What is the goal of anarchism?

ast year, I asked Peter Clayborne, author of Anarchy Unfolds, to explain anarchism to me. We spent the past year writing back and forth and are now publishing our letters as a series called “Letters to an Anarchist.” You can catch up here:

• Part one by Elle Griffin

• Part two by Peter Clayborne

• Part three by Elle Griffin

• Part four by Peter Clayborne

This is part five 👇🏻

Dear Peter,

I tend to agree with Graeber, there is no one way of being. We cannot generalize the past just like we cannot generalize the present. For instance, I think the show “Downton Abbey” did an incredible job depicting the many faces of wealth and poverty in the post-Edwardian era. The wealthier aristocracy were both content with their lives and discontent. The more impoverished domestic servants were both content with their lives and discontent. The classes were both separate and united. It would be very hard to paint over that complexity with one brush and say "life was good for this person and bad for that person."

As for your various examples—the nonviolent Rotuman, La Paz, and Semai peoples—I agree there is a lot we can learn from them. For example, I find shame as a punishment interesting. We used to use stocks and pillories to deter crime—essentially locking someone to a piece of wood in the town square with a depiction of their crime. I'm not suggesting we should bring that back (we shouldn’t), but the sex offender registry is a modern example of public shaming, and it has been shown to reduce crime by 1.21 sex offenses per year per 10,000 people. Is that the kind of thing you are thinking of? I am open to various replacements for some of our nonviolent prison population, and have written about some of them, I just don’t know what those might be.