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With all this in mind, there’s a curious mismatch developing. On the one hand, levels of hatred for the system are surely enormous; on the other, the vast majority of people somehow find themselves going along with things, swamped by the mass of little compromises. Why is it that relatively few people – extremely few, all things considered – seem to be consciously interested in fighting back? This is a complex issue, but here’s an idea: perhaps the majority of our methods just aren’t of much use to most people. It isn’t that they simply fail to care, but instead have already been sufficiently burdened by everyday survival under capitalism without the added expectation of struggling even more. The things we dedicate ourselves to – whether peaceful protest or militant revolt – offer us a great deal, but only rarely does such involvement stand a chance of making life any easier. In other words, the value of the struggle is in a sense spiritual, not material: it enhances our lives, but almost always lessens our ability to make ends meet.

Perhaps that’s the reason many of us are having a hard time exceeding the (often distinctly privileged) margins of society, because the struggle is a luxury. Only once your basic material needs have been met can you start worrying about less immediate concerns, including the wellbeing of society and the planet. Which just goes to show, there’s no excuse for losing faith in the species, not yet: the conditions of economic scarcity imposed by capitalism – its ruthless combination of debt, bills, and joyless careers – deem it physically impossible for most to realistically dream of changing the world. Not only that, it also means those who get involved are likely to find their commitment weighed down by the pressures of long-term economic security, that once youthful idealism often waning into our thirties. Only by reconnecting the struggle to the promotion of material autonomy can we expand its breadth of engagement, both for outsiders and ourselves.

What’s being proposed here, basically, is the need to make anarchy livable. Why wait for some mass upheaval to get hold of the necessary means of production? We can’t sustain ourselves on symbolic gestures alone: only by securing immediate solutions to everyday material needs – solutions valuable in and of themselves, irrespective of what’s on the horizon – can you expect to get greater numbers involved. People are hurting now, and that won’t be alleviated by some millenarian hope of revolution. All too often, anarchism sees itself as an ideology rather than a way of life, as if leveling hierarchy were a mere matter of aggregating opinions – a distinctly liberal notion. On the contrary, anarchy expands by realizing itself immediately within the social terrain, supplanting every function that keeps us loyal to the system, generating solutions more realistic than it has to offer.

We already have some useful examples, including the free breakfast program run by the Black Panthers, and the squatted ADYE medical clinic of Exarcheia. In order to reinvent itself as a true historical force, however, anarchism must increase its ambitions massively, reclaiming every condition of existence – food, shelter, education, medicine, transport, entertainment, social care – in the name of autonomy. This notion of anarchy as an immediate, communizing force stands to make major gains against the failings of institutional engagement: rather than getting bogged down in lengthy and prejudiced bureaucratic procedures, we could utilize direct action to start building our strength without delay.

Autonomous zones are extremely useful here, but they’re not enough. Pushing the boundaries isn’t only about having a concrete social alternative, but also an accessible one. In too many cases, our communes remain out of bounds to outsiders, something not at all helped by subcultural barriers or even outright contempt. These issues can, of course, be remedied with only a little sensitivity, but in many cases the problem stems from exactly the point of an autonomous zone: to establish a definitive break with normality. Rather than expecting outsiders to leap into the unknown, therefore, we’re the ones who need to be doing so, putting in the effort to build affinity beyond the usual circles. No excuses here: it isn’t as if all such engagement introduces a hierarchical dynamic, one between the revolutionaries and the masses, the missionary and the heathen. Separated from a commitment to organizational growth or ideological conversion, what one might call “outreach” is much more capable of occurring horizontally, opening up a reciprocal process in which either side stands to learn just as much from the other. The point isn’t to absorb outsiders into our own way of doing things, but instead to encourage people to struggle against power on their own terms, wherever that might lead.

In any society based on hierarchy, resistance to subordination is a fact of everyday life, no less so for “apolitical” people. The problems of capitalist expansion are rarely faced by ourselves alone, whether it’s a question of gentrification, maxi-prisons, slaughterhouses, migrant detention centers, nuclear waste dumps, high-speed railways, or surveillance systems. Take your pick: we’re already surrounded by opportunities to break down social barriers, counteracting any attempts to ghettoize our efforts. The struggles we undertake are diverse, yet each of them is grounded in a singular need to confront social hierarchy, thereby containing the potential to call everything into question. Even if the local, specific objectives of an intermediate struggle aren’t achieved, the mere fact of struggling together can be decisive for bringing people – ourselves as much as anyone – closer to the future possibility of rupture. Rather than abandoning the terrain of activist campaigning, therefore, the point is merely to deepen the perspective with which we approach it, shifting from a preoccupation with the specific to an appreciation of the general, from a reformist focus to something concretely revolutionary.

Miserable conditions are never enough for revolution; what makes this world intolerable is that one has confidence in an alternative. Surely most people continue with their lives – with working a job, paying rent, or going to school – not because they like it, but because they’ve been convinced, in the lack of a viable alternative, that it’s just the way it is. No matter how awful a situation, if it has a monopoly on meeting your basic material needs, the only conceivable response will be to suck it up and continue, perhaps even blaming feminism or immigration for the deepening crisis of modernity. As yet, we’ve failed to puncture that illusion. Which confirms the strange sense in which even we, as dissidents, must bear part of the responsibility for propping up this awful mess. Pushing the boundaries of struggle means establishing viable routes of desertion from the system, both accessible and secure. In short, anarchy expands by making it livable.

“Make the most of every crisis”

Common sense wisdom would have it that things will forever stay pretty much the same. The current situation will change, no doubt, but always gradually, taking care to maintain the guarantees of modern life. The privileged among us count on remaining insulated from the turbulence of history; any unavoidable volatility, meanwhile, will take place only on our television screens, never outside the front door. Maybe!? Of course, maybe not. Remember that such is exactly the arrogance preceding the collapse of every great civilization. There’s a growing fear among many of us that our sacred assumptions are beginning to expire. Perhaps a day will come – a day many of us could well live to see – in which we’ll arrive at the supermarket only to find it has nothing left to sell, let alone to find in the bins. And by that point it will already be too late.

Every day, global supply chains increase in complexity, to the extent that even minor disruptions have the potential to provoke widespread instability. The integration of our needs into a single, planetary economy provides certain conveniences, but it can’t go on like this forever. Just in order to survive, the system stacks itself up higher and higher, merely ensuring it has further to fall. With oil, for example, industrial civilization has already likely surpassed its peak capacities for extraction; in recent years, the economy has demonstrated an increased reliance on the dirtiest, most inefficient fossil fuels the planet has to offer, including shale gas, tar sands, and brown coal. Something similar can be said about water reserves, currently being depleted twice as quickly as they’re naturally renewed; already today, billions lack sufficient access to fresh water, especially during dry seasons, and the number is increasing fast. Soil erosion, too, is a significant threat, as industrial agriculture – with its relentless application of monocultures and pesticides – lays waste to what land around the globe remains capable of supporting complex life. Factors such as these suggest that, as the 21^st century smolders on, economic depression and resource wars will begin to proliferate on an ever greater scale.

There are already over 7 billion of us on the planet, and we’re predicted to hit the 10 billion mark around the middle of the century. Moreover, population growth is likely to crescendo in combination with the aforementioned factors, potentially leading to a sudden incapacity for the system to support its inhabitants in many regions. Having said that, population levels might not be the core problem here: most slum-dwellers in the Global South consume only a fraction of the resources consumed by middle-class Westerners, perhaps even one hundredth as much. What’s especially worrying is that population is booming in the very places – India and China, for example – that are beginning to emulate the resource-intensive lifestyles previously hoarded only by much smaller numbers in the Global North. It’s difficult to imagine a gentle outcome to this situation: an exponential decrease in available resources, combined with an exponential increase in our reliance on them, seems to deem some kind of major collision inevitable.

It’s not even the likelihood of crises that’s increasing, but also our inability to deal with them. We live in an age in which, having become so severely alienated from the conditions of existence, merely growing your own food is considered eccentric. This is a distinctly contemporary situation, owing to the destruction of peasant life wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as well as the further deskilling of the workforce ushered in by the Digital Revolution. Whilst the system used to concern itself mainly with the political organization of our lives, it nowadays holds down a monopoly on almost every conceivable facet of our material needs. This brings heaps of volatility: until a few decades ago, the collapse of a civilization would, despite the obvious turmoil, nonetheless have left most people capable of feeding themselves. The 21^st century, however, is such a strange creature, absolutely convinced of its advanced abilities, yet completely lost when it comes to the most basic gestures. We can have absolutely anything we want. (Provided the credit card reader is working).

Our techno-addicted culture is expanding at an ever greater pace, far quicker than anyone can begin to understand its implications. Rather than merely altering reality, this brave new world has created an entirely new one, steadily digitizing the entirety of the human experience. Information technology is used to augment basic cognitive functions – memory, navigation, communication, imagination – to the extent users suffer literal symptoms of withdrawal without them. We fantasize about cyborgs as if they were the stuff of science fiction, failing to realize that they’re already here, that we’ve already become them. Merely leaving the room without our smartphones is often unthinkable, and that’s saying a lot. We need to be wary of becoming utterly dependent on our digital prostheses, particularly when their operation relies so heavily on centralized infrastructure. Any level of disruption here – as with a solar flare, power failure, or terrorist attack – would spell major tumult.

It’s time to seriously ask ourselves: if the collapse happened tomorrow, would we really be ready? With every passing day, this question becomes increasingly unavoidable. Fortunately, however, the key solution is also quite straightforward, having already been discussed in some detail: make anarchy livable. By securing our material autonomy now – something highly valuable in itself, whatever the future brings – we increase our chances of coping and even expanding during any unpredictable moments of future turbulence. As this civilization tumbles into the abyss, it will expect to pull each of us along with it; yet that outcome can be avoided, insofar as we already know fully well how to live on our own terms. It would be ridiculous to wait for the supermarket shelves to be looted clean before trying our hand at growing a cabbage. What we do before things get really serious will be decisive.

For many of us, this could well be a matter of life or death. Yet the situation isn’t quite so bleak, either: there’s good reason to believe that crises (of certain sorts, anyway) present important opportunities to increase our strength. A crisis can be thought of simply as a breakdown in the smooth functioning of normality, something that might potentially offer its share of advantages. With the system failing to perform its expected roles, these are moments in which the status quo has become even less realistic, inviting autonomous projects to fill the void. Quite commonly, a self-organized response occurs organically, devoid of conscious political consideration: as with so many disaster situations, ordinary people rediscover their dormant prosocial instincts – those spontaneous, impartial inclinations towards solidarity and mutual aid – just in order to pull through. By intervening in these accidental ruptures in intelligent, sensitive ways, we can add strength to the efforts, pushing them towards a permanent break. Important examples here include US anarchists providing material solidarity to those devastated by the 2017/18 hurricane seasons, as well as the Greek anarchist movement squatting accommodation in response to the ongoing European refugee crisis. In all likeliness, however, the familiar depth of crisis will pale in comparison to what’s ahead.

We cannot shy away from crises: to hide from them is to hide from history – from our history, in particular. Literally every example of libertarian revolution – Ukraine 1917, Manchuria 1929, Catalonia 1936, Rojava 2012 – emerged from a situation of outright civil war. Perhaps that’s a shame, but it’s also no surprise, given that any large-scale experiment in autonomous living will usually need a power vacuum to fill. After all, it’s not up to us to choose which multifaceted contexts are inevitably thrown our way, only to work out how best to inhabit them.

That said, none of this suggests we should look forward to crises. Not only do they bring great danger to humans and nonhumans across the board (especially those already worst off), they also provide the moments of instability necessary for authoritarianism to lurch forward. Fascist governments, too, have relied on crises – real or imagined – in order to seize power. No less, long-standing regimes will always gladly exploit moments of panic to crack down on dissidents. Exactly that happened, for example, with the 1923 Amakasu Incident in Japan, in which the imperial army used the turmoil generated by the Great Kantō earthquake as an excuse to murder anarchist figureheads. Or look at 9/11 more recently, gleefully utilized by regimes in the Global North to roll out an unprecedented wave of “anti-terrorist” repression. The bottom line on crises is simply that, whether we like it or not, they’re inevitable – especially under capitalism. Given that stubborn conundrum, we can only ask how best to make the most of them.

This isn’t a matter of counting down the days until the shit hits the fan, quite the opposite: the crisis is already here. Social hierarchy, in its very essence, is crisis. Merely in order to persevere, it must forever overextend itself, destabilizing the very fabric of life wherever it goes. By intervening effectively in the carnage that engulfs us, we can minimize the damage wrought, all the while building the strength necessary to confront the single, planetary disaster this civilization has become. As the crises multiply in scale and frequency, it’s possible the recklessness of the system will be its undoing, granting ample opportunities for insurrection and even revolution. Just remember that the failings of our enemies will never be enough. We must also be ready to take advantage. And to do that we need to get going now.