Revisiting my Writing: The Anarchist Manifesto Project

A useful exercise and my first 'book' back in 1999-2000

Let's start with the Anarchist Manifesto Project or The AMP. I wrote a couple of the essays, mostly it was just an attempt on my part to understand exactly what people meant when they said they were 'anarchists'. My conclusion was that ultimately - it just meant that they didn't like the way things were and thought things could be better. As for myself, I came away from the project with a better understanding of what anarchism really is - for me and for others. I found myself resonating deeply with the cooperativism of the Mondragon Collective in the Basque country of Spain. I also recognized that there was a fundamentally anarchist energy to such spiritual practices as Taoism and Sufism - where the individual was put in charge of their connection to the greater power and the middle men of religion were disempowered. And that, was my revelation about anarchism on any level - it's about getting rid of the middle men, the representatives, the delegates. The governed become the governors and the governors only govern themselves. On a certain level, this works, but time has taught me that when you pass a certain threshold even those who are willing to govern themselves cannot do so as a collective. The optimal size is probably no more than fifteen people - after that, they simply can't cooperate because self-interest and egos become involved - so then it is essential to delegate responsibility for community governance to a representative who can then band together with other representatives to form another body which will do the same thing upon reaching scale (15). The key, as Acalan and Bookchin detailed in Municipalism and Democratic Confederalism is to have the delegates be immediately recallable and to never allow power the opportunity to protect itself or entrench itself. So, no single executives or administrators that can make decisions without oversight. Fifteen groups of fifteen represented by fifteen instead of by two-hundred and twenty-five.

Another insight from the collected manifestos was that power is really represented by both economic power and electric power. Political==Economic==Generated.

At the conclusion, I was disavowed of the idea that you could be an Anarcho-Capitalist because capitalism is, in itself - both predatory and exploitive and works on exploiting power dynamics. Libertarian in terms of free markets - truly free markets without manipulation or protectionism or cronyism - yes. And you can't be an Anarcho-Communist because communism is about the individual not being worthy of governing themselves. Socialist - however in using collective power to achieve collective benefit - yes. It's funny, at the end of this journey, I thought I was really breaking new ground by calling myself a libertarian socialist - but upon looking the term up- I discovered that it was the self-description of those who were truly the most anarchist of them all.

The International Workers of the World (IWW), Bakunin, Thomas Paine, William Morris, and Charles Fourier are key figures. In a sense, it was Libertarian Socialism that energized the American and French Revolutions and which brought about the most admirable parts of modern 20th century American society.

The concepts of grassroots democracy, workers' control, solidarity and autonomy were all a part of this along with the principles of decentralisation, participatory democracy and mutual aid. Every generation likes to pretend it is the first to discover these things - but they are old and just like my mistaken belief that I had coined the term libertarian socialist, it is a mistake to claim these are anything other than ancient and worthy concepts that should be strived for.

I've put together a sort of bibliography of most of my books so far. So there really isn't a huge need for me to do that again here, but the political aspects of The AMP are important enough to have revisited. My views haven't really changed, just become more nuanced. In fact, my novel

Notes from Nowhere was a modern adaptation of William Morris' scifi novel News from Nowhere but written more than two decades after The AMP.

I would like to clarify something here. I've never felt like I'm the best writer in the world or even one of the best writers. I write well, I have a strong voice that is relatable and easy to follow. I'm good at taking ideas and presenting them in a way that makes sense through storytelling - whether it is telling my own stories and adventures or telling stories that illustrate things that are important to me. That's where I feel that my writing has some importance - and also I'm good at creation from nothing. Bringing things and places and characters to life. This is part of the reason why collaborative creation is so important to me. I'd love for writers more talented than me in verse or turns of phrase or narrative - to develop these worlds. Why? Because I firmly believe that writing and literature and storytelling - in particular imagined worlds that come to life are the ideal place for us to not only identify but to solve the problems that beset our world, our species, our existence.