Reclaiming Anarchism from the Cult of the Self

Introduction

Every few generations, anarchism rediscovers its crisis: a longing for liberation collides with the temptation of purity. The result is often fragmentation—individualist hermits declaring the world lost, or insurrectionist circles chasing the spark that might ignite eternity in a single night. These impulses, though born from sincerity, hollow the very soil from which real emancipation could grow. They mistake self-expression for transformation, spontaneity for strategy, rebellion for revolution.

This tension is ancient. Each revival of the libertarian spirit wrestles with its own shadow: charismatic bravado posing as authenticity, aesthetic revolt substituting for mass organization, and secret affinities that resemble the hierarchies they condemn. The danger is not only isolation but inversion—when anti-authoritarian movements unconsciously replicate the authoritarian logic they dread.

Yet the cure is not repression of passion. It is the redirection of will into collective intelligence, a choreography of freedom rather than its annihilation. The revolutionary dream will revive only when anarchism re-anchors itself in organized working-class energies, in mutual accountability, in the everyday experiment of self-management. To rebuild anarchism is not merely to declare autonomy but to design the conditions under which no one can seize it from the many.

This essay maps the path between individualism and authoritarian mimicry, tracing how movements can embody shared leadership, prevent cult formations, and translate urgency into disciplined revolution. It argues that organization, far from being a bureaucratic cage, is the living commons in which freedom learns to sustain itself.

The Thin Line Between Liberation and Ego Worship

Anarchism was born from a paradox. It calls for the free association of equals while demanding the abolition of imposed authority. That tension can either forge durable solidarity or descend into narcissism disguised as liberty.

The Drift Toward Individualism

When freedom is interpreted as withdrawal rather than cooperation, anarchism turns poetic but politically sterile. The individualist isolate values purity of gesture over collective outcome, rebellion as art over rebellion as process. This ethos often arises during despair cycles—when organized labor is beaten down and institutional politics feels irredeemable. The self becomes the last remaining territory of revolt.

The trouble is that solitary defiance cannot scale. Without shared infrastructure, these acts inspire admiration but not adoption. The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi sparked uprisings only because the act was absorbed by a collective ready to translate grief into movement. Individual courage alone, without reservoirs of organization, remains mere flash.

Insurrectionism and the Cult of the Deed

Insurrectionism surfaces as the adrenaline counterpart to individualism. It shares the same impatience but weds it to a quasi-military tempo—a belief that liberation must be seized through perpetual rupture. Such militancy is electrifying but often shallow. History shows that without durable assemblies, insurgent intensity decays into burnout or repression. Or worse, it drifts toward authoritarian mimicry: small circles reenacting the command structures they claimed to abolish.

Echoes of Authoritarianism

Insurrectionist subcultures mirror vanguard formations when secrecy, specialization, and heroism replace transparency and mass participation. The cult of personality emerges whenever charisma outruns accountability. What began as a horizontal ideal mutates into charismatic hierarchy—the strong individual leading the awakened few. The psychological pattern repeats across ideologies: Stalinism once emerged from revolutionary egalitarianism through precisely this mutation.

The antidote lies not in temperance but in structure: forms that make the concentration of power impossible. Horizontalism must be reinterpreted not as formlessness but as continual redistribution of initiative.

Learning from Occupy and Beyond

Occupy Wall Street revived horizontalism for a generation, yet its refusal to formalize decision-making produced paralysis. The hand signals and general assemblies initially embodied collective will but later became rituals without responsiveness. The insight remains vital: openness must evolve into accountable co-decision. Otherwise, spontaneity becomes its own cage.

The lesson is to design movements as rotating ecosystems. Authority circulates like blood, never coagulating. The thin line is maintained through deliberate ritual, not rhetorical faith.

Transitioning from these dangers, we can explore how revolutionary organization creates balance—how urgency meets humility within self-managed frameworks.

Revolutionary Organization as a Commons

The word organization triggers ambivalence in anarchist circles. To some it evokes bureaucrats and bylaws; to others it spells the only hope of coherence. The new task is to reconceive organization as a commons rather than an institution, an evolving platform of shared capacity.

The Organizational Commons

Just as digital commons enable collective creativity without property, movement commons can enable collective power without hierarchy. The key principle is open iteration: strategies are published as drafts, accessible for revision by the communities they claim to serve. This transparency shifts ownership from names to nodes. When shop-floor workers, tenants, and neighborhood collectives contribute edits, the resulting tactics derive legitimacy from participation.

It is a mistake to equate open structure with chaos. The commons needs boundaries—not walls, but membranes separating contribution from domination. Accountability mechanisms act as the immune system of freedom.

Rotation and Recall

The simplest vaccine against vanguardia is rotation. Roles change before prestige crystallizes. Rotating facilitation every month or even weekly prevents the aura of indispensable leadership. Recall agreements introduce a cultural expectation: anyone delegated can be revoked by collective signal. The power to recall creates psychological humility. Leaders transform into stewards performing an ephemeral duty.

Visible rituals reinforce this ethos. Imagine facilitators wearing ribbons that anyone may symbolically pull to invoke a recall vote. By dramatizing reversibility, movements convert accountability into theatre—public, transparent, and non-punitive.

The Especifismo Principle

Latin American especifismo provides a mature paradigm of organized anarchism. It fuses specific political framework with insertion in mass struggles, asserting that revolutionary groups must orient toward the working class and popular sectors, not inwardly toward self-definition. Especifismo rejects both the dispersed spontaneity of pure individualism and the centralism of avant-garde parties. Instead, it builds dual power via participatory discipline—a discipline chosen, not imposed.

To visualize the commons, think of nodes of collectively held capacity: legal defense, education, cooperative production, communication infrastructure. Each node evolves autonomously but remains federated through shared agreements. Sovereignty is distributed but coherent.

Urgency Without Haste

Movements dissolve into insurrectionist impatience when they treat urgency as speed. True urgency is rhythm. Cadenced campaigns rise and fall inside planned cycles; moments of disruption are followed by recovery and analysis. The lunar rhythm protects from burnout and cements institutional memory. Urgency becomes measurable cadence: the ecosystem breathes instead of hyperventilates.

Through the commons model, anarchism regains mass substance while remaining faithful to anti-authoritarian ethics. The next step is to design gatherings where these principles become lived ritual.

Rituals of Accountability: Designing the Gathering as a Commons

Every gathering of organizers is an opportunity to rehearse the world we proclaim. If meetings reproduce the alienation of corporate conferences, the revolution has already been outsourced. A commons-based assembly can transform simple coordination into a prototype of self-rule.

The Architecture of Circles

Spatial design mirrors power dynamics. Begin with concentric circles rather than a podium. Place an empty chair at the center: anyone may step in, speak, then step out. The center remains symbolically vacant—a placeholder for collective authority. Such layout dissolves hierarchy visually and experientially.

Sortition and Shared Stewardship

To operationalize equality, facilitators can be chosen by sortition. Drawing names from a communal jar every hour emphasizes that leadership is a transient stewardship, not a career. Random selection reveals trust in the collective intelligence of the group. Participants learn to support whoever draws the role, recognizing facilitation as function, not personality.

The Recall Ritual

Accountability should be theatrical enough to lodge in memory. Attach a physical marker—a ribbon or badge—that anyone may gently pull to signal loss of confidence. Two simultaneous tugs trigger immediate replacement by another preselected facilitator. The gesture injects humor and ease into what is usually tense. It reminds everyone that dismissal is a community right, not a betrayal.

Collective Documentation

To resist private control of information, decisions can be scribed on large visible sheets with clear columns: agree, amend, block. Attendees update consensus through stickers or hash marks throughout the gathering. This method transforms deliberation into a living graphic display, accessible to all literacies and languages. It also liberates the movement from the tyranny of internal note-takers who later rewrite history.

Rotating Media Transparency

Because publicity breeds myth, each day’s communique should be crafted by a freshly drawn team. Their mandate: highlight mechanisms, not personalities. Instead of profiles of speakers, they report on the processes of rotation, recall, and debate. In this way, documentation promotes the culture of fluid leadership. Transparency reshapes fame into procedural memory.

The Spiritual Dimension

These rituals are not bureaucratic; they are symbolic education. They teach impermanence, humility, and mutual dependence. In the long run, movement culture shifts from hero worship to ritual admiration of procedure itself. People celebrate the process by which decisions remain collective rather than the individuals who coincide with it.

Assemblies that embody reversible authority inoculate themselves from cultic drift. They dramatize what post-authoritarian freedom feels like: no one indispensable, everyone responsible.

The next challenge is to ensure that such forms transmit into broader society—that self-management does not remain an internal performance but a contagious model.

Reconnecting Anarchism with the Working Class

Once anarchism defined itself by the workplace and commune. Today, cultural subcults often replace these roots. To restore effectiveness, anarchists must re-engage the realm of labor, logistics, and daily survival—the structural levers where power still nests.

Why the Working Class Matters

Class remains the infrastructure of contemporary domination. Even as gig economies fragment traditional unions, capital still depends on labor’s compliance. The ultimate measure of revolutionary relevance is not online discourse but the degree to which workers can collectively interrupt production and reproduction. Authority fears withdrawal of consent more than protest slogans.

Reconnection means inserting anarchist practice into existing worker struggles, not standing apart as critics. The experiment is not to command but to catalyze—helping workers build democratic control within their own contexts.

Mutual Aid as Prefiguration

Mutual-aid networks already embody fragments of self-management. When organized with strategic continuity, they offer both immediate relief and rehearsal for self-governance. Food collectives, tenant-defense groups, and community clinics prove that autonomy is viable before state recognition. These micro-sovereignties consolidate working-class confidence in their own capacities.

From Protest to Production

Movements rarely win by petitioning authority; they win by reorganizing social production. Historical visions like the Spanish CNT-FAI combined revolutionary syndicalism with libertarian communism, demonstrating that decentralized coordination can rival state functions. Contemporary equivalents might involve worker-owned logistics cooperatives or federated digital infrastructures. The motto shifts from “No gods, no masters” to “No bosses, no beggars.”

Avoiding Vanguard Drift

Insertion does not mean infiltration. Activists joining worker movements must reject savior complexes. The correct posture is accompaniment: rediscovering together. Leadership becomes competence shared horizontally. The practice of rotation within base assemblies sustains humility: whoever speaks for the movement remains under direct mandate of others.

Measuring Success Differently

Metrics define mentality. Instead of counting followers, movements should track the number of workplaces and communities that introduce genuine self-management practices—workers electing coordinators, transparent budgeting, participatory scheduling. These indicators measure sovereignty gained, not symbolic noise generated. Such metrics make revolutionary progress tangible without sliding into bureaucratic audit.

Through class reconnection, anarchism rebuilds its material backbone. But movements must also guard against the reabsorption of their energy by political institutions. Hence the importance of independent infrastructures—what some call dual power.

Building Infrastructure for Long-Term Freedom

Revolutionary movements decay when they lack institutional containers for their triumphs. Without infrastructure, each upheaval evaporates into nostalgia. Dual power, the construction of autonomous systems parallel to state structures, offers a concrete horizon.

The Ecology of Dual Power

Dual power is not about immediate overthrow but gradual replacement. Housing co-ops, energy commons, radical credit unions, and community media together form the parallel nervous system of freedom. They reduce dependency on hostile institutions and demonstrate practical governance.

To succeed, these systems must remain open-source. Document every cooperative formula, every contract clause, every conflict-resolution protocol, then publish it. Transparency inoculates against bureaucratic ossification.

Psychological Safety as Strategy

The human cost of sustained activism is exhaustion. Without decompression, communities repeat the burnout cycle that feeds cynicism. Regular pauses—festivals, collective retreats, moments of silence—are strategic. They remind participants that the method of struggle must already prefigure the liberated life. The revolution that cannot rest will soon devour itself.

Innovation and Pattern Decay

A tactic’s lifespan shortens as fast as it spreads. Once power recognizes your script, it neutralizes it. Hence, innovation must be institutionalized, not improvised. Movements should maintain R&D cells devoted to tactic invention—testing new public rituals, symbolic gestures, and narrative frames. Guarding creativity ensures survival.

Digital Sovereignty

In an era of surveillance and algorithmic herding, digital infrastructure is not neutral. Platforms shape social relations. Building federated communication systems, encrypted coordination networks, and cooperative data projects is as essential as marching in the streets. Information sovereignty translates into organizational continuity.

As infrastructure deepens, the culture of self-management gains material form. The goal is not just to resist power but to substitute it with living models. To move from critique to construction.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To turn these insights into actionable design, movements can take the following steps:

• Create Tactical Commons: Publish your campaign strategies and protocols in collaborative documents that any base group can edit. Vet every procedure through the smallest units—workers, tenants, students—and adapt in real time.

• Implement Rotation and Recall: Establish short terms for all facilitation and representational roles. Invent symbolic recall rituals so accountability feels celebratory rather than punitive.

• Design Commons-Based Gatherings: Arrange assemblies in circles, use open documentation walls, and employ sortition for facilitators. Train participants in consent-based decision tracking.

• Rebuild Class Insertion: Embed organizing efforts in workplaces and community cooperatives. Focus campaigns on concrete experiments in democratic management and collective ownership.

• Institutionalize Innovation: Dedicate a small team to continually design new rituals, symbols, and tactics, preventing stagnation and co-option.

• Measure Sovereignty Gained: Track new autonomous initiatives—cooperatives, assemblies, mutual-aid structures—as the primary indicator of progress.

• Include Decompression Cycles: Plan deliberate pauses and cultural rituals between surges. Reflection is not retreat but maintenance of collective health.

When theory enters ritual space, abstract ideals sediment into habit. The experiment of self-management becomes reflexive, shaping how participants live every day.

Conclusion

Anarchism stands again at its internal frontier: between the loneliness of absolute freedom and the tyranny of unexamined leadership. The choice is not between chaos and order but between ego and ecology. Collective self-management offers the synthesis: organization without domination, spontaneity with rhythm, leadership that evaporates into shared competence.

Revolutionary urgency demands structure—not as constraint, but as vessel for intensity. Without organized commons, freedom suffocates in its own rhetoric; without passion, organization calcifies into machinery. The art is to alternate: to choreograph rebellion and administration until they become indistinguishable.

If anarchism can relearn this dance—publishing its blueprints, rotating its voices, embedding itself once again in the rhythms of working life—it may yet save itself from both despair and authoritarian nostalgia. A movement capable of recalling any leader at any moment is a movement that can recall its own soul.

What symbolic invention will your next gathering unveil to remind everyone that power not only flows—it dissolves, continually returning to the collective source?