I’d like to respond to an article @George shared on the UK group Whatsapp, and how it synchronises with my weekend’s experience in Stroud, in the UK.
Having just come back from the Stroud Festival of Commoning, my head still humming with the strange electricity of it. The halls, the side streets, the conversations spilling into cafés—it felt like stepping into a parallel country that already exists but hasn’t yet declared itself.
Both my daughter and I noticed a distinct difference in the social interactions, even compared to other “intentional” or human-development-friendly spaces. Eye contact was longer, smiles more genuine, listening seemed more attentive and curious. It was an environment where everyone seemed highly engaged, agentic, not an audience in the old sense of the word. A real yet undifferentiated potentiality of friendship seemed to hum and spark in the spaces between us.
I met Carne Ross — The Accidental Anarchist himself — whose presence is still a riveting paradox to me: once inside the machinery of statecraft, now carrying the scar of its emptiness, speaking with a kind of quiet urgency that made you lean closer. And Indy Johar, a great presence and resonant voice, who spoke like an architect of the invisible—mapping infrastructures of relation and repair, drawing visions not of concrete but of trust, institutions as metabolism. He seemed to be speaking to a post-racial way of being, of transcending identity, to a realisation of our unity, and the illusion of separation.
Gem Bendall shook and rattled us with political triggers of language and meaning, and took great risk in the potential for misunderstanding. We had to wrestle with the deep currents that might flow beneath the surface narratives of our identity and rights. The room buzzed with dialogue after his presentation.
I greatly improved on my naive understanding of Anarchy, which was a version of nihilistic lawlessness that did not sit well with me at all. Instead, particularly as the Anarchy of the Commons, and it appears to offer an alternative to the damaging triad of conflict between the oscillating State, which wobbles iteratively towards excessive control of either the Left or the Right, and the Markets, that are incapable of factoring human and ecological thriving into their models.
It was against this backdrop that I just read the article George’s share, the article about “soft secession” in the U.S.—blue states war-gaming their survival against federal transgressions. Stockpiling, refusing, building parallel systems. Call it federalism, call it resistance—but what I saw in Stroud, and what I now see in those governors’ encrypted calls, is something deeper: commons anarchy taking root.
Carne’s refrain still echoes: “Government is only as strong as our obedience.” If governors in California or Illinois simply refuse to cooperate—if they withhold databases, highways, airspace—federal power evaporates like smoke. This isn’t rebellion, it’s disinvestment. It’s the quiet, potent act of saying no consent.
And Indy’s reminder: power isn’t only to be opposed; it must be re-patterned, metabolised into infrastructures that actually sustain life. It’s the moves we learn in Aikido. That’s what Stroud was alive with—people sketching out food commons, energy commons, land trusts, new architectures for care. It struck me: what’s happening in the U.S. isn’t only “soft secession.” It’s the old Leviathan (thanks Alexander Beiner) cracking open so the commons can breathe again.
Reading about Massachusetts refusing deportation orders, or Oregon stockpiling medicine, I felt less fear of fragmentation and more recognition: this is what Carne calls anarchism in practice—not chaos, but ordinary people and local institutions stepping up to govern themselves, because the centre no longer can. It’s already happening here too, in the UK, just less visible. Councils of consent are coalescing in practice, under the radar, if not yet in name.
The Second Renaissance lens feels vital here, as a full movement resistance without culture, without myth, without art is brittle. A lawsuit may win today, but it might be in the songs, the rituals, the public grief circles and ceremony, and the maps of care that hold people in the long rupture. Blue states are building legal scaffolds, yes—but they will need cultural scaffolds too, otherwise it’s just technical survival, not human thriving.
We need to outgrow our stories and reliance on the State, of Left/Right polarities as if they were the only options available to us. We need to escape the insanity of the Market led by profit and efficiency instead of value and resilience. We need to re-centre in the lived realities of Earthlings.
I left Stroud believing more deeply than ever: the question is not whether the state or the market should dominate, but how we put them back in their place—state as scaffold, market as servant, councils of consent as living sovereign. Carne showed the courage of refusal. Indy showed the architectures of renewal. Stroud showed the joy of commoning.
I’m exploring a structure where the State, the Market, and the Commons are reset, and rebalanced in right relationship with each other—and with LIFE ITSELF, the true Common Bond, as the central nexus.
Thank you George for sharing. It reveals that across the ocean, the cracks are widening—the same cracks we feel here. What grows through them is up to us.
