Not all anarchists are bomb-throwers, as Christopher Schwarz explains:
The idea of pairing anarchism and design work seems – on its face – to be a ridiculous marriage. After all, design is about creating things from scratch, and anarchism is about burning everything down, right?
Well, no. Anarchism – particularly the American flavor of it – is woefully simplified and misunderstood by people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The truth is that most of the furniture designers and graphic designers I’ve worked with in my career possess strong anarchistic tendencies. They just don’t know what to call their urges and beliefs.
I’ve been an aesthetic anarchist for more than 25 years, after first encountering the concept in graduate school (thanks Noam Chomsky), then observing one of my cousins, Jessamyn West, an anarchist librarian. There’s a chance you might be one, too. And while I’m certain that you probably should be working on something far more pressing and billable for work at McCorp, reading this short article isn’t going to hurt anything….
The face of American anarchism. Josiah Warren is considered the father of American anarchism. Among his many accomplishments was the founding of the Cincinnati Time Store, where you traded your labor for goods. No money.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.The Briefest Description Ever of American Anarchism
America’s individualist anarchism is not about the violent overthrow of the government and its institutions. Period. Full stop. Instead, it is a tendency to eschew the enormous organizations – churches, states and corporations – that we have created during the last 250 years.
Why do this? While working with others is generally a good thing, there is some threshold upon which an organization becomes so large that it is capable of inhumane behavior – war, slavery, environmental destruction, mass extinctions or even just failing to treat its employees and contractors fairly. These are things that individuals are (mostly) incapable of accomplishing.
Anarchists like myself avoid working with these massive and dehumanizing institutions. I don’t want to burn them down, but I also don’t want to prop them up by shopping in their stores, praying in their cathedrals or voting in their elections.
That doesn’t mean I’m opposed to making money, that I’m an atheist or that I’m uninvolved in my community. I just decline to work, pray and serve others via these institutions. Working with them gives them power, while working with the family architectural firm a few blocks away helps your neighbors in every way imaginable.
