Anarchism has gotten a pretty bad name, and unfortunately for the wrong reasons. So it’s a word I feel I have to avoid in order to discuss ideas about how to organize society without hierarchies. I never really understood it so well, until I recently got obsessed with the Spanish Civil War and Revolution.

It is an extraordinary period in history. All over the world, there were revolutions of all sorts, from communist to fascist, from anarchist to democratic, from dictatorships to returning monarchies. All sorts of new ideas about how to organize societies and economies were being tried, many failing. And as they failed, for various reasons, there were all sorts of conservative and reactionary responses.

Some of the most profound experiences in my life have been anarchic in their character, like the building of the jet fish called Death Rattler with Madagascar Institute. While there was supposed to be a leader of this project, he had been absent during most of the month of prototyping in New York, then arrived later than a bunch of us in Amsterdam, where we built it. We had a very capable and creative bunch of people, so rather than waiting for this leader to arrive, we just starting designing and building this project. At first, the leader seemed quite annoyed that we were not following him, but I think he was also taken with the enthusiasm and energy of the project, so he joined in the anarchy and we built a crazy machine from scrap metal in two weeks.

So then to see how spanish anarchists were just stepping up and organizing all
sorts of things, while trying to provide for everyone, it is really
quite inspiring. So far, I have dug deep into the anarchist side of
things, reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is a
great book. Then read some of the writings of various anarchists, and I’ve watched all sorts of newsreels.

My obsession still continues… we just watched Libertarias, which was interesting, but unabashedly told from the point of view of anarchist women. Then we watched Spanish Civil War, Part 4: Franco and the Nationalists today, which is a typical documentary in that it tries to show both sides of the story. And I want to watch La Guerra Cotidiana (The Daily War) soon, I find that personal perspectives are the most important. What I am missing is a strongly pro-Franco view on the war, though I have looked. It seems that the Francistas were more interested in repressing any discussion of the war rather than even giving their side of it. Or perhaps there were lots of Francista materials that have since been repressed.

Back to Free Software: after watching Eben Moglen talk about Software and Community in the Early 21st Century, I think I finally realized why this piece of history has such resonance for me: first, the self-organization of the spanish anarchists really highlights two things that are very important to me: a sense of duty to the community combined with freedom from abusive power in as many respects as possible. I see a lot of parallels with the development of the internet and free software. The core ideals of free software are very strongly aligned with the core ideas of anarchism: the ideas of mutual aid and sharing combined with essential freedoms.

I’ve seen a number of betrayals of these ideals from people with in, like the watering down of core values of free software by people who triumph “open source”. And I’ve watched the forces of free software meet some very powerful opposition. In this regard, I think the people involved in free software have been much more successful than the spanish anarchists, but in a more limited realm. At this point, I think can say that the key difference is how they treated the opposing forces. Under the anarchists, there was the widespread burning of churches and violence against Catholicism. Mostly, the Free Software Movement has aimed to get people to join rather than to fight them.

The Free Software Foundation provides a good example of taking a very different approach. When enforcing the GPL, they have deliberately avoided confrontation as much as possible. Though they were entitled to damages and such, they have always pursued compliance over damages and even publicity. This in turn made it much easier for the companies who were initially violators to come to adopt the ideas of free software.