The following article was written by Melanie Pinkert and published on her blog Broadsnark, December 18th, 2009. We are honored to have Melanie’s permission to feature it on C4SS.
Conservatives like to talk about personal responsibility. By that they mean taking responsibility for your own well being and perhaps that of your family and community. But if you are not within the circle, what that comes down to is “fend for yourself.”
Liberals talk about taking responsibility for the less fortunate. By that they mean donating time or money to organizations (that employ other liberals) and letting them help people in need. But that creates dependency and doesn’t question the privilege underlying their altruism.
Anarchism, as a system based on cooperation, addresses the weaknesses in both liberal and conservative philosophies.
Like conservatives, anarchists think we should be taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities. But where conservatives want to put up a wall, beyond which their responsibilities don’t go, anarchists have always understood that resolving our problems requires taking responsibility on a worldwide scale.
Like liberals, anarchists are concerned with the vast majority of people who struggle to have even the basic necessities of life. But anarchists don’t want to install themselves in positions of power where they can met out drips and drabs of whatever liberals have been willing to give up. Anarchists want to work side by side with people, questioning the hierarchies and privileges that cause those inequities. We are not creating dependency, we are recognizing interdependency.
And anarchist principles work.
Worker managed coopertives are more productive than hierarchical models. Community policing is more effective than conservative models. Community involvement in schools means better results for kids. Community involvement in budgeting means better allocation of resources. The more people around when a conflict begins, the less likely that conflict will escalate.
These examples aren’t perfect representations of anarchism by any stretch of the imagination, but they do exhibit anarchist principles of responsibility and cooperation. They demonstrate that we can solve our own problems.
Its easy to sit here and criticize our “leaders”. But what did we expect? Did people think we could just pull a lever every few years and then go back to watching American Idol? If we want problems to be solved, we need to take responsibility for solving them. And anarchism is a philosophy built around taking responsibility.
Wow, what a great article!
I would have expanded upon the whole charity, mutual aid, altruism spectrum with a quote from Rebecca Solnit's book: "A Paradise Built In Hell" which I have saved in my notes so I can easily copy and paste it when an opportunity presents itself. I highly recommend anarchists read her book, there are few that make such a solid case for the illegitimacy of the state and it's mostly worse than useless institutions which invariably fail us just when they're supposed to be most valuable by allowing ideologues to take advantage of the current disaster.
from pg 86 of her book
"Mutual aid versus the social Darwinists
Mutual aid means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity. When Dorothy Day established the Catholic Worker, she endeavoured to make the aid mutual by making the people they served active participants in the work projects. In flood ravaged New Orleans, the radical group Common Ground Relief's slogan is "Solidarity, not Charity."
Altruism and charity are distinct if not in the acts themselves at least in the surrounding atmosphere: altruism reaches across with a sense of solidarity and empathy; charity hands down from above. The latter always runs the risk of belittling, patronizing, or otherwise diminishing its recipients in underscoring the difference between those who have and those who need. It takes away a sense of self while giving material aid."
“What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice”
-Ursula K. Le Guin