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TOTW: Anarchists Take The Stage

Anarchy is a story. The ways that we tell it, the characters we emphasize, diminish, or omit altogether shape the way that we relate to it, the way we relate to the world and the way we relate to each other.

There are, as with anything, many ways of telling anarchy’s story, of weaving together the lives of individual people into something larger than themselves, of giving narrative structure to what otherwise might seem like isolated acts of rebellion. Two of these structures I’ve heard are 1. The wave system (1st, 2nd, ?) and 2. Something like “humans were anarchists for 99% of their time on earth and then something went wrong”. Both of these constructions create casts of rebels, anarchist or not, and both set anarchy moving on a particular path, crafting a particular anarchist story.

So, to keep pushing a bad metaphor, let’s cast our story of anarchy. Who would you choose as the stars? Would they be criminally under-represented anarchist figures? Non-anarchist writers, artists, criminals? Your grandmother? How do these figures fit into your definition of anarchy, and how do they change the story of anarchy from what it is to what it could be?