The ecological perspective is for everyone (but especially for anarchists)

A guest post by Alex Beels, an organiser with the Vrije Bond, the anarchist federation of the Netherlands and Flanders.

A few months ago I had the feeling of running into an old friend, someone I had known since childhood and somehow lost touch with. Or of watching a film that matched, scene for scene, a screenplay I had been quietly working on. That is what it was like to discover social movement ecology.

The recognition was immediate. Here was a way of addressing several problems at once: who we are as people inside a movement, where we stand in the world and how we can act, and how different groups, projects and organisations each contribute to the shape of the whole.

Any social system can be read ecologically, capitalism and absolute monarchy included. For anarchists, though, it is close to essential. Our movements tend to exist as a patchwork of autonomous and semi autonomous projects, often without much formal coordination, each following its own logic and drifting towards whichever ideological current best matches its practice. Social memory is patchy. And we have no wish to hand strategic thinking to a small council for everyone else to receive. So we need practical ways of working with many actors who each have their own agency, goals and style.

What if we talked about strategy the way fans talk about football?

Most of us think about strategy in some form, but we rarely make the time to talk it through together, and even more rarely in a way that leads to concrete next steps. Organisers could learn something here from football fans. Supporters argue endlessly about formations, managers’ choices, the playing styles of different clubs and the motivations of individual players. A feel for the game gets built through that shared talk.

We need ways of talking about our movements that are catchy and enjoyable enough that strategic thinking becomes intuitive. This is not ideological hair splitting. Any serious revolutionary needs some relationship to sensible strategic practice, and for anarchists that means many of us taking on the work consciously. Sharing the mental load of thinking about the whole is how we avoid concentrating that power in coordinating bodies. Not everyone needs to do it, but enough people should that we grow a culture of strategic learning that improves with time.

From the sparrow to the forest, and back again

Social movement ecology asks you to see a movement the way you might see a forest: trees, foxes, fungi and birds, each shaping the whole. It pulls your attention outwards. What does my project do, and what role does it play in the wider picture? How does a sparrow help a forest grow?

It also lets you turn the question around. What does a forest need in order to be inviting to sparrows? Imagine a movement that organises mostly through alternative music venues and struggles to reach anyone outside that scene. It might want to cultivate a practice of people heading out to other places and scattering the movement’s seeds there, as a sparrow might. How do you get that going when the venues share no budget, no formal structure, and certainly no paid organisers?

The exact metaphor matters less than having one. Football works for some people, strategy games for others. But ecology is a strong contender: it is familiar and memorable, and it holds competition, conflict and mutual aid all at once, within an ecosystem and between ecosystems, as with swamp and grassland. It moves us away from internal perfectionism and competing over the correct opinion, and equally from the abstract visions of the hobby strategist, towards concrete things we can work on. Without having to agree with anyone around us, we can understand our role in a broader movement and how much we depend on others.

The shared pond everyone fishes from

Once you are looking at the whole, you can ask what common goods and means we share. What skills do active people hold? Which funds, spaces and institutions can we reach? How do we pass on what we have learned? How do new people find us?

That last question is vital to any movement and easy to take for granted. A collective looking for the one perfect extra member to make its project run smoothly has little direct reason to invest in widening the pool that every anarchist project recruits from. But every project is looking for those couple of extra people to take the work to the next level. A fuller pond helps everyone find the right comrade, yet the pond belongs to no one in particular. This is a classic collective action problem. An ecological view makes it much easier to explain why this shared work matters, and why it so often goes undone.

Perhaps this points to something we could name more directly. Do we need left pipelines: routes that carry people from first curiosity to lasting involvement, which no single group owns but which every group depends on?

Four ideas that were waiting for a framework

Several concepts that came out of my own organising in the Netherlands connect directly to this perspective, though I developed them before I had an ecological frame to hold them together.

Revolutionaire veelheid, or revolutionary multitude, is about the strength that comes from diversity. Every movement is made of many actors, and whatever we do, we do within that wider field. Each project is limited in whom it can reach and which tactics it can use, and choosing your scope opens space for others to do what you have chosen not to. A movement with many faces and many strategic centres is less predictable and more resilient: as repression adapts, different parts can rise and recede. This is no argument for keeping groups small, but for building the multitude into your strategy and helping others stand up alongside you.

Intentionaliteit, or intentionality, is the personal counterpart. It asks what your project is adding and what it makes possible for others. Caught in constant reaction to one disaster, atrocity or wave of repression after another, it is easy to lose sight of what we are trying to achieve, and of whether our force is capable of achieving it. In a decentralised movement, the line between revolutionary goals and what we do this week is hard to draw. An intermediate question, what influence can my project have on the movement around it, helps make sense of small choices about time and energy. Intentionality also means building in slack: assume everything takes longer than you expect, and set aside time for reflection and for checking in with the people you work with. If you have no time for the overhead, you have no time for the project. Through a lens of intentionality we look at strategising as a verb, an action that takes time, effort and contact with your surroundings, rather than a static plan that everyone needs to buy into.

Multitude is the structural argument and intentionality the personal one; the aim was for them to meet in the middle. The next two ideas describe functions a movement needs fulfilled. Without a broader framework, their reception was muted, as if they sank in a sea of urgent, immediate action with nothing to keep them afloat.

Mycelium names how well a movement generates and nurtures new parts of itself, much as fungal networks carry nutrients between the plants within their reach. The Vrije Bond, as a formal membership federation, can offer what an informal scene struggles to: money, networks, a welcoming entry point, and a way of staying connected through life’s quiet periods. Seeing this generative capacity clearly lets us strengthen it, and shows the value of a formal federation within a mostly informal movement.

Draaideur, the revolving door, concerns the point where people already want to get involved. This is often where the holes are. Someone wants to act but finds nothing local, or cannot find a project that fits their situation or style, or needs to wait until the thing they would join has been built. Clearing house projects help here: they receive new people, show them around, point them onwards, and keep them connected in the meantime. In the Netherlands this role was long played by squatted social centres. Those now survive mainly in the largest cities, and the culture industry offers alternatives everywhere, so their pull has weakened. The function has to be carried by something else, and the Vrije Bond can take on more of it, though it is not the only organisation that could.

Wolves at the edge of the pasture

To bring this into everyday use, I would argue for more ecology, not less: biological metaphors for types of projects and how they combine. Here is an early experiment.

Picture a movement as a young forest beside a cattle pasture. In it is Group X, an effective propaganda collective whose videos and posters travel as far as possible. It is a healthy tree flooding the surrounding land with seeds and pollen, so that shoots spring up all around. It also shelters other collectives, attracting curious people and sharing its platform.

The pasture is capitalism. Grazing land is sometimes called green concrete. It is technically an ecosystem too, but it supports almost nothing except what can be sold, and survives only by importing fertiliser on a huge scale. Being describable as an ecology does not put it on equal footing with a forest. Most pasture was once forest, and it is kept from becoming forest again by mowing, poisoning and landscaping, and by the cattle grazing down every young shoot.

More militant groups, perhaps squatters, might be the wolves. They create danger zones at the forest’s edge where the cattle dare not graze. There the shoots, people who first met anarchism through the propaganda collective, can grow into saplings: active anarchists connected to the movement. Without the tree, no forest spreads. Without the wolves, the young trees struggle to take root.

A picture like this opens up better conversations. Does the propaganda collective see itself as the tree spreading anarchism into new ground, or more as a medium for internal discussion? Whom does it reach, and what support would help? How might the squatted social centres better draw in the people the collective reaches? And how could the growth they generate together seed further projects? A shared, slightly playful language lowers the threshold for strategic coordination, and helps us see the connectedness of our struggles despite diversity and division.

Strategy as an everyday conversation

This way of seeing has the most to offer when it becomes part of how we talk every day. Woven into introductory material, zines and ordinary discussion, it could help people see how a small action of theirs can help a movement correct for a structural weakness.

It is hard to move from a personal view to a movement wide one. As you look out through your own two eyes at the two hands that paint banners, wash dishes, lock arms and type up minutes, the wider movement can seem very far away. Seeing each recurring activity as part of a social ecology makes it easier to sense what it adds. You might realise: “My social media page introduces bored dads who like knitting to anarchist media and groups, so other parts of our movement can try to draw them in and organise with those who are willing.”

None of this will instantly solve our problems or draw in the masses (™). Over time, though, the habit of talking about the ecology around us can shift our attention towards the concrete, practical thinking we need to coordinate a diverse movement and fight fascism.

Beyond the individual and the collective

There is an ideological opportunity here too, against the liberalism all of us absorb growing up under capitalism.

An accessible social movement ecology could make tangible the largely academic arguments against the liberal notion of “the individual” and its twin, “the collective”. It shows how a person moves every day through many different groupings, shaping them and being shaped by them, and why neither a monolithic collective nor an isolated individual makes much sense as a practical concept. In doing so we might prise the idea of community out of conservative hands, freedom out of liberal ones, and coordination out of communist ones.

Kropotkin is still right.

The value of ecological perspectives lies in shifting our attention from the content of our opinions to practical action, to relationships and how they develop, and so to more effective struggle. They make strategy easier to talk about. And woven into solid radical theory, they might even help us fight the liberal sitting at the back of all our heads.