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Introduction and Synopsis
This week marks the end of HBO’s limited documentary, The Anarchists. This episode is the culmination of everything that has transpired over the course of the six years that Tod Schramke followed Jeff Berwick and the Anrchapulco community. The finale follows the three subjects we began with, Berwick, the Freemans, and Lily Forester as well as how they are dealing with the aftermath that was Anarchapulco.
Unfortunately, as was the case with most of this series, this episode was yet another disappointment as nothing was done to further explore anarchism or this particular subset of anarchist theory and praxis, anarcho-capitalism. What began as an embarrassingly bad attempt at research and exploration of these theories and set of praxis morphed into a human interest piece that is ultimately, a shameful exploitation of broken people and their personal tragedies which does nothing to further any kind of anarchist cause.
A Shameless Exploitation
I feel it is only appropriate to begin where we had six weeks ago with the grand grifter himself, Jeff Berwick. For those of us who have been following the documentary and who dug into Berwick’s past a bit since The Anarchists premiered, we know him for what he is: a cutthroat grifter and narcissist that truly believes in what he is selling. The last we saw of Berwick, he had ostracized Lily Forester and John Galton from the conference after they had founded Anarchoforko and had effectively alienated Nathan Freeman from the conference and had the gall to boast about how relaxed he was with this new leadership at the helm despite many of the attendees calling for his return.
Moving into the Freeman’s fate post-Anarchapulco, let’s shift our attention to Nathan, who, much like Berwick, had no reservations about anarcho-capitalism. He and his family were all in and together, they enthusiastically built the Anarchapulco community. Nathan’s fall from grace is difficult to pinpoint since Berwick’s only reason for pushing him out was that Nathan began to struggle with organizing and maintaining the event on such a large scale. Once pushed out from the conference, Nathan’s decline escalated at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, according to his wife, Lisa Freeman, he became an alcoholic and passed away from the complications of the disease.
Berwick, being partners with Nathan till his expulsion from Acapulco, did not reconnect with Lisa to offer his condolences or support upon hearing the news of Nathan’s death. Instead, Berwick reflects on Nathan’s organizing, commends him on camera and said the reason they did not reach to to Lisa is because he had thought that she had hated him. He displays no signs of grief at the loss of his former partner or sympathy for his family and to drive the tragedy of Nathan’s death further. One of the final scenes that Schramke uses to conclude the Freeman’s arc includes the Nathan’s oldest children reflecting on their father’s death and their bitter grief as his eldest daughter asks why their father had not stopped drinking when he had promised to.
Outside of the crumbling Anarchapulco community after Nathan’s death, I began to notice that Schramke has made a habit out of exploiting these kinds of tragedies. His continued negligence in terms of noting how tragedy, trauma, and mental illness affect the subjects of his documentary has been present throughout the documentary. This same negligence was most explicit with his portrayal of Paul Propert who was villainized without properly acknowledging how his PTSD turned him into the man he became. Unfortunately, Shramke continues to use this method to drive his documentary forward.
The shift from a poor exploration of anarchism to a human interest piece but at the cost of all the nuance is to accompany it, as evinced by Paul’s villainization and Nathan’s martyrdom, but it doesn’t end here. Schramke continues to use this method with Lily after John’s death where it she reveals recounts some of her most painful moments with John. While I am will not excuse John for his mistreatment of Lily or how any of Schramke’s subjects acted and treated others, HBO and Schramke completely ignore how mental illness and trauma affect individuals. At some point, a line must be drawn — personal tragedies cannot be exploited without properly acknowledging how these people were shaped and how it informs their actions and decisions.
Ancaps Don’t Understand Anarchy: Final Thoughts on The Anarchists
The final nail in The Anarchists’ coffin as a failed documentary on anarchism comes with Lily’s return to Acapulco where she explains how hard it is to be an anarchist and to be free in a society that is ultimately unfree. For Forester, Berwick, and other ancaps, their version of anarchism is a kind of Hobbesian individualism, where every man and women stands alone in their fight for survival. This sentiment is echoed at every turn of the series when one of the subjects of the documentary falls on hard times and is ostracized from the community. We saw this with the rise and fall of Bitcoin at the conference, with John’s murder and very few people had reached out to help her in her most desperate hour. This should come as no surprise given that anarcho-capitalism is founded upon the capitalist idea of the rugged individual rising to the top of the food chain through sheer will and the exploitation of weaker individuals along with the resources around them.
Readers, if you would like to see a true anarchists society or something that comes close to it, look to Revolutionary Catalonia, or Ukraine under the command of Nestor Makhno, or the ongoing radical democratic confederalist revolution in North and East Syria that is currently being threatened by an impending invasion by Turkey, or any other contemporary revolutionary movements founded upon mutual aid, dual power, and horizontal leadership.
What HBO and Schramke have provided is the exact opposite of anarchy. It is a shameful exploitation of broken people and their personal tragedies. At The Anarchists’ core ideology of anarcho-capitalism is its proginator, Murray Rothbard, an economist, far-right extremist, sexist, and white supremacist among other things. HBO and Blumhouse should be ashamed to have produced a documentary which touts this ideology and its founder as an authentic form of anarchism and resistance to the state. The research provided on anarchism and even anarcho-capitalism was pathetic. In this day and age with the tide of fascism and authoritarianism lurching forward, this documentary does nothing to further the cause of those who are truly resisting the state and all its authoritarian impositions.
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