Revolutions Are Built on Failure

Last weekend, I packed up my van and drove over to the Shenandoah Valley anarchist bookfair in Virginia. I won’t tell you a ton about the bookfair itself, only that the food was both free and incredible—a rare thing to say about big collective events—and that the people there were kind and welcoming. One thing I love about modern anarchism, especially in smaller towns and more rural areas, is that it’s no longer aggressively subcultural. I was probably the only person there wearing a punk vest, and there were several of us in nice, colorful summer dresses. (Well, my wine-red dress was colorful by my personal standards.)

Clearly, subculture is close to my heart, and clearly the overwhelming majority of my clothing is black, but my love for monochrome fashion is entirely unrelated to my interest in anarchist politics.

I was asked to come down and give a sort of opening address, a speech about the topic and slogan “A Better World is Possible.”

I figured I would write up a speech and then let it do double duty as my week’s substack post, but I didn’t finish writing it down ahead of time. So I did what I usually do: I cobbled together notes and then just talked about shit. I’m reasonably comfortable talking about shit in front of a microphone, as one might imagine.

It’s a funny topic, “A Better World is Possible,” because it’s so… true and untrue in self-evident ways. You can’t look around this world without realizing that things could be better than this. For one thing, we could live in a world without livestreamed genocide. That would certainly be a better world. We could live in a country without concentration camps that do double duty as grifts and sell concentration camp merch to the concentration camp fans who elected fascists to run the United States.

It’s really easy to imagine a world without those things, because a few years ago, we lived in a terrible world that was, somehow, better than our current world, because it didn’t have those particular atrocities.

See, one thing I’ve learned by reading history is that things can always get worse. There’s not actually a bottom we can hit. There’s bad and there’s worse and there’s worser, but there isn’t worsest. (Or, you know, to use vaguely correct grammar, there’s no “worst.”) It’s terrifying to realize there’s no limit ...