Abstract
In the past decade or so, a sizable literature on anarchism has appeared. It has often been attached to the newer movements associated with alternative globalization and with post-modern theoretical currents. This literature is of significant interest for those working within the areas of social and political theory, globalization studies, and social movements. This article critically surveys the literature. It starts by examining the devices used to make the case for a renewed interest in anarchism, and traces the broad lines of historical anarchism. It then moves to explore the affinities between anarchism and the alternative globalization movement, and, at greater length, those between anarchism and contemporary theoretical issues. Critical of some of the post-modern excesses in this literature, and of the too sharp divide between Marxism and anarchism, this reconfigured anarchism is of great relevance. The article closes with some modest suggestions for further exploration in this work.
Introduction
Mikhail Bakunin’s last few years – following his dynamic, productive anarchist phase, running from the mid-1860s to the early 1870s (Shatz, 1990) – were far from happy. In a letter to the Journal de Genève in 1874, Bakunin wrote that he felt ‘neither the strength nor, perhaps, the confidence which are required to go on rolling Sisyphus’s stone against the triumphant forces of reaction … Henceforth I shall trouble no man’s repose; and I ask, in my turn, to be left in peace’ (in Woodcock, 1962: 169), explaining to Elisée Reclus the following year that ‘there is absolutely no revolutionary thought, hope, or passion left among the masses’ (in Dolgoff, 1972: 354). This gloom was materially well founded: the tragic end and reactionary aftermath of the Paris Commune; the acrimony and intrigue between the Bakuninites and the Marxists, culminating in Bakunin’s expulsion from the First International; the split with Carlo Cafiero (who ended his days in madness, obsessed with the idea that he might be consuming more than his fair share of sunshine), amidst charges Bakunin had mismanaged the Italian’s inheritance; the unfortunate entanglement with the nihilist Sergei Nechayev; the participation in the chaotic, doomed Bologna uprising of 1874, possibly in the hope of salvaging something with a heroic death (Joll, 1979; Marshall, 1992; Masters, 1974; Woodcock, 1962). These unhappy final years aside, perhaps it is possible that, at the end of the epic Marx-Bakunin bout, we might be compelled to declare the anarchist the winner. This, at least, could be the implication if we are to take the current publication purchase of anarchism as any sort of scorecard.
In this ‘cottage industry’ (Franks, 2007: 127) of work since the protest events in Seattle at the 1999 World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference, anarchism tends to be viewed as something like the spirit of contemporary anti-capitalism – David Graeber (2011) in al-Jazeera on 30 November 2011, for instance, recently speaking of Occupy Wall Street’s ‘anarchist roots’. Thus, Gordon (2008: 2) talks of a ‘full revival of a global anarchist movement on a scale and on levels of unity and diversity unseen since the 1930s’; Bowen and Purkis (2004: 5) view anarchism as being given a new lease of life by the newest movements (those associated with ‘anti-globalization’), forcing overdue attention to ‘the most idealistic, complicated and contradictory political philosophy to have emerged from the Enlightenment’ (2004b: 213); and Newman (2011b: 314) declares that we are presently at ‘an anarchist moment’. Thus, a host of journals, events, and books – often bridging, or seeking to bridge, an academic-activist divide – have appeared in recent years. 1
Responding to an earlier phase of re-awakened attention to anarchism in the 1960s, a surprised Eric Hobsbawm read the phenomenon as an explicable outcome of the crisis of post-Stalin communism, student discontent, and the then bare revolutionary horizon, uncharitably suggesting that anarchism’s intellectual primitiveness has proven a strength in the face of the rebellions of the late 1960s – ‘an occasion when only the blind chicken was in a position to find the grain of corn’ (1973: 87). Here, Hobsbawm continued an earlier line that had interpreted early Spanish anarchism as categorizable together with a range of other forms of social organization of ‘pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world’ (1963: 2). More impressive in social ambition than, say, social banditry, Spanish anarchism had produced little of intellectual interest beyond ‘hedge-preachers’ and ‘village priests’ and was, all in all, a modern mass millenarian movement, an outcome of modern conditions, but certainly no answer to them – the history of anarchism judged, overall, one of ‘unrelieved failure’ (Hobsbawm, 1963: 83, 92).
This article will return to a number of these issues (the relevance of the movements of the 1960s, Marxian ‘failure’, political and geo-political changes, and questions of class and agency) and to the persistent Marxism-anarchism debate, but what are we to make of this rather impressive revival of interest? In the following essay, this new literature will be explored, beginning with a reflection on the meaning of anarchism and on its major transformations, as a backdrop against which to consider our own ‘anarchist moment’. The article then turns to two affinities that are often appealed to as making anarchism relevant to activists and to academics: an affinity between anarchism and what has been happening ‘on the streets’ within the alternative globalization movement; and an affinity between anarchism and the post-modern thought that has been so influential in the seminar rooms across the human sciences. These affinities, as well as the scope and energy of much of this literature, make anarchism worthy of greater sociological attention. Nevertheless, it will be suggested that this work continues to demonstrate the fruitfulness of emphases more characteristic of the Marxian tradition and the interest of a new round of Marxian-anarchist dialogue in addressing central political and intellectual dilemmas.
Narrating Anarchism – Devices, Unity, and Change
The article begins by considering the ways in which anarchism is narrated, and, first of all, with four common introductory framing devices, openings typical of both popular and academic treatments of anarchism. The first device is definitional, which often serves as a way of heading off the immediate association of anarchy with violent disorder – for instance, in Ward’s (2004) gentle, concise introduction, anarchism as simply contrary to authority, the condition of being without ruler. It will soon be seen that even this apparently straightforward launching point comes into question today among anarchist-leaning intellectuals.
The second device is what Newman (2010: 1) appeals to as the ‘anarchist invariant’. This, again, can function to close down quick, negative assumptions, with the desire for a life without government posited as continually reappearing throughout history (Newman, 2010: 1). Thus, in Peter Marshall’s (1992) mammoth survey, we find anarchist impulses, for example, in Taoism, Buddhism and Greek antiquity. Once more, this device might be found wanting today as at odds with dominant theoretical emphases, because the assertion of ‘anarchist invariance’ appears to have a suspiciously ‘essentialist’ quality. A variant of this device is to insist that anarchism is always already here – as Ward (1988: 14) puts it, like a seed beneath the snow – wherever people are organizing together in ways that are voluntary, functional, temporary, and small.
The third device, a ‘difference device’, has a post-modern taste to it, underscoring plurality, multiplicity, complexity. Thus, readers will often be reminded that we are speaking of many anarchisms, rather than a singular anarchism. This multiplicity is perhaps especially important in the case of a tradition that has so often been associated with extreme individuation – bringing to mind William Godwin’s suggestion that even participating in a musical ensemble might negatively affect creative self-direction.
On this note, Godwin, the last device is an appeal to ‘intellectual credentials’ – partially in contradiction of the notion of anarchist invariance, and also of the frequent anarchist pride in being without a pantheon of professorial gods 2 – to a relatively systematic set of ideas found within a classical canon, a small number of dead, white, male founders – for instance, Godwin (1756–1836), Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), Bakunin (1814–76), and Petr Kropotkin (1842–1921).
Connected to these questions of definitions, locations, differences, and canons is the question of what holds anarchism together as a family of ideas, a coherent set of practices, or a culture? Rejection of the state has been the answer that looms largest here. As Klausen and Martel (2011) note, perhaps, today, this anti-statism seems less compelling, in the face of what many commentators describe as the withering of the state under the force of neo-liberal globalization. That is, one line of argument holds that, at this point in capitalism’s trajectory, some variety of defence of the sovereign state, or, at least, of certain state-sponsored institutions, is the only progressive tactic for those on the left. One possible anarchist response to this is that the state has been rendered completely irrelevant as a tool of even a mildly ameliorative politics and is ever more a simple committee for managing the affairs of the ruling elite, with steeply escalating post-democratic and repressive (surveillance, political policing, incarceration) tendencies everywhere. In some of the contemporary anarchist literature, the state is portrayed as looking, in certain ways, increasingly like it did in the period of anarchism’s 19th century emergence.
These important issues aside, the tendency in recent work has been to consider anarchism’s unity as an intellectual-political formation in a manner that is more wide-ranging than anti-statism. For instance, for Jun (2012: 107), anarchism is, above all, a movement against ‘representationalism’. This problematic notion will be discussed further below. More useful may be Gordon’s (2008) enumeration of three idea clusters to approach anarchism’s stable core: the concept of domination; a set of commitments to direct action and prefigurative politics; and a commitment to diversity and open-endedness, an inclination, that is, to perpetual experimentation. The prevailing emphases attached to these idea clusters – direct action, consensus seeking, grassroots alternatives, decentralization, spontaneity, diversity, flexibility, affinity, a concern with means, liberty, opposition to hierarchy, authority, domination (Epstein, 2001; Gordon, 2008; Grubacic and Graeber, 2004) – provides a helpful snapshot of anarchism as a tradition.
Unsurprisingly, when one examines the ways in which anarchism has played itself out over time, its cycles and sequences, things become more complicated. One way of anchoring anarchism would be to set it against Marxism, and there is compelling material to work from here in Marx’s confrontations with Proudhon, Stirner, and, above all, Bakunin (see, for instance, Thomas, 1980). Yet, despite Bakunin’s expulsion from the First International, the demarcations separating Marxists and anarchists were unclear for a long while (Cole, 1954), with the anarchists – Kropotkin, Landauer, Michel, Malatesta, Reclus, Nieuwenhuis, and others – participating in the Second International between 1889 and their expulsion at the London Congress of 1896, 3 insisting that they too, as socialists, should be involved (Braunthal, 1966; Foster, 1955; Joll, 1966; Woodcock, 1962). Despite the difficulties involved, however, already by this point a number of patterns and tendencies were discernable. One issue here is that of national specificity, because it has been the case that anarchism has flourished in certain quarters and not in others. Early on, Bakunin had particular success in Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, and anarchism was to make its presence felt, at points, in France, Russia, Latin America – Malatesta spent four years in Argentina, something, as Anderson (2005) points out, that would have been unthinkable for Marx or Engels – and to an extent in China and Japan, while it was unable to penetrate significantly into North Western Europe, with the exception of Holland (Hobsbawm, 1973). The most well travelled explanatory route on this issue is a class one – the more extensive industrial working class of Northern Europe, the anarchist appeal to the artisan and the peasant, as well as the attraction the emphasis on individual freedom was to hold for writers and artists, particularly marked in France (Anderson, 2005). So, for instance, the particular strength of anarchism in Spain has been linked to the slow industrialization, authoritarian politics, and intense localism of that country at the time (Hobsbawm, 1973).
A second issue of patterns of anarchism involves three noteworthy tendencies, which crystallized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first and most persistent – the anarchist mainstream, according to Ward (2004), if not the most impressive in mass movement terms – is anarcho-communism. First mentioned in the mid-1870s by Francois Dumarthray, and adopted by the Jura Federation in 1880, anarcho-communism could be viewed as an evolutionary development out of Bakunin’s later collectivist work and that of his close collaborator James Guillaume, the resemblance especially clear in the latter’s ‘On Building the New Social Order’, for example (Dolgoff, 1972; Fleming, 1979; Pengam, 1987). It is most closely associated with Reclus, Malatesta and, particularly, Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread (1972), while, in the author’s memory at least, one of the most attractive and persuasive attempts at popularization was provided somewhat later by Alexander Berkman’s work, What is Communist Anarchism? (Berkman, 1972 [1929]). This strand of thought combines systematic critique of state and capital, often bolstered with close attention to questions of anarchist/communist transition.
Concurrent with anarcho-communism is a second tendency – the notorious period and tactic of ‘propaganda by the deed’. A development that can arguably be traced to the Benevento affair of 1877, an uprising that Malatesta and Cafiero and a handful of others instigated, or, alternatively, to stormy developments in Russia in the same period, this line of development must be viewed as an expression of the post-Commune intensification of capitalism, autocracy and imperialism, with recourse to targeted violence against authorities viewed by its adherents as a tool that would intimidate elites and ignite the flame of rebellion among the popular classes (Anderson, 2005; Guerin, 1970; Joll, 1979). Blossoming after the close of the 1870s, this line is associated with names such as Duval, Ravachol, Vaillant, Caserio, Henry, Lucheni, Bresci, Czolgosz, with Italians playing a significant role, with support from central anarchist thinkers such as Reclus and Kropotkin, with some spectacular successes – royals, police chiefs, heads of state – and with the dubious honour of acting as a model for the nationalist assassins that were to follow (Anderson, 2005). As Anderson (2005: 4) notes, these actions can be seen as an early form of suicide bombing by those who viewed themselves as ‘acting for a world audience’.
The third tendency, anarcho-syndicalism, begins to take hold as the period of propaganda by the deed of the 1880s and 1890s recedes (Cole, 1954), emerging and peaking in different places between the 1890s and 1940, a mass, more organized, movement (Van der Linden and Thorpe, 1990). With its emblem of revolutionary unions of workers as both fighting organizations and the basis of the new social order, emphasizing direct action and the general strike, and rejecting, often fervently, state politics and reformism, this tactic was expounded by Fernand Pelloutier in 1895 and is seen, by some, as born with the unification of the Bourses and the CGT (General Confederation of Labour) in France in 1902, to be followed, particularly significantly, with the USI (Italian Syndicalist Union, 1912-) in Italy and the CNT (National Confederation of Labour, 1910) in Spain (Sonn, 1992; Van der Linden and Thorpe, 1990). Achieving its high point in France before the First World War, and elsewhere (America, Holland, Germany and Italy) in the period 1916–23, anarcho-syndicalism re-emerged spectacularly in Spain, and particularly in Catalonia, in the 1920s and 1930s.
The defeat in Spain is frequently viewed as the final chapter of anarchism’s heroic period. In most narratives, anarchism is depicted as confined thereafter to small – though this is not to say stagnant (Cornell, 2011; Sonn, 1992) – activist and Bohemian pockets. However, as previously indicated, it is common to detect in the upheavals of the 1960s an anarchist quality – either negatively, to lament the spontaneity, lack of organization and direction, and hedonistic quality attributed to these contestations, or, positively, as indicative of a libertarian break from the dominance of Bolshevism. This re-emergence is captured, for instance, in Gombin’s (1975) discussion of the flavour of the rebellions of this period in France under the heading ‘modern Leftism’. The most well known of the explicitly anarchist thinkers coming to prominence from this point are undoubtedly Noam Chomsky – relentless critic of US foreign policy – and Murray Bookchin, a prolific and combative public intellectual who developed an ecologically informed anarchist municipalist stance, which, despite its expansive, systematic, and tenacious qualities, remained rather modestly influential.
Today – in the Streets and the Seminar Rooms
Today’s anarchist revival, as mentioned, is sometimes linked to this 1960s ‘New Leftism’ (Cornell, 2011; Epstein, 2001), often in terms of both intellectual tendencies and modes of political action. Here, one may return to those two affinities noted in the introductory remarks and explore some of the qualities of this revival of interest in anarchism, in the streets (more briefly) and in the seminar rooms, examining a number of difficult questions characteristic of our ‘anarchist moment’.
Anarchism as Alternative Globalization
Numerous commentators have noted the presence of something akin to an ‘anarchist sensibility’, a ‘soft and fluid form of anarchism’ (Epstein, 2001), within the alternative globalization movement of movements. Both Epstein (2001) and Grubacic and Graeber (2004), for instance, note that while participants in this movement seldom explicitly describe themselves in this fashion, a core of anarchist principles and impulses animate the thinking and practice of those involved. One important aspect of this is the prominence of non-violent direct action, smaller, autonomous (but sometimes flexibly linked) ‘affinity’ groups, and consensus decision making within the movement (Epstein, 2001). These emphases were visible, for example, in the highly planned, co-ordinated and successful activities around the Direct Action Network, in its attempt to shut down the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 (Gabay, 2010).
In related fashion, an anarchist sensibility is also evident in what Epstein (2001) describes as the ‘morally charged and expressive politics’ contained within the alternative globalization movement, connected to the very creative, sometimes playful, desire to put values into practice. Linked with the notion of prefiguration (living other-wise), the role of humour and ‘carnivalesque dissent’ (De Goede, 2005: 381) – for example, ironic slogans and chants, The Yes Men, revolutionary anarchist clowns – as well as aspects of do-it-yourself culture (informational politics, becoming the media, for instance), and more existentially oriented contestations (e.g. activism around consumption) – all of these impulses have important anarchistic resonances and appear at some distance from more traditional Marxian modes of political intervention.
Equally distant from Marxian orthodoxy are the emphases on consensus and decentralization that many have detected within the newest movements. A key inspiration here has been the Zapatista movement, with Subcomandante Marcos explicitly rejecting vanguardism, denying he is leader of the movement, rejecting power seizure, and emphasizing instead the participatory organization of society (Franks, 2010; Grubacic and Graeber, 2004; Lynd and Grubacic, 2008; Marcos, 2001). Apparently breaking from the Leninist dictum that there can only be ‘one struggle … one theory … one leadership’ (May, 1994: 21), we find emphases across the alternative globalization movement on participatory or high-intensity democracy (Santos, 2005), pluralism and open structures, compromise and synthesis, and horizontal rather than vertical organization (Grubacic and Graeber, 2004; Santos, 2005; Tormey, 2004).
In a similar way, we also see initiatives – often most developed in semi-peripheral countries – linked to alternative globalization that attempt to organize another type of production, separate from neo-liberal capitalism and statist socialism, and often centred around principles of democracy, solidarity, equity and environmental sustainability (Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito, 2006). These include: decommodification; alternative development schemes; re-localization; new forms of capital control proposals; co-operatives; movements for ethical consumption; new forms of labour internationalism; and organization of marginal workers and other excluded groups. Again, such initiatives are frequently viewed as prefigurative and as reminiscent more of anarchist than of Marxian forms of action.
The many dilemmas and difficulties surrounding the alternative globalization movement have been the subject of extensive discussion, within and beyond the social movement literature. The article now considers at greater length the intimately connected questions around that second affinity mentioned above, between anarchism and post-modern thought, especially contained in the notion of ‘post-anarchism’. This is a topic of considerable interest, a door to more detailed consideration of the distinctive character and claims of anarchism today, and, because of its position with respect to other social theories and pressing theoretical issues – hegemony, universal and particular, essentialism, power – of great interest to sociologists and others within the human sciences.
Rethinking Classical Anarchism
A persistent and foundational issue of contention within the contemporary academic literature might be captured as ‘an inheritance in question’ – the problem of the relationship between today’s and yesterday’s anarchism, an obstinate theme, for instance, in Rousselle and Evren’s (2011) post-anarchist reader. On the one side are those who suggest that a simple return to the anarchist classics is out of the question, particularly in light of the developments (progress?) that have occurred in the world of social theory. Thus, Koch (2011: 39) claims, ‘Post-structuralism offers a new opportunity to reformulate the claims of anarchism.’ The most prominent contemporary thinkers to advance this position are Todd May 4 and, particularly, Saul Newman. For Newman (2010: 4), post-anarchism is a project that promises to radicalize and renew anarchism, a kind of deconstructive enterprise that works at the limits of anarchism. Insisting on the always ‘heterodox’ and ‘diffuse’ character of anarchism, Newman (2010: 1) nevertheless charges that certain predominant tendencies found within the anarchist tradition need to be decisively abandoned – the essentialism of the subject, the universality of reason, the dialectical view of history, the positivism, the naive approach to power, the attachment to necessity in history and to the idea of progress – in short, an Enlightenment humanism that can no longer withstand the strong questioning provided by post-modernism. Indeed, a good case can be made, I believe, that what is often called classical anarchism is characterized by appeals to the authority of science and the notion of universal laws, to an understanding of human nature or society as organic (in opposition to the artifice of the state), to a fairly straightforward conception of the operation of power, and to a conception of history as unfolding in a progressive direction.
In opposition to such ‘sins of modernist theorizing’ (McLennan, 1996), Newman (2010) assembles a number of more contemporary theoretical tools and emphases to support the formulation of a recharged anarchism: from Stirner, a non-essentialist view of the subject; from Laclau and Mouffe, an emphasis on contingency, as against assumptions of the stability, coherence, and systematicity of the social; from Foucault, a focus on micro-power, and an insistence that power is, and will remain, everywhere, unable to be exclusively, or in large part, reduced to state power; from psychoanalysis, an interest in the psychic attachments to power; from Balibar, an emphasis on ‘equal-liberty’ as anarchism’s driving ambition; from Levinas, an anarchical ethical focus. I think it is worth examining some of this more closely.
To begin with, the use of Stirner already suggests possible doubts about certain kinds of post-anarchist claims about the flawed Enlightenment humanism of classical anarchism. Similarly, the appearance in this literature – for instance, in Day (2005) or Gaarder (2009) – of Gustav Landauer’s injunction that the state is, above all else, a relation, raises questions, as does Landauer’s (1978: 54) impassioned appeals to spirit over the arguments of the ‘scientific swindlers’, his anti-productivism, his scepticism about progress (is 1908 really better than 1907, he asks). In like fashion, Emma Goldman might not mesh with post-anarchist contentions, given her Nietzschean enthusiasms, and given the advocacy of ‘ceaseless epistemological and political change’ (Bertalan, 2011: 209) we arguably find in her work. There are even questions to be raised about Kropotkin – for instance, his insistence that anarchism was perfectly compatible with ‘variety, conflict’ (in Antliff, 2011: 161; Jun, 2011). And was Bakunin, in fact, naively optimistic about human nature – his assertion that anyone participating in government would change completely – and science – his emphasis on the imperfection of science, his doubts about Marxian appeals to science, his suggestion that, in some respects, art was a superior mode of knowing (Bakunin, 1973; Maximoff, 1953)?
Raising such doubts, Franks (2007: 128), for instance, maintains that post-anarchist discourse simply misrepresents classical anarchism, that everything the former try to market as a new way for anarchism to forge ahead was always already there in what has, since its inception, been a very ‘flexible constellation of principles, theories, discourses and practices’. In conclusion, post-anarchism is ‘a variant’ and ‘not a transcendence’ of classical anarchism (Franks, 2007: 128). On a related note, Jason Adams (2003: 1) has made the pertinent suggestion that we are reading things the wrong way around, in that post-structuralism was itself an expression of the anarchist-flavoured rebellions of the 1960s: the anti-authoritarian spirit of anarchism ‘mutated into a thousand different miniviruses, infecting all of these critical theories in many different ways’ (2003: 6). A similar but more controversial line is taken by Jun. Arguing the need to clear the ‘detritus’ of post-anarchism, Jun (2012: xiv) contends that anarchism calls into question the entire framework of political modernity – the ‘state fixation’, universal and transcendent solutions, normativity. Rejecting out of hand the idea of classical anarchism as ‘mythical’, Jun finds what he takes as the defining feature of post-modernity, the refusal of representationalism, evenly spread across anarchist thinkers from the 19th century, brought together, too, by their positive emphasis on immanence and vitality.
Jun is clearly, the present author would suggest, ‘bending the stick’ too far. I would not think these assertions – that, across the anarchist thinkers he mentions, there is a uniform absence of fixed views of human nature, uniform uncritical worship of science, uniform attempts to represent what is, a uniform conception of power emerging from a unitary centre, uniform universalization, and the like – stand up to scrutiny. More broadly, one might also wonder, placing post-modern doxa aside for a moment, why an appeal to the inherent goodness of people (co-operative, empathetic, uncomfortable with inequality and suffering), to the ordinary anarchism that operates here and now, is necessarily bad, at the least as a rhetorical strategy, given the omnipresence of the neo-liberal view that human beings are straightforwardly self-centred, competitive, acquisitive, and aggressive. Does not this more optimistic humanist language still have plenty of political and moral purchase?
Politics Today – Hegemony, Power, Democracy, Ethics
Another variety of response to post-anarchist arguments has been that it is anarchism that is in the position to draw attention to, and provide resources for amending, the various shortcomings of post-structuralist and post-modern thought (Antliff, 2011). This type of reply might be a signal of certain anti-intellectual, or – perhaps better – pro-activist, non-academic tendencies to be found within the new literature on anarchism. Thus, Gordon (2008: 43) dismisses post-structuralist anarchism as a mere ‘intellectual preoccupation’ that scarcely touches upon activist concerns, seeking instead, with his Anarchy Alive, to write an ‘anarchist book about anarchism’ (2008: 3), and closely tying theory to activists and their dilemmas. Thus, concern with the issue of co-optation is a major sub-theme in the rather academic-oriented Amster et al. (2009) collection. Thus, we sometimes find a curiously apologetic tone from writers involved in activism but evidently concurrently pursuing academic studies, with numerous nervous disclaimers and uncomfortable situating of self – ‘Male, young, white, university graduate, precarious worker, activist’ (De Rota, 2011: 139). 5 On a related front, one mode of critical retort to post-anarchism has been to draw attention to its supposed Eurocentric and masculinist biases, biases against which anarchists are urged to respond with ‘unlearning’ and a thoroughgoing commitment to decolonization (Jeppesen, 2011: 152). Here, while mobilization around marginalized indigenous groups and related questionings of West-centred forms of knowledge have clearly been important within the alternative globalization movement (Santos, 2005), it is likely that the fitting together of anarchist universalism with assertive status group identity politics 6 remains a tricky and unresolved problem.
One way of reading this question of particularism and universalism is that it is an issue of articulation and hegemony. Indeed, part of what appears to be taking place in discussions of post-anarchism is congruent with debates around post-Marxism, where problems of unity amidst diversity loom large. In fact, in thinking anarchism today, a number of commentators are explicitly or implicitly drawing from Laclau and Mouffe. 7 This is true, for instance, of Simon Critchley (2009) who says he has gone in the direction of anarchism as a result of frustration with Marxism, and who, in his recent book, Infinitely Demanding (2007), brings together a range of resources, which include, very prominently, emphases from the authors of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: insisting on the current multiplication of subject positions, against the Marxian notion of the progressive simplification of class structure; speaking of the contingency of capitalism and of dislocation; and arguing for the centrality of the notion of ‘hegemonic universality’. In like fashion, Mueller (2011: 77) finds anarchistic resonances in Gramsci’s notion of creating ‘sustainable communities of resistance’.
On the other hand, Day (2005, 2011) seeks to contest the ‘hegemony of hegemony’, the assumption that significant social change can ‘only be achieved through the deployment of universalizing hierarchical forms, epitomized by the nation state, but including conceptions of the world state and other globalized institutions as well’ (2011: 96). Day’s argument is that the terrain on which radical politics operates has shifted with the failure of the new social movements to prevent the progress of neo-liberalism, and with the rise of the novelties within the alternative globalization movement (visible, say, in the practices of the Zapatistas, Indymedia and Food Not Bombs). There has been a shift, he maintains, away from the attempt to create a new power around a hegemonic centre, towards a ‘politics of the act’ (rather than that of the demand) – an affinity-based, direct-action politics, which is beyond both reform and revolution (in its prefigurative emphasis) and ‘challenges’, ‘disrupts’, and ‘disorients’ hegemonic politics (Day, 2011). 8 In a similar way, remarking on the affinities between post-anarchism and the work of Laclau and Mouffe (2001) – a wider conception of domination, for example – Newman (2010, 2011a) notes and contests the underlying centralism (connected to the importance lent to the notion of representation) of their thought, the prominence of leadership in Laclau’s analysis of populism, and Mouffe’s (2005) capitulation to a conservative cynical realism in her attempt to work from the materials provided by Carl Schmitt.
In social theory and political philosophy in recent years, and under the influence of post-modern anti-foundationalism, a number of efforts have been made to rethink politics or ‘the political’ – Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism being one particularly influential version. This rethinking has frequently been of a rather abstract, meta-theoretical type, characterized by attempts to rid political reflection of essentialism, determinism and teleology, and it has tended to issue in analyses close to Claude Lefort’s argument about the distinctly modern emptying of the place of power. And there is certainly a strong flavour of such lines of argumentation in post-anarchist discussions – for instance, in Critichley, Newman, Jun, and May – which is often coupled with more familiar political theoretical themes – power, the state, democracy – again, though, examined under post-modern lights.
Arguably, the most defining theme of anarchism has been its equation of power with the state and with unfreedom. After Foucault, though, a more nuanced appreciation of power has apparently become necessary, evident in Gordon’s (2008), and others’, re-specification of anarchist objections as opposition to domination. Here, anarchism is sometimes touted as more in line than other radical traditions with Foucauldian subtleties, because of its early advocacy of decentralized resistance, its awareness of the ills of multivalent hierarchy, and its attachments to a range of prefigurative, here-and-now, and processual political actions (Bowen, 2004). In particular, these anarchist themes are said to contrast sharply with a ‘day-of-the-great-sweep’, revolutionary, strategic, and centralized Marxian political focus.
Once again, the rhetorical intent here is to proclaim the contemporariness of anarchism – for instance, in its affinities with the apparent convergence of ‘radical feminist, ecological, anti-racist and queer struggles … in the late 1990s’ (Gordon, 2008: 31). It can also be seen as again recalling Landauer’s focus on the state as a relation rather than a solid entity (Graeber, 2004). I think, though, it is worth remarking here on what I would argue is the obvious awkwardness of attempting to combine anarchism and its historical attention to the state with a Foucauldian desire to jettison outdated analyses of sovereign power for a focus on the ubiquity and micro-quality of contemporary power – a course that might be seen as even more difficult for anarchists than for Marxists to take. A related disjuncture appears to be created when gestures to Foucault, micro-power, and the necessary break from the simple-minded classical anarchist opposition between state and society are combined, say, in Newman (2010: 29–30, 2011b), with assertions about a contemporary situation of ‘naked power’ in which democratic states are increasingly becoming ‘authoritarian police states’. Having said this, the opposition to normalization and attention to governmentality apparently works well with anarchism, as do the Deleuze and Guattari tropes such as excess, lines of flight, overcoding, nomadism, antagonistic desire, and becoming-other (De Rota, 2011; Heckert, 2011). 9
The argument, then, presented by those seeking to bring anarchism together with post-modern thinking is that, at their best, anarchists help us grasp the autonomy of the state, teach us that, today, there is no winter palace to storm (the state, now, is ‘dispersed and differentiated’), remind us to be permanently suspicious of all forms of authority, and demonstrate that power is everywhere and, as Foucault put it, ‘everything is dangerous’ (Newman, 2010: 63, 169). What might contemporary anarchism offer us in thinking about democracy? A common historical line has been to raise scepticism about mere state forms and to appeal to some more genuine democracy, but, alongside this, we might appear to be transported to some place other than democracy with the persistent anarchist focus on individual freedom, the emphasis on direct action, and the commitments to decentralization and consensus. This clearly remains a very difficult and sometimes embarrassing question, which is rather lightly and ineffectively dealt with in this new literature. Newman (2010), for instance, equates post-anarchism with a politics of autonomy, equates this autonomy with democracy, and, at the same time, apparently means by democracy Derrida’s democracy to come, or, in another formulation, the ‘democracy of singularities’. This reluctance about institutions can certainly seem solidly anti-vanguardist, and it sensibly refuses rigid blueprints of the future, but is it helpful? Similar are Simon Critchley’s (2007) appeals to the young Marx’s (by way of Abensour) notion of ‘true democracy’. For Critchley, at least for now, there is no path beyond the state, which is insinuating itself into ever more areas of life. Given this, the most promising response, says Critchley, is to attempt to create spaces at a distance from the state (‘interstitial distance’) within state territory by way of such true democratization. This democratization is understood, following Rancière, as a disturbance of order and consensus, here and now, upon the ‘terrain on which we stand, live, work, act, think’ (Critchley, 2007: 114).
This may all seem unobjectionable for the already converted, but it clearly needs some meat added to its bones. One way in which Critchley and others have sought to provide this flesh is by turning to ethics – Critchley (2009: 8), for instance, summarizing anarchism as, above all, a ‘set of ethical concerns with practice’. 10 For Critchley, Day (2005), and Newman (2010), the work of Emmanuel Levinas can help us here. The attraction of Levinas resides, at least in part, in its offering an alternative to a too-libertarian anarchist conception of the subject and of freedom, in favour of a ‘relational and communal’ (Newman, 2010: 55) understanding of liberty. In addition, the prerogative given by Levinas to ethics appears to offer a brake that might prevent the dangerous inflation of politics to everything. Critchley’s (2007) account is the most developed here, seeking to prioritize responsibility over the old imaginary of unlimited freedom, a responsibility based on our encounter with the other, an encounter that ‘dividuates’ us from ourselves, showing us our limited self-mastery, inauthenticity, and ridiculous failures. The ethics of commitment that this Levinasian anarchism promises, Critchley (2007: 7) hopes, might allow us to ‘face and face down the drift of the present’.
One reply to such Levinas-influenced accounts is provided by Žižek (2005) and by Badiou (2002), who charge that such an intellectualist ethics is completely inoperative – one part of their assault on what had appeared to be a new academic-theoretical common sense around human finitude, limits, responsibility, post-secular tolerance, and human rights moralism, the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in social thought (Garber et al., 2000).
Post-Anarchism, Radical Academia, the Disciplines, and Marxism
At this juncture, it seems relevant to deal with the ways in which post-anarchist discourse has intersected with the radical thought that has succeeded post-structuralism and that might provide resources or competition for anarchism’s bid for attention – especially the work of Hardt and Negri, Badiou, and Rancière. Here, Newman (2011a: 52) argues that despite a ‘general and somewhat perplexing silence about anarchism’, there are a number of important anarchist themes in the work of these thinkers: variously – a break from the industrial working class as privileged agent of change; a wider focus on domination; the notion of a politics without parties; a thoroughgoing opposition to the state. With respect to Badiou, both Newman and Critchley see the notion of the ‘Event’ as too rare and grandiose, an ‘implicit vanguardism’ (Newman, 2011a: 53) that discounts the possibilities alive in ordinary events and politics; and Newman argues that both Badiou and Žižek dangerously and reactively respond to liberal concerns by fetishizing revolutionary violence. In the case of Hardt and Negri, Newman (2011a: 57) sees the concept of the multitude as ‘a dressed up version of the Marxist theory of proletarian emancipation’ and rejects their ‘immanentism’, which posits emancipation as an automatic result of the unfolding of capitalism. We have seen, finally, that Critchley draws on Rancière – as do May (2008) and Newman – and Rancière (2008) himself notes the ties between his thought and historical anarchism. Certain kinship connections are indeed suggested by Rancière’s emphases on the presupposition of equality, dissensus, anti-vanguardism, and by his focus on current forms of opposition rather than future-oriented programmes. However, it seems that Rancière’s anarchist-inflected commitment to anarchistic forms of political action are unaccompanied by anything like an anarchist vision of an emancipated future, a world free of police.
Arguably, the literature surveyed above furnishes us with at least some of the important elements of a reconstructed anarchist political-intellectual orientation, and, here and there, this is combined with some attempts to trace the shape of an explicitly anarchist academic theory. Graeber (2004), for instance – though underscoring the need for low (around immediate questions linked to political action) rather than high theory (Grubacic and Graeber, 2004) – very imaginatively sets out a number of key problématiques for an anarchist anthropology. These would include an analysis of the state as a relation between a utopian imaginary and a messy reality of flight and evasion, elite action, etc., a proper theory of wage labour, an ecology of voluntary associations, a theory of political happiness, and an attention to uncovering the already extant counter-powers to state and market across space (against Eurocentrism) and time (questioning, after Latour, the solidity of our Modernity). 11 In like fashion, Purkis (2004) provides a Bauman-esque critique of sociology as in the business of modern knowing, ordering, and controlling, and he identifies a number of tools useful in the construction of an anarchist sociology: 12 Feyerabend’s ‘anarchist epistemology’; post-colonial critiques of Eurocentrism in the social sciences; the feminist questioning of objectivist methodological precepts; and chaos theory (especially its critique of hierarchical, predictable, and generalized theories, in favour of non-linear, non-determinist, non-reductionist emphases). 13
In these kinds of proposals for an anarchist presence in the disciplines an obvious point to make is that anarchism has not had the success of Marxism in the academy (Graeber, 2004; Purkis, 2004). This could be either a source of pride or resentment among anarchists: pride, in that this could be explained by anarchism’s predominantly practical, down to earth, worldly and activist character; or resentment, in that anarchism deserves as much credit, can compete on the same terrain, is every bit as intellectually rigorous and morally compelling, etc. – although unburdened by Marxism’s authoritarianism and dogmatism. It is evidently time to return to this long postponed issue – Marxism versus anarchism.
Frequently, an important rhetorical step in the contemporary anarchist plea for reconsideration is to represent the contemporary political field as marked by the resolute and final defeat of anarchism’s major historical competitor on the left. Marxist failures are posited as manifold and crushing: for instance, its notion of a single antagonism (class), against an increasingly complex and contingent reality; its productionism, set before looming ecological catastrophe; its naivety about the state as a tool of emancipation, its vanguardism, and its indifference to ethical reflection, all in evidence in Stalinist totalitarianism (Bowen and Purkis, 2004; Critchley, 2007; Newman, 2010). However, as Evren (2011) notes in his introduction to the recent post-anarchism reader, the emblem of Marxist failure is no argument for or against anything, especially as anarchism can hardly contrast this with a history of anything that could reasonably be counted as ‘success’. The relentless hostility to the Marxian tradition often found in this new body of anarchist re-thinking can be perplexing, especially as this tends to stand cheek by jowl with emphases on pluralism, experimentation, and tolerant, pragmatic attentiveness to other modes of thought and ways of being.
Of course, this unsympathetic boot has very often been on the other foot, as indicated by my earlier reference to Hobsbawm (1973) – the British historian limiting anarchism’s entire worth to a rather backhanded compliment about its sensitivity to spontaneous elements in mass movements. Far too seldom have Marxists remarked on, let alone analysed at length, the frequent instances when they and the anarchists were at least roughly on the same page. This convergence can be seen, for instance, in the concerns within the Third International around ‘anarchist’ tendencies, such as those represented by Marxian currents attached to names such as Pannekoek, Bordiga, and Luxemburg (Hobsbawm, 1973).
The polemics on both sides are unhelpful, as well as frequently wildly inaccurate: on the one side, Marxism versus anarchism as a story of authoritarianism, vanguardism, and statism versus liberty, spontaneity and autonomy; on the other, a story of organization, intellectual clarity, and persistence versus shambolic, capricious and individualistic politics. Thankfully, there are contemporary voices speaking to a move beyond such simplifications. For instance, the conversation between Lynd and Grubacic (2008) involves discussion of the ‘Haymarket synthesis’, the periodic coming together – for example, in Chicago in the late 19th century, then again with the Wobblies – of Marxian and anarchist emphases. Similarly, reflecting on the alternative globalization movement, Santos (2006, 2008) suggests that the current period is neither anarchist nor Marxist, but instead the moment of the making of a new global Left. This global Left has at its educative and strategic disposal a rich and variegated socialist tradition, and – while, within this Left, people will certainly continue to emerge from and lean towards particular socialisms rather than others – for reasons of changing generations, and in the hope of making in-roads, a clear cut segmentation of socialist currents seems both unlikely and of little help today (Epstein, 2001; Santos, 2008).
Concluding Comments
There is a good argument to be made that, both in terms of political life and the orientations within the human sciences, the old is dying but the new cannot yet emerge. This in-betweenness presents us with an experimental, promising moment (Badiou, 2008), both in politics and social thought. It is a virtue of this new anarchist literature that it straddles both, that, in its efforts to retrieve a much neglected radical tradition of thought, it positions itself at the intersection between recent contestatory social movements and contemporary theory and political philosophy.
Despite this promise, this article has suggested a number of problems or issues still unresolved within this literature – in particular, some potential concerns about a strong post-modern line of influence. Here, it seems that a too tight set of post-modern strictures – against totalizing, determinism, universalism, and in favour of difference, contingency, and complexity – would undermine central basic dimensions of theoretical reflection (McLennan, 1996, 2006). Tied to this, the article has also maintained that a more embracing, interlocutory approach to Marxism would be one way forward in this literature. This, as noted, is encouraged by the situation of these newest movements at present. That is, it seems likely and important that anarchistic impulses will continue to be strong in such a new global Left: opposition to a range of forms of domination; intransigence towards and bypassing of conventional political forces, stages, and modes of action; suspicion of vanguardism; emphasis on prefigurative politics and direct action; concern with the equation of means and ends (Bowen and Purkis, 2004; Purkis and Bowen, 2004b). It is equally probable and vital that we will find affinities with more conventionally Marxian emphases and strengths – equality and solidarity, organizational discipline, the ambitious expansion of networks and institutions, attempts to systematically theorize the social transformations occurring, and a renewed focus on the question of work.
Developing further reflections in all of these directions is important. In particular, one would mention, in closing, four pressing and recurrent sub-themes and dilemmas, all of which are in evidence, to greater or lesser extents, in the new anarchist literature – work and class, prefigurative politics, violence, and science and technique.
On the first issue, one of the apparent strengths of anarchism vis-a-vis Marxism is to be well equipped to think about identities and contestations that require wider resources than merely those associated with class analysis. However, I think it is clear that no radical politics today can do without vigorous analysis of the changing character of work, reconfigurations – both within nations and in the international division of labour – of class composition, and various attempted ‘fixes’ by capital. This work is clearly being done, but more could be appended to this literature.
Second, prefigurative political impulses have been important across socialism’s traditions, especially to anarchism and left varieties of Marxism. The frequent sense that the older reform-revolution debates and transformatory strategies are, today, of diminished relevance, because of transformations such as globalization and neo-liberal post-democracy, make this focus of renewed importance. It is surely time for more intensive reflection on the socialist history of the construction of alternative institutions and on unearthing and reclaiming the everyday reality of mutual aid. The workers’ councils, anarchist efforts at alternative educational principles and institutions, 14 and the multiform socialist assembly of cultures within cultures are significant examples, but new forms are needed, and already being established, as modes of living otherwise, as responses to urgent needs, and as new sources of meaning making.
It seems likely, third, that such institution building will be faced with the prospect of violence, as it always has been, and, here, some re-exploration is in order, too. Beyond corporate media representations of the irrational and criminal character of anti-globalization activity (Gabay, 2010), and the fetish sometimes made of anti-violence and the uncritical use of liberal discourses of totalitarianism and limitation in left academic circles, a nuanced discussion of violence is in order among the global Left. Relevant topics, here, include reflection on the violence already in play in apparently peaceful situations, the contemporary repressive turn by states – coercive accumulations by dispossession, intolerance of dissent, new developments in surveillance and law – and the emergence and strengthening of violent reactionary forces.
Last, from anarchism, in particular, we have an important strand of thinking that has raised questions of size, technique, and nature, which has run from 19th century figures such as William Morris and Kropotkin, to a more recent anarchist thinker such as Bookchin, and, at its farthest reaches, to the work of anarcho-primitivist thinkers, such as Fredy Perlman, John Zerzan, Jacques Camatte, and David Watson. 15 Even if it is easy to conclude that this latter strand is out of step with present realities like no other socialist tradition, this current raises again, in the most striking fashion, questions about authenticity, consumption, alienation, knowledge, and domestication. These questionings deserve a serious hearing today. 16
Such discussions, involving Marxists and anarchists, drawing on a range of paradigms and practical experiments to live otherwise, are of great interest to social scientists and to anyone concerned with the shape and direction of our current world-system.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the rigorous and collegial feedback provided by an anonymous referee.