Welcome to another anarchism research
group video. In this episode we speak to
Peterson Silva about the concept of
freedom in anarchist political theory and
its relevance for contemporary politics.
Don't forget to click subscribe, like and
share this video. The academia has
discussed freedom a lot recently right
so we have talked about liberalism,
republicanism, right, There's been a
resurgence in republicanism but
anarchists have been left out of this
conversation on freedom, and part of the
reason is because there there might not
be exactly clear concept of what freedom
is
in the anarchist tradition of thought. I
think that anarchism is very diverse in
terms of dealing with freedom especially
because I think it attracts a lot of
people with different philosophical
assumption different different philosophical
backgrounds, so you think about it
like for instance Bakunin like coming
from the Hegelian tradition and if you
get, and in the way he talks about
theology and Christianity or religion,
I don't know, like things like that, and
then you've got Leo Tolstoy coming from a
point of view of Christianity and then
you got Proudhon coming from a
completely different tradition then you
get, you know it's it's really very
different background assumptions that
change the way you talk about freedom
and and propose to understand it and the
idea is try to read into that and come
up with a concept that is more like a
commonality and try to define the
concept better so that we can insert
ourselves as anarchists in that academic
discussion on the concept of freedom.
one of the problems is
well from talking about the anarchist
concept of freedom who are the
anarchists, right? What are the texts that
I should read? And then we come in
contact with some of the problems of sub-
currents and strands and branches of
anarchism and which ones are really anarchist,
which ones are not and all these
kinds of internal discussions that are
really relevant when you're talking
about the anarchist tradition as a whole.
For this research it's relevant to
realize that it's it's more than
just saying who is anarchist and who is
not, but who has contributed to anarchist
discourse who has contributed to
anarchists tradition so if you get for
instance the Zapatistas in in Mexico,
right, in Chiapas, they have certainly
contributed to anarchist discourse, they
have certainly been is it's kind of a
political experience that anarchists
have looked at too approvingly so
there's a contribution there even though
it could be complicated to speak about
them in terms of look they're anarchists
right. They might not be but at the same
time there's something there, so I think
thinking about things in terms of
contributions kind of sidesteps the
whole discussion about who is an
anarchist, and so to understand that 
kind of gives us a good idea of where the
tradition is, the debates, internal
debates that even shaped the tradition,
so I've tried to cast a wide net in
terms of experiences in terms of sub-
currents, branches, strands, to really try
and see what's common among them and
also what's different. Anarchists are rarely
analytical in their texts and
pamphlets and philosophical
discussions so they don't usually at the
beginning of the text come on and say
"well you know, readers forget what you
think you might know about freedom,
you're wrong, I'm going to explain to you
what freedom really is like conceptually
and then I'm going to use that concept
coherently", anarchists don't usually do
that, right, anarchists are usually
common sensical, right, they use common
sense words and concepts and try to draw
people into the discussion, right, be a
little open to being read more widely
and so when they do that they end up
kind of bending to using the liberal
common sense way of understanding
freedom, right, and that presents some
challenges because later when people in
academia for instance read anarchists
they read that and say "well there's no
specific concept of freedom here, you
know, it's just it's just liberalism, some
sort of liberalism", so that's that's a
problem. So in order to get to an
anarchist concept of freedom we have to
kind of do some reverse engineering in a
way so we have just to think like, well
if anarchists political positions are so
different from everything else it cannot
be that the notion of freedom is the
same, so we have to think about these
differences and then what makes anarchists different from liberals and Marxists
and Republicans and so on and how does
that relate to a more fundamental
concept of freedom.
Really you have to change the way you
see the notion of individual itself,
right, it has to change too to accommodate
for anarchist freedom because this whole
divide between individual and society is
kind of a it's an integral part of
mainstream Western political theory and
that's why I think anarchists are so
distinctive, right, so sometimes that's
very obvious for instance in Bakunin's
work in terms of trying to say, "well you
know the individual is is nothing
without society" and things like that, but
I think it's more complex than
that, I think we have to try and get also
the decolonial production related to
anarchism and how that affects this
relationship between individual and society. I
think that we come to realize they're
both two sides of the same coin of a
socializing process, right, a process of
social relations and I think that's
that's something that's really important
with anarchism. We're always
focusing on social relations and when
you see freedom as a characteristic of a
relationship instead of the individual,
right, things change quite quickly. If you
go like to Bakunin, right, his famous
maybe the most famous formulation on
anarchist freedom is his, right, and it
says that you have to have equality as
well unless all my, you know, everyone,
unless every man and women has
freedom, if they don't have it I don't
either, this sort of thing, so equality is
everywhere in anarchist discourse, and
Ruth Kinna's research in particula,r she
supervised my work, has made me see how much the language of domination is also
important. It featured more prominently
in the more, in the earlier texts of
anarchism, but it's it's interesting
because it frames this urge for equality
in a nice way because the thing
about this discourse of equality, you know,
demanding equality as an integral part
of what it means to be free, is kind of
hard because equality of what?
What are you trying to equalize? And
would you get to a point where everyone
will be equal and then that will be it,
right? So that is a classical thing even
in liberal discussions and everything
like that it's kind of a liberal trap in
a way, right, if you see, both if you see
freedom from an individual standpoint
and if you see it as something that is
detachable from equality since that, it's
kind of a trap. If you think in those
terms this is kind of hard. And another
thing for instance with a recent
David Graeber research on on the idea of
freedom and equality he tells us how the
indigenous critique of European
societies for instance was always
initially the critique of freedom, right,
so they didn't initially think "oh guys
you are so unequal" right they said "oh
you don't have freedom" and then later
they came to understand that inequality
of material resources kind of gave way
to inequality of power among people,
right, and and then this discourse of
inequality caught on even within Europe
of course Rousseau and things like that,
so it's interesting how, you know, inequality matters but it can't be reduced
to this thing about this liberal
redistribution thing, right, once we're
equal it'll all be fine, it is not really
about equality it's about domination,
it's about distribution of power in a
sense, right, so it's not really that
people have more than others but how
this can be used so that the voices,
you know, of some people go and heard and
things like that, so I think that freedom
is really tied to this notion of
fighting against domination in that
sense. So apart from the idea of figuring
out the idea of equality, right, how
frequent it is and what could it mean
and how it's related to domination, right,
and also the whole thing about the
individual, right, which i think is a very
Eurocentric legacy of anarchism that
kind of hinders our way of looking at
the whole social process and how we
could privilege that, you know, thinking,
one of the things that is more
problematic is the whole idea of non-
restriction I think as a concept of
freedom which is because it's the
nonsense, right, if you're bound
physically even, right, that's the
metaphor we use to feel free, right, I
mean feel unfree, right, so we tend to
think about being free as being not
restricted by something and that's
really a conceptual straightjacket, I
mean anarchists talk like that, they use
the word like that, and then they
question it right and they say "well you
know we want to be free but are you
really within the state, are you really
within capitalism?" To think in terms of
nonconformity, it shifts your view
quite dramatically because you are
assuming there is a norm, right, there is
a rule in the sense that and there will
always be, as people interact in complex
ways there will always be like social
expectations and social patterns, right, a
rule will always be there, there'll
always be a norm, right, and so but
the thing is to not be able to to
conform to that and to do that in a way
that doesn't create or enforce
domination, that that's what freedom
really means and that really changes how
you see everything else.
I think that presenting freedom this way
sort of quite like latitude for
nonconformity and which is also non
dominating latitude for nonconformity
that's a important qualification there I
think it's important in practice because
you know, as I said like it's kind of a
reverse engineering, so we begin with the
anarchist positions and think that
that's what freedom must mean if
you're thinking about these institutions,
so if you think about the commune and
how to deal with property or how not to
have private property of the means
production and things like that and how
to deal with, you know, decision making
processes and things like that, it's all
to ensure that we have like these
safeguards against domination in a way,
so that we are alert and vigilant to not
let all sorts of inequalities
flourish and then when we least
realize then we are in a situation that
is harder for things to change, right, so
it's kind of always being open to
non-conforming, always understanding that
things are in a way now but they can
change and circumstances can change and
so you have to be able to change your
social relations and I think for
instance not to be too cliche I mean
this is an interview in times of, you
know, pandemic phenomenon so it can I
have to talk about it but you know, it's
really a nice example what that
means in practice. Why are we not free? Is
it because a pandemic is imposing things
on us? In a way yes but the problem when
we point out that capitalism is a real
problem with the pandemic is that it has
made things harder to change in a way
that it could it would be required to
now, right, things have changed the
situation has changed so dramatically
that we should be able to better
organize the way we work, the way we live
in order to, you know, protect the people
who are more vulnerable, and so that
everyone can be more protected in fact
right and so that we can
fight this together things like that, but
the way the society is structured in
this isn't talking not only about the
state and capitalism but patriarchy and
and race relations and things like that,
it makes it very hard for us to stop and
think and rethink and reshape our social
relations based on changing
circumstances, for instance. Apart from
you know the institutional arrangements
that we know are very associated with
anarchism I think it's interesting that
thinking about freedom in this
way, it's it's not really a matter of
becoming free, like you're either free or
you're not, but you're expanding freedom,
right, and also in several levels, in
several social networks, so you can be
very free in a certain social network
and a certain web of relations with some
people but when you expand your view and
consider other relations then you're not
as much, so you have to fight for freedom
on that level, so I think that there's a
lot of, depending on what networks you're
talking about or social networks, you can
have different experiences and different
attempts to to become more free because
it's always a matter of context as well,
right, so in the way you become
more free in a romantic relationship is
very different from the becoming free in
the place you live which is different
from becoming free in the place you work,
right, so it's interesting to think about
the diversity of anarchism that way,
because you know we have some
discussions about for instance what is
the appropriate place, you know, like Bookchin has all this talk
about cities, right, oh you have to have
the decision has to be, there has to be
like assembly, city-based assembly or
something like that, right, while for I
don't know since Proudhon we've been
talking about the the workers
association, right, as the basic unit of
the federation, and things like that, but
I think that we have to, we must do
something like what we're seeing for
instance in Rojava, right, where you have
like intersecting, multiple levels of
communities that they have all like
different attributes and they deal with
sometimes the same
things so they have to talk so it's a very
interesting way of not privileging one
sector of activity, one way of relating,
but thinking that you're gonna have to
apply the same principle of freedom with
whomever you relate in however ways so
there are lots of ways lots of practices
that this can give birth to. When we talk
about for instance the recent uprisings
about the death of George Floyd, right, in
the United States, I think that is
interesting because some voices here,
they are saying that the United States
has failed black communities, has failed black people, and I think that
anarchists support that kind of thinking
but they go beyond it and I think the
uprisings they are happening precisely
because, you know, black people not only
in the United States but in several
other places they look at the current
system and they see that the
problem is systemic and that they can't
do anything to change the violence
that they suffer and the way that they
live through it so I think that
anarchists, the idea of insurgence and the
revolution as a horizon and things like
that, they speak so well in
these times because it's all about
seeing that to non-conform, you know, you
really require the destruction of these
sort of repressive institutions and in
Brazil for instance what's happening is
interesting because we have a certain
portion of you know the president's, the
current president's, supporters who, you
know, doing all sorts of public
gatherings to, you know, ask for a
dictatorship basically, right, so
military intervention and things like
that and there has been a lot of support
for fighting back against that and the
concept of freedom as I've been thinking
about it also you know is in that in
the sense that anarchists can support
an opposition to that because even
though a lot of movements in Brazil have
merely claimed to support, you know,
democracy, the institutions, you know,
that are not
what the president wants right now, we
still support that in the same sense
that Kropotkin said once, you know, that
well, you know we recognize the
difference between a dictatorship and
bourgeois democracy,
right, even though bourgeois democracy is
not really the best thing and it's not
really desirable for us, what we really
want out of our social organization,
is still interesting to defend it in
given contexts because it's it offers
more freedom, because it offers more
latitude for nonconformity than a
dictatorship. Of course he didn't say
latitude for nonconformity, I'm just
saying that it jives with that, right, it
matches that defense, right, this
language matches that defense of
some political actions so you know
everywhere anarchists are acting in terms in different circumstances to try and
broaden our capacity to change the way
we live, right, and I think that's
really what it's about in terms of
freedom.
