I was hanging out in the woods with a few old friends over a long weekend recently and we got to debating about our usual political topics. One friend is a Silicon Valley brand of conservative libertarian, another is a progressive liberal, and I am the resident leftist anarchist. The progressive is more willing to consider other viewpoints and finds some aspects of both the libertarian and the anarchist perspective appealing, whereas the libertarian and myself are much more rigid and uncompromising in our contrasting and long-standing convictions. As such, the libertarian and myself end up trying to win over the progressive on various points. Our hours-long debates are mostly cordial but sometimes get heated. Nonetheless, we all seem to enjoy these skirmishes.

During this sojourn in the woods, I came up with a way of framing anarchist politics that captured better than any other phrasing I’ve come across the distilled essence of my commitment to anarchism. The progressive asked me what about anarchist politics was appealing. In response I posed the following question, “Would you ever want to have less influence over the things in your life that you care about most?” 

While being a sincere expression of my understanding of anarchism, it’s also a leading question. Given my politics, my progressive friend knew what I was getting at and was at pains to not fall for my supposed rhetorical tricks. The idea implicit in the question’s framing is that only a form of politics that refuses hierarchical authority over people can guarantee that people have meaningful influence over the things they care about in life. Insofar as anarchism is the political philosophy most critical of hierarchical authority, any step away from anarchism is inherently a step away from the idea that people should have influence over the things they care about most. The progressive repeatedly tried to find some way out of answering the question in the negative for fear of agreeing with me. 

But what I like about this question is that it really forces you to think about the things in your life that are important to you, such as your family, your friends, your interests, your values, your well-being, and the source of your income. It sweeps away all of the abstraction of anarchist theory and poses the core principle in the form of what is most coveted in our lives, for example, one’s physical and mental health, the safety of loved ones, the time and energy to pursue your passions. Would you ever want less influence over all of these things that are most dear to you?

My progressive friend’s first response was that he was happy letting other people decide things for him because it takes too much time and energy to make every decision yourself. Therefore, he claimed, he’s content to give up his influence. This is one of the most common objections to any anarchist or truly bottom-up democratic politics.

I think two distinct matters underlie my friend’s erroneous notion that he’s happy to give up his influence. First, what I think he actually means is that he’s fine giving up his influence over important things to people he agrees with and trusts. So I responded to the progressive that being able to delegate influence to others who you trust to mostly act in your interests is itself a form of influence over the things you care about. As a progressive, was he happy to see Trump in the White House making decisions and exercising influence that he strongly objected to? Of course not. 

The fact that he tended to agree with Joe Biden on most things meant that he was happy delegating authority to Biden on major political issues as someone he agreed with and he trusted could act in his interest. Delegating your authority to someone you agree with and trust to handle all of the heavy lifting of specific decisions is itself a crucial form of influence. So implicitly, when my friend said he was happy giving up his influence on things, what he meant was he was happy giving his influence over to people he agreed with and trusted. Because this is itself a form of influence, he was actually agreeing with my point that he is NOT ok with having less influence over the things in life that are important to him. (Whether Biden actually acts in my friend’s interest and can be trusted to keep his campaign promises is a separate issue we talked about at other points over the weekend.)

Second, over the lengthy course of this part of the discussion my friend seemed to be conflating the giving up of decision-making influence over important things vs. technical and small things. He repeatedly said he hates having to make decisions about what I took to be mundane matters. When I pressed him on if he’s really ok with giving up influence over the things in his life that are important to him he tried to squirm out of it.

Anarchists are not against delegating authority as such. Delegating decision-making authority on most of the technical details of what is required to administer and coordinate a functional society is a key feature of all political systems, including anarchism. Anarchists don’t want endless mind-numbing meetings any more than anyone else. What anarchists and all others truly believe, in their heart of hearts, is that they want influence over the big picture and important stuff in their lives and in society as a whole, and then specialists can be delegated to work out the details. The difference between anarchism and other political systems has to do with how this is accomplished, with anarchism being the least willing to give some sub-grouping of people authority over those things that are important to everyone. Again, my friend ended up agreeing with me that he didn’t want to surrender his influence over the things in life that are important to him.

Another point that was brought up was the claim that democratic decision-making doesn’t always result in leftist policy or something you find appealing. Certainly, any single person or group can’t be assumed to make a decision one way or the other merely because they are given the power to make such a decision. But the point of anarchism is that people are generally better safeguards of their own true interests (aka, the things they care most about) than a small minority who has power over them.

When some liberals and leftists point to the Republican Party with a large following in the US as evidence against the value of popular democracy, I think this misses the point. Rather, the detestable views of the Republican Party (or the Democratic Party, for that matter) are a result of anti-democratic forces in society, such as billionaire control over news and political media (and everything else) that are closely aligned with entrenched political parties. The only way to imagine a more democratic society is to imagine one without a handful of billionaires having excessive influence over the media, which I think would invariably mean the marginalization of the detestable and often unpopular views associated with the Republican Party and their Democratic counterparts.

Central to anarchist thought is the idea that the state and the market are not and can not be truly democratic institutions. The free market is inherently an anti-democratic institution where one’s possession of money and capital is the only governing principle and excludes any consideration of human needs and democracy apart from whether they can be bought. The free market in capitalist society brutishly violates people’s ability to have influence over the things in life that they care about.

The state is a more contested institution, both in theory and in practice. The rhetoric of liberal democracy rests principally on the notion of a mandate from the citizenry as granted by universal suffrage and majority vote. Both in the past and today, anarchists see such rhetoric as a smoke screen meant to obscure how liberal democracy is subordinated to the interests of the rich in capitalist society who own the media companies, provide the vast majority of the funding for campaigns and political parties, and direct the flow of most of society’s resources to prioritize their own profit. One can debate whether such a system can ever be democratic in any meaningful sense, but I have my doubts (I lay out some arguments at length here). (As anarchists sometimes neglect to clarify, we are not against truly democratic forms of communal self-government, only against non-democratic forms of government, such as “the state” in reality and as defined by anarchists).

Let’s return to the central question of my little woodsy sojourn with friends: “Would you ever want to have less influence over the things in your life that you care about most?” I think this question leads most people to respond intuitively with a no. 

Once some of the above counter-arguments are rebutted, my next maneuver is to take this question and universalize it. I think we can set aside special cases, such as young children or those in highly compromised mental states, and ask whether this question can reasonably be asked and answered in a certain way by nearly all people nearly all of the time? Would anyone under relatively normal circumstances ever respond to that question with anything but a “no?” I think not.

When this logic then is extended beyond the individual to the society, what consequences does that have? It means we should design social institutions and cultural norms that maximize all people’s influence over the things that are important to them. Somewhat obviously, in my mind, this excludes notions of private property that gives highly disproportionate control over the allocation of society’s resources to a small handful of people. Chief among social institutions that give people influence are those of direct democratic decision-making over important matters at all scales of society, instead of some minority of people being given (or taking) that authority. Radical direct democracy is in fact the *only* mode of governance that gives all people direct say in the things that they care about, whether it be in the workplace, in the home, in the community, or in a country.

I think that the intuitive “no” to this question springs from a natural moral impulse towards giving people the right to self-determination. I call the politics arising from this intuition “baseline anarchism.” This simple idea doesn’t describe all of anarchist politics and theory, and it certainly doesn’t provide a detailed blueprint for how all of an anarchist society should be structured, but I think it expresses in condensed form the guiding principle. Trying to elaborate on or apply this principle is often very complex, but I don’t think that stops you from recognizing its pull on your sense of social reality and moral integrity.

As powerful as I find this line of argument in framing my own moral views, I tend to agree with most leftists that moral arguments on their own are actually very weak in creating social change (some leftists wrongly accuse anarchism of being merely a moral stance, which I find ridiculous even if I’m eager to acknowledge that my politics have a moral foundation). I find solace in being able to state my ideals and give them meaning in succinct form, but I think such raw moral content does very little work in social struggles. Rather, I think social change is more productively stimulated through narratives that connect political concepts with concrete experience and pull people towards action by engaging their emotions and values. This is the stuff of social movements and grassroots organizing.

But I still think we can benefit from a little philosophical inquiry amidst everything else. I hardly won the argument in the woods that weekend, and if I had any influence in altering anyone else’s opinion it probably wasn’t very much. But in finding a new way to express my ideals I discovered a little more about who I am and why. This self-understanding helps bolster the resolve I’ll need to rely on as I know much more will be asked of me in this journey towards creating a better world, one where people have influence over the things that they care about.