FOUR FUTURES PART III – REPRESSION

SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL REPRESSION

Possibly the worst future that anarchists might face after the next election is one of competent political repression. This would be a government that, looking at the current problems that are causing unrest, does not attempt to relieve any of those problems but instead attempts to repress the unrest they cause through:

• Implementing widespread surveillance so that enemies can be tracked

• Progressively increasing violence

• Deceiving people into supporting the regime, capitalism, etc. or to turn their unrest on each other through prolific propaganda and the widespread indoctrination of the youth and possibly political prisoners.

Such a future can easily follow one of failed reform, where a government moves to destroy a social movement that has escaped their control.

This is the kind of oppression that helped break the anarchist movement in the first half of the 20th century. This kept it suppressed in many places through most of the latter half, and we are still recovering from this today.

This could come as the result of an openly fascist Reform or Conservative government, but could also come from something like a Labour government that refuses to reform, attempting to maintain the British state in the face of increasing systematic problems. At time of writing, this seems to be the road that the current Labour government is heading down, although their recent election defeats may change their strategy in various ways.

It is important to note that, looking at historic examples, such oppression has often involved a variety of non-state and semi-state political organisations as well as formal governmental and private security forces. Fascist authoritarian governments especially have often relied on right-wing street movements to impose their political goals on society when the bureaucratic structure of the state was not responsive enough for the job or when state agents were not yet fully on board with fascist policies. If we expect to face competent political repression from a far-right party like Reform UK, we must be ready to face paramilitary forces that do not even pretend to stay within the limits of the law.

In terms of state repression, we must expect that many of the ways we communicate and organise will become far more dangerous:

• Aboveground anarchist and anarchist-adjacent organisations may be entirely banned, whether in law or informally (whether enforced by the state, non-state actors or both).

• Many of the tactics we rely on may be made illegal, or be confounded by paramilitary groups regardless of their legality.

• The internet may become increasingly censored and surveilled in ways that make communication, organising or even simply reading radical texts online risky or impossible.

Against such authoritarianism, anarchists will have to fall back to underground methods of organisation, communication and resistance.

Such a turn to oppression will also affect how the state and capitalism approach propaganda and indoctrination of the youth. They will likely find it hard to maintain the pretence of pretending to care about human freedom and wellbeing, ideas which can we can argue to anarchism from, and will have to elevate other ideas, like nationalism, white supremacy and patriarchy, which are completely incompatible with anarchist ideas. The general cultural environment that we operate in will likely become hostile to anarchism, even outside of institutional oppression.

For anarchism to have the best chance of surviving such a future, we must start preparing for it now. Any competent repressive government will make use of not only the information it can gather while in power, but also whatever information previous governments have collected on its opponents, meaning that lax security in the present will get people imprisoned, exiled or killed far into the future. The kind of organisational forms, technical skills and equipment necessary to survive such totalising political repression is best developed beforehand instead of waiting for repression to strike and having to develop it on the fly where any mistake could mean disaster. However, we must also remain aware that unnecessary paranoia about security can make anarchism unwelcoming and hence prevent its growth as a movement in times when such high security is not necessary.

We should look to places like Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and China for ideas on how a competent repressive government might attempt to deal with resistance. Comrades from those countries have important things to say about operating under a surveillance/police state, what could have been done differently as those countries became more oppressive, and what they wish they had prepared for beforehand.

It is important to note that such an oppressive government will not automatically lead to a revolutionary response against its domination. People are just as likely, if not more so, to yearn for a return to mild social democracy or liberalism as they are to reject all hierarchy and turn in an anarchist direction. Many of the most repressive states in recent history successfully suppressed radicalism and, when they did finally fall, those societies transitioned to generic capitalist liberal democracy instead of abolishing the state and capitalism in a social revolution. Because of this, it is important that anarchists both work out how to survive under such oppression and spread our ideas, so that resistance might head in a truly libertarian direction.

It is also important to note that all competent repressive governments have historically ultimately ended up as victims of their own success: they suppressed internal opposition, but in doing so, they suppressed the internal forces that might have held the leadership accountable to basic standards of diligence, competence and sanity. Such oppression has always led to a ruling class that became increasingly corrupt, negligent and detached from reality. Competent repression lays the groundwork for oppressors to become incompetent, and for the system to collapse or be overthrown.

This future is also heavily contingent on how technology develops and is implemented. Ubiquitous surveillance and advanced data analysis could open the possibility of a permanently totalitarian state that makes organised internal rebellion nearly impossible. However, such systems could instead accelerate the collapse of the state and capitalism by removing some of the pressures that prevent them from giving in to their most self-harming tendencies. Likewise, technological development can open up new avenues of resistance just as it makes old tactics harder. This development and implementation is itself something that is not pre-determined, and can be influenced by what we do now both in terms of organising against state surveillance and developing technologies that enable resistance.

FAILED POLITICAL REPRESSION 

While authoritarian governments like to project an air of hard-headed competence, this is often more a myth than a reality. Often, political repression is incompetent from the very start and fails to achieve the ends of those imposing it. However, just because such repression is not effective does not mean that it is not also horrific in terms of the suffering that it causes. Indeed, an incompetent repressive government may end up causing far more harm than a competent one, as it uses increasing amounts of violence in a vain attempt to achieve its aims.

Such incompetence can take many forms:

• Using enough oppression to anger people without using enough to bring them into obedience

• Using violence or surveillance without doing the necessary propaganda work to justify it

• Using so much violence that resistance becomes a necessity for survival

• Using violence or propaganda/indoctrination without having the surveillance apparatus or understanding of society to ensure that it is used against the right targets

Successful anarchist preparation for a repressive government make it head towards these kinds of failures. Ensuring that our movements are not easily identified or understood by hierarchies, ensuring that the technologies and techniques to evade repression are widespread, and embedding a broader culture of resistance and disobedience into British society are all ways to make political repression harder to use successfully.

Such incompetence is also likely to show itself in more than just how the state and capitalism deploy repression, but how they run other parts of society. Political repression does not solve social problems, but only covers them up by suppressing obvious discontent and resistance so that they fester under the surface. For instance:

• Workplaces and infrastructure are likely to be run in a negligent or corrupt way.

• Services that not only make people’s lives better, but are key to keeping society running from the perspective of its rulers, will likely be underfunded and mismanaged.

A future in which we suffer under a government that is both incompetent and repressive is the one most likely to lead to deeper social collapse.

Such a future is likely to be one in which anarchists must be well-prepared to deal with severe oppression, but in which there are also gaping vulnerabilities in that system of oppression that anarchists can exploit to resist. Failed political repression is likely to see bottom-up movements of resistance that grow to oppose it, which anarchists can launch, take part in, and propagandise in. Failed repression is also likely to create gaps in social provision which anarchists can build mutual aid organisations in that can act as both a logistical backbone for resistance and the seeds of a future libertarian society. But again, we cannot assume that these movements will be naturally revolutionary without anarchists arguing for our position. Left to their own devices, they are just as likely to be movements simply for “good governance” or a return to liberal capitalism. The failures of a repressive government will create openings for change, but the direction of that change will be determined by whoever can best advocate for their ideas and structures and prove them in practice.