One of the ways in which I was brought over to anarchism was the argument for effective altruism. The quick way this point is made is the thought experiment of a young child drowning in a very small pond you are walking past. The argument goes that on a broad level most people accept that given just how easy it would be to save the child’s life at only the cost of getting your feet a bit wet, there is no ethical way that you can just walk by and that you are actually in the wrong if you don’t save them instead of just being in the right if you do. This argument is then expanded to our society and the question is posed that is it not true that most people in a country like the UK could, with minimal cost to themselves save lives by just putting the minor effort in. As the charity ads always go “for the cost of a coffee” etc.

The original argument then goes that everyone should live a comfortable life but beyond that you should – and ethically must – donate everything else to charity or you are actively allowing those who need your aid to die. This leads many to the argument that you figure out your “comfortable spot” where you might say that you need £18k a year and then everything you earn on top of that you automatically donate to charities that save lives.

Being impacted by this argument while coming into contact with anarchism for the first time made me apply it on a systemic level that instead of just giving to charity we have a moral obligation to make revolution and end capitalism. Within the thought experiment it’s as if there’s someone throwing these children into the pond and the original effective altruism position is just fishing them out one by one instead of stopping the person throwing them to their death. As anarchists I believe when we are able to we have a moral duty to not only try and carry out aid to help others and ourselves currently struggling but also to end the system that creates the suffering.

Beyond this it’s worth saying I don’t just view building anarchism as some sort of altruistic act, not only am I and we a part of the group that requires liberation but it is also an important part of being an anarchist that we fight for ourselves and not for some sort of “People” who require us to save them.

The arguments here and how I became an anarchist I think have led me to be a bit of a purist in my anarchism because to me I would feel actively wrong if I wasn’t building anarchism; it’s a bit of an intense way of looking at things but I don’t see it as escapable, I don’t expect everyone who calls themselves an anarchist to have this strange commitment to it but I hope that others can understand it.

I relate quite a lot to what Aragorn! calls being relentless but I maybe see things a bit less poetic as he does. I just find a lot that I don’t understand why others who have discovered and understood anarchism don’t want to spend as much time as possible doing it and building it; the simple response is “they can’t, not everyone can spend every minute organising” but my hope isn’t really that everyone spends every waking hour organising anarchism, it’s more that people keep anarchism in their minds most of the time and actually have a desire to do anarchism on an emotional level instead of seeing it as a chore or a hobby.

This “hobbyism” is one of the things I’m writing this against, I cannot stand that anarchism to many people seems to be something that is picked up and dropped at will and is squeezed in on a weekend like yoga or doing the dishes. I feel personally angry when I see something that shouldn’t be like a fascist event or a police officer walking down the street like they own the place and it makes me want to actively do anarchism not just get angry or sad in itself. The feeling I keep getting is that there’s a dissonance between the pushes against us and the (lack of) response. Anarchism doesn’t feel like a movement because there isn’t much movement here that isn’t pushed or planned or trundled through. There seems to be this lack of organic energy because in its current form anarchism in London feels much closer to a musical subculture or a hobby association. I want more and for anarchism to flourish we need more people who internalise anarchism and feel it in their daily lives instead of just on their allotted “anarchism time” like DnD club.

I feel this is a fairly urgent question at the moment where liberal democracy is in crisis and explicit right wing authoritarianism is becoming more and more the accepted political system. As of now anarchism is either completely disconnected or far separated from any form of organic resistance to the attacks that this new political force and its emboldened far right and fascist threat poses to many people. Applying the effective altruism model on a societal level, many people agree in the 1930s in Germany or Italy it would be an actively bad thing if you didn’t take action against the government and their brownshirts. The question then gets raised of at what point it becomes indefensible to not act, as anarchists we would probably say we must act at any point during capitalism because of the immense human suffering it creates, beyond this though there are more and more explicit acts of not only social murder but just out and out direct state murders, at what point is it the only moral position to start blowing up the railroads and commit entirely to removing the obvious evil of the system at the expense of yourself?

This is where I pushback to an extent on some of the more liberal “activist style” ways we discuss organising, with discussions like “capacity” and people saying that “political organising shouldn’t burden your social life”. Sometimes I get the feeling that no one has even accepted the idea that we may win or even force a serious struggle, how do you apply your “work/life balance” to anarchism when it’s all out war in the streets? It’s true that no one should do more than they can, anarchism won’t be enjoyable or possible if we fight when out of breath – part of being committed to winning anf building the strongest anarchist movement we possibly can means building structures that enable rest, care and social spaces to flourish, I’m not advocating that people need to work out every day and train in weapons in order to become a super solider, what I want though is an acceptance that to change things we need to radically change and expand our capacity beyond hobbyism. At a certain point if you are serious about anarchism you may have to cancel drinks with friends.

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