Estelle Ellison || Among communists, anarchists, and abolitionists, there is much insistence upon hope. Hope is an instruction, a demand, and even a discipline. We must hope for a better future. We must hope our preferred organizing strategy will bring about revolution. We must hope our chosen candidate will build socialism. We hope state violence will bring about communism.
Anarchism does not benefit from as common and powerful a boon as hope. Instead, it is treated as synonymous and interchangeable with words like “chaos,” “apathy,” and “apocalypse.” Even where anti-communists characterize “communism” as dangerous and worthy of fear, it does not take the place of the words “danger” and “fear.” Communism is afforded a degree of recognition as a political system and ideology that anarchism is not. Anarchism is seen more as impulsive disregard of others than a distinct political position or ideology. It is privileged disinterest in combating forces of oppression. A state of uselessness and selfishness.
While all revolutionary ideologies have at some point in history been co-opted by fascists and other reactionary forces, anarchism is often singled out and judged by the actions of those who have stolen and defaced the label. “Anarcho-capitalists” are a standout example of this, infamously combining two irreconcilably opposed ideologies while perceiving no such contradiction.
Second in popularity behind this egregious example is the figure of the white anarchist. White anarchists certainly exist, just as white marxists do. Both are more visible than Black and indigenous people and people of color who identify with either communism, anarchism, or a combination of the two. As beneficiaries of white supremacist settler colonialism, white anarchists have become notorious for abstaining from combating anti-Blackness, misogyny, ableism, just as white communists have. In their greater visibility, political projects organized by majority white radicals often become remembered for their negligence and/or endangerment of marginalized peoples, sometimes resulting in tragedy.
Despite these incidents, acting as though white anarchists in the heart of empire are the sole claimants to anarchist praxis is disingenuous. There are many anarchist currents of thought and practice internationally, each with a varied focus on combating the violences we each face. We fight the violences that white settlers are spared. We all have our own histories of struggle and we utilize our own methods of combatting today’s global fascism.
Rather than engage with the actual politics of these anarchisms, the figure of the white anarchist is positioned as an excuse to dismiss all anarchisms while fully ignorant of what they each actually entail. In the absence of meaningful engagement and examination of anarchist politics broadly, anarchism is reduced to another antonym of hope.
Hope’s vices hide within despair’s shadow
This brings us to the actual antonym of hope: despair. Despair and anarchism receive nearly identical treatment. If hope is a singular prerequisite for making revolution that must not ever be abandoned under any circumstance, despair is then the clear enemy of revolution. In this way, despair has been maligned by communists and abolitionists alike, as well as some anarchists.
Similar to how so-called “wreckers” are characterized as both pitiable and dangerous, despair is perceived to be a corrosive force. Despair is viewed as a privilege for those who don’t show up to do the work. It is seen as a reactionary inaction that makes you complicit in fascism. At best, despair may seen as an understandable feeling that must be fought at all costs. To make revolution, despair must ultimately be replaced by hope before participating in liberatory efforts.
But what of hope? Is hope so impervious to the vices that anarchism and despair are supposedly guilty of? Is hope so inherently effective a starting point for liberatory work? Are there no negative consequences for making hope central to our revolutionary politics? We despairing anarchists reject these hopeful suggestions.
Hope can be and is often a brandished weapon against oppressed people. Hope can obscure the ways a given praxis is ineffective. Hope presents itself as a revolutionary discipline while it functions as stubborn negligence. Hope easily shields “leaders” from ever grappling with how they’ve misled or failed their followers, members, and those supposedly served by their work.
Insistence on hope is often anti-Black and ableist. Hope can minimize struggling peoples’ reality and oversimplify the question of liberation altogether. Hope can be as much the absence of care as it can be a holding out for care until it’s received. There is an arrogance about hope that is both paternalistic and naive in organizing spaces. But this does not make hope the cause of action and it does not make despair the cause of inaction. Requiring hope begets leadership that insists upon itself, a fetishization of militancy, forced forgiveness, and stagnating direct action and mutual aid.
Hope is stagnation when anti-fascist actions are planned without input from and consideration of the primary targets of fascism. Hope is a demobilizing force in organizing spaces where critique is frowned upon unless its leadership critiquing those who show up to be led. Hope is mere anti-survivorship where known abusers are owed a chance at transformation before the importance of survivor safety is ever remotely considered.
Hope requires unconditional support at the cost of communal negligence. It is the valorization of neurotypical behavior and able bodies paired with the demonization of trauma and disability. If hope is indicative of how we wish the world to be, despair is a reflection of how the world is.
Criminalized anarchism and wasted despair
Fascism is defensively targeting those who act against its armed forces and vigilantes, and anarchists have accumulated enough deeds to this end that the state has noticed. The efficacy of anarchism within empire is incomplete as global fascism continues to escalate its cruel violence. But this public perception of who acts against this regime is peculiar.
Unfortunately, with this renewed active persecution of anarchists, many communists have relished our plight and misfortune as some of us are captured by the state. Brandishing a bloodthirstiness for anarchists that they dismiss as liberals and dilettantes, vanguardists participate in our repression. After all, if only hope is revolutionary, surely the embodiment of chaos, despair, and privilege must be defeated. Such is the product of a culture that centers hope. But, much is lost by dismissing despair.
Contrary to popular belief, despair is informative. It clarifies and exposes obstacles ahead. Despair motivates action under dire circumstances, and the situation posed by today’s fascism is indeed dire. There is a well of knowledge in despair, untapped due to hope’s animosity for its counterpart.
Despair is made up of squandered opportunities to develop collective care. Despair connects those who find each other in exile and appreciate a mutual grounded understanding of how bad things have been and how bad they can get. There is solidarity and comfort to be found among those who do not see despair as an ugly thing.
To reduce despair to a lack of discipline is to fundamentally misunderstand the problem posed by fascism. It is a failure to grasp the significance of revolution itself. Liberation is not a matter of hoping until we all hope together. Liberation fundamentally is an upheaval by despairing people against a vicious world order.
That we know despair is why we fight. We fight so that we need not hope for better days. To know despair is to come face-to-face with the project of eugenics, anti-Blackness, settler-colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. To despair is to bear wounds inflicted by systemic arsenals of violence and viscerally understand why fascism must be defeated.
To demand hope from despairing people is to refuse them care. It makes revolution out to be determinable by sheer force of will so long as you hope no matter what. In reality, revolution is for despairing people. Revolution is something made possible by unprecedented levels of coordinated compassionate collective care mobilized for and by those who have every reason and more to despair.
Worship of hope generalizes and flattens our suffering, reducing the intersections of oppressions we face to an inconsequential background to organizing work. Like capitalists who praise poor and disabled people for working tireless hours just to survive, pedestalizing those who sustain ongoing horrific violence while still clinging to hope serves a similar function. That function is exceptionalising the few so that we may forgive ourselves for showing apathy to the many.
As for the utility of despair? Where we listen to it and understand those who carry despair in their hearts, the duty to act becomes clear. Despair isn’t idealism. It is a concrete reality informed by the power structures that govern daily life. We move to dismantle the hierarchies that make fascism possible because we know despair.
Seizing the impossible
Instead of endlessly asking ideology to excuse us from actions not yet attempted, we seek the unreasonable. We seek that which is explicitly off the table. We fight to actualize yet more access and inclusion. We won’t content ourselves with the people who already show up. We need to know who couldn’t show up and why. We crave their feedback because we understand that we cannot succeed without them.
Rather than pat ourselves on the back for every crumb distributed and every march walked, we seek evidence of oppressive power halted. We want to know when care is well-received and when violence is effectively deterred. As we work to end oppression itself, we affirm that global fascism is cause enough to despair. It deserves our despair far more than it ever comes close to deserving our hope.
Unapologetically opposed to everything that makes global fascism possible, insurrectionary action develops from an anarchism of despair. This anarchism emerges from our dissatisfied exhaustion with wasted organizing efforts that have nothing to show for their work except more insistence that we must continue as we have until morale improves. From anarchist despair comes the work refused and put off by so many today and generations past.
We move to implement strategies designed to combat present fascist conditions. Instead of hoping that states will inevitably and inexplicably abolish the myriad oppressions despairing people face, we propose a collective power fashioned by our own hands. We see people who need and want someone to show up with and for them, and we offer our answerability to them. We make transparent our intentions of care, defense, and attack, and we welcome assessments of our work. If revolution demands organizing work, let that work be determined by we primary targets of fascism. Let that work be a dialoguing relationship with and shaped by those who despair.
Organizers that make themselves unanswerable to despairing people are responsible for the times that despair needlessly claims lives. Where is hope when despair is vindicated by further injury? Where is hope when despair prevents more wounding from familiar sources? At minimum, despair is worth reflection on past actions.
Wherever abandonment and eugenics structure public space to impose continual violence, an anarchism of despair contests that space. In utter disgust of power that has no right to be, the anarchism of despair makes business as usual impossible. Despairing anarchists refuse to be custodians of states and their constituting social mechanisms. We do not seek the same forms of power that turned despair into our only shelter. Unsatisfied with faith in hope, we instead fight for autonomy and care.
The work before us
Thus, we stand for interdependent community defense.
We are tired of having only vigils to offer those slain in cold blood under fascism. We grow weary of those offering only prayers and calls for trials. We hold no sympathy for those capable, yet avoidant, of the duty to protect marginalized people from abuse. The absence of broad collective preventative anti-abuse measures normalizes culpability and capitulation to fascist violence. Leaving this ground uncontested ensures the continuation of gendered violence that has rotted countless groups and formations from within.
We trans folks would rather be supported and protected from what now awaits us than be mourned once it’s too late. Care includes defense because the threats we face prevent care from taking place. Care requires attacks against everything that deprives us of our means of survival. Fascism targets our care because we need care to live. As such, the anarchism of despair understands that effective care work is inherently hostile towards the violence of fascist structures.
We are troubled by the discrepancies in effort by those who claim to be mobilizing in solidarity against fascist violence. We notice whose deaths bring forth rage and insurrection and whose deaths are only mourned. We see who is quick to have their needs met by others and who is left to scrape and beg indefinitely.
We instead seek a collective means of structurally, interpersonally, and laterally deterring racialized, gendered, and systemic violence. We intend to adapt and repurpose our decentralized networks for interdependent community defense. We see this as a prerequisite for anything resembling collective care. We understand, if we are ever to obtain the care we need, we must first survive. In our despair, we know all too well our survival is not entirely up to us. For this reason, we mobilize to wrest our agency from our enemies.
Attempting to combat reactionary forces does not automatically guarantee a job well done. In the face of ongoing oppressive violence, just hoping things will be different next time forfeits the possibility of success. A militancy that consistently fails to deter fascist violence is just militant theater, however much said militants hope for success.
The ubiquity of despair globally should humble anyone who hopes to have revolution all figured out. Evidence of our efficacy, or lack thereof, should be transparent and undeniable. Did anyone benefit from our work or not? Is the perceived benefit of that work worth those disabled, wounded, or failed by that work?
Care is not something you can define for someone. Attempts to care for others should always be shaped by and with them. We may make resources available, but our work is insufficient if they aren’t accessed. Willingness to seek and apply feedback is central to any care effort. It is a major failing of movement spaces that disdain for people’s concerns and critiques is regarded as a righteous and fitting position to take towards “wreckers” and “the masses.”
Political education in service of ideological uniformity cannot produce collective work shaped by people’s needs and compassionately gathered feedback.
Taking on a liberatory task in earnest should, in part, be a demonstration of humility. Past failed efforts inform our determination to understand what should have been done differently. The breadth of duty before us is intimidating, by its nature. Intimidated, many hurry to seek and specialize in a single option among a wide array of tasks that need doing.
In settling for and placing faith in a single method or praxis, they forego an awareness of that breadth. They forget that there is interplay between the prerequisite ingredients to a prefigured reality. By forgetting this, they miss out on greater efficacy posed by work that relates to other work. Without connecting different forms of collaborative work to each other, a single form of care on offer cannot help those who need myriad other forms of care.
The point of liberatory work is not to prove one action or instance of care was completed, but rather to help ensure that as many people as possible can access the care and safety they need. Embracing only one form of action but not the fullness of work that makes revolution possible does a disservice to we primary targets of fascism. Siloing off work from those most impacted leaves that work largely unable to grow into greater forms of resistance. Thus, movements unshaped by we primary targets of fascism will never liberate us.
Life is made up of a long sequence of decisions about survival, and fascism seeks to interfere with every last one of them. During pivotal moments when fascism tries to enact violence and there is a chance it can be contested and stopped, despair informs successful interventions. We do not hope fascism will change its mind as it fires its arsenal of weapons at us. We despair at the imminent violence happening before us and move to ensure that fascism misses its targets. We do not hope our being bystanders to violence won’t be of any consequence. Despairing over what may happen if fascist violence hits its targets, we make consequences for attempting to enact violence while we are in a position to stop it.
The anarchism of despair exists for those who’ve been exiled, abandoned, and forgotten. For those who’ve been punished for surviving. For being disabled. For being Black. For being trans. We offer the anarchism of despair to those jaded from witnessing organizational abuse and corruption. For those betrayed and wounded by lateral violence. For those who have every right to have lost faith in possibility. For those who stopped hoping. We are animated by our despair to take up the work ignored and refused by the arrogant and cruel. With interdependent community defense, we move to end fascist violence and scarcity for good.
