and cons of each solution or revisit the brainstorming stage: One or more objections automatically blocks the approval of the proposed solution. **Depending on the urgency of the decision, and if there are various groups of people within the larger group that each have major objections, two steps can be taken: reconvene at a later time or even a different day to give everybody the chance to decompress and think on their own, or, less ideally, default to a simple majority (50% approval + 1).

6. If there are minor objections, consider adding amendments to the decision: If there are a few people hesitant with the terms outlined in the chosen proposal, find ways to eliminate, add, or otherwise edit aspects so that nobody in the group is left feeling ambivalent about the decision.

7. Once there are no major objections, proceed by stating the final decision(s) and outlining agreements: This step is simply a matter of announcing the final decision to ensure it is clear to everyone. Yes, it may be redundant, but it is important to establish in exact terms what decision was reached to avoid confusion and uncertainty.

Consensus works best in-person among a relatively small group of people (~20, if not fewer) in a space where there is pre-existing trust among members. While it can be spread over multiple meetings, it typically works better and more efficiently in a single session. Obviously, there are exceptions, and what works for one group will not work for every group.

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There are, however, some situations in which consensus should not be used and in which decision making should be delegated to long-term core members in an affinity group. One of the biggest examples is time-sensitive decisions. For example, deciding whether or not to recruit people for an emergency watch when ICE agents are reportedly arriving outside of a multicultural center in 30 minutes requires quick thinking and immediate action, not a consensus meeting. Consenus should also not be used in an introductory meeting for new members. Consensus is a long process requiring patience and some baseline knowledge of the collective, and it can dampen the enthusiasm of and discourage new organizers from returning.

Beyond local, singular affinity groups, there are decentralized organizations/networks that use consensus to make decisions. Food Not Bombs, Radical Routes UK, and La Consulta (EZLN, or the Zapatista movement) all rely on consensus. There are resources linked at the end of this article with more detailed information on facilitation and what consensus looks like in a network, specifically the model that Food Not Bombs uses.

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Consensus is a great method for decision-making in anarchist organizing circles. It is prefigurative and helps both anarchists and non-anarchists practice and see that decision-making outside of the state is possible. By rejecting government models of compromise and the government’s execution of democracy, it becomes easier to tangibly envision a post-authority-driven world. Additionally, by including everybody in the process, consensus strengthens trust over time and can lead to more thoughtful and effective actions.

That being said, consensus also has its flaws. It is tedious, time consuming, and emotionally exhausting. It runs the risk of an organization getting stuck in the consensus process and can prevent things from actually getting done. In other words, it very easily could curb momentum. Additionally, not everybody involved will be operating from the same (emotional) maturity level. Consensus relies on people’s ability to regulate themselves, be mature, and have constructive conversations. On that same note, some people are naturally more shy and less likely to speak up if they disagree, and this can lead some members of the group to quietly resent the choice.

Personally, I have experienced both the benefits and disadvantages of consensus. It has led to better collaboration when planning and executing actions, but it has also stifled progress and taken valuable time from what could have been spent demonstrating and actually organizing. I’ve been a part of several meetings where the most commonly used phrase was “how does that sound?,” only to result in a meeting about planning our next meeting to plan the next meeting. Those meetings (for everybody involved) were a waste of the already limited time that organizers were able to contribute.

Yet, consensus is still useful as a general framework. It might not— and in fact, almost certainly will not— be carried out exactly according to the steps above, but it’s a valuable alternative to state-decision making. Like everything under the anarchist ideal, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It takes practice, experimentation, creativity, and a committment to preserving and upholding the dignity and unique needs and perspectives of everyone involved. Consensus isn’t anti-democracy; if anything, it ismore democratic than any other model used by institutions of power. There might be additional modes of decision making that prove more effective and efficient in the future, but we will never discover those if we don’t practice consensus now. The most important thing we can do is to try.

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Resources:

1. https://neighborhoodanarchists.org/facilitation/ (This is a good general guide in the form of a zine for facilitating a consensus meeting).

2. https://foodnotbombs.net/CONSENSUS_FLOW_CHART.pdf (This is a practical diagram and sample agenda outlining Food Not Bombs’s consensus process).

3. Anything written about consensus on the The Anarchist Library would also be excellent for further reading.

A: I have been waiting my whole life for this question. Here goes. I’ll sort these into a couple categories for your convenience…

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a: if you’re an anarchist, you’ve likely heard a whole bunch of labels—BashBack aligned, prefigurative, egoist, postleftist, anarchonihilist, anarchoqueer, collectivist, primitivist, you know them, you love them—and then tried to explain your views with this level of specificity to a friend who’s not anarchist. and …

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Q: “who would be the garbagemen under anarchy?"

A: Anarchists get asked who takes out the trash so often it’s almost funny. It seems emblematic of a larger issue—who would do thankless jobs that obviously aren’t their own reward?—and ties Instead of just writing my own answer, I’m going to share some of my favorite takes on this from anarchist theory—then write my own response.

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From Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays (not directly pertaining to the trash, but about the general issue of people who don’t want to contribute to society):

The deterrent influence of law on the lazy man is too absurd to merit consideration. If society were only relieved of the waste and expense of keeping a lazy class, and the equally great expense of the paraphernalia of protection this lazy class requires, the social tables would contain an abundance for all, including even the occasional lazy individual. Besides, it is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities. Our present insane system of production fosters both, and the most astounding phenomenon is that people should want to work at all now. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.

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From Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed:

“All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?”

“What dirty work?” asked Oiie's wife, not following.

“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said; Shevek added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the loti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.

“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they're for one half year only.”

“But then the whole personnel must consist of people just learning the job.”

“Yas. It's not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can't tell a man to work on a job that win cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”

“He can refuse the order?”

“It's not an order, Oiie. He goes to EMvlab — the Division of Labor office — and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.”

“But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?”

“Because they are done together...And other reasons. […] Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can — egoize, we call it — show off? — to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing.”

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From Peter Gelderloos’s Anarchy Works:

If everyone is free to work as they choose, who will take out the trash or perform other undesirable jobs? Fortunately, in a localized, anti-capitalist economy, we could not externalize, or hide, the costs of our lifestyle by paying someone else to clean up after us. We would have to pay for the consequences of all our own actions — rather than paying China to take our toxic waste, for example. If a necessary service like garbage disposal were being neglected, the community would quickly notice and have to decide how to handle the problem. People could agree to reward such work with small perks — nothing that translates into power or authority, but something like getting to be first in line when exotic goods come into town, receiving a massage or a cake or simply the recognition and gratitude for being a stand-up member of the community. Ultimately, in a cooperative society, having a good reputation and being seen by your peers as responsible are more compelling than any material incentives.

Or the community could decide that everyone should involve themselves in these tasks on a rotating basis. An activity like garbage collection does not have to define anyone’s “career” in an anti-capitalist economy. Necessary tasks no one wants to perform should be shared by everyone. So instead of a few people having to sort through garbage their entire lives, everyone who was physically able would have to do it for just a couple hours each month.

The Christiania “free state” is a quarter in Copenhagen, Denmark, that has been squatted since 1971. Its 850 inhabitants are autonomous within their 85 acres. They have been taking out their own trash for over thirty years. The fact that they receive about one million visitors a year makes their achievement all the more impressive. The streets, buildings, restaurants, public toilets, and public showers are all reasonably clean — especially for hippies! The body of water that runs through Christiania is not the cleanest, but considering that Christiania is tree-covered and automobile free one suspects most of the pollution comes from the surrounding city that shares the waterway.

So what are the takeaways from all this? Well, here are some of the main points I got from these anarchist theories of the trash (a sentence I never thought I’d say):

✭ When thinking about this question, as the CrimethInc. graphic established, it’s always important to consider who takes out the trash—and provides care to others—now. Thankless, dirty, and emotionally taking jobs are disproportionally pushed into queer, femme, POC, and low-income people in today’s society—especially child and elder care. Statistically, housework (including, yep, the trash) is disproportionally pushed onto women and femmes—and not only the physical labor aspect, but the mental load. It’s not as if a patriarchal, statist society has discovered the perfect division of household labor whereas anarchy has no good solution. In a statist society, the most marginalized people take out the trash.

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✭ As EG highlighted in Anarchism and Other Essays, people are more willing to do essential care work (including housework) in a society without exploitation and labor alienation—and without privilege. Similarly, without a patriarchal system that socialized cis men to ignore dirty jobs and everyone else to do them without complaint, cis men would likely feel less resentment about doing them.

✭ Importantly, a job can be rewarding even if it isn’t traditionally “fun”—as Le Guin pointed out, without capitalism, social capital and building trust and solidarity with others matters a lot more. In most anarchist spaces I’ve been in, there’s often a social expectation that everyone who’s able contributes labor such as trash (and, you know, other household chores), childcare, logistical planning, tech support, emotional labor, and all the rest—and people do this in part to prove to others and themself that they care about the space and its networks of care.

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✭ According to Gelderloos, given the hyperlocalization of anarchy, it’s much harder to outsource dirty jobs in an anarchist society (at least not the physical ones, technology based stuff is often different)—so if they are being pushed onto marginalized people, that’s much more obvious to the community and can be more easily rectified. And, as he also points out, autonomous zones actually exist and usually don’t struggle with issues such as the trash.

✭ All this is to say: people are capable of providing care for reasons other than capitalism. And not only are we capable of this, an egalitarian and collective ethic of care is the only way to handle domestic and care work while resisting oppression. This labor does not magically “go away” in hierarchical societies. It’s just done by people who hierarchy oppresses.

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