Praxis,ontology,and the pursuit of an anarcho-geography

Praxis is primary

Springer’s intervention highlights the underappreciated historical contribution of anarchist thought to radical geography and quite reasonably suggests that geography would benefit from a serious engagement with this history. He also suggests that the primary reason this engagement has not occurred is to be found in the prevalence of a particular form of Marxist thought in geography, a form that inherited the politics of socialist schism born in the First International when Marx and Bakunin, and their respective acolytes, found their differences to be irreconcilable (see p. 301). His critique highlights the failings of Marxism as a political movement and faults Marxist geography for its conceptual and political ties to institutional Marxisms. However, little is said about the ways that the practice of an anarchist geography might change the analytic focus of geography nor the organization of the discipline and the academy.

This is somewhat surprising because anarchist theory has stressed the importance of praxis both in classical (Bakunin, Recluse, and Kropotkin) and in contemporary work (Clough and Bloomberg, 2012; Springer et al., 2012). This brings a series of questions to the fore: In what ways does geography exhibit anarchistic tendencies at the moment? I am thinking here, for example, of the ways that the sessions at the AAG annual meeting are created through relatively horizontal forms of self-organization within a framework of relative free-association (acknowledging the hierarchies and exclusions of fame, wealth, etc. that impact these associations). Geographers, other social scientists, and indeed just about every person on the planet also engage in anarchist praxis daily through the communal development of ideas, affinity between individuals and groups, and using our positions to diminish unequal power relations in the field, the academy, and society. Following on this question, what ought the anarchization of geography as a discipline look like? Further, what are the analytic foci of anarchist geography? That is, what spatialities are correctly investigated by an anarcho-geography, that are obscured by a Marxian orientation?

Defining anarchisms

Springer points out that one of the basic disagreements between anarchism and Marxism has been the ontological priority of class as the site of radical politics within the Marxian tradition. Against the claim that the working class is the foundational subject of revolutionary politics and that all else is of lesser concern, much anarchist scholarship and politics has insisted on the co-constitution of all forms of domination. From Kropotkin’s (1902) ‘Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution’, which examined the role of cooperation in species survival, to the collective Anarchist People of Color’s two-volume self-published zine ‘Our Culture, Our Resistance: People of Color Speak Out on Anarchism, Race, Class and Gender’ (2004), anarchist analysis has consistently expanded the scope of critique beyond the confines of Marxian political economy.

There is, however, considerable disagreement between various factions of anarchists about how anarchism ought to be conceptualized, lived, and reproduced, and about what the basic ontological foundations of anarchism are. One of the most prominent divides between anarchists, at least in the United States, is the split between the so-called ‘red’ and ‘green’ anarchists. Red anarchists derive their critique from a working-class perspective that views the state as one mechanism of capitalist domination. Green anarchists on the other hand build their oppositional politics through an ecological anti-modernism that equates capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and the state as elements of eco-domination. One of the opening salvos of the schism described above was Murray Bookchin’s (1995) ‘Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm’. In this text, Bookchin identifies two different trajectories of anarchism in the United States; the first, in which he includes himself, is the classical tradition of anarchism similar to that referenced by Springer previously. This trajectory of anarchism emerges out of the debates of the First International, finds fertile ground in the struggles for the 8-hour workday and 40-hour workweek, and is operationalized in the Spanish civil war and the tradition of syndicalism and the organizing principles of, for example, aspects of the campaigns waged by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union. On the other side, Bookchin identifies lifestyle anarchism as an individualistic, anti-organizational, primitivist, and a-political style of identity politics, one that he finds to be contrary to the ideals of what he sees as the true forms of anarchism. Lifestyle, or green anarchism, emerged out of the environmental struggles of the 1970s and 1980s and tends to be built around an ethos of radical environmentalism rather than a class politics.

I’ve been involved with, and witnessed, many examples of the lifestyle/social split that complicates any attempts to define what counts as anarchism. The most recent example, which I think is illustrative, involves two Minneapolis-based anarchist collectives, the local chapter of the IWW (see: http://canvassunion.org) and an organization called Sisters Camelot (see: http://sisterscamelot.org/category/news-and-updates/), an anarchist collective dedicated to distributing and preparing free organic food for anyone who is hungry.

Sisters Camelot is a democratic collective with a relatively open consensus-based decision-making structure. The collective uses canvassers to raise funds by going door to door to solicit donations. The canvassers keep a percentage of what they raise. The current struggle began when canvassers affiliated with the local IWW branch organized a union to negotiate on issues of pay, workplace democracy, and the place of canvassers in the organization. When the organizational structure of Sisters Camelot was unable or unwilling to meet the union demands there began an acrimonious campaign between the two groups. The IWW claims that the canvassers are employees and that the Sisters Camelot collective is an employer regardless of its anarchistic mission and structure. Sisters Camelot claims that the IWW campaign is a divisive and destructive attack against an anarchist institution and that this struggle has undermined the ability of the collective to engage in an anarchist praxis of food justice. The situation became more volatile on May 4, 2014 at the annual Minneapolis May Day parade when a tussle broke out between IWW workers who were picketing the Sisters Camelot food bus and supporters of the Sisters Camelot collective (see: http://www.iww.org/content/iww-picket-violently-attacked-call-full-boycott-sisters-camelot).

I bring up this story in order to point out that both organizations are anarchist, both are democratically organized, both have roots in classical and modern anarchist principles, and they are deeply divided by the question of how an anarchist movement ought to operate. The question of what counts as anarchist, and what an anarchist geography might be like is therefore fraught, and it is not at all clear how the call to create or acknowledge radical geography as an anarchist endeavor might be operationalized or defined. If radical geography must be anarchist, then whose anarchism ought it to be?

It must be noted, additionally, that anarchists are not the only ones who embrace what we might consider to be anarchist values. Diverse trajectories of critique, from Women of Color Feminism, to post-colonial studies, to post-structural and neo-Marxian scholars and movements have all attempted to broaden the theoretical base of politics well beyond an exclusive focus on class, race, ethnicity, or gender. In fact, most of these trajectories incorporate many values, thoughts, and analyses that we might well term anarchistic insofar as they are opposed to exploitation and domination, whatever categories it may be based in. Ought we then to subsume these movements under the terminology of anarchism?

It seems that Springer would like us to call such approaches anarchist, and I would certainly agree that they exhibit anarchistic tendencies. But, what is at stake in such a label? What is in a name? To get down to the point, is there a difference between, for example, feminist intersectional analysis and anarchist geographical research? If so, what? If not, ought we to worry that renaming such praxis as anarchist might be a patriarchal and colonial appropriation of minority thought?

The trouble, I think, for Springer’s argument, boils down to two points. First, due to the necessary heterogeneity of anarchism as a political trajectory there are serious problems in claiming that some cluster of values is anarchist and another not. Second, as Springer rightly points out, anarchism is precisely un-utopian; it is already everywhere; therefore, geography is already anarchistic in many ways, and it is unclear what would be gained by attempting to hegemonize an anti-hegemonic trajectory of thought within the discipline. Nevertheless, Springer’s ongoing attempts to bring anarchist geographies into the mainstream of critical geographic debates are very helpful, particularly when they touch on the above points which ought to be debated as much among anarchist geographers as between anarchists and radicals of other stripes. These are conversations that I look forward to a great deal.