The Anarchist Case for Polyamory

Questioning power doesn’t immediately multiply your number of partners, so what’s the connection, via “Relationship Anarchy”, between Anarchism and Polyamory?

Take most-cited-living-scholar and coolest-cognitive-scientist Chomsky’s big-tent definition of Anarchism as a “tendency in human thought to question power, domination, hierarchy, and submission”. (Something like that.) Taken this way, anarchism is not a position, but a method of questioning, not unlike the philosophical skepticism of Pyrrho or of Socrates, and originally inspired by Jesus, which also drives many a conversion from theism to atheism, and a questioning of other social institutions such as the church, establishment science, state misogyny, homophobia and institutionalized racism, and internalized classism, you name it.

(Taken this way if skepticism became the dominant power the supposed self-refutation of skepticism would have more meaningful political force.)

These, my friends, are The Anarchisms, and they were scattered to the corners of the earth so as to conquer by dividing them. I call it ‘methodological anarchism’ when name-dropping Chomsky is not illuminating and when emphasizing the common method behind the good parts of various movements for social justice is at issue.

And what are the good parts? Anarchism itself, and democracy, have epistemic arguments on their behalf — that is, it’s possible to construe this collective project for our mutual liberation and recognition as still part of a larger quest for The Truth which, even more so than with money, cannot be possessed by an individual: if you held all the bitcoin on earth you might not find a buyer, and if you held all the knowledge you would be the only person. [Well a person is a network, too, so that to own them is to destroy them.]

So what’s the argument? If this is anarchism and it suffuses every question, what’s its special relevance to sex and procreation? Well, you may have noticed people get controlling in sexual relationships, and that our dominant form of politics is authoritarian and maintained by people being controlling, which they learn from the sexual relationships which produce them as offspring.

So, since some relationships, like some countries, are more controlling than others, a natural question is: how do I control my partner the absolute minimum theoretically possible, and never deviate from that unless I can justify it in explicit verbal terms? This is what it would mean to be principled in your anarchism — to demand a verbal appeal to a principle discussed by the light of day which somehow justifies anything other than the least controlling approach to sex you can imagine. Notice, this has nothing to do with pursuing an additional partner or not.

(Therein lies the difference in the game you’re necessarily playing when you’re poly with one partner and when you’re mono with one partner — you’re mono to the extent you take steps for the purpose of reducing your partners’ chances of connection, or steps which have that effect other than via improving connections.)

So, while there’s no direct connection, ask yourself: if everyone were already taking the least controlling approach to sex they could imagine, what would be the average number of simultaneous or lifelong partners? To the extent that this number (remember, use your own estimate) is higher than the current reality, you’ve just proven to yourself the existence of a certain amount of controlling behavior, or #RelationalAggression, but nothing about where it lies among the relationships you’ll encounter and participate in out there in the world. This pattern of inference is necessary if we’re going to root out literally any kind of under-reported, and especially under-recognized, oppression. And when you consider something like ‘structural stockholm syndrome’ you may realize that under-recognition is the norm.

This is the ‘Dark Matter’ of Social Science: no one knows how to talk about it or where it lies, but we’re certain it exists. Not just, of course, the case of polyphobia, but all forms of subconscious, unconscious, under-reported, or otherwise covert oppression.