We argue that diversity of theory, organisational form, tactics, and strategy is something that anarchists have to accept about our movement for it to succeed as a movement, and we can not impose ideological or strategic unity on our comrades. It is not a question of if we accept this diversity, but rather a question of how we react to it? Should we embrace it and build networks of communication and cooperation across our pluralistic movement, or should we treat disunity as an unfortunate cost of bottom-up structures that we must overcome?
We take the side of building networks of communication and cooperation across the anarchist movement that mutually embrace our inherent diversity. Such an approach plays to the strengths of anarchism instead of working against them, allows us to better exploit weaknesses in the hierarchical structures we oppose, and ultimately is the approach that will allows us to develop a shared strategy that actually works, if such a thing is possible.
The first advantage of embracing the diversity within anarchism is that it will allow us to reach far more people. There is often a tendency to treat outreach and recruitment as a zero-sum game, with different forms of anarchism competing for the same small pool of radicals who we might come into contact with. This may be true in terms of our existing base of activists, but that is the attitude of a movement that has accepted stagnation, death, given up on the prospect of significant growth, and turned inwards on itself.
If, instead of focusing our discussions on each other, we turn our focus outwards to people who are not already anarchists, then this logic changes. People are diverse, with their own interests, preferences, and experiences. Someone who is not interested in anarchist organising in one sector, or around one issue, may be drawn in by some other anarchist project. Someone who dislikes one kind of propaganda may still be receptive to a different set of arguments for anarchism. In this context, the diversity of anarchism does not put us in a situation in which we are competing with each other to build our specific projects and organisations, but covering each others’ blind-spots, and building a movement that draws from the broadest possible pool of support.
This broadness is important not just for making anarchism relevant to as many people as possible, but also to deny space to our ideological opponents. This is especially important in this time of rising fascism; anywhere we are not organising and building solidarity across society is a space that we risk giving up to fascist opportunists. We need to be in the community, in the workplace, in subcultural spaces, building our movements and organisation around as many issues as we can, working to influence culture from as many angles as possible, and such a diversity of organising space is going to both demand and reinforce a diversity of anarchisms.
The second advantage of diversity is that it allows us to operate in ways that are harder for the centralised institutions of state and capital to counter. Centralisation grants state and capital access to monstrous resources to deploy against their opponents. Radical movements that attempt to mirror this rigid, homogenised, and centralised structure are often defeated, because state and capital are better at playing that game, and can throw more resources at the problem until it is crushed by sheer brute force. Anarchists should not make this mistake.
Instead, an anarchist movement of diverse anarchisms can exploit the ways in which centralised hierarchies are weak and ineffective. A diversity of anarchisms allows us to quickly find out what works against state and capital in any given circumstance; a diverse bottom-up movement is capable to testing many more different theories at once, compared to a top-down hierarchy that can only try a limited number of approaches. A thousand activists all trying different approaches to fighting state and capital are always going to find weaknesses faster than 999 activists waiting on one theoretician to come up with the answer through abstract thought. This is a way to offset the resource advantage state and capital have, by being able to use the resources we do have in a way that is more responsive to reality.
Diverse bottom-up movements also have an advantage over top-down hierarchies in their speed of adaptation. State and capital adapt to better suppress social movements, but they do so slowly; information must be gathered, filtered, and made understandable to each level of the hierarchy as it travels up towards the top where decisions are made, and then orders must flow back down the hierarchy. Bottom-up activists can use their own initiative and adapt to changing circumstances on the fly. This adaptive advantage grants a diverse bottom-up movement another way to offset the resource advantages of state and capital, by adapting faster than they can counter, ensuring those vast resources are going to fight whatever we were doing yesterday, not what we are doing today.
The third advantage of a movement of diverse anarchisms is that it can better tailor itself to local conditions and specific circumstances than any top-down hierarchy that is always going to have to apply a more one-size-fits-all approach to organising society. We don’t seek to spread a single anarchist monopoly across the land like a fast-food franchise but to connect localities that are unique and relevant to their communtiies, to whom they belong and reflect. Someone embedded in their community or workplace is always going to better understand what is happening on the ground, compared to a top-down administrator. A diverse anarchist movement can organise and resist in ways that are themselves diverse, shifting, and exploit specific local weaknesses in state and capital with scalpel-like precision, while state and capital can only respond slowly with a generalised defence, that cannot cover all of its vulnerabilities at once.
Lastly, if there is a single collection of ideas, organisation forms, and tactics that are correct for the vast majority of anarchists, we are more likely to discover this within a broad and diverse movement, than in one that is smaller and more homogenous. The greater the breadth of our collective experience, the more experiments in resistance we can look to, and the more angles of critique we can expose our ideas to, the more capable we will be to be able to sort the good from the bad.
But these advantages can only be leveraged if we commit to active communication and cooperation between different strands of anarchist thought and action. We can not learn from each other if we do not talk to each other in good faith. We can not cover each others’ weaknesses if we treat those weaknesses as irrelevant. We can not support each other, if we do not accept that we need different ideas and tactics for different situations and different sections of society. We can not build an anarchist movement that has maximum social impact, if we dismiss all ideas that are not relevant to our particular projects and concerns. We need to accept diversity and build trust in our movement before we can use it as a weapon against state,capital and the dominant culture.
The Eclipse 
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