LEAVING SOCIETY

Among all the suffering and carnage the pandemic has wreaked, it has also created fertile ground for experiments in anarchism.

In America, the Black Lives Matter movement to defund the police led to one neighbourhood in Seattle declaring itself the ‘Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone’ (CHAZ) - a cop-free mini-republic, with a food bank, street cinema, public lectures, and dancing in the streets. For a week, this little neighbourhood that decided to take itself ‘off-grid’ attracted the media attention of the world. Could it survive?

Alas, the experiment in self-government didn’t last long. Within a week, a spate of shootings made the citizens of CHAZ realise they depended on state structures like hospitals. It is often like this with experiments in anarchism. They are often better