If ever the community of anarchists (if that isn’t too much of a contradiction in terms) were to choose a mode of transportation as a symbol of their movement, I propose it should be the bicycle. Private cars require personal ownership, rentals wouldn’t get very far unless the driver followed all the rules of the road, whether they ‘needed’ to be followed or not. Public transportation would out completely because, of course, that would make one dependent upon a state that should not exist. Taking a cab everywhere might be okay.
Going by foot would also be a strong candidate because it is even more independent than cycling, but much more limited in terms of speed, distance and carrying capacity. The bike, by contrast, is fast and versatile, highly adaptable, as well as being cheap, easy to learn how to maintain pretty much by oneself (the simpler bikes, anyway), and much easier to share among people than a pair of shoes might be. A bike allows a person to go anywhere, anytime, with just about anything smaller than a couch, traits that would suit the anarchist’s life to a tee.
Just about the only way in which walking holds a clear advantage to the anarchist’s way of thinking would be that it’s nearly impossible to hurt someone accidentally while walking. Plowing into someone on a bike could cause serious injury, but that isn’t terribly likely if the cyclist is paying at least a modicum of attention to surroundings, and the cyclist would likely get hurt as well. And compared to other modes of transportation, a bike/anything accident wouldn’t cause anywhere near the damage that would result if the bike were instead, a car or scooter or motorcycle.
Indeed, the bike might already be the anarchist’s unofficial transportation mode already, based on people I sometimes see riding however they want. The typical picture is that of a rider dressed in somber colors, wearing a hip cap (no helmet). They look like barristas from Starbucks, and perhaps they are (Starbucks, that hotbed of Anarchy!) They ride a single speed bicycle* with one tight pant leg rolled up, and use rat trap pedals and not those capitalist things that require special shoes. They rarely speak or make eye contact as they blow stop signs or ride the wrong way up busy one-way streets, or weave around pedestrians on sidewalks at speeds normally reserved for riding in the street. Philosophically, they are above having to justify themselves, evolved to the point where the rightness of their action should speak for itself, but not of course to proles who are still stuck doing what society tells them to.
* Many would expect me to write ‘fixed-gear bicycle’ here but take a closer look; most of those people are freewheeling. Fixed gears take a lot of strength and practice so you don’t hurt yourself, and in fact you actually see very few of them on the road; they’re too much work for the everyday anarchist.
Or put it another way; I am willing to bet that when cyclists ride however they wish on roads or sidewalks or across lawns, regardless of the inconvenience or danger they pose to the traffic conditions around them, they justify their behavior by invoking the tenets of Anarchy. Whether or not they are actual anarchists or are even aware of these tenets is irrelevant; their rationale is that in doing whatever they want, they are not hurting anyone and so should be left to their own devices.
For the sake of this post, I’m going to overlook the fatal flaws in the philosophy of Anarchy itself, such as the fact that it has only ever worked on a relatively small scale among people with very similar positions in society, and then not for very long (see the Jura Federation). I’m also going to ignore the circular reasoning of Anarchy (you’d see things my way if only you saw them my way), and that anarchist’s believe they are held back from creating utopia by ‘the man,’ when in fact they’re held back by other people who prefer ‘the man’ to Anarchy.
And I’m going to forget that in a stateless society there would be no one to go after car drivers who did horrible damage to a cyclist and then simply drove away. (In a genuinely anarchist society, supposedly, that would never happen, but it’s a crazy assumption anyway. In any case, let’s just let that one go.)
Instead, I’m going to argue that as a cyclist, s/he who doesn’t follow the rules of the road is in fact a bad anarchist, and that to be a good anarchist you have to obey traffic laws.
Unless Anarchy and chaos are the same thing (and they’re not), there must be some level of general understanding of how to conduct oneself in society; principal among them being not to cause harm to others. I propose that traffic safety laws are among the most data-driven, politically value-free laws enacted. Their main (and nearly sole) aim is to reduce injury and death in traffic. They are, then, precisely the kinds of ‘general understandings’ anarchistic societies would likely adopt. Even under Anarchy, that a specific person can perform some feat safely in public is less important than whether or not any person could perform it safely. Translation: just because you’re comfortable blowing stop signs at speed doesn’t mean you should, and if you lived under the Jura Federation you’d get in trouble for it.
What’s more, whether or not your actions could lead to causing harm to another is purely incidental. What counts when it comes to safety, even to an anarchist, is the likelihood that a given act will cause harm. Anarchists may feel they are above a lot of things, but they aren’t above the odds, and anarchistic societies that have formed in the past continued to expect members to act safely when the likelihood of injury was great; like the society we live in, they didn’t wait around for the injury to happen and then assess blame, they tried to stop the injury before it took place.
As the confirmed anarchist flies through trafficked spaces, self-assured of not causing harm, how can they be sure they are not impairing the rights of others? Do they stop and ask? I’ve yet to see it. The truth is that they cause inconvenience to others far more than they care to admit. It’s a selfish act, not a philosophical position.
Still, anarchists hate laws that were made for them by someone else. To which I reply: You’re in luck! I think it’s safe to say that no law aimed at making cycling better came from any group other than cyclist organizations. Who else would advocate for them but us? They’re our laws!
It may simply be a matter, then, of trading the principle for the moment: far better to get where a person is going quickly and feel bad later for how they accomplished it. In Catholicism, the most non-anarchistic faith there is, that’s called Confession. I would hope a true anarchist would create a bit more distance from such an established institution as that.
Ignoring traffic laws with the Anarchy defense, more than anything else, undermines Anarchy itself. How could a society seriously consider Anarchy with examples like its cycling faithful? Maybe Anarchy should adopt the bicycle as it’s symbolic mode of transportation. Maybe then anarchists would behave like they belonged to something.
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