Let’s divide social anarchist practice into two rough families of approaches: combat anarchism and venture anarchism. Combat anarchism refers to acts of insurrection and struggle, typically mass insurrection and class struggle. Venture anarchism refers to acts of exodus and creation, typically exodus from the dominant system by way of living off-grid or adopting an anti-systemic lifestyle, and creation in the form of building non-hierarchical settlements or enterprises, or artistic and technological creations.
Both are necessary. But successful action means knowing how much of one or the other to employ in a given situation. In the last few decades, anarchists have perhaps placed too much focus on what’s wrong we the current world we’re fighting against (for understandable reasons), and not enough on the kind of world we’d like to replace it with. In other words, we’ve had too much combat anarchism and not enough venture anarchism. We need to appeal to people with discourse and optics which stress the positive features of the alternatives we want to build, emphasizing the values of caring, vitality, cooperation, and creativity, and tone down (without dispensing with) the discourse and optics of revolt, struggle, attack, and negation. To repeat, we need both, but as of now, we need to alter the balance to favour the politics of creation.
From ‘Social Anarchist Futures’ by Connor Owens.
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