This Pathless Hour | 267grappling with the problematics of order in freedom, we should be suspicious.
Perhaps something important about anarchism is lost in these denials. Because
anarchism is an ideology of freedom, must not even ordered freedom contain a
strong element of the unpredictable?
Consider the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, a “centerless, amoebic,
invisible” social phenomenon that refuses to define itself as an organization and
sometimes publishes books.^96 It defines “crimethink” as “the stirrings of a new
world, smuggled across every border in the heads and hearts of a dissident na-
tion of millions, thrown through plate glass windows on notes tied to bricks.”^97
It makes outrageous gnostic/neo-situationist claims on its own behalf: the claim,
for example, to be “a force that exists beneath the currents of history, outside
the chain of events... the first stirrings of a revolt that will take us all out of
history.... [W]e have come to be the ones to fire the first shots of the third
and final world war, the war which will be fought for total liberation.” It com-
bines unreconstructed Enlightenment opposition to religion (“Everything that
glorifies ‘God’ and the afterworld slanders humanity and the real world”) with
criticisms of everything from gender roles to the exploitation of animals and the
marketing of deodorant. It calls for readers to “stop thinking of anarchism as
just another ‘world order,’ just another social system,” and to conceive of anar-
chism instead “as an individual orientation to yourself and others, as a personal
approach to life.”^98 Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), the founder of social ecology,
who decried the individualism of American anarchism, its preference to express
revolutionary commitments through style rather than the grind of social orga-
nizing, would probably have described CrimethInc. as “lifestyle anarchists.”^99 To
which CrimethInc. might have replied: Your Politics are Boring as Fuck.^100 They
insist that politics should be as joyous as one wants life in general to be. Rejecting
the charge that miniature interventions and resistances are an ineffective praxis,
CrimethInc. sardonically notes that “staying alive is reformist: you keep trying
the same basic approach, hoping for a different outcome. Suicide, on the other
hand—guaranteed results. If you want to solve a problem, solve it.”^101
The more orderly vision of anarchism, meanwhile, lives on in Michael Al-
bert and his idea of participatory economics, or Parecon.^102 Albert found himself
faced constantly with the question of what he and his fellow activists proposed
to put in capitalism’s place, if not a Soviet-style command economy. Participa-
tory economics is his attempt at an answer. It is not a blueprint to follow, but an
effort to show how humans create economies rooted in values and priorities, so
that one can imagine how alternative values and priorities—solidarity, equity,
and diversity—would generate an alternative to capitalism. While it may not yet
be a practical or widespread economic model, Parecon nonetheless contrasts
sharply with the stylistic romanticism of CrimethInc. Parallel tendencies can be
found on a local level, in the focus of anarchist activists on issues of process and