adapted from nancy a. heitzeg

One of the frequent rejoinders directed towards anarchists goes something like this:

“But is seems so impossible! How could it work on a large scale? Isn’t it easier to make a state that we like?”

Well, no. Currently, activist energy and attention is constantly spiraled into never-ending battles over the most minor adjustments to the policies of the state. Most of these are never achieved to any satisfaction, or worse still, if they are implemented, it is quickly clear that they are Trojan Horses which serve to both entrench and expand the long reach of state power into our lives. We have said so repeatedly elsewhere, and the examples are manifold.

Reconstructing society without a state would actually be easier than this.

The latest examples include the endless dithering over the “legality” of bombing elementary schools in Iran, of ICE cops kidnapping children and abandoning elders to freeze to death, of concentration camps, kickbacks, and outright bribes. That happens in relation to the U.S. Constitution, the UN Charter, the International Criminal Court, and the shambolic dumpster-fire called “international law”. As if any of those things actually control what states decide to do. As if “the rule of law” means anything besides “what states decide to do”. As if the core structure of the state – any kind of state – was not centered on assigning specific people the “discretion” to do what they want regardless of law and formal policy, with impunity from consequences from the state.

As if any of those things would be easier to do without the state structures that enable them, rather than massively harder.

Anyone concerned with liberation should carry with them at all times a laminated copy of this adaptation from Mariame Kaba and Survived & Punished NY’s guides to “non-reformist” [sic] reforms you should always oppose:

1. Do the proposed reforms rely for implementation on state employees and functionaries? If yes, then you should oppose them. As anyone who has ever dealt with a state benefit office or cop knows, state agents have the “discretion” to ignore these kinds of directives with minimal consequences from their employer, if any.

2. Are the proposed reforms advocating for more state surveillance and control? This includes the use of fig-leaf mechanisms like ‘counsellors’ and ‘social workers’ whose licenses and thus livelihoods depend on doing what the state wants, including turning people over to the cops (“mandatory reporting”). If yes, then you should oppose them.

3. Are the proposed reforms primarily focused on centralized technical measures (technological or bureaucratic)? If yes, then you should oppose them.

a. Centralization makes control and manipulation of technical measures by whoever holds state power simple, easy, and inevitable.

b. Technical measures are almost never used against state agents or processes, and almost always against those seeking liberation. Anything that can be used against an enemy of a particular government, will be used by other governments against other enemies – and no government holds power forever.

c. Technical measures provide the parameters for oppressive actions; they do not prevent them.

Without this kind of critical attention, organizers are just farmed trout leaping at policy proposals dangled into their sunlit pool. Once the bait and the hook have been totally swallowed, then activists have committed to hours, days, weeks, months, years – indeed, eternities – of sinking endless energy and resources into electioneering, into lobbying, into writing strongly worded letters to the people they’ve gotten elected, and then into (often quite profitably) picking up the service-provision pieces to alleviate the harms caused by the policies they’ve pushed for.

One recent local example of this is the massive jail expansion plan pushed through the New York City Council by Mayor Bill De Blasio and Council Members Brad Lander and Jumaane Williams (among others) – all elected almost entirely due to the support of progressive 501c organizations, who were then obligingly silent throughout a citywide mobilization against the building of four new jails at an original planned cost of over $11,000,000,000 (the actual cost overruns have been just as large as you would expect). They pretended to believe the transparent lie that the plan involved closing the Rikers Island jail complex (it never did), and the ridiculous fantasy that building more cells to lock people in would somehow lead to fewer people locked in cells. As if we did not see the actual text of the bill. As if we had never seen a jail expansion before. As if more jails were a sensible response to the wildly popular demand to “Close Rikers Now”.

Since then, rather than crying betrayal, they have shifted even more of their considerable resources into the electoral sphere, in large part to back those same politicians. They have even dismantled their (admittedly ineffectual) Coalition for Police Reform, and in some cases completely abandoned active campaigns against police violence. This while their own actions against the genocide in Palestine and the fascist regime in the U.S. have remained entirely symbolic and arrest-based, feeding rank-and-file members into the state surveillance machine as it further sharpens its teeth, while carefully avoiding any material impact on local IDF and ICE contractors.

And they have since been the moving forces behind the candidacy of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who retained as Police Commissioner his far-right cop predecessor’s pick, hotel/tobacco/oil-pipeline/gas-drilling/plastic-packaging heiress and anti-Muslim surveillance specialist Jessica Tisch. Predictably, his eloquent words about immigrants have been matched with absolutely no actions to prevent the NYPD he now has authority over from collaborating with ICE to disappear and gun down New Yorkers or from arresting and assaulting ICE-watchers.

Multiply then, scenarios like this times a million locales and issues – or even just by your lifetime and the issues you have raised your voice about – the amount of human, social and actual capital expended for naught will make your head spin. It is clearly unsustainable, and yet they would have you do this forever. Let’s be brutally honest too about the interests served here. Unless you are part of The Machine, the non-profit industrial complex, or the celebrity activist click-bait circuit, there is nothing but exhaustion here for you.

So tell me again how unrealistic anarchism is. And I will say – and i hope someday you say it too: anarchism is easier than this.