The Anarchy of Oligarchy
Why we need an Anarchy of Ecology
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
America’s collective imagination is once again being held hostage by the recent release of more than 20,000 emails from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, now the most infamous pedophile in modern history. These files expose the depth and depravity of a global elite whose networks Epstein navigated with ease: sex trafficking young girls, rubbing diplomatic elbows with world leaders, investing in eugenics-like scientific projects. His life illuminates the moral rot embedded in the heart of oligarchy, a world with two separate systems of rule, one for the 1% and another for everyone else. This is capitalism at its most extreme: a global system I call the Anarchy of Oligarchy.
Global governance, at its core, is anarchy. As one ascends the pyramid of power, one eventually reaches a stratum where world leaders and oligarchs operate without any overarching authority. Everything at this level is voluntary, moderated only by the uneven power relationships between states. International institutions that attempt cohesion remain subject to the whims of those same leaders, whose priorities shift with elections or personal ambitions. Ultimately, no cosmic or structural force compels global elites to cooperate.
Hierarchy itself does not exist in nature; it is an invention that emerged only with the development of complex human cognition and society. Once created, hierarchy produced contradictions that justified regimes of oppression across countless populations. When we study global governance through the lens of this root contradiction, we see the same hierarchical tentacles shaping the environments that produced the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world.
Many people witness Epstein’s depravity and accept it as proof that evil is inherent to nature, forgetting that nature is itself distorted by hierarchy’s contradictions. The dialectic of first nature and second nature, and the tension between them, generates social absurdities that defy our ethical intuitions. Without a general theory of power that describes hierarchy across all dimensions of society, Epstein’s evil appears banal. But once we understand hierarchy as the language of the ruling class, that banality becomes a rationality — one encoded into global capitalism itself.
This is the Anarchy of Oligarchy, the world being offered to us by the billionaire class. Against it, we must fight for an Anarchy of Ecology, “a world where many worlds fit,” a world rooted in unity-in-diversity rather than extreme individualism and homogeneity. Only such a world can counter the conditions that enable the oligarch’s power, wealth, and depravities.
I. The Resilience of Grassroots
“After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”
— Zohran Mamdani
The Anarchy of Oligarchy functions through top-down power accumulation; wealth concentrating upward, and power supposedly trickling downward. To build an Anarchy of Ecology, we must reverse this flow. Power must emerge from below, from grassroots movements rooted in ecological principles.
The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City offers a rare glimpse of such grassroots vitality. His campaign was grounded in listening, turning the act of listening into the campaign itself. Although his rise partly emerged from DSA networks and prior municipal experience, his success depended on transforming the everyday struggles of ordinary people into a unified political force.
Mamdani’s victory has captured the public imagination because it represents the other half of the dialectic. Amid intensifying authoritarianism, where hierarchy narrows the boundaries of freedom, Mamdani’s campaign embodied a widening of those boundaries. His identity and politics generate contradictions that confound the ruling class, whose attempts to pigeonhole him often appear desperate.
Yet Mamdani did not rise in isolation. Across the world, young people are toppling governments, Indigenous movements are fighting ecological catastrophe, and socialism is reemerging in the imperial core. His victory is a flashpoint within a broader global momentum, one that carries enormous implications for confronting fascism.
Grassroots movements may appear chaotic or ineffective, but their decentralization gives them resilience. Movements built through unity-in-diversity endure contradictions better than hierarchical organizations ever could.
When Mamdani speaks of dismantling the conditions that empower authoritarians, he points toward a holistic theory of political emergence. New political forms arise from prior conditions. If we want a just society, we must cultivate the conditions from which it can emerge, an economics of anti-fascism.
II. Cities as Webs of Becoming
“Everyone’s politics are influenced by their experiences, which are determined by whom and by what they encounter in everyday life. That’s why place makes politics — and ceteris paribus proximity makes progressives.”
— Robin Koerner
Socialists continue to win municipal races across the country, even as the Trump regime deploys militarized repression in many of those same cities. This is no coincidence. Cities possess an evolutionary resonance: their density forces interaction, fosters shared experiences, and creates the conditions for grassroots antifascist movements.
In this sense, the same system capable of producing Donald Trump is also capable of producing Zohran Mamdani.
Cities are not unnatural constructs. They are ecological structures; complex habitats similar to those found across the animal world, built for collective shelter and survival. But cities are also the primary terrain where the dialectic between fascist oligarchy and ecological anarchism now plays out. While MAGA advances its project through raids, repression, and psychological warfare, our task is to build political movements grounded in imagination rather than fear.
Yet capitalism has embedded itself so deeply into our collective unconscious that it now feels cultural and even spiritual. Its zero-sum logic has produced an atomized society of commodified individuals; isolated, vulnerable, and easily manipulated by authoritarian narratives.
To resist, we must repair the threads that bind us. Indigenous Samoan thinkers call this the vā, “the space between things and the invisible thread between people.” Healing the vā means rebuilding community, restoring imagination, and nurturing environments that bring out humanity’s finest qualities.
Let Mamdani’s victory serve not as a historical anomaly but as the beginning of a new history. As Amanda Litman writes in The Nation: “We don’t need one sparkly unicorn to save us. We need an unending stampede of high-spirited horses.”
III. Imagination Is Only for Oligarchs
“The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible.”
— Sun Ra
Hierarchy produces a profound contradiction in the domain of imagination. It constrains the imagination of the oppressed while unleashing the imagination of the elite. The result is a culture defined by the dreams of the powerful; dreams born in ecosystems of domination and extraction, while the oppressed are forced to imagine only survival.
For oligarchs, imagination is boundless precisely because their basic needs are never in question. Freed from existential dread, they can shape worlds around their desires. The same cannot be said of the global oppressed, whose imaginative capacities are redirected toward endurance.
Consider Palestine. Israel’s ruling class frames its settler-colonial project as progress, even as it wages a slow campaign of ethnic cleansing. Yet even under such oppression, the imaginative spark for liberation persists. When Palestinians and allies speak of “Globalizing the Intifada,” they point to the global recognition that local struggles and global struggles interweave, that healing the vā must occur everywhere.
The imagination of the elite is limited by market sensibilities, unable to conceive innovation outside capitalist logic. True innovation must be democratized so that communities themselves shape technological futures in harmony with ecological sensibilities.
Boundless imagination belongs to everyone. Yet people are constantly told to “be realistic” while oligarchs like Trump or Epstein rarely hear the word no. Their imaginations, inflated by wealth and privilege, become delusional worlds of their own making, worlds with real, often destructive consequences.
IV. The Dialectic of Anarchy
Humanity has long chosen the illusion of hierarchy, accepting imagined authority and denying the anarchic nature of the world. Because our experiences have always been shaped by hierarchical institutions, we mistake them for natural. But what appears as hierarchy in nature is merely the unresolved dialectic between first and second nature.
Nature is not inherently brutal or oppressive. Those qualities emerge when nature reflects back through humanity distorted by hierarchy. Human society is self-reflexive nature, and at its core, everything is anarchy.
The Anarchy of Oligarchs is a world where merit is measured by obedience to market logic, where invisible hands govern our fates. The Anarchy of Ecology, by contrast, emerges from material reality and the infinite imagination of nature expressed through humanity. We already possess the capacity for ecological creativity and collective flourishing.
A society that excludes 99% of its population from innovation is a society starving itself of potential. Under oligarchy, a system that emphasizes growth over wellness produces leaders who govern with such prejudice. Under ecological anarchy, possibility flows freely.