Author: Crimethinc., Anonymous
Title: Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace
Date: 2025/02/21
Source: Retrieced on 2025/06/15 from https://crimethinc.com/2025/02/21/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace
As Donald Trump and Elon Musk subordinate the United States government to their pursuit of totalitarian power, their opponents remain in a defensive posture, accusing them of lawlessness. But neither courts nor laws will halt the descent into autocracy. Massive numbers of people will have to take it upon themselves to organize concrete acts of resistance, to take direct action on a horizontal and participatory basis—in other words, to become anarchists.
Tyranny Is the Opposite of Anarchism
On February 8, the editorial board of the New York Times wrote that Elon Musk
“is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee.”
If you know any real-life anarchists, you know how absurd this is. Given access to the government’s payment systems, no anarchist would begin by cutting off resources to starving children or medical research. An anarchist would begin by cutting off funding to the police and the other instruments of state violence—precisely the institutions that Donald Trump and Elon Musk will expand at any cost.
Anyone who tells you anarchism is about abolishing the social safety net for the sake of unbridled profit is lying to you outright. There are other words for that—for example, neoliberalism.
Anarchism is something else entirely. Anarchists propose to abolish all institutional means of coercion, so that no one can dominate or oppress anyone else:
Anarchism is the idea that everyone is entitled to complete self-determination. No law, government, or decision-making process is more important than the needs and desires of actual human beings. People should be free to shape their relations to their mutual satisfaction, and to stand up for themselves as they see fit.
Anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchy—every currency that concentrates power into the hands of a few, every mechanism that puts us at a distance from our potential.
-To Change Everything
In other words, anarchists seek to bring about a situation in which no politician or billionaire, elected or not, could ever be in a position to cut off essential resources to millions of people with the flick of a pen. This is a profounder commitment to freedom, equality, and the well-being of the general public than one can find within the halls of any government.
At this moment of peril, when aspiring autocrats have taken power and are attempting to consolidate permanent control of the state, why would the New York Times muddy the waters by taking a cheap shot at some of Donald Trump’s most determined enemies? Looking more closely at the quote above, it seems that the editorial board’s chief concern is not what will happen as a consequence of Elon Musk’s actions, but whether Musk and his cronies are following the rules properly.
A Three-Sided Conflict
As Trump and Musk carry out a hostile takeover of the United States government, outlets like the New York Times are narrating a story in which there are two sides: on one side, democracy and the rule of law, and on the other side, the criminal oligarchs that threaten to undermine them.
But this is not the only way to understand the situation.
It would be more precise to say that there are three camps—those who desire to return to the forms of governance that prevailed until January 20, 2025; those who are currently in the process of overturning that system in order to impose an even more oppressive system; and those who reject both of those options in favor of a more egalitarian alternative.
In the first camp, we find people who believe that a certain amount of self-determination is acceptable, as long as it falls neatly within whatever laws happen to be on the books. They are also comfortable with a wide range of ruthless self-seeking destructive behavior, provided that it, too, complies with those same laws. When people in this camp talk about “equality,” they do not mean that all of us should have comparable leverage on the conditions that determine what we can do with our lives. They mean equal opportunity on the market and equality before the law—both of which are preposterous to speak about when some people start life with pennies while others start with billions. People in this camp are concerned about Elon Musk overhauling the federal government, but they had no objection to him amassing hundreds of billions of dollars while a hundred million Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. They are concerned about Trump’s plans for Gaza, but until a few weeks ago many of them were perfectly at ease with the United States government funding a genocide there.
In the second camp, we find those who are determined to consolidate power in their own hands, regardless of what laws happen to be on the books. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their various capitalist, nationalist, and fascist backers will preserve whatever laws assist them and overturn the rest. They have no allegiance to any particular legal system or protocol. They seek their own advantage by any means, mendaciously claiming that they are the only ones who can address the problems of our time (“I alone can fix it”). Such people have always existed, but only over the past few years have resources become so unevenly distributed that a handful of them could take over the United States government.
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