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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
The achievement of his aim, whilst possible, is extremely difficult.
The one context in which anarchy, liberty and community can
co-exist is the ‘secular family commune’ – where groups attempt to
institutionalize friendship in a domestic environment. Yet friendship
is precarious as a basis for community and the aims of the
secular family commune can be compromised if members of the
community mistakenly treat the maintenance of the domestic
environment as a measure of friendship, thus prioritizing the need
to fulfil social duties over the more difficult task of building human
relationships. Moreover, even where secular families succeed, Taylor
argues that the prospect for anarchy is undermined by the difficulty
of maintaining inter-community relations. Taylor does not believe
that his inability to find a solution to this problem suggests that
‘the goal of a radically decentralised world of small communities’ is
unattractive. Nevertheless, he concludes:
We have no grounds for believing that growing up and living
in community necessarily engenders a tolerant, pacific and
cooperative disposition towards outsiders. It is true that many
primitive anarchic communities lived at peace with their
neighbours (though having little contact with them and invariably
taking a dim view of them); but many did not, and the world is a
great deal more crowded now. 48
Experiments in anarchist communitarianism have not provided
a robust answer to this objection. However, proponents of the
second form of anarchist communitarianism – community networking
– suggest that the objection can be met.
As Howard Ehrlich explains, the purpose of networking is to
build ‘a “transfer culture”’, to extend anarchist ideas by constructing
sites for anarchy in mainstream society. 49 Unlike members of
intentional communities, networkers are not separated from other
members of the community: they work with them in order to
rebuild social relationships on the basis of trust and support. Tom
Knoche defines the project as:
... changing what we can do today and undoing the socialization
process that has depoliticized so many of us. We can use it to build
the infrastructure that can respond and make greater advances
when our political and economic systems are in crisis and
vulnerable to change. 50