This work was painted in oil on canvas. It depicts Piotr Kropotkin, who lived from 1842-1921. As a scientist, he published Mutual Aid: a Factor in Evolution. As a philosopher, his work informed the development of anarchism. Below is a pencil sketch I did as preliminary work for the portrait.
Kropotkin's anarchism didn't involve ungoverned society. Rather, it envisioned a world of self-governed communities working together in federations serving common interests. A world where power was decentralized and individuals could enjoy the freedom each of us is naturally endowed with. Modern democracy aspires to protect this freedom, but in practice it rarely lives up to this ideal. In the US, which is technically a constitutional federal republic and not a democracy, our natural freedom is continually under attack by the corporate oligarchy and entrenched beaurocracy.
Taking the long view, Kropotkin's ideas appeared as a rational response to urbanization and industrialization in an era when the church and aristocracies were beginning to cede power to marketplace actors. In this sense, his political ideas may be somewhat dated. Yet the basic thrust of his work, that cooperation produces better systems than competition or conflict, remains as relevant today as it was two hundred years ago.
Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last summer, my city was engulfed in literal anarchy. After a police station was burned down by an angry mob, the cops stopped patrolling neighborhoods altogether and crime spiked. At the same time, neighbors who had never met before started getting to know each other. Neighborhood groups formed to patrol the streets and clean up after the roving packs of vandals plaguing the city. This was the kind of organic response to a crisis that shows how useful Kropotkin's ideas about self-governance could be if put into practice.
Of course, an actual police department, accountable to the community it serves, is a much better way of dealing with crime than ad hoc neighborhood patrols. But this might not be so true if the ad hoc situation had persisted for years or decades. Self-governance isn't a turnkey solution to a power vaccuum. Decentralized power is much more complex than centralized power. Effective decentralized power takes time to develop.
At a time when corporate policies control society to the same extent that traditional government does, it's challenging to picture what a truly self-governed community might actually look like. And in a moment where sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination are structurally programmed into societal power structures, some may rightly fear power decentralization due to the possibility that localized bigwigs could amplify such discrimination in localized settings. But this doesn't mean that power decentralization is bad. It means that establishing it would necessitate ensuring that assholes can't accrue power.
I'm not sure what Kropotkin would say about the US in 2021. And I'm not aware of a single contemporary anarchist who could be rightly considered Kropotkin's 21st Century counterpart. We've got window smashers and academics, tree sitters and long-winded bloggers. But, on the whole, sensible anarchism seems to have fallen out of fashion. Given our state of technological advancement, this may be unsurprising. Perhaps the decentralized crypto economy now coming into being will bring with it something as compelling today as Kropotkin's anarchism was in his era.