Anarchist Memory Without Idols

Reclaiming Collective Storytelling and Radical Practice Beyond Academia

Introduction

Anarchism, born from revolt and ungovernable imagination, faces a peculiar danger: being embalmed by the very institutions it once sought to dismantle. Across Europe and North America, the rhetoric of liberation drifts through university corridors. Scholars cite Emma Goldman in lectures subsidised by fossil-fuel grants; research centres named after David Graeber pursue “radical democracy” through policy papers peer‑reviewed by bureaucrats. This is not liberation but capture—a slow, polite exorcism of anarchism’s spirit.

The challenge is not simply that academia dilutes radical content. The deeper threat lies in idolisation, in the creation of icons who float above struggle rather than arise within it. When we elevate individual names over collective efforts, anarchism ceases to be a living practice and becomes a mythology for sale. Yet total amnesia is not an option either. Without memory, movements drift and repeat errors; without appreciation, the sacrifices of past comrades dissolve into forgetfulness.

The question, then, is how to remember without worship. How can activists preserve lineage without turning it into hierarchy? How can stories of rebellion inspire action without freezing into textbooks or foundation grants? This essay argues that the answer lies in decentralised memory practice: rituals of storytelling, archiving, and mutual aid that keep anarchist history alive as shared fuel rather than private capital. The balance between remembering and forgetting is not a theoretical puzzle but a tactical necessity.

Anarchism must learn to treat its memory like compost—alive, productive, and periodically turned over. Only through living processes of collective remembrance can movements stay fluid enough to resist both commodification and despair.

The Academisation of Anarchism: From Praxis to Symbol

A new cage for anti‑authority

When radical thought enters academia, it undergoes translation. What was once a cry becomes a citation. The classroom rewards analysis over action, and soon the rebel morphs into a reference. This transformation has happened repeatedly across intellectual history. Marxism was canonised by universities long after its revolutionary moment, its scholars often detached from working‑class struggle. Feminism likewise splintered between ivory‑tower theory and grassroots campaigns. Anarchism now faces the same siphoning effect.

The academisation process presents itself as inclusion: anarchism finally taken seriously. But the cost of legitimacy is sterilisation. Within scholarly frameworks, hierarchy reasserts itself through academic ranking, intellectual ownership, and the language of expertise. Knowledge becomes property again.

The neoliberal machinery behind the syllabus

Modern academia functions less as a house of ideas than as a market of reputations. Keywords, conference slots, and citation counts govern moral and material survival. Radical vocabularies are absorbed to decorate institutional branding. When anarchist theory appears in this setting, it is re‑coded into consumable “thought experiments,” detached from barricade smoke or communal kitchens.

This process mirrors neoliberalism’s fragmentation impulse—the breaking of wholes into manageable, monetisable parts. Anarchism’s insistence on total critique, its refusal to compartmentalise ethics, economics, and emotion, becomes incompatible with the scholarly norm of specialisation. Scholars extract just enough radicalism to show relevance while keeping their careers safe. The rest—risk‑taking, anti‑hierarchy, mutual aid—is relegated to footnotes.

The idol problem

Names then replace networks. Academic centres invoke historical figures like Goldman or Kropotkin to attract funding, recasting them as mascots rather than challengers. This personalisation reassures donors that anarchism has heritage but no teeth. The memory of militant practice dissolves, replaced by badges of cultural capital. Such institutions preserve the illusion of dissent while reinforcing hierarchy.

Against this co‑option, activists face a double task: dismantle the idol economy and defend the living coherence of anarchist principles. This means translating critique into structure. Cooperative learning circles, temporary archives, and prefigurative education settings can embody horizontal memory. The point is not to reject knowledge but to remake how it circulates.

Lessons from past resistance

Radical traditions have long waged war on institutionalisation. The nineteenth‑century workers’ autonomist schools in Spain and Italy pioneered anti‑authoritarian education outside state control. Black and Indigenous freedom schools in the 1960s insisted that knowledge must grow from struggle, not observation. The Zapatista Escuelita, open to global solidarity visitors, continues this lineage: communal pedagogy unapologetically political, accountable to villages rather than donors. These precedents remind us that anarchist education flourishes wherever the line between teacher and student dissolves.

Within this lineage, contemporary activists can craft non‑academic infrastructures for knowledge sharing. Podcast collectives, skill‑shares, and mutual‑aid reading groups restore proximity between thought and action. The test of authenticity is not style but risk: ideas only count once they endanger existing hierarchies.

Yet resistance to academisation is not anti‑intellectualism. It is anti‑hierarchical clarity. The goal is to ensure that intellectual work remains an extension of action, not its substitute. As anarchist pedagogue Gustav Landauer wrote, the state is not an exterior force to be stormed but a relation to be undone. The same applies to the academic state—its grading systems, its priesthood of reviewers, its cult of the author.

When anarchists reclaim knowledge production, they dethrone the cult of personality. The classroom becomes a circle again.

The Politics of Memory Without Mastery

How remembrance turns reactionary

Memory is a battlefield. Every revolution breeds historians eager to tidy the chaos, select protagonists, and fix meaning. States depend on monuments to instruct obedience. Movements risk the same fate when nostalgia replaces spontaneity. To remember wrongly is to domesticate the past.

Anarchists must therefore treat memory as a living commons, not a museum. The slogan “no gods, no masters, no academic idols” captures more than refusal—it proposes a model of historical consciousness where inspiration circulates without ownership.

Collective storytelling as counter‑infrastructure

One antidote to idolisation lies in redistributing narrative power. Story circles, walking seminars, and oral history projects rooted in active communities bypass institutional gatekeeping. Instead of commemorating victories as if they were relics, participants recount recent acts of solidarity—a rent strike, a forest occupation, a defence campaign. By foregrounding present struggle, historical continuity emerges organically. The story of the week becomes the story of the century.

Such circles reconfigure education as mutual aid. Every participant is both historian and witness, every anecdote an invitation to act. The database is memory embodied: situated, local, renewable. Importantly, these gatherings can include ritual elements that dissolve ego—shared silence after stories, collective authorship of summaries, immolation of meeting notes to signify transience. Forgetting becomes part of remembering.

Archiving the ephemeral

The anarchist archive should mimic the campfire, not the museum. Digital storage allows decentralisation, yet permanence can betray principle. An anonymous wiki maintained by rotating volunteers may serve better than a central server stamped with institutional logos. Introducing decay into archives—auto‑deleting files unless updated with new context—keeps history metabolically active. Every retelling becomes an act of renewal.

Such ephemeral design echoes ecological thinking: nothing stands still, and everything circulates. The Casseroles movement of Québec, for instance, carried forward sound tactics from earlier Latin American protests through living, sonic memory rather than textual study. Lessons survived because people drummed them nightly. Likewise, oral repetition keeps tactics in motion without freezing them into rulebooks.

Protecting lineage while rejecting hierarchy

Total anonymity, however, carries risks. Without lineage, authorities can rewrite history at will. Fascists thrive on historical amnesia. Therefore anarchist memory must balance self‑erasure with traceability. A story circle might omit names while maintaining dates, places, and collective identifiers. “The kitchen crew at Blockadia camp” says enough. This partial visibility frustrates co‑option: too detailed for mythmaking, too collective for appropriation.

Preserving lineage also nurtures gratitude. Remembering that ideas descend from struggle fosters humility. The challenge is keeping gratitude horizontal—directed toward communities, not saints. Commemorating the Haymarket martyrs or Spanish anarchist collectives should feel like communing with ancestors, not bowing before deities.

By embedding remembrance in everyday practice, movements stay immunised against fetishism. The archive that demands participation to stay alive keeps ideology porous.

Designing Rituals of Resistance to Idolatry

The necessity of ritual without religion

Hierarchy often returns disguised as reverence. Ritual can either reproduce domination or dismantle it depending on its choreography. When activism neglects ritual, fatigue fills the void with symbolic leaders. Reclaiming ritual politically means crafting procedures that embody equality in action.

The story circle model

Imagine a circle where participants share recent acts of mutual aid—repairing bikes for neighbours, releasing zines, blocking detentions—without citing any heroes. Each story concludes with silence, allowing listeners to absorb tactics rather than applause lines. The group then extracts replicable elements: how coordination occurred, what tools proved useful, what could be improved. Memory thus flows directly into strategy. Anonymity transforms from self‑erasure into collective authorship.

This ritual translates anarchist ethics into muscle memory. By decoupling inspiration from identity, it cultivates resilience against celebrity logic. The ritual also counteracts burnout: hearing peers describe small, tangible victories restores belief that change remains possible.

The rotating archive

Following the story circle, a shared notebook or encrypted drive records lessons learned, stripped of personal markers. Custodianship rotates monthly to prevent fixation. Each custodian can add, delete, or annotate, ensuring the document mutates like an organism. Instead of copyright, contributors apply copyleft or creative commons, guaranteeing open reproduction. Once a year, the group reviews the entire record, collectively deciding which portions to release publicly and which to let decay.

This “living archive” resists both stagnation and betrayal. Nothing becomes absolute; everything remains provisional.

De‑idolising institutional invitations

When universities request anarchist speakers or collaborations, collectives can subvert expectations. Replace lectures with participatory workshops where attendees co‑create content. Send rotating duos—one storyteller, one mutual‑aid organiser—to dismantle the lone‑genius format. Redirect honoraria toward prisoner‑support funds or solidarity kitchens, publicly documenting this redistribution. The gesture teaches by action what rejection of hierarchy looks like.

The art of joyful forgetting

Not all memory must be preserved. Some should fade. Ceremonial forgetting, through festivals or symbolic burnings of obsolete banners, prevents nostalgia ossifying into orthodoxy. This does not mock the past but releases it. Just as land periodically needs fire to regenerate, movements require controlled amnesia to stay alive.

When activists treat forgetting as gratitude in motion, history ceases to hold them captive. Each burnt flag seeds experimentation—freedom found again in impermanence.

Toward Decentralised Pedagogies

From classrooms to commons

To resist the academisation of anarchism, movements must create alternate pedagogical ecologies. This does not mean rejecting reading or theory; it means transforming how knowledge is created and circulated. Decentralised pedagogy embraces three core principles: co‑production, participation through doing, and ephemeral authority.

Co‑production of knowledge

Learning happens through mutual acts, not passive consumption. A community garden can host workshops on ecology, labour law, and mutual aid simultaneously. Each participant brings expertise honed through experience, blurring the line between educator and learner. This approach mirrors the CNT’s anarcho‑syndicalist schools that coupled literacy with sabotage training. Education grew from the shop floor, not from imported syllabi.

Participation through doing

Theory must emerge from immediate struggle. Instead of writing dissertations on direct democracy, facilitators can convene neighbourhood assemblies to practice it. Documentation follows action, not the other way around. The story circle becomes both classroom and experiment, its lessons immediately field‑tested. Success is measured by increased autonomy, not citations.

Ephemeral authority structures

Even the most horizontal group risks crystallising into hierarchy. To counter this, responsibility must rotate and dissolve. Facilitation privileges fade after each session; administrative passwords expire monthly. By institutional design, no one remains gatekeeper for long. The pedagogy mirrors anarchism’s cyclical temporality: bloom, compost, re‑bloom.

These practices cultivate a decentralized learning organism capable of regenerating amid repression. When authority raids archives or imprisons educators, the knowledge remains distributed. Survival equals duplication. Each participant becomes a cell containing the total blueprint of the movement.

Historical echoes

Throughout history, oppressed communities have leveraged similar decentralised education models. The maroon settlements of Brazil’s Palmares shared tactical knowledge orally to evade colonial surveillance. The Spanish Civil War’s libertarian schools paired childcare with revolutionary debate. Today’s networked movements—from Rojava’s communes to punk‑feminist infoshops—extend this continuum. Their pedagogy refuses neutrality, insisting that every learning space must mirror the society it seeks to build.

In adopting such models, anarchists reclaim pedagogy from academic enclosure, proving that intellectual work can flourish under free association rather than credentialism.

The Ethics of Collective Authorship

When the book signs itself

If the idol economy thrives on individual recognition, then collective authorship acts as its solvent. Authorship anonymity frightens institutions because it makes accountability diffuse yet responsibility shared. For anarchists, this diffusion is moral coherence in practice.

Collective bylines, rotating spokespeople, or unidentifiable online collectives challenge the mythology of the singular thinker. The CrimethInc. experiment exemplifies this approach: open contribution, no fixed membership, and perpetual evolution. The result is a body of work impossible to commodify because no one can own it. Its legitimacy arises from utility: people judge text by how well it helps them act.

Techno‑infrastructural tactics

Digital tools can extend collective authorship. Shared online pads, decentralized file systems, and blockchain‑style timestamping create traceability without revealing identities. These methods ensure transparency of revision while preventing authority fixation. Open access under copyleft ensures knowledge circulates freely, staying loyal to anarchism’s anti‑proprietary core.

Cultural implications

Practicing collective authorship also alters emotional economies within movements. Recognition becomes internal rather than external: the joy of contribution substitutes for the spotlight. This prevents rivalry and fosters trust. When achievements belong to everyone, betrayal loses its incentive.

Moreover, collective authorship thwarts academic economies of prestige. Without identifiable authors to cite, scholarly appropriation collapses. The work thus escapes enclosure by becoming unownable.

The balance of anonymity and accountability

Anonymity, though vital, need not excuse irresponsibility. Movements must develop internal ethics for verifying authenticity and addressing harm. Rotating moderators or cross‑collective accountability pacts maintain integrity while avoiding punitive culture. Transparency of process replaces visibility of person.

By embedding these practices, anarchist networks maintain coherence without succumbing to cults of personality. The revolution writes itself in plural voices, vanishing authors, and recurring acts.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To keep anarchist memory resistant to commodification, adopt practices that embody decentralised remembrance rather than merely theorise it.

• Create story circles: Gather regularly to share current mutual aid or direct‑action experiences. Omit individual names; highlight collective tactics and emotional lessons. End each session by identifying one replicable action.

• Design living archives: Use open‑source platforms or physical notebooks with rotating custodians. Permit documents to self‑erase unless updated, ensuring historical continuity through participation.

• Institute role rotation: Any administrative or facilitation task should expire within a defined cycle—one month or one campaign—preventing curator or leader entrenchment.

• Redirect academic invitations: Accept institutional opportunities only if they funnel resources into grassroots projects. Pair each theoretical presentation with practical training in mutual aid.

• Celebrate ritual forgetting: Host annual ceremonies to release outdated forms—burn old posters, remix slogans, retire obsolete tactics—acknowledging gratitude while inviting innovation.

These steps operationalise anti‑idol politics through embodied routines. They restore alignment between anarchist ethics and organisational form, keeping the movement unpredictable and alive.

Conclusion

To safeguard anarchism from academisation and idolisation, activists must rebuild the link between thought and action. The future of radical memory depends not on erecting monuments but on cultivating living rituals of remembrance that self‑destruct before they calcify. The antidote to hero worship is not cynicism but constant renewal—collective storytelling, ephemeral archives, rotating roles, and shared authorship.

Anarchism thrives when it behaves like an ecosystem: diverse, adaptive, and cyclically self‑composting. Knowledge becomes soil, not scripture. In that soil grows the next insurrectionary imagination—one that refuses celebrity, resists commodification, and remembers through doing.

The question lingering for every collective is simple yet profound: what ritual will you invent next to ensure your movement’s memory remains alive—and ungovernable?