A Modern Anarchism (Part 3): Revolution

Author's Note

The following is the script of the video I published on my channel Anark. If you would like to watch that video, it is here

Minor edits have been made to the script to instead refer to itself as an essay instead of a video. Other than this, the content has remained the same and may be seen as a copy of the video, in text form, that can be distributed wholly in place of the video.

Solidarity forever in opposition to the mega-machine. Refuse defeat until death.

Introduction

Over the last two parts of this series, we traveled a long path. First, we had to rouse the sleepers awake, to force open their eyes and implore them to gaze upon the horror that that had endured in their slumber; to look around and regard a waking nightmare. Indeed, the darkness is so deep that, had we stopped there, hope may have seemed nothing more than a distant dream; a reminder why we sleep instead of wake. But this was not the end of our exploration. We journeyed further through the forest until we arrived upon a lofty overhang which oversaw a world beyond the canopy. And there lay a verdant cove in the distance. Knowing this place existed, we assured ourselves that, were we to reach it, there would be fertile soil in which we could plant the flourishing garden which we call anarchy.

But it will not be easy to reach this place nor to plant our garden. A great trek lay ahead, through the unknown, where treachery will lie, where momentous dangers will continually bar our progress. To tread this path, we will be forced to strengthen ourselves step by step, overcoming exhaustion and discouragement. If we are to protect the world and those we love, great sacrifices will be forced upon us, of ourselves and of many of our old comforts. Now, we have returned home to prepare ourselves for the long path ahead.
We do not tread this path because it will be joyful, though joys there may be along such a trek, nor because we expect a return on our efforts, though the names of great heroes may indeed echo through time, but because predation and parasitism have risen to such a height that they threaten the very continuation of all life. Because our misery and alienation deepens day by day. Because the ecology collapses now around us. If there is a purpose for humanity in this planetary ecosystem, it is to reverse the drive toward death and to bring about a new world of complexity and diversity. If the horror is ever to end, it is us, the people, that will carry out its final decline. We are left with only one option and it is: revolution.

The Anatomy of A Power Structure

Setting upon our path now, with knowledge sufficient to drive us from the dark wood, knowing what better potentialities might await us, it is necessary we prepare ourselves for the journey. This requires us to synthesize together all those principles which have been at play before and to find those new principles which might come into play in the ensuing analysis. For this reason, we may restate some of these foundational conclusions, but we will do so in the interests of deriving the next layers of our conception.

In the analysis before, we spent significant time formulating the key relational principles that characterize the kyriarchal mega-machine as well as how anarchy might function by way of a foundational method. However, what we did not do is discuss the landscape between where we are now and where we wish to be, nor what principles would allow us to walk whatever path might take us there.

Such a path through the landscape has been proposed in many forms by many different people, the vast majority quite unsuccessful in practice. This bevvy of failures, in fact, contributes to our modern paralyzation. It is easy now to give up hope that real transformation will ever be possible. It seems hard to imagine that the astounding force and renowned brilliance of the previous revolutionary waves could not have contained the potential to undergo this transition. If they could not do it, how can we?

But the presence of previous failures does not show that failure is a permanent state of existence. Preceding the first true success of any measure, there is always a litany of mistakes and half-measures. And, not trusting that chance will fulfill our liberatory future, it is up to us to ask what lessons might be learned from our previous shortcomings, to what degree our failure was incidental as opposed to guaranteed, and in what ways we can prevent these conditions from reoccurring the next time we struggle.

And so it must be said: one of the most important reasons why these failures have taken place is that we have not mapped the landscape we are meant to bridge correctly. Confronted by sloping mountains and plummeting valleys, we find the ground infirm, our bridges tumbling down into ravines beneath, attempting to scale impossible ascensions by hand. So with this, it is necessary that we think more methodically about the terrain we are confronted with, asking how the relations which form its basis can be moved and shifted, how we might avoid these peaks and valleys or confront them where necessary.

In the first part of this series, we intimated that a power structure is:

“a material and conceptual system embodied through social, technological, and environmental relations that then determine how the collective powers of some group of conscious beings are directed.”

Though, in that definition, we referred to the categories of: the social, the technological, and the environmental, which then have bearing on the conscious, let us construct a mapping that is even more precise. The anatomy of all power structures consists of some combination of the four following fields of relations: individual conditioning, interpersonal relations, social structures, and environmental structures.

Individual Conditioning is the result of nature and nurture acting on some given individual, comprising all of their psychological and biological conditions. This also crucially includes ideology, which is a system of ideas that inform an individual’s outlook on the world.

This category includes examples such as: reward-seeking behavior, personal meaning, fear, trauma, delusion, bodily disfigurement, or strengthening, but also capitalist ideology, anarchist ideology, communist ideology, liberal philosophy, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism, and so on…

Interpersonal Relations are those relations which an individual has with the other conscious beings that they directly interact with.

For example: friendships, intimate partnerships, families, boss-worker relations, but also such phenomena as racism, transphobia, sexism, xenopobia, domestic abuse, etc…

Social Structures are consistent patterns which direct the flow of social power and are reified by continued use of social power.

For example: capitalist property relations, the state, law, white supremacy, patriarchy, honor, chivalry, but also anarchic society, communal ethics, organic societies, mutualism, hospitality standards, and so on…

Environmental Structures are non-conceptual structures, embodied in the non-human physical world. These are those structures which, were humans to cease existing, would remain.

Ie: infrastructure, factories, buildings, technology, armories, cars, tanks, firearms, forests, deserts, fields, animals, asteroid belts, galaxies, even natural law.

And note that these are not simply the key features of hierarchical power structures, these are the anatomical features of all viable power structures. It is depending on how these relations are arranged that some structure may then be based in authoritarianism and domination or libertarianism and mutuality. And also note: these four fields of activity are not separated into singular realms, as if sealed in different containers.

The universe is constrained only by the laws of physics and mediated only by flows of energy. And so, while it may be the case that certain phenomena most primarily root to one or another of these fields of activity, they all intervene on one another in crucial ways. As energy flows from one place to another, unbound by our conceptual distinctions, these different aspects then naturally form together into complexes. And these complexes then grow more and more sophisticated, more embodied as they involve more of these realms. This means that these recurring bundles of relations are also not happen-stance occurrences. They exist because they work in perpetuating their existence through the real diversion of energy flows and, wherein any thing perpetuates its existence, it lives as a real impulse and affects the world repetitively.

All these complex bundles of relations are then constructed and reconstructed through the creordering process we discussed earlier in this series of essays. And this creorder is built in order to maintain a set of key power relations that characterize the existing power structures and which cannot be undermined lest the system cease to function. In each system, the set of key power relations will differ, causing the creorder to function differently as well. But it is these power relations which animate the system, resting in all four fields and perpetuating themselves throughout.

This is important because in order for systems to self-perpetuate, they must also then iterate. This is to say, as certain varieties of systems are met with choosing filters, only those which carry out successful strategies in relation to that filter will survive and then go on to produce copies. For this reason, the adaptation we discuss, as well as the systemic structures themselves, must be understood as iterations of these power structures which seek successful strategies for autopoiesis. Based on how rigid these structures are, then, they may iterate more or less broadly.

Beings within the mega-machine, for example, pressured by kyriarchal social structures, limited by environmental relations, and forced into eternal conflict with internal forces of opposition, carry out strategically viable paths to maintain systemic consistency, not only in their own interest - as it is indeed within their interest to perpetuate the system that provides them sustenance - but because the system constantly produces pressures which condition the actions of the beings within them. And the strategically most useful position, in the interests of systemic autopoiesis and individual self-interest, is for hierarchical power structures to maintain maximal kyriarchy. Note that maximal kyriarchy is not the same as maximum kyriarchy. Maximum means that we have achieved the highest possible peak of a given thing. Whereas, maximal instead means that we have achieved a relative peak, given relevant circumstances. This is important, because the system cannot achieve maximum kyriarchy without destroying itself, as this would involve absolute unitary power and suffocation of all complexity and organic creative impulse. The kyriarchal mega-machine is a parasite which must resist killing its host.

This is why neither the system nor its individual agents can harbor a significant variation from these maximal kyriarchal strategies for long. Though it is true that authority may drift from one place to another and that domination may shift more from threat, to deception, to real exhibition of physical violence, the basic precept of the machine always remains the same: deprivation of the masses from control of the world around them and the enforcement of that deprivation through coercive means. If any component were to function otherwise, it would threaten the systemic and individual ability to self-perpetuate and therefore be purged.
Even when well-intentioned actors make their way into privileged positions within the system, they will find the limits of their control quite quickly. Whether individuals or entire parties, the machine cannot be changed by bureaucratic willpower alone. Its interconnections are deeply embedded into reality. Thus we must also emphasize, it is not that the capitalists themselves are the great masterminds of the capitalist system any more than the civil administrators within the state are the controllers of the governmental apparatus. The system, built as it is, bounds all possible actions and drives internal pressures that maintain its key relations. As Malatesta has said 1 :

“...social wrongs do not depend on the wickedness of one master or the other, one governor or the other, but rather on masters and governments as institutions; therefore, the remedy does not lie in changing the individual rulers, instead it is necessary to demolish the principle itself by which men dominate over men”

This process, wherein systems maintain themselves under various kinds of pressures within the four fields of activity by changing their internal and external relations, while still maintaining their key relations, I will call restructuring. Restructuring is a process that takes place as one pressure, occurring in one part of a power structure, is relieved by enforcing pressure elsewhere. And, because of this restructuring, the misery of the subjects within the global mega-machine is rarely reduced on aggregate. More often, as the machine seeks maximal kyriarchy, it enforces that misery in some other way. This can take place largely within the local system’s bounds, such as the example where an economic system is faltering and therefore uses xenophobia, white supremacy, or some other form of exclusion to maintain economic supremacy. Or it may be external, such as in the example of imperialism, colonialism, international economic exploitation and other such forms of geopolitical leverage.

This restructuring process is also the reason why the old predictions that the “contradictions” of capitalism would build up until it could no longer hold itself together, have failed to come true. Where the system would break, it re-routes the stressors into some other field, holding its threatened component in place and burdening some other oppressed population, some other bureaucratic agency, bolstering some other form of domination, annihilating some new niche within the ecology. Restructuring maintains systemic consistency, producing interrelations between apparently discontinuous pieces. And the interrelations of the machine can only shift within certain key limits. So let us now briefly discuss the broadest strokes of these interrelations in the current world and we will return to these interrelations as we discuss what the process of transformation must look like.

Firstly, individual conditioning perpetuates individual conditioning. Ideology, for example, has a tendency to confirm itself through bias, through the accumulation of evidence, and in one’s intellectual development. A person’s expectations of the world form their actions, which then either enforce or diminish those expectations in the future. This is a very important component of kyriarchy, as it embodies a micro-political perpetuation of its hierarchical features. Most importantly to kyriarchy, hierarchical realism perpetuates itself within the minds of its subjects as they move through their lives.

Individual conditioning then also determines how people will interact with others in their lives. At a young age, people are conditioned to treat others in particular ways based on the way they have been treated beforehand, based on the expectations set for them by others whom they trust. And, as they move through their life, they then serve this purpose to others. Subsequently, this leads to the development of the mask we discussed in part 1 as well as the foundation for willing performative aspects of identity. And, depending on how this process plays out, it will enforce feelings of either belonging or alienation. This takes ideological orientation and brings it into the person’s immediate social world. As others are affected by the outcomes of this ideological orientation, they will often then be conditioned toward these orientations themselves, especially as these principles become more generalized in their environment, whether they like them or not. This interface is then a key playing field of racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism and all other forms of bigotry, themselves becoming embedded in the cycle of individual conditioning.

Social structures also serve a crucial function to enforce different ideological perspectives by forming the acceptable bounds of normativity. And the mega-machine produces bounds of normativity which reinforce kyriarchal maximization. This is then a primary interaction in producing the Overton Window, which creates more individuals with a kyriarchal ideology. Individuals may be said to become polarized toward or against specific structures within society that affect them based on how well aligned their ideological orientation is with those structures. And so those which have developed a hierarchical polarity will tend to seek out hierarchical structures and operate within them. In this, these individuals work to enforce or reinforce kyriarchal social structures set upon them by oppressive norms. And this cyclic process of normalization can then develop attitudes of slavishness, backward conceptions of progress, and desire for submission to the mega-machine. This is one of the most primary mechanisms through which hierarchical realism is established and reinforced.
Individual conditioning is then also in immediate feedback with environmental structures. The way that one views the world, affects the way they will treat the world around them. If the world is a thing to be "used" then it is okay to use it up and discard it. This is true both of ecological structures and human infrastructure. The idea that humanity is “superior” to nature leads to exploitation of nature. And, the recognition that one has no ownership of the urban cityscape around them also leads to low investment, thus low impetus toward custodianship. Furthermore, the content of people’s environments determines a very significant aspect of their individual emotional content, affects their belief in the success or failure of the society they are embedded in, and limits the sorts of choices they are able to make within its bounds.

Different kinds of interpersonal relations influence the development of further interpersonal relations. Indeed, this is a crucial aspect of how hierarchical mentalities become wedded to one another; a sort of electric valence which helps align the many ideological components of society toward a common end. As people are exposed to these standards of interpersonality by those around them, they develop new neural networks, new dopamine pathways, which will change their behavior to act more in accordance with the needs of the mega-machine. Interpersonal structures such as families perpetuate the creation of a family bond, to expand the family group more broadly, or to protect the members of that family. As do friendships tend to perpetuate themselves into the future, to promote new friendships adjacent to those you know, and to protect those within this realm. Accordingly, these dynamics of interpersonal perpetuation also play out in examples such as village communities and small towns or clans.

So too do interpersonal relations and social structures interact quite prolifically. Not only must it be said that almost all social structures originated in interpersonal relations at one point or another in their history, perhaps more importantly, social structures form the normative bounds of interpersonality. Patriarchy, for example, produces the norms for how men and women are expected to act, both in society abroad, and in interaction with each other. These oppressive patriarchal gender standards introduce a hierarchical contagion into nearly all gender interpersonality, driving the prevalence of domestic violence and abusive household power dynamics, placing men and women against one another in the workplace, and therefore introducing a constant struggle which perpetually resists resolution. Moreover, because patriarchy provides the core social conditioning and expectations that define the role of men and women in society, it also acts as suppression of transgender and queer identities by conjunction. These identities become ‘other’ and therefore invite contempt, revulsion, and desire for suppression by those who have been brainwashed by the patriarchal order. Capitalism as well produces arbitrary human interrelations, driving humans to think of all interactions as transactions, to see other human beings as disposable competitors, turning human existence into nothing more than a race to hoard artificially scarce resources. White supremacy produces social fissures between different racial populations, creating distrust and resentment, even pitting disenfranchised non-white populations against one another. The examples of this interface, as with the others, are endless. All of these sorts of dynamics are why, as we shall discuss, we cannot simply alter social structures alone; mass alterations in interpersonality must take place if we wish to alter those social structures to begin with.

Interpersonality is also crucially conditioned by environmental structure and acts to condition it in return. Interpersonality creating environmental structure was seen much more commonly in the development of early townships and when small cities made structures to serve as stages to already existing interpersonal relations. But because the mega-machine relies on monopolizing all environmental structures, this process mostly takes place in the opposite direction in the modern world. This process of environmental monopoly has taken place through accumulation of the legal ownership of land and standing structures, but expanded most prolifically with the enclosure of the commons, as well as global imperialism and settler colonialism. As a result of this aspect of mega-mechanical colonization, new interpersonal relations have a great deal of difficulty developing environmental structures to suit them. Environmental structures, reorganized for the needs of kyriarchy, now serve to restructure interpersonality rather than be formed by it.

Social structures also perpetuate themselves by using other social structures. Capitalism is, for example, encoded deeply into law. But so has white supremacy been at various points in history. The state and its representative fictions are used to suppress movements which might undermine kyriarchy, whose complexes bolster one another. As capitalism fails, kyriarchal mentalities rise, especially in phenomena such as anti-semitism, white supremacy, homophobia, or transphobia. As particular hierarchical social structures are diminished, others are called in to produce maximal kyriarchy in their place. This is the field of play for many of the most important shifts in the functioning of the mega-machine, as we have said up to this point.

And the interaction of social and environmental structures is one of these interactions which has been written about most extensively of any we discuss. Environmental structures form the bounds of motion within a given social regime. Environmental structures require transformation to abide by social structures and social structures function to bolster existing environmental configurations, thus the historical emphasis on how the means of production form the basis of class society. This can also be seen in discussions of environmental racism, culminating in phenomena such as redlining, or in the ecocidal interaction between hierarchical power structures and the ecology. This also plays a very significant role in ableism, allowing access to or denying access to even many public and private facilities.

Lastly, environmental structures bolster one another prolifically. In fact, the perpetuation of environmental structures by other environmental structures comprises everything that is non-conscious in the cosmos. The entire universe, up until conscious beings entered the picture, functioned through environmental structures interacting with one another. The laws of physics and chemistry, unbound and undiverted by consciousness. Those energetic reservoirs moved about by conscious action all originated here, through billions of years of process.

As we can see, each of these interfaces between the four fields are overflowing with analytic potential, bursting from the bounds of these mere paragraph overviews. Indeed, as we abbreviated the analytic interfaces of the five values in part 2 of this piece, we will hold off on the higher order interrelations for now. It is more important that the reader hold these conceptions in mind as we proceed, as we will return to them time and time again in the analysis to come. So with this introductory inter-relational analysis complete, it is time we move on to the namesake of the essay.

After all, the mega-machine presents a problem so dire and so necessary to confront that this confrontation comprises a dictum for existence. If we want to live in a world of complexity and diversity, of freedom of power, cooperative coordination, and holistic embrace of uniqueness, we will have to fight for it. Because, though the misery of the mega-machine may be held at bay by manufacture of consent, it is within its sheer functioning as a machine to cyclically return to this deprivation and degradation of its subjects. In this case, all that is left is suppression of their subjects’ retaliation by fiat of violence and coercion.

But it is not enough to analyze. We could sit and muse on the interrelation of all things for hours or days or months or years; so long as we do not act, we will fail to free ourselves from this misery. In this, we echo Marx in saying 2 :

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

It is not enough to say we oppose a system, nor to lay out what kind of system we would like by contrast. We must earnestly ask: how do we propose to alter or destroy the one at hand? What kind of power structures must we create and how will the enemy structure respond when we do? Because, like any machine, the kyriarchal mega-machine can cave under sufficient force. Let us speak of how.

Breaking the Machine

So then, seeing as we are caught up in the gears of this great death machine and knowing that our only ray of hope lies in the construction of a horizontal counterpower, we must determine the strategic conditions ahead. In beginning this analysis, let us again note that all power structures survive by internalizing flows of power. However, whereas under horizontal power structures complexified energy reservoirs are built up and distributed at the whim of the masses, able to be shared and utilized by those that they affect, under hierarchical power structures there is a drive to make all complexified energy reservoirs standardized and manipulated to produce obedience to authoritarian structures. And so, likewise, whereas hierarchical power structures, based on monopoly of power, are threatened by the existence of bodies which resist monopolization, horizontal power structures, based on distribution of power to the masses, are threatened by all bodies which seek to monopolize powers within society. In order for one to grow, it must grow at the expense of the other. Where both exist, they always, in time, enter an overt struggle to totalize the field of power and therefore dismantle the key relations of their opposite.

In the greater strategic landscape, there is no way for hierarchical power and horizontal power to cooperate. There is also no way for a hierarchical impulse to become a horizontal impulse, because all viable power structures seek to perpetuate their fundamental relations. It is therefore only in systemic failure that some power structure can be replaced by its opposite. Just as solidified objects require some substantial energies to disassociate, so too does the mega-machine. And this is no small account. In fact, dismantling the mega-machine requires such a titanic energy that it can even appear to be changing into a liberatory form when it is really only being partially dissociated. Where half-measures predominate, many of its basic catalytic components are able to re-solidify back into another rigid, hierarchical structure, as we have seen time and time again in the attempts at state capitalism.

This is why all these hierarchical methods have failed to bring us closer to our liberatory goal. The refusal of the authoritarians to recognize the unity of means and ends has made them into foot-soldiers for reaction. An anti-hierarchical path requires that we eternally inject agitation into the mega-machine, such that its kyriarchal structures malfunction, such that human interrelations can be re-formed, and then allowed to solidify into an anarchic structure instead. Wherever authoritarianism and domination seek to reproduce themselves, they must be perpetually countervailed through libertarianism and mutuality.

These facts also give rise to several notable theoretical principles within anarchism. The first is the necessity of what anarchists call “direct action.” This is to say, anarchists do not act through secondary parties to carry out our goals. We do not beg for power from outside sources and we do not need to be granted permission to act from higher bodies. Anarchists act directly in the world to achieve their ends. More than this, they build their strength by acting. Anarchists must always seek to become the force within the world which reshapes the world and ensures its ensuing form.

To alienate one’s power to intermediaries is to rely on those intermediaries for power, to trust that they will act in the benefit of the people instead of the bounds of the system they are contained within. But as we have seen, when the flows of power move, individuals cannot be trusted to act as representation of the wills of others; they can only be expected to move as their conditions dictate. And so, wherever some flow of power relies on the continued grace of our enemy, it becomes a mechanism for our later defeat when it is withheld.
Accordingly, the broadest details of a transformative strategy can be stated summarily: to constantly diminish the field of relations that have been claimed by hierarchical power and therefore to weaken the kyriarchal mega-machine, while continually growing the field of relations that have been subsumed by horizontal powers, therefore strengthening the masses and setting the stage for anarchy. This condition of struggle must persist until it produces progressive crises, each of them driving the enemy to reveal its true face, wherein we escalate through an era of extended conflict.

If a well-organized, distributed, horizontal process is carried out to its most extreme form, it will constitute a revolution; the phase transition of human political structure, the dismantling, melting down, and refashioning of old component pieces. This revolutionary demand remains the same in all societies: the complete control of the flow of power by the masses of people. The abolition of the mega-machine; libertarianism and mutuality held together in harmony. Any revolutionary demands that do not have this as their thrust will only backslide into reformism and realpolitik in time.

This is, in fact, why systemic reform will always be a dead-end. It is a request for mercy from a countervailing, hierarchical system. Reform can only ever give a jolt to an otherwise smooth-functioning machine, destined as it is to settle back into equilibrium and return to its primal drive. In this way, the demand for simple quality-of-life improvements, in and of themselves, cannot be revolutionary in their thrust. After all, hierarchical powers can improve people's lives by considerable amounts so long as the demands of their subjects do not diminish the ability for the mega-machine to continue on. And so, when the bounds of those things which people want improved are relegated to easier sustenance, better housing, better wages, and so on, there can be no complete transformation of society. It ultimately amounts to begging for bread-crumbs from the table of the ruling class. Under extreme pressure, the mega-machine may indeed do what is necessary to provide those things, but in return it will vampirize some other aspect of human existence which will make all of these demands in vain.

And so, given that power is the ability to enact one’s ends, mass power is crucially reliant on the existence of some means which can feasibly bring about the liberatory ends of the masses. It is, after all, not enough to decide that one grabs an item from the tabletop, the subject must also move their limbs to meet the task. And to lift a great weight, one must strengthen their body to meet the burden. In this same way, horizontal power constitutes the material strengthening of the masses, to lift a great weight indeed; a complete transformation of human social, economic, and political affairs and in their wake, the reunion of humanity with the ecology, the destruction of phantasmal boundaries, and the establishment of interconnectedness and holism.
This gives enormous historical revolutionary importance to the content of the vehicle that is built! If that vehicle which is built to weather the transition is a model of hierarchical control, it will only ever degrade into a component of hierarchical society. Indeed, as we have seen, it can become the progenitor of hierarchical society itself.

This is then the justification for the revolutionary praxis called ‘prefiguration.’ In this, we must actively construct the negating impulses within the world we currently have and then tend them to fruition. This requires us to create a counter-system which embodies emancipation, which protects and perpetuates the liberatory process. The prefigurative anarchist is then attempting to carry out actions and create real, living structures which are as similar to the critical point we discussed in the second part of this series as conceivably possible. This might be seen as the creation of auto-catalytic forms of existence that, as they perpetuate, act to shift relations around them, to internalize flows of energy and form them into a horizontal counter-power, and to therefore bring about a system that is closer to our anarchic critical point.

Within the anarchist milieu, there is some significant dispute over what form this creative process must take. Some may take a looser and more anti-organizationalist approach, oriented around the creation of informal affinity groups and fluid interpersonality. However, bearing in mind the conclusions from our foray into complex systems analysis, the range of possibilities for effective solutions is significantly narrowed. The horizontal powers we construct absolutely must be able to self-perpetuate into the future, as to provide a continuing impetus for social and political transformation. If they do not self-perpetuate, then they cannot learn from their mistakes, internalizing lessons and solutions to repeated problems. And they must also be able to spread themselves through a process of automatic proliferation. That is to say, we must build an engine of anarchist revolutionary transition which perpetuates itself and multiplies prolifically.

When looking upon every frame of the thing that we build, we must see within it the impetus to produce its next moment’s existence, not only overcoming current hurdles, but new challenges that will confront us as our power grows. Every time our structures fall apart and must be reformed from scratch, we lose our progress, decreasing the total leverage we can build against hierarchical power. Every time we produce something that is short-sighted and incapable of looking forward to foreseen circumstances, it will be taken off guard as it confronts new and difficult challenges.

After all, our structures will never carry out a wide scale social revolution if we cannot eventually develop power leverage over enemy structures. To defeat a power structure, it must be overpowered. And when some system has power leverage over another, it will tend to gain more and more power over time, unless it is stopped. Indeed, this tendency of power structures with superior leverage to continue exacerbating their leverage is so important that we will give it a name: ratcheting. Every moment that passes in which we do not develop our counter-structures and wherein we do not empower ourselves together through them, the mega-machine increases its ratcheting over us and through us.

Moreover, if some structure no longer has to exert energy catching up to the enemy and maintaining their gains against an overwhelming tide, all of its energy can be spent on further expansion and basic autopoiesis of existing structures which have already been solidified. It can then begin to accumulate reserve energy reservoirs. And when a system has developed to such a strength that it can utilize its reserve energy reservoirs to suppress opposition, we might say it has become the hegemon or that its reign is hegemonic. In this occasion that some power structure holds hegemony over its region of interest, its structural power will begin to grow faster and faster, with each new flow of energy serving to expand its existing structure. As creorder continues, ratcheting continues, producing a more and more unassailable hold over its territory.

Therefore: with prefiguration and direct action considered together, each action we carry out must be in the interest of creating autopoietic mass power, as to distribute the organic power of those masses in a way which is consistent with the eventual production of anarchy. This is to say, we must create multi-faceted horizontal power structures which act to reduce hierarchical power leverage, to impede its ratcheting process, and to eventually establish leverage over the mega-machine instead.

In order to move from here to there we will have to change both the environmental and social structures that exist, as well as the ideological and interpersonal relations of society, not as separate programs, but as a unified and concerted prefigurative project. For this reason revolutionary action carried out as it must be through prefigurative methods must also consist in the joint construction of horizontal organizations and horizontal consciousness. This concept, regarding the importance of simultaneous action in all four fields of activity, I will call strategic holism.

This concept of strategic holism is not a minor realization. It is so totalizing in its importance that it influences every aspect of how we must struggle. This is to say, it is not enough to build horizontal organizations and to change ideological conceptions apart from one another. Each of the four fields will have a tendency to backslide into kyriarchy without the other ones there to provide a restabilizing force. More plainly those anti-kyriarchal mentalities must be held by those who occupy horizontal revolutionary organizations. And, where anti-kyriarchal mentalities have been spread throughout culture, they must serve to catalyze the creation of horizontal organizations which will embody their strength.

Likewise, horizontal organizations must also attempt to create more horizontal mentalities inside and outside of themselves. The catalyst of a horizontal revolution cannot become a tiny affinity group cut off from the rest of society if it hopes to achieve any success. And at the same time, it must still remember to grow organically. That is to say it must grow at the rate at which it has permeated society with its new ideas and in measure to the degree that it has constructed real, existing horizontal power structures that may facilitate a further expansion of these ideas. As Malatesta says, in closing his essay Organization 3 :

“If it is utopian to want to make revolution once everybody is ready and once everybody sees eye to eye, it is even more utopian to seek to bring it about with nothing and no one. There is measure in all things.”

Just as the mega-machine builds and perpetuates itself through kyriarchal interrelations in all four fields of activity, so must we construct anarchic responses in those same fields. And so, let us inspect the dynamics which must play out in order for us to truly embrace this necessity of strategic holism.

Firstly, the aspect of individual conditioning as it tends to perpetuate itself within the individual, is a field of interaction that anarchists have focused on quite prolifically. In fact, this work is aimed at just such a process. My goal in exposing you to these ideas is to create a self-consistent ideological system which perpetuates itself over time within you. But this is not the only important thing to be said upon this field by any means. We must also cultivate a self-questioning process, wherein we act to root out kyriarchal mentalities which have been embedded within us, because those too, as we have said, perpetuate themselves within our psyches unless we do the work to uproot them. In order to cultivate such a process, we must take seriously the work of enriching our unique through rigorous and ceaseless self-education, nourishment of our psyche and our body, self-discipline, struggle for autonomy and selfhood, perpetual mindfulness, and loving treatment of self. We must hold ourselves to very high standards, while also accepting that we make mistakes, that we are in an unceasing process of self-transformation to become the beings which are needed to overthrow the kyriarchal mega-machine.

The masses are psychologically and socially conditioned, through many interlocking systems of hierarchy, to have given up hope on transformation. They are exhausted by the grueling work of existence under capitalism, under patriarchy, under white supremacy, under colonialism, under cisheteronormativity, and all other systems of exploitation. In this way, we must act within our interpersonal field to promote a loving orientation; a delicate balance between acceptance of others along with a belief in their capability to change. We must act to externalize the education we have amassed and therefore sow the seeds of an autopoeitic anti-kyriarchal consciousness. As Goethe says 4 :

“If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”

What we do in this interpersonal world which surrounds us matters. We must act to embody our political principles within our personal lives to the best degree possible, in our relationships, in our orientations toward friends and co-workers, and toward the strangers which surround us in the bustling urban landscapes we often occupy. This does not only serve to prefigure the interpersonal relations of a new world, which we will discuss shortly, it acts to produce healthier human beings around us, to establish anti-kyriarchal mentalities, and to give reality to hypothesized interrelations. It produces conscious people and conscious people are harder to exploit.

We should, in fact, be trying to spread an anti-kyriarchal consciousness which promotes activity in all our personal affairs. Radicalization should be seen as a process wherein those who can act to destroy the mega-machine are convinced to do so, not just convinced that they should. It is to remind the people of their hidden uncoordinated might and to coordinate it once more between themselves to the best ends of the masses of the oppressed. We must therefore construct not only the will, but the knowledge about how to act, to give people hope that transformation can take place, to unburden them, to give substance to their dreams while in movement. As Frantz Fanon says in Wretched of the Earth 5 :

"To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people."

Radicalization is then a process of preparing the polarities of the many individual components of society to respond in a particular way given shifting circumstances, not just in the future, but right now. It is our work to act as the catalysts for this radical consciousness and to spread education, both through action, through development of prefigurative bodies, through the perpetuation of a new, generative interpersonal substrate, and through concerted propaganda, such that the masses will act in proper response to the conditions at hand.

Because, the larger the number of those who are radicalized and who have prepared themselves by inhabiting these new interpersonal relations, when the time comes that conflict with the mega-machine escalates, the more people will be ready to seize upon that moment. And, by contrast, the fewer radicals that there are, the fewer people will be mobilized to act in order to change the conditions of the system when a rupture arrives. No matter how fortuitous the rupture at hand, if the people have not been radicalized, they will be unable to seize this opportunity. And if they have not already undergone significant revolutionary education, they may struggle in a way which is ineffective or counter-productive, even if they do recognize that the time for militancy is at hand.

It is also integrally important that we change the way we relate to one another, not just at a mass scale, wherein social structures may be affected by agglomeration. We must seek out the kyriarchal conditioning within our interpersonality, asking how it serves to reproduce hierarchical society and how it serves to make us easier to exploit. This serves not only to undermine the social structures at hand, but also to produce more comradery, more cooperation, more solidarity, more freedom within our personal lives. We must reject misogyny not only because it bolsters kyriarchy, but simply because it hurts those around us. We must reject racism not only because it bolsters white supremacy, but because it degrades and dismantles the psyches of other human beings.

If we wish to create a new society, we must then begin inhabiting these new forms of being. We must question all those interpersonal conceptions that define our lives, asking what interpersonality would bolster continued solidaric relations, asking what would restore trust. In this, we must practice loving kindness to the extent it is available, we must try to embody trustworthiness and sincerity, lack of uncharitable judgment, and patience for others. We must be steadfast friends and reliable partners and caring lovers, knowing that these relationships perpetuate themselves at each juncture we are present in their reproduction. At the same time, we must learn to assert ourselves, to develop confidence and dignity in our personal experiences. To escape and confound the abuse, degradation, and oppression in our lives, to stand our ground in the face of exploiters, and to defend others from those acts of subjugation that we witness.

However, we must also create new social structures that act to produce these new human psyches. This is another crucial role that prefiguration plays in the process. As we have said: prefiguration provides those structures that facilitate revolutionary training within the current mode of society. Because where the people lack such a training ground, they may tend to be deceived by charlatans, just as the uninitiated are more likely to be taken in by all manner of underhanded schemes. And, though it may sound dour, if the people have not been educated in the revolutionary school of prefiguration beforehand, they may even be incapable of managing that which is suddenly handed to them. After all, though hierarchy and leadership are not strictly necessary in themselves, the functions which have been absorbed into those administrators and the skills of the technicians and the civil procedures of the bureaucrats and economic movements known to the heads of Industry still comprise key functions in coordinating the flow of power in society. And while it is true that much of these particular bases of knowledge will change so radically in our new structures that a substantial portion of the old ways will be disposable, if we think that absolutely no pertinent knowledge would be lost in a violent, exterminationist transition, we would be deluding ourselves as to the evidence of history. The people do not simply inherit the expertise that was once held in these privileged enclaves out of desire, but are instead thrust into learning out of bare necessity while under active siege by outside forces.

This is why history shows that, on the occasion that the people are not properly prepared for rupture, most often some despot comes forth and claims that a new hierarchical rule is necessary, that the masses will aimlessly mismanage the environmental and social structures which they have inherited, and that this despot should stand at the helm instead. Accordingly, the people must be made skeptical of all such power hoarders and learn to sufficiently manage their own affairs, to carry out their revolutionary duties as human beings, to transform social and environmental structures before rupture arrives, and in doing so, transform themselves and their relations to others. The radicals of a prefigurative revolutionary method must then learn how to orient themselves holistically within horizontal structures, knowingly embedded in a tumultuous and unfavorable world, committed to learning these new ways of being that characterize the horizontal creorder. If they do not, they will be caught on the back foot when the time comes that they have the opportunity to seize the flows of power once captured by the mega-machine.

This means we must create horizontal organizational structures at all scales to prepare us for the coming world, revolutionary social structures that will perpetuate themselves, which then act in the other fields. This entails liberation in many spheres of social structural opposition: socialism, racial equity, gender equity, disability justice, youth liberation, trans liberation, social ecology, animal liberation, and others. It must abide in a social strategic holism. Because these represent our movement from hierarchical society to horizontal society. Wide scale libertarian organizations and forms of mutualistic norm then act as the key autopoietic components of this revolutionary transformation. This array of horizontal social structures must become forces in and of themselves, reproducing themselves at new junctures, perpetuating one another in our anti-kyriarchal approach.

So too must we remember that the individual is formed by their interaction with environmental structures. If we want to transform human interactions with their environment, we must endeavor to create new spaces that nurture a social ecological stance, to produce reverence for the organic and inorganic natural world, and to provide reintegration of this alienated humanity with their environment. Those spaces we craft within the urban landscape must then serve as refuge from the hierarchical orientations we have become accustomed to; spaces where we are once more in control, where an ethos of the commons pervades instead of the ethos of monopoly.

There is also important work to be done in transforming our environment to foster new interpersonal relations and in developing interpersonal relations which confound existing hierarchical arrangements of the environment. In order to develop new interpersonal relations, it will be necessary that we create new spaces for those interpersonal relations to inhabit. This entails that we must then reclaim literal territory from the mega-machine, to reverse enclosure and reproduce the commons. In rural areas, the mega-machine has often not claimed all valuable territory. There is still untamed wilderness and unwatched places. For this reason, there is great potential in utilizing this wilderness to create intentional communities, agricultural cooperatives, and communes. Suburbanization also offers unique opportunities. The proliferation of home ownership allows the possible development of backyard garden networks and rewilded yards, for example. So too might quasi-formal organizational models such as neighborhood pods or block committees serve to rekindle solidarity within these atomized areas. In urban areas, struggles to develop interpersonality may involve efforts such as squatting, urban agricultural cooperatives, and establishing community centers, among others. However, it must be said that the struggle to redevelop spaces for interpersonality to thrive are most difficult here, because of the absolute proliferation of mega-mechanical control over the land.

It is imperative then that the urban, the suburban, and the rural are linked together, as to repair the atomization between them, recognizing each as a crucial front in the struggle. At the same time, we must always keep in mind that these differing conditions entail different strategic imperatives and try not to impose approaches from other conditions onto these others. Aiding in this, popular assemblies should be hosted, so as to produce connection between the catalyst group and the local population, to allow inquiry into local conditions, and to produce new spaces for interpersonality to flourish. Those who dwell in each of these places must develop communication with radicals in each of the others, coming together without false beliefs in the superiority of one or another of these fronts. The fractures must be repaired through both an ongoing dialogue and through material demonstrations of solidarity, meeting one another where they are at as they struggle to reclaim their commons from the mega-machine.

Lastly, we must also endeavor to reproduce ecological cycles which perpetuate themselves. That is to say, we must restore those self-perpetuating cycles within the ecosphere which have produced all of the ecological fecundity that we currently direct and redirect. Thus the common recognition in ecological thought that our goal is simply to reduce human impact in the environment. But we are counseling more than that here; we must create new ecological structures which, lying in harmony with those that already exist, produce a true place for humanity. That is to say, we should be trying to create a new humanistic ecology, not humanistic in its focus around humanity, but in that it is a complex, functioning ecology that holistically includes humanity. There was once such an ecology, before humanity rose to dominate the world around it. But we cannot and should not want to go back. We must go forward. We must abandon our position as dominators and instead recognize ourselves as stewards of a new ecology which flourishes as per its needs and our own; not just as the organic creatures we evolved to become from natural selection, but those which we have now become and can become. We must learn to live alongside the ecological mass, to know its worth, and to cultivate its fullest wellbeing.

So, with this in mind, we have now discussed a broader overview of how we might walk the path ahead, but we have not discussed what we will encounter along the way. Let us now lay out the cartography of our struggle and begin mapping our journey through the wilderness.

A Revolutionary Roadmap

So now that we know our current location, our destination, and the method by which we might walk whatever path we are confronted with, let us attempt to arrange a route. To facilitate such a desire, I will propose a sort of revolutionary roadmap. It would be easy for the reader to mistake the following roadmap for a prediction or an all-encompassing statement about the future. It is, after all, the repeated refrain of the foundational revolutionary theorists that we will not be able to predict the form of a revolutionary transformation, what exact methods will be utilized to make decisions or coordinate resources, and what conditions will persist after reaction is suppressed. But what I produce here are not predictions; they are anticipations.

Because, though to say that there are circumstances that will change the unique content of our decisions and then cease all inspection of commonalities may seem tempting, given our desire to avoid rigid blueprints and fantastical utopias, a complete denial of planning is nothing less than a strategic disaster. A general that does not plan for war, is a losing general. Viable systems are those that have the ability to form and carry out successful strategies within the landscape of their conditions. This capability to “look ahead” in order to guide future action is a fundamental component in a wide variety of complex tasks. In fact, it is part of learning. Mobus and Kalton speak about this extensively in their work, Understanding Complex Systems 6 :

“Based upon the fact that every system always has potentials and probabilities that constitute the topography of an expected future, there is a next step, the emergent capacity to actively use this expectation in a way that amounts to proactively moving into the future. This comes to fullness with the evolution of creatures that have the ability to cognitively anticipate the future.”

In order for us to succeed, we must plan, understanding how circumstances will change our response. This means that we must anticipate trends in the data. We must derive a plan for action based on the results of our theory and the results of history. We not only have to strategize our response to the current system, we must strategize how we will prepare ourselves for the mega-machine’s ensuing incarnation. This requires careful thinking and the construction of robust autopoetic methods, toolkits which are prepared to deal with not only the current incarnation, but its replacement, flexibly.

It is now time for us to discuss a strategic overview given all of the facts in mind thus far within this series of essays. In this spirit, what follows is a generalized flowchart which covers the field of possibilities. Then, after this, we can discuss how we might proceed on our trek.

Illustrated here is our preliminary flowchart. Each square or rectangle drawn with a dotted line can be understood as a frame in time or space wherein certain strategic conditions prevail. These conditions are represented visually using triangles, circles, and lines. Triangles represent hierarchical power structures. Circles represent horizontal power structures. Lines with arrows, as we used them in part 2, represent the exertion or flow of power. Arrows connecting the frames can then be understood as “paths of possible movement.” Anywhere an arrow points in between the frames it is a statement that that frame could be reached under certain conditions.

With this in mind, let us now discuss each of the frames within this revolutionary atlas.

A1) Kyriarchal Stasis

In this frame, the mega-machine has achieved very high degrees of social and political suppression, having created a deeply hegemonic atmosphere for hierarchical power structures. This is a society wherein hierarchical realism has, if not fully caught hold, attained a very firm grasp over culture and nearly all other flows of power. This means that the people will likely have become oblivious to the functions of those very power structures which control their lives. Not only can they probably not even imagine their own liberation, they may have even come to desire their own subjugation, brainwashed and downtrodden by behavioral control. Though no people are ever truly broken, here they have been sunken deep within themselves by the propaganda structures of society and the just-so balances of reward and punishment. This is the condition which has been described extensively in the early part of this series of essays.

Appropriately, the system seeks to return to this frame at nearly every other frame, and is always at risk of doing so if it is able to eliminate horizontality. However, we cannot understand this frame as a singular state of existence. Kyriarchal stasis can be achieved through the implementation of liberal democracy, fascism, state capitalism, and many other sub-variations of these. Though clearly anyone can see that these differ in drastic ways which bear addressing in their own tactical rite, there are clear strategic imperatives that hold in all of these.

Firstly, this frame can only exist so long as its hold in the four fields continues. If it falters in individual conditioning there will be doubt of its dogmas. If interpersonality fails to enforce its structures of control, its people may slowly recover their dignity. If social structures fail to hold the people in place, coup may lurk around the corner. And if environmental structures can be seized or re-formed, its total control over all things may dissolve. In this way, it has been noted by many revolutionary theorists that the people, when subjugated, are almost guaranteed to one day recognize the misery of their conditions. A being can only subsist in deprivation for so long, after all, when they can look around and recognize that all possibilities are otherwise. Thus the kyriarchal stasis is a sort of containment chamber, not destined to burst if structures can hold, but constantly at threat should this containment falter.

Spreading radical consciousness is therefore a necessity within this period, even if done through subtle means. Radical propaganda should be proliferated to the maximal degree, bearing in mind the long struggle ahead and the presence of growing suppression. Whatever means necessary, an anti-kyriarchal consciousness must be spread. Radicals should study theory and radical history and encourage such reading broadly through reading groups, study groups, discussion groups, and so on... And, importantly, radicals should try to integrate and participate in their community, providing expertise and insight where they can.

Within the era of kyriarchal stasis, revolutionaries must tend the soil in preparation for new growth, to plant trees under which they may never sit. Here live those visionaries and truth-tellers who have come before their time, outcasts who do what is necessary to construct the scaffolding for those horizontal power structures to come. Exiting this era means that the people slowly reclaim their inherent dignity. Therefore the transition into Catalysis is embodied in the rekindling of hope; the portent of a revolutionary bravery which may one day grow into revolt.

A2) Catalysis

This frame may be seen as equivalent to the production of those early auto-catalytic forms in the creation of life. Here is the production of organizations formed under transformative principles, the accumulation of power into an embryonic horizontal creorder, arising as it does within the ambient background of a hierarchical society. This aspect of catalysis takes place within every kyriarchal stasis, whether in the skeptical thoughts of a regimented people or in the bonds of cooperation and unified power within communities. This is the era wherein these forms are solidifying into autopoietic bodies of struggle.

During this period of time, groups will begin to form components of a broader regional, national, or continental expansion, all of them operating in different localities and within different fields of need. In each they will be tasked with analyzing the conditions of their area and discovering the rhetoric which will catalyze a growing anarchist or libertarian socialist affinity therein. In some places, this horizontal culture will have already occurred organically from before the mega-machine colonized this region. This horizontal culture, whether anarchist adherents are welcome or not within these spaces, should be supported in the struggle for autonomy. They should also be studied. After all, therein can be found autopoietic horizontal forms which have lasted decades, centuries, or millennia. They should be respected and understood.

However it is done, however, an anti-kyriarchal consciousness must be spread. Because the beliefs and expectations of people act as bridges to the actualization of potential realities. And if we wish to act in a coordinated fashion with many other people, we must begin to circulate common knowledge and agreement on our shared goals of strategic holism, prefiguration, and direct action.

This is not to say that each organization can or will immediately transform individuals, form completely new interpersonal relations, prefigure strong horizontal social structures, and communalize the environment. Each of these will likely be protracted struggles to dismantle psychological conditioning and behavioral inertia. And, as has always been noted by the broadest spectrum of leftist theorists, the means of production and the configuration of the natural world are mighty things, often only altered by large agglomeration of activity, therefore typically occurring at the scale of social machines. It is quite challenging to prefigure environmental structures. Groups may have to gain significant power before they can begin communalizing property, recuperating the ecofield, restructuring infrastructure, and so on… Nonetheless, it must be understood as a goal.

And, insofar as the methods can be both understood and acted upon, every person practicing our shared method and educating others on it becomes like a catalyst creating more catalysts for an oncoming process. Every catalyst becomes a vector for expansion. And by spreading these ideas through the people in every latent actuality, this anarchist conception functions as a sort of actuation wave, perpetuating a further and further libertarian polarity within the masses of people, pushing them to agglomerate like molecules into sophisticated apparatuses for struggle. This process then acts to turn every rupture into an opportunity for transformation and every reaction by kyriarchy into a vector for resistance. In fact, this catalytic process must act at every scale and within every structure. Where this can pervade, it can act as a suppressor to the hierarchical instinct everywhere it begins to rise. In this process, they should endeavor to build out what I call the Four Pillars of Prefiguration: councils, economics, defense, and intelligence.

Councils are organizational bodies which are created to facilitate decision-making between some group of people within a locality, acting to coordinate their combined powers together. These are not relegated to being simple geographic entities, they may also serve to give voice to some group of people with a common identity or shared interest. Economics is a category meant to represent our ability to produce and distribute materials to meet people’s needs. Horizontal economics may include decommodified relations such as free stores, timebanks, or direct sharings, but they could also be embodied in cooperatives or unions or collectives or communes, so long as they function under horizontal mechanisms. Defense represents the capability of our projects to prevent violence by countervailing forces, to teach people hand to hand training, de-escalation, weapons training, and small unit tactics, to train the people to defend their own neighborhoods and communities, and to keep public events safe from reactionary incursion. Intelligence represents our capability to gather information, to embed in enemy structures, to publish sensitive information about our opponents, and to do effective spycraft.

These four kinds of structures then represent different kinds of schools to teach revolutionaries how to manage a complex society within the belly of the one that exists, but also to prepare all of those necessary components which allow a self-perpetuating power structure. There is a greater expansion of this four pillars concept in my work Constructing the Revolution, which might be seen as a companion piece to this work.

As all of these strategic goals come to fruition, it will increase the amount of power relations that have been internalized by horizontal structures, meaning that the mega-machine will be slowly deprived of some of its common accumulation. In this, the very growth itself of this horizontal power will tend to escalate tensions with the mega-machine. After all, this new embryonic creorder represents a dire threat to kyriarchy if it is constructed as we have described here.

However, there is escalation by existence and there is escalation by overt conflict; a fact that the anarchists of history are all too familiar with. Accordingly, horizontal structures should only begin overt escalation of tensions with hierarchical powers when their victory can be certain and bearing in mind the proliferation of an anti-kyriarchal consciousness -and thus the likelihood that new radicals may be brought to the fore. Unless these conditions are favorable, they should use all the time that is available to them to internalize more power into revolutionary structures and to spread anti-kyriarchal consciousness.

Because, though horizontal power structures should not eagerly seek rupture (especially within Catalysis), this does not mean that they should not prepare for it. Indeed, revolutionaries must construct organizations that are prepared to wage conflict well before conflict arrives. In time hierarchical power will begin to recognize the threat of what is growing within. And if these horizontal powers are unable to respond to this escalation, they will be crushed. For this reason, during Catalysis, our horizontal power structures must prepare for the next frame, recognizing what is to come. As Sun Tzu has said 7 :

"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable."

And so we reach the first branch in our chart. At this point there may only remain one horizontal power structure or many may grow. Even though these can be seen as exhibitions of a similar strategic impulse to internalize flows from the mega-machine into horizontal power, the two may occur more or less often in different contexts, both in their likelihood to survive and in their strategic viability. If many groups begin to form before the mega-machine escalates, it may be said that you have proceeded into Adjacent Catalysis.

B1) Adjacent Catalysis

Adjacent Catalysis is a frame which describes more than one horizontal power structure arising within the same region as another while a hierarchical power structure with superior leverage remains. That is to say: more than one horizontal organization arises within the same locality, that polity resting within the control of the kyriarchal mega-machine. This frame is also meant to stipulate that these concerned horizontal bodies have chosen neither to associate nor to enter conflict with one another.

It is an inevitable reality that this frame will take place, both at the scale of national regions and at the scale of global struggle. However, though this is clearly permissible by principle of free association, this also correlates with decreased communication and structuralization, thus decreased trust and decreased power in a general sense. The more fractured these horizontal power structures are, the weaker that they will become. And in this weakness, the more likely it is that hierarchical power will increase its ratcheting over everyone. Unlike hierarchical power structures, which seek to destroy or consume one another, horizontal powers must seek to confederate. Indeed, enormous efforts will be worth it in order to join these structures together, as it may make or break the revolutionary future of the planet.

However, this frame is not a representation of some strategic failure. It occurs most often because there are many different struggles that the people of this region are facing. This is to say, this occurs most often in places where the mega-machine is diversely kyriarchal, utilizing many different modes of cruelty and exploitation to achieve its ends. Accordingly, many groups focused on the issues of many people are likely to form. It is therefore a necessary temporary stage in the struggle, though containing its own internal conflicts which must be resolved for revolutionary success.

In this capacity, it is also a frame of great potential. This is where the seeds are multiplying, where the soil is growing richer, and wherein new struggles are being addressed. This is where diverse structures grow together embryonically. Side by side, many groups develop the total horizontal social power acting within their context. If these horizontal structures move towards confederation and cooperation, they enter Extended Catalysis, as will be discussed shortly. If, however, they choose to compete against one another, they move into the stage called Self-Sabotage.

B2b.) Self-Sabotage

This frame represents when a horizontal structure seeks to destroy another horizontal structure. This is the frame of rivalries, competition, and betrayal between horizontal organizations. By all measures, this is the worst strategic option that is available for horizontal power structures on the entire chart. Such an occasion is the height of incompetence, a counterproductive foolishness that can likely never be justified. Already facing a nearly unified kyriarchal front against the horizontal revolutionary movement, those who seek the destruction of other horizontal powers sacrifice success in a liberatory war in favor of the narcissism of small differences.
This does not mean that all federations are inherently good, of course. Disorganized federations can hurt more than they help, by distracting participants, wasting energy on fruitless endeavors, and by functioning to prevent the creation of a more organized and horizontal federation. Nor does this mean that any horizontal power structure is free from need for criticism. After all, during this stage and for a long time to come, the organizations in question will be in the process of fighting back against individual and interpersonal programming which will cause people to act in harmful and ineffective ways. Indeed, these leftover kyriarchal behaviors must be countervailed in order for the movement to succeed. However, healthy conflict and discourse, aimed toward growth and change does not lie in this frame. It lies in the frames to success.
Accordingly, as pressures rise, Adjacent Catalysis is a much preferable situation, such that these horizontal powers can move toward Extended Catalysis: to quash rivalries and to cease competition with one another in favor of mutualism. Self-Sabotage should be resisted at all costs. It represents aid to the mega-machine. If it cannot be stopped, it is very likely to proceed to Mega-Mechanical Recolonization.

B2b1.) Mega-Mechanical Recolonization

This frame represents the occasion when, where there were once numerous horizontal power structures, now one or more of them have become hierarchical. This can take place either in the transformation of one that already exists into a hierarchical structure on its own or by one horizontal power structure seeking to dominate the other. In the latter occasion, it might be said that this dominating horizontal structure ceases to be a horizontal structure in measure to how much it seeks to dominate the other horizontal structure. If its domination is slight, then it has not necessarily entered Mega-Mechanical Recolonization. Because it must be noted that this transformation is not simply the presence of some hierarchical feature within the four fields. This process of correcting ideological and interpersonal orientations continues for the individual for an extended period of time as horizontal power internalizes more of the flows of society. And so this frame is not meant to represent the case where people within one of these organizations are simply demonstrating old cultural brainwashing which they have not yet dismissed, but who are otherwise amenable to horizontal counseling and grievance resolution. It is unlikely at this stage that any organization will have the ideology of its adherents totally decolonized from the mega-machine.

This frame constitutes a conflict which is outright and concerted, domination by either an internal or external threat. And, on this occasion, the mega-machine can be understood as having internalized the acting body in question and thus they cannot be trusted as allies. It must be emphasized: this frame is meant to represent the idea that the organization in question has functionally become a hierarchical entity. This is to say: the flows of power within that organization no longer move by the boundaries of freely agreed measures and cooperative development, but instead have begun to function by way of monopoly control within the group or a desire for that group to establish monopoly control over a “territory.” This may mean they have begun openly cooperating with other hierarchical organizations and supporting more authoritarian praxis. This may also mean that an internal hierarchy has arisen wherein one or some small group of members have come to make all formal decisions.

Regardless of these particulars, horizontal organizations must refuse to confederate with hierarchical organizations. Cooperation with hierarchical power plays into the hierarchical tactic of co-option and consumption. Over time, hierarchical powers will seek to subvert the horizontal structures within the organization and to establish monopoly control through sabotage.

This does not, of course, mean that the horizontal organization is obligated to enter overt conflict with the hierarchical organization in question. But they must at minimum avoid strategic or organizational cooperation. There can be no unity between the hierarchical and horizontal structure at any scale. Where the two exist, they will always enter a war for hegemony in time.

Horizontal power structures must maintain autopoiesis of mutuality and libertarianism within and without, focusing their actions upon the construction of Catalysis, so as to proceed toward Emanation.

B2a.) Extended Catalysis

Whereas Catalysis will tend to rely upon the creation and expansion of few distinct organizations across a large region, Extended Catalysis is a process wherein a large variety of catalyst groups are built up within the same region, federated, then those federations are federated, and so on… preferably until these federations cover the entire interested region. This federated structure is then the one which solidifies more power and coordinates resources between different components.

It is important to note: Extended Catalysis is discerned as a frame from Catalysis by a difference in scope and duration, impressed upon revolutionaries by necessity. Extended Catalysis is Catalysis, but at length, without possibility for retreat, and with prolific recourse to confederation. Extended Catalysis, like Catalysis, will tend to take place within a deeply ingrained or very wide-spanning mega-machine, building up the power of the horizontal structure to the maximal degree before struggle takes place. Extended Catalysis occurs, most notably, because the mega-machine has territorialized too many aspects of society for a horizontal power structure to effectively escape the mega-machine’s influence into rural geography. Accordingly, the focus of Extended Catalysis is to solidify the existence of these horizontal power structures within their points of origination, not to escalate conflict. Because this ensuing power structure does not seek to tactically retreat (largely because it cannot), it will tend to rest within the urban centers, though it may also have extended presence in rural communities.

The difference between Catalysis and Extended Catalysis, then, is that Catalysis, once it proceeds through Emanation later, is more likely to seek un-colonized territory to occupy, whereas horizontal power within Extended Catalysis is forced to co-exist with the mega-machine, therefore extending the period of time it has available to internalize flows of power once controlled by the kyriarchal mega-machine, but also restricting its freedom to maneuver.

These things being said, however, there are noted strengths to Extended Catalysis in a purely theoretical sense: when two horizontal bodies voluntarily cooperate, this correlates with increased communication and structuralization. Under this condition, horizontal power increases, allowing the combined power structure to resist sabotage by hierarchy even more effectively. In order for this circumstance to occur, anarchist organizations must seek to create other anarchist organizations and to prepare themselves for the sorts of agreements that will need to be made to join organizations with relatively horizontal power structures together, even though their cultures and expectations may differ considerably. This is carried out by necessity, recognizing what the mega-machine might do to destroy them.

Over a considerable period of strengthening, if this structure can be built up without any state suppression, then this structure may be able to move straight into Civil Conflict, going to war with the state and capital directly; seizing territory in an old-fashioned sense. However, while this extended catalytic process is taking place, just as in the case of Catalysis, it is most likely that the state will recognize what is arising within it. Indeed, if this extended catalytic process is potentially more powerful than simple Catalysis, as we claim it may be, then the hierarchical power structure is likely to begin countervailing this structure somewhat quickly. In this occasion, Extended Catalysis may enter Emanation, wherein the same basic dynamics continue as for Catalysis, but with a stronger structure.

A3) Emanation

Though the era of catalysis was pervaded by a totalizing, ambient kyriarchal background, progression into this frame takes place as horizontal power grows in strength, resisting that ambient kyriarchy. This is then also the stage wherein the kyriarchal mega-machine has likely recognized what is arising inside it and has begun to countervail the horizontal structures which threaten its monopoly. This can be seen as an era of rising conflict, but wherein the mega-machine has not yet mustered the necessary energy to crush the horizontal society it countervails. If it can succeed in this process, the conditions may be said to return to Catalysis or Stasis. And, in this attempt to return the strategic conditions to Catalysis or Stasis, the mega-machine will act with varying scales of violence, suppression, and sabotage, within this frame, attempting to kill the auto-catalytic horizontality, and forcing the group in question and often many other groups into an era of struggle.

However, in this stage of Emanation, the mega-machine is nonetheless in a mode of struggle and reapportionment of available powers. For this reason, horizontal structures should seek to confound the mega-machine in its process of reapportionment, while actively planning positions of fallback and sabotage should the structure grow to the strength that is actually needed to crush this horizontality. Horizontal power must begin, in this period, preparing for the violence of the mega-machine, establishing organizational structures that are both covert and public. Accordingly, while revolutionaries must begin forming clandestine militias and spy networks, they must also begin making even more serious inroads into the social movements seeking to provide crucial assistance to those in need, seeking to restore dignity and develop the horizontal power of those harmed by the violent expansion of the kyriarchy.

This era of struggle will introduce new difficulties, necessitating a new sort of bravery as we proceed through a crisis with the system. Whether in our clandestine activity or in the economic conflicts which might be caused by the expansion of our horizontal economics, we must prepare ourselves with diverse and flexible tools; those which will be absolutely necessary if we are to put down this most terrible predator of human history, the kyriarchal mega-machine. This entails strategic patience, only ever antagonizing the mega-machine when we are confident in our ability to win the engagement. Horizontal power should never try to escalate any further than it can rise to meet the burden.

For this reason, during Emanation it is imperative that catalyst groups encourage the rapid escalation of social power, such that the people develop the strength to begin disciplining their government, not vice versa; a task that, crucially, one learns only by doing. The people must therefore coordinate their power together into cohesive organizational structures. They must discover the methods by which they can rise up and pressure the state to their will every time it disobeys. When it brings riot police, the people must bring an overwhelming wave that crushes the state’s suppressive attempt. When the mega-machine sends their spies and their wreckers and their informants, horizontal structures must eject them, confound them, or utilize them to our whim. The people must become strong enough to teach the state humility. Only then shall we ever throw off its reign.

As horizontal power expands, it will internalize more and more power relations, placing pressure on the mega-machine, and therefore encouraging the machine to utilize prolific restructuring. This means that the system may assume configurations which seem quite foreign to previous conventions. And technical disciplines based upon one or another of those configurations will find themselves incapable of understanding the system they are witnessing before them. As the old thinkers have put their finger on the particulars of its functioning, it changes into something new.

Each time this happens, our tactics will have to change to meet these new burdens, using every success to bolster the next attempt, building councils of the oppressed, establishing radical democracy, fighting for unions, establishing solidaric networks of radicals, and doing everything within our power to internalize flows of power permanently into our horizontal structures, so that each new wave is stronger than the last.

At some point, this repetitious cycle will tempt the mega-machine and it will expand its brutality to test the mettle of the growing revolution. If revolutionaries proceeded to this frame through Extended Catalysis, then the horizontal power structure should be able to drive the masses to support it and rally them to countervail the suppression by hierarchical power. And if the masses are organized toward a mass revolt, it is possible horizontal power may move into the frame Civil Conflict.

But, if the project has proceeded here through Emanation, it is much more likely that hierarchical power will recognize what is taking place and seek to end the expansion of horizontal power well before it has a critical mass of support. This means that the horizontal power must be prepared to go to war to maintain itself. Ultimately within this, the horizontal power should be seeking to diminish and ultimately destroy the hierarchical power it coexists with, again leading to Civil Conflict. However, if it cannot, horizontal power structures may be forced to tactically retreat, either seeking new territory which has not been internalized by the mega-machine or maintaining autonomous zones within the urban centers. In either occasion, this means they will move to the frame called Secession.

C1) Civil Conflict

This frame can be understood as the escalation to overt warfare with the hierarchical power structure. Whereas in the previous frame, tensions were escalating and limited conflict with the state had begun which characterized an oncoming rupture, this frame is when horizontal power and hierarchical power become engaged in a military affair. In this frame, the horizontal power will be forced to truly embrace the underground/overground approach, especially if the majority of their power rests in the urban centers. This stage may see escalation to tactics such as decapitation strikes, land and property seizure, infrastructure sabotage, and urban guerilla combat. This marks the beginning of the era of war and revolutionaries must understand themselves as oriented in such a battlefield. It is now a matter of self-defense to defeat the mega-machine. The mega-machine must be defeated, in fact, for this area to be claimed and maintained by the horizontal powers resting there.

As this combat escalates and as more territorial autonomy is claimed, council federations must assemble to navigate social unrest and to provide the basic amenities of life to people with those areas that they populate. Mutuality and libertarianism must expand prolifically, solidifying control over the metabolized mega-machine, then forming these old tools to horizontal needs. As this process takes place, this is likely to lead to Autonomy, though it may start first as Secession.

A4) Secession

This frame takes place when a horizontal power structure is beginning to successfully dis-attach from the mega-machine, but has not completely done so. This is to say, within this frame, the horizontal power structure has either internalized so many flows from the mega-machine it once rested within that it can expand autopoiesis largely through those flows or it has fled the urban centers and begun internalizing environmental structures outside of the immediate control of the mega-machine. Either way, within this frame, the horizontal power structure has begun to achieve autopoiesis, while still in conflict and interaction with hierarchical powers.

This is because this is the era marked by the end of hierarchy’s hegemonic control of the relations within the seceding territory, even though it may maintain control of all surrounding territory. In this era, hierarchical control over all four fields of relations is being thoroughly undermined and replaced: hierarchical philosophies of justification are falling apart, interpersonal relations of domination are declining, hierarchical social structures are being dismantled, and land, infrastructure, and goods are beginning to be horizontally redistributed by default.

As with other frames, we must note that none of these are likely to disappear immediately. Indeed, it is expected that the scars of the old world will join us long after our struggle is complete. It is likely, during this era and the next, that something akin to the system described in my essay After the Revolution, will be instituted. This system will have to mix decommodified and market components in order to facilitate its interaction with external systems and will require a continued existence of militia formations. But in this era, the internal balance of power for this region has now come decisively into the favor of horizontality.
For this reason, the machine will do everything in its power to reclaim those seized flows of power and thus the machine will carry out barbaric campaigns of sabotage and military intervention. For this reason, many of the features seen in Civil Conflict will occur, however this frame marks the point where the horizontal power is moving toward autonomy instead of requiring an immediate war to seize enemy territory.

Remaining in accordance with a principle of self-defense, it is effective for this region to go tit-for-tat as a strategic method. At every step that our structures are forced to interact with the hierarchical power structure outside ourselves (and we will be forced to do so) we must make the interaction a one-way interaction. This has been at the center of each era, but in this era the injunction rises from a watchword to a rule for effective conduct. If the enemy breaks its agreements, we should do so in return. If they follow their agreements, we should follow our own. But we should never rely on the continued benevolence of an existential enemy, no matter how cooperative they may appear at the moment.

If this process took place by consuming the territory of the mega-machine, then it will only ever be maintained through active conflict with hierarchy; whether cyclic, sporadic, or whatever else, thus this is categorically an era of regional conflict. Under an extended conflict and alongside substantial demonstration of fighting effectiveness for horizontal power structures, the hierarchical power structure may not want to continue an all-out war. Instead, the hierarchical power may want to concede Autonomy to this region.

A5) Regional Autonomy

This is the era wherein horizontal society has become the new creorder within its region of control and wherein it is at roughly equal or even superior advantage to the hierarchical power it borders. This is the culmination of the attempts to internalize flows of power into the horizontal structure, which is not a total autarky, but has established an autarky of some crucial features. The structures which characterize the new society now solidify and reproduce themselves naturally. This means that this is the true end of hierarchical hegemony not just within the horizontal region, but also in the shared field of the autonomous region and the local mega-machine. Nonetheless, the mega-machine still exists and so this era may or may not still be characterized by civil, regional, or global conflict. Crucially, however, this is the first era since Catalysis that the horizontal power may be able to establish some homeostasis.

The mega-machine may even cease conflict with the autonomous region, as to spare itself expenditure of further resources. Such a time of peace, while it will represent a pause on the revolutionary process of mega-mechanical decolonization, it will also represent an opportunity for horizontal society to continue reinforcing itself and creating the conditions for a self-organized criticality.

In this way, the defining characteristic of this era is that the horizontal power structure has now achieved high degrees of autonomy from hierarchical power. This is not to say that it has no entanglements with the global system, but instead that it has now exited the era of struggle with the hierarchical power structure it sought to gain separation from. Struggle in this era will be defined not by grasping to continue existence, but instead a slow ratcheting of horizontal power over regional hierarchical powers. As the horizontal power within the region is given time to adjust, it may very well begin to decommodify more of its internal functions and may require less militia formations for internal protection. However, it should not move without foresight on either of these, as this era has not marked a decisive end to hostile engagements.

With this in mind, it is important that this rising horizontal regional hegemony still not move too aggressively or become too eager to eliminate its enemy outright, though it must indeed carry out extensive spycraft, conduct subtle campaigns to undermine the kyriarchy abroad, and to degrade hierarchical hegemony in those opposing regions of control, a singular regional autonomy is unlikely to bring about this complete destruction by itself.

If conflict is unavoidable, the horizontal structure should, as it gains more power leverage over the hierarchical structures around it, only take those battles where it has superior strength and then allow the structure to retract. Over time, this will weaken the structure and exaggerate the ratcheting of the horizontal structure instead.

If the horizontal structure becomes too eager, seeking to exterminate the hierarchical power in its midst without giving it the possibility of escape, they will be faced with a brutal and bloody struggle, much more gruesome than that which would have been carried out by strategic patience.

Ultimately, the goal of this stage of struggle is for this horizontal regional power to confederate itself further with other horizontal power structures within the region and prepare itself to crush the enemy when the battle arrives. Here we see why it is so crucial that horizontal power structures must be built everywhere. When the time comes that the horizontal structure is in conflict, it will need other horizontal allies. If it does not have them it will be in a position to be sanctioned, to be teamed up on by many hierarchical powers, or to simply be starved out.

With this in mind, so long as this regional autonomy remains, it should focus on slowly expanding its borders through the seeding of new autonomous organizations at the bounds, as well as helping to develop new catalytic bodies of revolt deeper within the hierarchical polities abroad. As these new horizontal organizations are seeded into the enemy structure, they should be bolstered and supported, then encouraged to undergo Emanation, Secession, and Autonomy, themselves. If this can be repeated or if other autonomies can arise from their own originating struggles, the regional mega-machine can be consumed from the inside out through repetition. If this process can be repeated, it will lead into Adjacent Autonomy.

D1) Adjacent Autonomy

This is the stage wherein numerous horizontal structures in some region or across numerous regions have begun to achieve autonomy from their hierarchical structures. This is the beginning of a new era of world politics for the project. Other nations which may have been largely uninvolved or which did not see their stake in the conflict at hand, will likely become players. And, just as the horizontal structure confederated itself with other horizontal power structures within the region in order to solidify its control, it will now need to do the same upon the global scale. Confederations will need to be created and solidified at the continental or intercontinental scale. And, if possible, at the global scale.

As more horizontal power structures begin to populate the regional landscape, once homogeneously occupied by hierarchical power, it will be a prolific driver of conflict, just as it was upon the smaller scale within the local mega-machine. For this reason, regional horizontal power structures must coordinate and confederate so that their combined power grows precipitously and can be coordinated against the local arm of the mega-machine. If this can be done, it establishes a horizontal ratcheting more and more certainly and, indeed, may even establish power leverage over the hierarchical structure that they have seceded from. This era is therefore defined through a global struggle between horizontal powers and hierarchical powers, which are likely to form into blocs based on their allegiances.

These confederated regions must then begin asking themselves what can be done to achieve the global-scale revolutionary goals at hand. They must establish trade networks, coordinate expertise, provide key materials and technologies, and therefore internalize more relations into confederations across the planet. Since the goal is to eventually achieve global confederation, this represents the beginning inspection of true solidarity. These autonomous regions, each arising in their own local conditions, will have to answer the most important questions about what material solidarity looks like in shifting circumstances. Solidarity is, as Andrewism has said, a conversation, not an act.

However, now that these horizontal regions are rising to the stage of world powers in their confederation, they must not rest on their laurels, but instead speed up the horizontal expansionary process we have discussed before, utilizing the greater power which has been gained from escalation in previous stages. The mega-machine must be suppressed, confused, distracted, and undermined prolifically. Simultaneously, its rulers must constantly be given the impression that they can escape, that the mega-machine can avoid its certain demise, or that it can retreat to live another day. As Sun Tzu has said:

“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”

This is because, when an enemy is cornered, they will fight much harder than if they were engaged under normal circumstances. It is important that the enemy is always fought when it is weakest, never encouraged to fight at its strongest. This has been a dire mistake of the revolutionary movements of history and served to catalyze not only extensive regional military conflicts, but ingrained legacies of hatred and power-structural resentment that have festered for decades and potentially even centuries. The hierarchical power must be slowly, organically suffocated to death and more and more of its waning regional control slowly internalized by surrounding confederating horizontal powers.

There is much much more that could be said about each of these frames. Indeed, in the next part we will discuss some of these further details. And it is possible this flowchart could be built up a great deal more, iterating these strategies at several more scales or delineating different frames more closely. However it is better to understand that what is really taking place is a sort of algorithmic loop: The anarchic agent starts by seeding anti-kyriarchal catalysts into the world at their scale, attempting to build a horizontal power structure. This horizontal power structure then acts as the anarchic agent at a new scale, seeding anti-kyriarchal catalysts at its own scale and below. The anarchic agents at all scales then work to internalize flows previously held within the kyriarchal mega-machine into this new scale of horizontality. This then either expands the horizontal power structure itself or creates more horizontal power structures, which are then combined together at yet another new scale to produce new associations, and so on, and so on…

We must proceed onwards toward a repetition of the loop leading to Adjacent Autonomy and then that layer’s federations and free associations. Indeed, it might be said that there will be movement into the global stage precisely in step with this progression. The more filled the planet becomes with horizontal power structures proceeding through Catalysis, Emanation, and so on…, the more that the globe will begin to see a slow turn toward horizontal power leverage. In this process wherein the horizontal powers across the planet have begun to produce a true, effective threat to hierarchical power, we will be in a period I call Counter-Hegemony.

So taking for granted now these different frames of analysis and the namings we have given them, let us speak of some of the generalities of how this struggle will proceed from mere Counter-Hegemony at the global scale.

A New Hegemony

So what conditions might prevail if we were to proceed successfully upon this repetitive, iterative process, carried out at larger and larger scales? In time, whether the ascent is long or short, the global balance of power will tilt toward horizontal power structures. And when this tipping point toward a global anarchic society has been achieved, we can speak of a new era.

Unlike those frames within our flowchart which all served to delineate germinating dynamics, of a society struggling to be born within a suppressive kyriarchal mass, during the era wherein horizontal power structures have scaled to the scope of global struggle and truly embarked upon the internalization of continents and hemispheres, we will begin to establish a shining period of global horizontal hegemony. This is to say, we will finally come to confront the last bastions of Authoritarianism and Domination now as a superior force instead of one which struggles to be born.

This is the beginning of a stage I will call Anarchic Hegemony. This is the era wherein horizontal society has become so hegemonic it no longer fears opposition, wherein horizontal flows of power are no longer spent just trying to resist and overcome the enemy, but instead serve to reinforce the horizontal creorder. This is the era wherein the global creorder moves toward horizontal orientations. And, given that this is a return to power structural homogeneity, this will also likely correspond to a drop in regional or global conflict. However, such arrangements will have to be carried out consciously. As stakes rise to the level of regions, pressures may push some set of horizontal powers toward competition instead of cooperation, just as we discussed in Self-Sabotage. Just as in the smaller frame; the goal must always be to secure mutualistic confederations instead of to secede or compete.

As time moves forward, if this process can be carried forth with humility and solidarity, harmonious control of the horizontal creorder will become more and more pervasive. Thus sounds the death knell for kyriarchy. Where once all hierarchies propped one another up through various structures within the four power structural fields to produce a totalizing hierarchical conditioning, these will now be progressively broken into pieces and eliminated. In this, anarchism no longer acts from behind, but is a fully self-sustaining force which can no longer be undermined without a prolific, coordinated, counter-revolutionary campaign. This era may still be characterized by some civil strife, as remnants of the old order remain, but they will have no claim to social primacy and are stuck in a matrix of defeat. Where once prolific restructuring was available to them, by way of their control over the total social flow of power, they now act as anarchists once did, to build out hierarchical relations under a totalizing suppression by horizontal creoder. Accordingly, there can be an escalation in decommodification and an appropriate de-scaling of militia structures, given that domestic threats will have declined. The cooperative market and the presence of militia confederations should remain only in measure to present competitive threats.

During this era, horizontal power structures must continue to spark Catalysis, to encourage Emanation, to expand anti-kyriarchal consciousness anywhere on Earth where hierarchical creorder remains, and to bolster horizontal internalization where autonomous territories have been created. This is necessary if we are to build that power structural homeostasis which can theoretically produce emergence.

However, it must be said: it is impossible to predict at what stage of our struggle that emergence might start to take place. As we have said before, one of the characteristics of emergence is that it is quite unpredictable, to the degree that some complexity scientists have chosen this as part of its very definition. So we should not rely on it arising at any given stage. Where we rely on emergence to solve our present problems, we may be left waiting for an untold amount of time while our enemies simply amass whatever power is available to them. We must instead always eagerly seek the expansion of these horizontal power structures and their confederations, knowing that these are the crucial preconditions for emergence. Those preconditions must be built up as prolifically as they are available to us.

In this way, and bearing in mind that anarchy is that emergent political order which might arise from an anarchic society, a society which acts as more than the sum of its parts, it is possible that anarchy may arise at any time during this revolutionary process. Indeed, one of the characteristics of emergence is that it tends to take place far away from equilibrium conditions. And it would certainly be advantageous if this could be achieved before outside interference is eliminated, as it would allow the system to achieve a greater utilization of its available resources. Wherever it might take place, the destruction of hierarchical power would proceed much more rapidly. And, indeed, wherever it can be observed to have taken place, revolutionaries must look closely at what conditions allowed it.

However, the other characteristic is that emergence takes place through gradual adaptation. This indicates that it is more likely anarchy will arise after the global shift in power relations, when horizontal power structures can be allowed to enter a relaxation state. Because, though it is certainly the case that hierarchical power will push the anarchic system far away from equilibrium conditions, it would be challenging for this system to be allowed the space for gradual self adjustment with constant forces of kyriarchy countervailing it. Not only will hierarchical power structures constantly serve to disrupt any gradual process of self adjustment through sabotage, competition with prevailing hierarchical power structures will necessitate that decisions be made quickly rather than slowly and iteratively.

So we must endeavor to recall: such a society, under the wrong conditions, could fall backwards into reaction in time. Anarchic society must watch after itself closely that this does not happen and that, instead, the participants in this global revolutionary process endeavor forth in liberating more and more of the ensuing hegemonic horizontality from the stasis of the mega-machine, both outside of the horizontal power structure and within it. Indeed, even under anarchy we will always be in the process of fighting back against hierarchical power structures that continue to exist. This is what Rudolf Rocker meant when he said 8 :

“I am an anarchist not because I believe anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.”

This future will not be some perfect utopia, but a new society containing its own conflicts to be resolved, both hierarchical and horizontal. Our revolution must proceed toward an endless emancipatory future, seeing no tyrant as too great to topple and no problem too intractable to confront. In this process and this process only will our global society approach the further enactment of an anarchic ethos, wavering here and there as all societies do, but fluctuating about a critical point, a state of harmonious, social ecological balance. It is at this stabilization point that a phase transition will have solidified. The fundament will have been established on which a new array of things, an entirely new world of interactions, can arise. Just as each strata is itself a wonder, anarchy becomes the playing field for things once inconceivable to take place. So anarchy is not the end of history, but the beginning of a new era of history.

And so it is clear: if we are to step into this new era of history, we must act and act now. We must break the mega-machine and prepare the world which negates it forevermore, knowing that no inevitable arc comes to sweep us away and no great cataclysm can be relied upon to eliminate our enemies. Our revolutionary responsibility is startlingly clear: we must stand tall in the face of a withering wind and walk toward the horizon, knowing that no higher being, no emancipatory process is coming to save us. It is those who act, not those who speculate about inevitable stages of historical progress who make history, even while great men are lauded with praise for things they had no hand in.

History does not act. We do.

• 1Class Struggle or Class Hatred?, Malatesta (https://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1921/09/classhate.htm)
• 2Theses on Feuerbach, Marx (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/)
• 3Organization, Malatesta (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-organization)
• 4Various Attributions, Goethe (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe)
• 5Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/frantz-fanon-richard-philcox-jean-paul-sartre-homi-k.-bhabha-the-wretched-of-the-earth-grove-press-2011.pdf)
• 6Understanding Complex Systems, Mobus and Kalton (https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=34DE93366947B92568070E222C787CE1)
• 7The Art of War, Sun Tzu (https://sites.ualberta.ca/~enoch/Readings/The_Art_Of_War.pdf)
• 8The London Years, Rocker (https://libcom.org/article/london-years-rudolf-rocker)