:-: Small, both quiet loud, have been made possible by anarchism :-:

• Final summary

:-: Small, both quiet loud, have been made possible by anarchism :-:

There can be no doubt – anarchists have not made much progress in bringing about massive, societal change via revolution. But that doesn’t mean that the political efforts of anarchists have been for naught.

On the contrary, many aspects of our lives that we take for granted were, in fact, made possible by anarchist activism.

Take the way we dress, for example. We often forget that as recently as fifty years ago, what we wore was restricted by class or gender. But, by practicing radical nonconformity and rejecting fashion, anarchists throughout the twentieth century were able to contribute to a huge relaxation of what different people were expected to wear.

The same can be said when it comes to the women’s movement. Emma Goldman, one of the most prominent feminist philosophers within the anarchist tradition, wrote an influential treatise rejecting male dominance titled The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation, first published in 1906.

Within its pages, she explains why suffrage is not enough for the emancipation of women. Decades before mainstream feminists would campaign on the same issues, she asserted that women also needed to fight for the right to choose whether or not to have children, or to engage in sexual relations at all.

Beyond her influences on feminism, Goldman was an early advocate – and practitioner – of free love, which was central to how she envisioned the function of sexual relations within a potential anarchist society.

Anarchists, including Goldman, were indeed the first to promote free unions as an alternative to state or church-sanctioned marriage. And by the end of the twentieth century, combined with advancements in contraception, their revolutionary practice of free love had become the norm.

These quiet revolutions have undoubtedly revolutionized our daily lives. But not all small revolutions undertaken by anarchists have been so hushed.

With the introduction of the internet, for example, anarchists have been able to take their fight online, and coordinate activism with fellow groupings all over the world.

Such coordination was evident in 1999, when anarchists and other anticapitalists successfully demonstrated against the “Multilateral Agreement on Investment,” a treaty drawn up by OECD nations and big business that would’ve made it possible for corporations to sue countries restricting their profit-making activities.

Internet activists were able to acquire and leak the draft treaty and subsequently organize massive protests. In November 1999, treaty negotiators met in Seattle only to be greeted by tens of thousands of protesters that were so disruptive that the talks collapsed.