Appalachian

A Critical Consideration of my Critical Consideration

Center for a Stateless Society by Eric Fleischmann

It’s been explained to me that every writer—whether of highbrow novels or online internet discourse—always has one or two things they’ve written that they dislike and which haunts them. For me that piece is “A Critical Consideration of Hensley’s Appalachian Anarchism,” which is a response to Dakota Hensley’s article “Appalachian Anarchism: What the Voting Record Conceals.” I do not fundamentally disagree with anything I wrote in said response, but rather I take issue with how I wrote it and what I omitted or did not expand upon.

Critique of Appalachian Anarchism

via Center for a Stateless Society

In his book "Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism", Chris Matthew Sciabarra makes the astute observation that “[j]ust as relations of power operate through ethical, psychological, cultural, political, and economic dimensions, so too the struggle for freedom and individualism depends upon a certain constellation of moral, psychological, and cultural factors.” This is something that Dakota Hensley, in his article “Appalachian Anarchism: What the Voting Record Conceals,” seems to implicitly know but not elaborately understand.

Appalachian Anarchism

"Banjo" playing his banjo rifle, from the film "Sabata" (1969).

via Center for a Stateless Society

Appalachian Anarchism: What the Voting Record Conceals

Individualism, community, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and faith are the values of the people of Appalachia. It is in these values that we find an anarchism that has existed in the cities and rural communities for decades. However, most Appalachians don’t refer to their culture as such, but it carries many of the same attitudes and beliefs as anarchism. .This fact is further obscured by the pressure to view political beliefs through an electoral lens.

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