Autonomous initiative is the life blood of anarchy.
Without individuals dreaming, scheming, and turning their thoughts into action, nothing happens. Protest organizers are not special; they imagine a situation they want to bring to life and invite others to help them make it happen. The same is true for any anarchist endeavor involving more than one person. Gardens, attacks, fundraisers, occupations, bands, they’re all the result of people deciding to make their own realities. The constant process of thinking and acting without being told what to do is what makes anarchy possible. Some people call this autonomy, and without it anarchy is impossible.
Waiting for protests places the responsibility to take action on others.
As anarchists, we reject the notion that others are responsible for making our lives how we want them to be. We know better than to trust our leaders to fulfill our needs and desires. We have to make what we want ourselves. When we wait for protests instead of doing what we want, we pass along the responsibility of meeting our needs to organizers, marshals, activists, or whoever else is planning the next big thing. If we are going to practice self-determination, we can’t let ourselves be carried by the current of the next protest.
Waiting for protests centralizes our power.
There is an infinite number of ways we can be powerful; the struggle is multi-form. We can build our capacity to live and support one another, we can sharpen our analysis to better understand and fight authority, we can gain confidence and learn new skills, we can attack what keeps us from freedom. When we drop our projects to look forward to the next march, we limit our power to only one form.
Waiting for protests means only acting with police and liberals.
All the big protests guarantee two things: police and liberals. Police are paid to maintain the social peace, and liberals are more than willing to try to maintain it for free. These people are less than ideal company for creative rebels. Certainly some things can still happen with them around, but usually much less – why try to do with them around what we can do without them any other day? This isn’t a call to abandon marches and rallies altogether, but instead to do things outside of and alongside them when that makes more sense.
Waiting for protests is waiting.
It can never be repeated enough” “the secret is to really begin”. When we put off taking the actions we know are necessary to create the lives we want, free of domination, we add to the inertia of inaction that we are fighting against. Anarchy is not just a distant horizon to be achieved after the revolution, it is also every moment of freedom lived in the here and now.
(via Anathema, Volume 3, Issue 9)
Anathema
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