I just edited my Facebook profile so the political views section reads anarcho-socialist. Which is a silly thing to bother specifying on a Facebook profile, but what the hell? I also updated my religious views section to read chicago bears. I am large; I contain silly multitudes.

I used to write extensively on the notion that the personal is political. If you saw me on stage between 2004-2006, that was probably the main theme of my show. It’s true, of course- what else would it be? The point of politics is to realize your vision of a finer world. There are grand discrepencies as to what that might be, but in the end, that’s the point. If you want the world to be better, then you want better things for the people in it. And if that’s what you want, then your goal, ultimately, is personal.

The flipside to this idea is that the political is personal. It works both ways- the grand ideas stem from a desire for a better world, and the worlds we inhabit shape our political views.

You have to smirk when you say anarcho-socialist, because it just sounds goofy. Doesn’t it? But that’s only when you view the political as theoretical- just like theories fall apart when put into practice, practical applications lose their shine when you try to extrapolate theories from them.

In Chicago, two years ago, I belonged to an anarchist collective. No one involved would have ever thought about it in those terms. Ever. Ever-ever. It was small- at any given time, maybe a half-dozen of us. Of those, I was the only one who hadn’t voted for George Bush in 2004.

I’ve seen a lot of anarchist collectives in my time. Some of them are functional and made up of dedicated people devoted to living their theory and some of them are not; some of them are full of people who in-fight and back-bite even when their politics tell them that it’s against the point. For every 1919 Hemphill or Iron Rail Collective that functions because a small group of people really believe in what they’re doing and understand the hard work involved, there are countless well-intentioned community spaces I’ve seen throughout America that lasted three months and ended in broken friendships. I don’t want to play my collective is better than yours, but it was exceptionally functional.

It worked mostly because there were no politics involved. It was me and Bush-voting Midwestern white men with mustaches and their radios set to 560 AM radio. If we ever got on the subject of politics, we mostly just kept our mouths shut while the others talked so as to not disturb the peace.

We were a moving company, sort of. Like I said- more of a collective, really. We had a very specific agenda and accomplished it collectively. Each of us- me, Dave, Bob, Jeff, sometimes Christian and Omar- placed ads on Craigslist offering our services as movers. We set the same rates, which worked out pretty well- one of us could have dropped it by 20% and grabbed some extra work, but we found that the nature of the work meant that cooperation was more efficient than competition. Since many moving jobs require more than one person, we would frequently call each other up to collaborate on bigger moves. Dave was the best at advertising and maintaining a reference list, so he probably got the most work, but we all traded jobs with one another. If I found myself double-booked on a Saturday, I could call Bob or Jeff or Dave and ask them to take one off my hands. Since we all kept the same rates, the customer hardly even noticed. And whenever a job required an extra person, the rate just doubled. Which meant that I got paid the same for a job that Dave booked or one that I had taken under my own name. This meant that the incentive was exactly the same to do as good a job for one of Dave’s customers as one of mine.

There had been other people with Craigslist moving companies that I had worked with from time to time. It’s not a hard business to get into- basically you just need to be able to lift things and the ability to rent a U-Haul. And you can find people to work for you at any rate- if you charge twenty-five dollars an hour per worker, you can find someone to do the job for fifteen and pocket the extra ten. During the summer, when there’s forty or fifty hours of work a week available to anyone who wants it, you can make an extra five hundred dollars a week and still pay someone three times the minimum wage. But the people who pocketed a portion of the helper’s rate rarely stayed in the business long. I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that it’s hard to find good help in a hierarchical system- when one person is making more money than another for more or less the same amount of labor, people start to resent it. Any of us could have made a little bit of extra money on small jobs by hiring outside our circle- when you post an ad offering to pay two digits an hour for labor, you get about forty replies for each hour the ad’s online. But we didn’t. Not because we all loved each other, but because it was inefficient. Competing with one another meant that we did a poorer job for our customers, got less work, and made less money. Cooperating meant that I made enough money for Kat to take the summer off and I still only had to work twenty hours a week.

And I get that anarcho-socialism (those italics are the smirk) doesn’t work when it’s implemented with an iron fist. But that’s ideology. None of us ever thought in terms anarchy and socialism was a dirty word among most of the people involved. In practice, things work much differently.