I thought I might as well upload my honours project from last year, and let those of you with masochistic tendencies have a read. It’s entitled:
Post-Anarchism and Social War
Post-Structuralism, and the Revival of an Anarchist Subterranean
I’m trying to re-write the thing into a 3,000 word article for imminent rebellion coming out in April, so if you just want the gist maybe wait till then.And don’t point out all the spelling and grammatical mistakes, there are loads – I only had 15 days to do the thing in the end.
* * * * *
From the conclusion:
The collapse of the utopian project in the post-World War Two era is widely accepted as a given, as if those that previously fought for the total reorganisation of society had finally given themselves to the lesser task of the more rational and humane management of the status quo (social democracy, the third way, etc.). The failure to see the continuation of a utopian project, or rather a multitude of such projects, is due precisely to a shift in the very conception of revolution and utopia. The very real and substantive difference between Marxism and classical anarchism over the question of the State and power masked the fact that both were really quite similar – as products of Enlightenment thinking – in their foundational assumptions. These assumptions, the a priori that haunts classical anarchism, can be reduced to two key aspects: firstly, a notion of power as transcendent to the social body and originating in the singularity of the State, working in a simple top-down fashion upon the otherwise autonomous organisation of society; secondly, a humanism that posited a human essence that was essentially freedom-desiring, cooperative, that tended towards egalitarian relations and which was suppressed under the ‘yoke’ of the State. Upon these assumptions were built the familiar utopian project. Freedom, the aim of the classical anarchist project, was conceived unproblematically as the absence of power, in which conditions the natural cooperative tendencies of humanity could be unleashed so as to realise, once and for all, the revolutionary society. Revolution, therefore, was the destruction of the State – a cataclysmic rupture and qualitative change with previous social organisation – and was to be conducted by the revolutionary subject embodied in that broad mass in whom lay the seeds of change and are collectively known as the ‘oppressed’. A utopian project conceived such as this – Marxist or anarchist – has indeed largely subsided in the post-World War Two era. But the utopian impulse has not died; rather, it has been eclipsed by a project that bears little superficial resemblance. The singular and totalising conception of revolutionary change of the classical emancipatory theories, the notion of becoming-major to use Deleuze’s formulation, has instead been replaced with a dispersed, decentred and viral becoming-minor of contemporary, second-wave anarchism.
Post-anarchism is a systematic attempt to build an anarchism without the a priori faults of its predecessor, to further deepen the tendencies of contemporary – as opposed to classical – anarchism, and to commit itself to an understanding of the social founded upon an ontology of immanence. In the first instance, power is conceived as decentred and exercised from innumerable points, as immanent and necessary to all interactions, and as constitutive of larger relations of domination. This latter aspect forms the basis for Deleuze’s separation of micro- and macro-politics. These domains don’t correlate simply to the State and society, and nor are they fixed to any particular strata, but rather describe the processes whereby emergent strata are ontologically produced from the complex and non-linear interactions – the micro-politics – of the strata below. Power, therefore, is for the most part bottom-up, where macro-assemblages and large-scale relations of domination are produced in the micro-politics of everyday life. While macro-politics remains important (it is not one or the other, as Deleuze insists, but ‘and, and, and…’), the micro is primary. Moreover, fundamental changes in social relations necessitate a total transformation in the relations of everyday life or else risk, as Foucault warned, simply a reconstitution of the politics of old. This is a non-functionalist conception of macro-politics, where the historical construction of macro-assemblages is not teleological, but arises through the capillary and contingent spread of certain techniques at the expense of others. Crucially, in regards to this discussion, freedom is conceived not as an absence of power but rather a specific organisation of power, one that avoids the asymmetric and frozen relations that characterise conditions of domination, and which seeks the free flowing exercise of power distributed throughout the social terrain. This is not a static state, but instead a becoming, a practice, an ‘ongoing actuality’. In the second instance, post-anarchism views the subject not as transcendent to the forces that act upon the body but as produced by them, as an effect. The ‘oppressed masses’ cease to occupy a pure space of resistance and come instead wholly complicit and produced by the everyday practices of which they are part. The revolutionary subject of post-anarchism, therefore, cannot be founded upon an existing social category that is produced out of relations of domination; its aim, in fact, is for the eventual abolition of those very categories. The revolutionary subject must instead be an orientation, an inclination towards permanent revolt against practices of domination and a tendency towards social experimentation and reorganisation of power relations, aiming always to further maximise conditions of freedom. In a similar vein, the notion of revolution is transformed. Social change must be approached in a fashion concomitant with the operations of power. Cataclysmic, qualitative change is replaced with widespread change in degree, and utopian finality is replaced with an open-ended conception of revolution, as a process never fully realised.
A radical new underpinning such as this necessarily entails a shift in practice, in the conceptions of social change. The classical anarchist project contained within itself three tendencies of resistance: the insurrectionary tendency, the evolutionary tendency, and anarcho-syndicalism. The first was heavily rooted in classical anarchism, representing a purely destructive moment and relying on the egalitarian impulses of the masses. The second, the evolutionary tendency, was its opposite and focused entirely on the constructive moment in the creation of alternative institutions, but in lacking a destructive aspect and often choosing institutional legality, the evolutionary tendency was limited and risked full integration into hegemonic practices. Of the three, anarcho-syndicalism was the most developed, aptly integrating both the destructive and constructive moments, but it was limited by its focus on simply on the condition of work. In addition to an insistence on both the destructive and constructive moments to anarchist practice, and in its opposition to the totality of relations that constitute domination, the post-anarchist project brings a number of insights from its revised view of the social. The politics and transformation of everyday life becomes an essential aspect, both in the reconstitution of macro-political assemblages and equally in the creation of new subjectivities. These transformations must be treated as experiments, and must be conducted not en masse as a singular project, but rather as a multiplicity of small-scale projects, each designed with the aim for their reproduction and spread across the social terrain. Moreover, this is a tactical model of change. In opposition to a singular strategy, a multiplicity of tactics works in accordance with the decentred, bottom-up, and non-linear nature of power, constantly pressing against various practices, transforming some, and creating other relations anew. Contemporary anarchist practices offer many such examples of possible tactics, including the notion of exodus, direct action, and the creation of autonomous spaces. In all, the aim is a prefigurative politics: withdrawing ourselves from practices deemed antithetical to relations of freedom, similarly fighting against and disrupting those of which we are not a part, and seeking out fissures of time and space so as to create new relations with one another and with our material world. This notion of social war, of revolutionary practice without end, is one that seeks not the conquest of power but rather a generalised revolt and the viral adoption of these tactics throughout the social terrain, opening and creating spaces of becoming-minor.
The central question with which we started – ‘What is to be done?’ – remains perhaps only partially answered. Indeed, more concrete answers lie in the substantial and expansive practical work in implementing and experimenting with the multiplicity of tactics and relations that are available in pursuing freedom as an ongoing actuality. Nevertheless, the criticisms of the ‘spectacles of resistance’ made of the anti-globalisation movement ring even stronger in this evaluation. The large anti-summit protests, at least by themselves, make for a weak tactic precisely because they maintain the notion that there exist centres of power to global capitalism, whether in the Group of Eight, the World Trade Organisation, or otherwise. Indeed, in many ways they marked a return to the insurrectionary model with all of its faults. It appears, in fact, that since the decline of the anti-globalisation movement it is to the alternative praxis advocated here that many have turned, and perhaps there is in that some hope.
anarchafairy 
16 comments
Comments feed for this article
January 22, 2008 at 9:48 am
Daniel
Hoho. Post-modernist trendy academic anarchism. Nuff said. “Insurrectionary” anarchism is the true anarchism, huh? Hmm… I don’t think so. Its more like a product of nihilist neo-Jacobinism. Nothing to do with real anarchism which grew out of the labour movement.
Fuck some shit up, anarcho-kid!
January 24, 2008 at 7:23 am
radicalhypocrite
“While macro-politics remains important (it is not one or the other, as Deleuze insists, but ‘and, and, and…’), the micro is primary.”
Isn’t the fixing of the primary too an arbitrary fixation of norms? PS, you should acknowledged Foucault for the definitions of power you’ve borrowed. The French gentleman ended up supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1977! Refusal to see centrism of power can draw similar strange blinds on the eyes!
January 29, 2008 at 10:47 am
Tim
I liked your essay, good summary of both trends and unlikes Richard Days book you actually bring up practical examples.
February 2, 2008 at 2:33 am
anarkaytie
Just eading the conclusion made me realise how much of my brain has turned to mush since I dropped honours in July. Ho hum.
So, forget about any wild ideas I had about finishing that unpublished project for Rebel to publish.
Back to you: extraordinarily lovely writing, & I’d have been worried about the hope expressed, if I’d seen this without previously reading the later post about the stock market tanking, and your responses to that – whew, no näivity whatsoever in your outlook to the sobering likliehood that we’re all completely screwed. Unless we stop relying on others’ productive skills to create food & other staples of decent life.
hehe – after the best part of three years of academic study of anarchist theory, I may just be turning into a nihilist in the face of incontrovertible evidence that doom is nigh.
Or maybe my jokes will just be in poorer taste, and less well understood or accepted – you be the judge 😀
April 1, 2008 at 6:21 pm
jakethesnake
To be fair Richard Day’s book brought up a lot of practical examples; in fact that’s just about what made his book so popular — that it read as a casebook .. a tactics handbook delivered to the state.
I recently read that there is a Post-Anarchism anthology of sorts coming out by the end of this year or something. I think it was on the postanarchism wiki or the clearinghouse.
July 26, 2008 at 9:35 am
toby
“The collapse of the utopian project in the post-World War Two era is widely accepted as a given, as if those that previously fought for the total reorganisation of society had finally given themselves to the lesser task of the more rational and humane management of the status quo (social democracy, the third way, etc.).”
No, the collapse of the ‘utopian project’ (which i take it is meant as a slur against those of us who think a classless and stateless society is possible) was not widely accepted as a given. it is only widely accepted amongst the post structuralists.
Um, i think this is historically incorrect. There was a global revival of revolutionary politics from 1968 to about the mid to late 1970s. This was caused by an unprecedented upsurge in class struggle. This caused a revival in revolutionary praxis. Some of the revolutionary thinking during this time was naive and utopian and impractical, for sure. But it was also concrete. An example would be the Portuguese revolution in about 1974 that overthrew fascism in that country — there was a brief flourishing of what may be termed workers councils.
Your view of history reads like to me that in 1968 all the revolutionaries in France realised revolution was a myth, got jobs, and became social democrats. This is, as I understand it, the pomo version of history. But it’s simply not true in the vast majority of cases (apart from a view academics like Lyotard). 1968 was a beginning, not an end. It was not really until capital recomposed itself as neoliberalism that the upsurge of the time was contained.
“The failure to see the continuation of a utopian project, or rather a multitude of such projects, is due precisely to a shift in the very conception of revolution and utopia.”
This is idealist thinking. ‘Utopia’ cannot become possible not through simply rethinking it, but crucially also by but people themselves changing the material conditions on the ground.
” The very real and substantive difference between Marxism and classical anarchism over the question of the State and power masked the fact that both were really quite similar – as products of Enlightenment thinking – in their foundational assumptions. These assumptions, the a priori that haunts classical anarchism, can be reduced to two key aspects: firstly, a notion of power as transcendent to the social body and originating in the singularity of the State, working in a simple top-down fashion upon the otherwise autonomous organisation of society; secondly, a humanism that posited a human essence that was essentially freedom-desiring, cooperative, that tended towards egalitarian relations and which was suppressed under the ‘yoke’ of the State. Upon these assumptions were built the familiar utopian project. Freedom, the aim of the classical anarchist project”
oh dear, where to begin!!! have you actually read a wide variety of classical anarchist literature or just the pomos take on it?
the classical anarchists — i’m talking about anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism, not individualist anarchism — did not generally see power as transcendent. sure, a few were idealists like malatesta, but overall they saw power as being grounded in the material conditions of the time. specifically, in the combined power of capital, the state, the church, the army, the remnants of the aristocracy, and so on. the vast majority of classical anarchists did not see power as originating in the state. in fact, they thought it was a function of class society, with the state and its bureaucracy and army and so on the most essential buttress of the ruling class.
for the second bit, yes there is some truth in that, in that some thought all you had to do was to get rid of capital and the state and the anarchist society would naturally bloom, esp Bakunin and his cohorts. Of course, anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism were a reaction to this naive thinking, and instead posited constructive alternatives to capital and the state, such as revolutionary unions and workers’ communes and councils. ie. that is where the praxis of building the new society in the shell of the old comes from.
but most classical anarchists did not think human nature was freedom loving or cooperative. in fact, they thought there was a historical tendency for some people to want power over others. they generally saw humans as capable of both cooperation and domination — a complex two-sided view of humans — and saw their task as encouraging the former over the latter. Kropotkin is generally taken to be the believer in natural goodness par excellence, but if you actually read his stuff you will find it is actually quite nuanced and not as naive as the pomos and liberals like George Woodcock make it out.
anyway, i could go on but its a saturday morning…
a good critique of post modernist and post structuralist distortions of classical anarchism was written by Jesse Cohn
and Shawn Wilbur. i’ll quote them at length:
1. Postanarchism has, as one of its core narratives, a
drastically reduced notion of what “anarchism” is and
has been. The “classical anarchist” tradition treated
by Andrew M. Koch, Todd May, Saul Newman, and Lewis
Call, usually restricted to a limited number of “great
thinkers” (Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin),
is reductive at best. As the late John Moore noted in
his reviewvof The Political Philosophy of
Poststructuralist Anarchism, postanarchists omit any
mention of “second wave” or “contemporary” anarchism,
reducing a living tradition to a dead “historical
phenomenon” called “classical anarchism.” Reiner
Schürmann is content to dismiss “Proudhon, Bakunin,
and their disciples,” in a single paragraph, as
“rationalist” thinkers, plain and simple. There is
almost complete inattention to the margins of the
“classical” texts, not to mention the margins of the
tradition. Such “minor” theorists as Gustav Landauer,
Voltairine de Cleyre, Josiah Warren, Emma Goldman, and
Paul Goodman, to name just a few of those excluded,
would seem to merit some consideration, particularly
if the project is a rethinking of “normal anarchism.”
2. Conflict, as well as diversity, is smoothed over in
the historical accounts of anarchism given by
postanarchists. Anarchist history is a terrain
occupied by materialists and mystics, communists and
mutualists, nihilists and scientists, progressivists
and primitivists alike. Terms taken for granted in
much postanarchist critique—“science,” for
example—were the explicit subject of complex struggles
within anarchism and socialism broadly. To fail to
look at this history of internal difference can also
blind us to the related history of organizational
conflict and strife—the other set of forces at work in
shaping anarchism and socialism as we have had them
passed down to us. Marc Angenot notes that “the point
of departure for Proudhon” is not “an axiom,” but a
sense of “scandal”—a provocation into thought by
“something unthinkable.” Just as we have to read
Kropotkin’s theory of “mutual aid” as a response (or,
as Kingsley Widmer calls it, a “countering”) to
Huxley, we ought to analyze other key developments in
anarchist theory in the context of an anarchist milieu
traversed by a continuing series of disputes,
controversies, and epistemological “scandals.”
3. Where Koch, May, Newman, and Call examine specific
“classical anarchist” texts, the passages they cite
often seem far from representative of the actual
arguments made by those writers. Particularly when
using texts like G. P. Maximoff’s Political Philosophy
of Mikhail Bakunin—a patchwork of translated
quotations from some twenty-nine source texts in three
languages—close attention to the overall use of
concepts is necessary to compensate for the
unsystematic nature of the original sources. Lack of
such attention, together with preconceptions about
anarchist “rationalism,” can lead to curious
misreadings. In Newman’s “Anarchism and the Politics
of Ressentiment,” for example, the argument proceeds
by reading “classical anarchism,” represented by
Bakunin and Kropotkin, as follows: at certain points,
these anarchists depict the human subject as naturally
opposed to power, while at other points they seem to
say that power naturally emanates from human subjects.
From this premise, Newman goes on to conclude that
classical anarchism is riven by a fundamental
inconsistency, a damaging “contradiction.” The
unstated assumption which warrants this move from
premise to conclusion is that these two
characterizations of the human subject are mutually
exclusive—that Bakunin and Kropotkin cannot intend
both. This assumption begs the question: why not? In
fact, a close reading of texts by these theorists
would support a different conclusion—that for both of
them, it is the human subject itself which is the
site, as Kropotkin writes in his Ethics, of a
“fundamental contradiction.” What Newman misses is the
possibility that, in Dave Morland’s words, “anarchists
are proprietors of a double-barrelled conception of
human nature” as composed of “both sociability and
egoism.” Of course, for Anglophone writers and
readers, the difficulties of understanding are
compounded by a linguistic barrier: for instance, of
the thirty-nine texts collected in fifteen volumes of
Proudhon’s complete works, only four have ever been
translated into English, so the only glimpses of his
more ambitious “theoretical” work available to
us—including his paradoxically “absolute” refusal of
“the Absolute”—are in Selected Writings of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a collection of scattered
quotations.
4. Poststructuralist critiques of “classical
anarchism” tend to place it in intellectual
contexts—“humanism,” “rationalism,”
“Enlightenment”—which are likewise treated in the most
reductive terms. For instance, Cartesian rationalism
is conflated with movements directly opposed to it—and
is applied to texts from the late 19th century, as if
there was no significant developments in ideas about
subjectivity, truth, or rationality after the 17th
century. Rather than artificially tying the ideas of
anarchist theorists to those of philosophers they
directly oppose (such as Rousseau), we might be better
off looking at Kropotkin’s use of Wundt’s psychology
and Guyau’s ethics, Goldman’s reading of Nietzsche,
Godwin’s engagement with the epistemology of Hume and
Hartley, Malatesta’s flirtation with pragmatism, or
what Bakunin might have learned from Schelling’s call
for a “philosophy of existence” in opposition to
Hegel’s “philosophy of essence.” Contemporary French
sociologist Daniel Colson’s recent essay on
“AnarchistReadings of Spinoza” in the journal
Réfractions is suggestive of what can be done along
these lines.
5. Having constructed, on such an impoverished basis,
an ideological ghost called “classical anarchism,”
postanarchists then subject this phantom entity to a
critique based on some drastically undertheorized
concepts, tending to proceed as if the meaning of key
terms like “nature,” “power,” and even
“poststructuralism” were both self-evident and
unchanging. They act, as Foucault hears Nietzsche
complain of Paul Rée, as if “words had kept their
meaning… ignor[ing] the fact that the world of
speech… has known invasions, struggles, plundering,
disguises, ploys.” Moore, again, fingered this
difficulty: “’One would not call all exercises of
power oppressive,’ May states. But surely that depends
upon who one is.” Why assume that what Bakunin meant
by the word “power,” in one particular essay, is the
same concept designated by Foucault’s use of the word,
or Moore’s, or May’s—or even that named by the same
word in a different Bakunin essay? Indeed, even Newman
seems to allow the meaning of the term to slide in a
strategically convenient manner: on the first page of
>From Bakunin to Lacan, he uses “power” as synonymous
with “domination,” “hierarchies,” and “repression,”
but soon shifts over to a Foucauldian usage which
defines “power” as “something to be accepted as
unavoidable,” while defining “domination” and
“authority” as things which are “to be resisted.” The
problem is that, depending on which definition is in
play, Newman could be contradicting Bakunin or simply
reiterating him. In his “Reflections on Anarchism,”
Brian Morris makes a distinction (similar to the
Spinozan opposition between “potestas” and “potentia”
to which Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt apeal)
between “power over” and “the power to do something.”
It is only “power” in the first sense that anarchists
categorically oppose, while “power” in the second
sense, as what Hannah Arendt calls “the human ability
not just to act but to act in concert,” is central to
anarchist theorizations of the social. Bakunin
considers what he and Proudhon call “social power,”
conceived as the non-coercive influence of individuals
and groups on one another, to be absolutely real and
ineradicable, condemning as “idealist” the “wish to
escape” the play of “physical, intellectual, and moral
influences” which is continuous with society itself:
“To do away with this reciprocal influence is death.”
http://libertarian-library.blogspot.com/2007/07/cohn-and-wilbur-whats-wrong-with.html
toby
July 26, 2008 at 10:17 am
toby
another thing…the classical anarchists, apart from maybe Bakunin, did not think this:
“Revolution, therefore, was the destruction of the State – a cataclysmic rupture and qualitative change with previous social organisation – and was to be conducted by the revolutionary subject embodied in that broad mass in whom lay the seeds of change and are collectively known as the ‘oppressed’.”
they instead saw revolution as an on-going process that aimed to qualitatively change capitalist social relations that would take years and years and years, not something that happened overnight. insurrection is a beginning of the revolutionary process, and not the end of it.
and why this liberal interpretation of anarchism meaning solely the destruction of the state? what about capital, the church and other forms of authority?
the classical socialist anarchists believed in an immense social revolution, a revolution that was simultaneously individual, collective, social, cultural, economic etc
ie. it was both macro and micro, changing ways of life, relationships, psychology, and material conditions. the classical anarchists had their problems, but their praxis was far more nuanced and intelligent than you make it out.
and you seem to think you have found a new, more complex, wow! theory that hasn’t been thought of before — not true — eg. the revolution of everyday life has been around for a long long time — as way far back as those awful christian medieval communist peasants, not to mention those awful rationalist utopian revolutionaries of the 1960s. poststructuralism is nothing new, just as anarchism, just as communism, just as everything else. i reckon there is nothing new under the sun, or as Beckett put it, “the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
July 26, 2008 at 2:56 pm
anarchafairy
Hey Toby,
Thanks for your comments. I haven’t had much in the way of substantial criticism, so it’s good to finally get some. I fear, however, that in (apparently) only reading the conclusion you’ve misunderstood some of my main points or indeed made some points that are already within the main text. Also, I think you’ve made all sorts of assumptions about my thinking simply because I’ve used post-structuralist theory (actually, *only* Foucault and Deleuze). So here goes…
“I take it is meant as a slur against those of us who think a classless and stateless society is possible”
Not at all. I feel you’re attributing a sort of ‘post-Marxist move’ to what I have written, wherein the nature of revolution is redefined to something ‘more realistic’ by all sorts of rather clever word games, the original idea of revolution is made to have been actually impossible all along, and they come out at the end claiming to be sort of democratic revolutionaries but perhaps could be better described as seeking to humanise State/capitalism.
This text does not dispense with these goals. Indeed, it broadens them to include all sorts of oppressive power relations including that vast array of contemporary oppressions as well as *future possibilities* of oppressions. This last bit, which is perfectly sensible, is for me one of the important contributions of Foucault – the focus on micro-State practices (on the part of the revolutionaries) which potentially could lead to new sorts of oppressions. In any case, it’s not an abandonment of seeking a ‘classless and Stateless’ society but, in my mind, a thoroughgoing expansion of this project.
“Utopia cannot become possible not through simply rethinking it, but crucially also by but people themselves changing the material conditions on the ground.”
The distinction I was making between these two different utopian projects was not, as I have said, a redefinition of utopia. Rather, it was the *form* these projects took. Or, to use the terms of Richard day, it’s the transition from a (counter-)hegemonic project, to an anti-hegemonic project. This is the rejection of taking power as a means of revolution, and instead engaging in the immediate decentralisation of power – which has always been the explicit aim of anarchism. For Richard Day, the idea of anti-hegemony is important for anarchists because, though we explicitly reject hegemonic means, a careful evaluation of our methods may, in fact, reveal contain elements of hegemonic thinking.
Insofar as I made the historical division prior to and after WWII – I am quite happy to abandon this division entirely. I feel that well before ’68 there was growing unease about the then-dominant (hegemonic) revolutionary project that extended well beyond the anarchist circles. I’ve put this as growing in the ‘post-WWII’ era, but I make no pretense that I simply pulled this figure out of the air.
No, ’68 certainly was not the end as you think I am saying – quite the opposite! (In fact, that should have been patently clear in my conclusion, without needing to read the rest of the essay. I feel you’re once again attributing to me a vague po/mo reading of society simply because I’m using Foucault and Deleuze.) Though ’68 is in my mind given far more importance than it deserves, it certainly marked a massive groundswell in the rejection of the hegemonic revolutionary project.
“The classical anarchists […] did not generally see power as transcendent.”
Again, I’m not sure we’re on the same page here. You’re juxtaposing materialist versus idealist, as if these were similar to what I mean by immanent versus transcendent. I’m not entirely sure what you have in mind by materialist/idealist, except if these are used in the same way the Hegelian/Marxist sense, and that’s certainly not the distinction I have laboured.
The distinction I wrote on was the idea that the State and Capitalism (I would rather use more specific words than these, but they will have to suffice for now) were separate from the masses. They were nonetheless real and material, but there was a clear and sufficient distinction between those who operated the State and Capital, and those who suffered under it. For example, Bakunin wrote (as is quoted on page 7):
“Beneath the apparatus of government, under the shadow of it politic institutions, society was slowly and silently producing its own organisation, making for itself a new order which expressed its vitality and autonomy.”
The early Kropotkin (which is another distinction I made on page 24) had essentially the same idea – both stressed the autonomy of the masses as separate to the State-Capital apparatus. This is what I mean by transcendence.
Moreover, both stressed that this autonomous organisation of society that existed under the State was *cooperative* and was the basis for the new organisation of society. This to me seems to stress a certain humanism, a belief in the essential goodness of people – whether individually as an aspect of human nature, or perhaps rather as a natural tendency in groups of people free of the State.
“A good critique of post modernist and post structuralist distortions of classical anarchism was written by Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur…”
This text, as well as one written by John Moore, are both footnoted of page 4. If you look at page 3, you’ll see my discussion of the “caricature” that I’m making in talking about classical anarchism, or first- and second-wave anarchism, as well as a note in the footnotes of those main anarchist thinkers that break this neat distinction. I state clearly that the distinction is not real, but made merely to delineate the critique that follows. Moreover, a large part of section two is devoted to actually uncovering those elements of anarchist thought that predated and preempted the post-structuralist move, focusing specifically on Landauer, Colin Ward, Stirner, and Le Guin, as well as much more recent stuff from the likes of Bob Black, and the Curious George Brigade (their notion of ‘folk anarchy’ in particular).
(The Cohn and Wilbur piece, as well as defending classical anarchism, makes several quite ridiculous claims about po/str. thought, particularly their (deliberate?) misinterpretation of the Foucauldian notion of power.)
In any case, the reason I think the distinction between classical and contemporary anarchism is useful is because it points to actually existing differences in ideas that exist now – and I feel (from my personal interactions) that those ideas that I’ve attributed to the caricatured ‘classical anarchism’ are actually quite prevalent. Moreover, I feel there was a need to have better, more specific, and more careful notions of what we mean by freedom, revolution, the State/capitalism, power, etc. etc. That’s what this text principally does.
“Why this liberal interpretation of anarchism meaning solely the destruction of the State?”
Well, I know of no liberal theory that advocates the abolition of the State! In any case, I use the destruction of the State as short hand, because it’s my belief that capitalism – or any exploitative economic system – requires systemic violence in the maintenance of property relations, and that the destruction of this systemic violence necessarily entails the destruction of capitalism. They’re quite inseparable, as far as I’m concerned.
“You seem to think that you have found a new, more complex, wow! theory that hasn’t been thought of before.”
It should be obvious now that this is not the case. As I’ve already explained, I went to great lengths to show how milieus within the anarchist tradition had already arrived at the conclusions of post-structuralism. To quote a line from the introduction:
“Post anarchism is an unfortunate name, and is used here only in accordance with recent convention. It is not, as its name implies, an attempt to render obsolete much of traditional anarchist theory, but rather an attempt to give life to a subterranean tradition that has always existed within, at times concealed but becoming more clearly discernible more recently. While originally a contraction of post-structuralist anarchism, the theory is not simply a marriage of the two bodies of work, but is foremost a juxtaposition of the post-structuralist critique so as to draw out those moments within anarchist theory – already extant – with which it is consonant.”
And that’s all for now.
July 27, 2008 at 3:09 pm
toby
“Thanks for your comments. I haven’t had much in the way of substantial criticism, so it’s good to finally get some. I fear, however, that in (apparently) only reading the conclusion you’ve misunderstood some of my main points or indeed made some points that are already within the main text.”
yeah that was a gut reaction to your conclusion. i’ve skimmed through your essay now, and i see you do address a lot of the criticisms i talk about. however, and please excuse my deep southern bluntness, but i think you address those criticisms in a fairly superficial way based on a largely fairly cursory reading of the classical anarchists that lacks much subtledly or depth. so, u try and distance yourself from unnuanced distortions or caricatures of classical anarchism in ch1, and then you go and contradict yourself in yr intro and conclusion by baldly stating these very same unsubstantiated caricatures.
hence you make some absolutely astonishing generalisations about classical anarchism eg. the one where you claim that they saw the state as basically the source of all exploitation (p1)
now its fairly easy to go and read some bakunin and find one isolated, taken out of context quote that confirms this. (after all, that is what the leninists have been doing for ages — read stalins polemic against anarchism ie. to make anarchism sound like it is a simply right wing anti-govt idea that has no association with socialism at all — marie fleming’s books on reclus are great for fucking up this bullshit leninist/liberal myth)
but a deeper search of classical anarchism, you will find quotes like these: The programme of the newspaper Le Travailleur in 1877, which was most likely written by the French anarchist communist Elisée Reclus, claimed that economic inequality was the “source of all oppression” whilst the state was considered “the most powerful instrument of oppression” which the ruling class had as its disposal.
G. P. Maximoff, a russian anarcho-syndicalism, has called the programme of the First International, “The philosophy of the mass labor movement which has not been rejected to this day by a single Anarchist, and which lies at the root of the teachings of Bakunin, of the Jura Federation and of Kropotkin”.
(excuse the preachyness)
and what did this programme contain?
“That the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence;”
I have found numerous other quotes by classical anarchists saying the same thing. This is hardly surprising, as classical anarchism — or at least anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism — was just one part of the broader socialist movement of the time, and in fact first appeared as an organised distinct explicitly anarchist political tendency as the anti-authoritarian wing of the 1st international
call this economic or class reductionism or essentialism or whatever you like, but the classical anarchists actually differed little in their critique of capitalism than that of the Marxists — main difference was that the class. anarchists saw revo. potential in the peasants as well as the workers.
“Not at all. I feel you’re attributing a sort of ‘post-Marxist move’ to what I have written, wherein the nature of revolution is redefined to something ‘more realistic’ by all sorts of rather clever word games, the original idea of revolution is made to have been actually impossible all along, and they come out at the end claiming to be sort of democratic revolutionaries but perhaps could be better described as seeking to humanise State/capitalism.”
isn’t that what post structuralism is about in concrete terms?
“This text does not dispense with these goals. Indeed, it broadens them to include all sorts of oppressive power relations including that vast array of contemporary oppressions as well as *future possibilities* of oppressions.”
well, there is nothing new in this, classical anarchists also had a dawning awareness of a rejection of all forms of authority and all forms of oppression whatever their current form, and some libertarian socialists saw revolution as a permanent protest that would go on after the revolution eg. max nomad. i am sure some classical anarchists thought the same. some passages from kropotkin can be read like that. and of course many sixties anarchists thought much the same.
“This last bit, which is perfectly sensible, is for me one of the important contributions of Foucault – the focus on micro-State practices (on the part of the revolutionaries) which potentially could lead to new sorts of oppressions. In any case, it’s not an abandonment of seeking a ‘classless and Stateless’ society but, in my mind, a thoroughgoing expansion of this project.”
well, the classical anarchists were aware of this as well, eg. kropotkin’s critique of pouget and pataud’s anarcho-syndicalist utopia, and the spanish classical anarchists had enormous debates about this
“The distinction I was making between these two different utopian projects was not, as I have said, a redefinition of utopia. Rather, it was the *form* these projects took.”
i dont see no binary opposite between your new shiny improved utopia and the old classical anarchist one
” Or, to use the terms of Richard day, it’s the transition from a (counter-)hegemonic project, to an anti-hegemonic project. This is the rejection of taking power as a means of revolution, and instead engaging in the immediate decentralisation of power – which has always been the explicit aim of anarchism.”
no, it is just one of the many aims of anarchism
” For Richard Day, the idea of anti-hegemony is important for anarchists because, though we explicitly reject hegemonic means, a careful evaluation of our methods may, in fact, reveal contain elements of hegemonic thinking.”
yuk yuk yuk i hate the term hegemony — in socialist schools of thought, hegemony means that the working class have been basically spooked and brainwashed by capital, which reveals a contempt for the creativity, resistance and self-organisation of working class people and culture. it’s a term used by leninists and the frankfurt marxists who dont believe that workers cna liberate themselves. some of this crap got published in IR once — that awful Gramsci piece.
if all is Day is saying is that anarchism means decentralisation of power, so there is no hegemony anywhere, that is fine, that is what the classical aanrchists said anyway
“No, ‘68 certainly was not the end as you think I am saying – quite the opposite! (In fact, that should have been patently clear in my conclusion, without needing to read the rest of the essay. I feel you’re once again attributing to me a vague po/mo reading of society simply because I’m using Foucault and Deleuze.)”
fair enuf point, but i disagree with you if you think that the anti-summit movement was some sort of high in terms of working class resistance — it was not — the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a huge working class attempt to stop the imposition of neoliberalism. hence there was far far more working class direct action back then and thus much more space opened up for anti-capitalism back then, eg. in NZ the 80s has the second highest amount of strike activity of any decade in our history, problem was we got defeated, our struggle was defensive rather than offensive, and now we live in period of defeat. the anti-summit movement did not change this
“Though ‘68 is in my mind given far more importance than it deserves, it certainly marked a massive groundswell in the rejection of the hegemonic revolutionary project.”
wtf is a hegemonic revolutionary project? a belief that class is the major form of exploitation in society today and that the working class is a revolutionary subject? shit i’m a evil hegemonist then!!! and proud of it, cos the class struggle is a struggle to liberate of all humanity, and not just one part of it
“Again, I’m not sure we’re on the same page here. You’re juxtaposing materialist versus idealist, as if these were similar to what I mean by immanent versus transcendent.”
well were not on the same page obviously — i’m a marxist who knows a wee bit about classical anarchism and sixties anarchism and contemporary non-pomo anarchism and you’re post-anarchist who knows a wee bit about post-structuralism and contemporary anarchism. transcendent in the socialist tradition normally means idealist. obviously i dont know my pomo jargon. dammit, didn’t read that pomo Negri closely enuf.
“The distinction I wrote on was the idea that the State and Capitalism (I would rather use more specific words than these, but they will have to suffice for now) were separate from the masses. They were nonetheless real and material”
i’ve already replied to your criticism above. yes, sometimes the classical anarchists did see capital and the state and authority as separate from the masses. and good reason too. there was no welfare state back then, so peasants and workers had to look after each other, and formed all sorts of socieites and groups (economic, social, cultural) to that end. the state was much smaller and much more openly oppressive.
(now i would disagree with the classical anarchists here and draw upon modern unorthodox Marxism to say the capital and the state is both inside and outside the working class at the same time, if you know what i mean)
but as i said above the classical anarchists realised it was not as easy as just simply destroying state/capital/authority for anarchism to bloom — you needed to create as well as destroy. hence anarcho-syndicalism with its prefigurative politics.
“The early Kropotkin (which is another distinction I made on page 24) had essentially the same idea – both stressed the autonomy of the masses as separate to the State-Capital apparatus. This is what I mean by transcendence.
Moreover, both stressed that this autonomous organisation of society that existed under the State was *cooperative* and was the basis for the new organisation of society. This to me seems to stress a certain humanism, a belief in the essential goodness of people – whether individually as an aspect of human nature, or perhaps rather as a natural tendency in groups of people free of the State.”
no, i disagree, your flimsy reading of kropotkin is based on two texts, and one quote that you got from May.
as i said above, kropotkin and most classical anarchists did not believe humans were essentially good. kropotkin believed there was an authoritarian tendency in society and a libertarian, co-operative one. mutual aid was just one tendency, and not at all dominant. ie. humans were capable of both cooperation and domination, but it depended on their self-activity as to which one won out.
kropotkin’s theories were essentially constructive rather than destructive — in the conquest of bread, he stressed all the constructive activity he thought people needed to do to bring aobut communism. first, get food and distribute according to need. then expropriate houses. then expropriate clothes shops. then plant food. then mix up the town with the country and manual labour with mental and artistic labour. etc etc his theories are very concrete and replete with constructive examples.
“Moreover, a large part of section two is devoted to actually uncovering those elements of anarchist thought that predated and preempted the post-structuralist move, focusing specifically on Landauer, Colin Ward, Stirner, and Le Guin, as well as much more recent stuff from the likes of Bob Black, and the Curious George Brigade (their notion of ‘folk anarchy’ in particular).”
yes but most of these are either individualists, nietzschean elitists or liberals. what about the definite post-structuralist tendencies in the socialist anarchists? you’re basically writing off the whole rich and diverse fabric of the socialist anarchist traditon and romanticising the individualist and liberal anarchist one.
colin ward just attempted to update kropotkin except without the communist and class analysis — that is why i call him a liberal
stirner was an elitist who hated the herd. as one of the cattle who go to work everyday and reproduce capital, institutionalised racism and the state everyday, i ressentiment this.
landauer was a toff of a mystic idealist who also disliked mass movements and those smelly uncreative unartistic workers but somehow called himself a socialist
leguin is a scifi feminist writer who i dont have bad things to say about. wahoo!
this division of anarchism into four waves seems very very suspect to me, not historically grounded and ideologically driven
“In any case, the reason I think the distinction between classical and contemporary anarchism is useful is because it points to actually existing differences in ideas that exist now – and I feel (from my personal interactions) that those ideas that I’ve attributed to the caricatured ‘classical anarchism’ are actually quite prevalent.”
so you’re saying todays anarchist mob are mired in a classical anarchist praxis which allegedly has as its central tenets a belief that the state is the source of all evil, that humans are naturally good, and the workers are separate from capital, and a belief in the working class as the revolutionary subject?
i would say that the current anarchist mob, with a few exceptions, know very little about the classical anarchist movement. they know a lot about alternative lifestyles, DIY, crimethinc, feminism, and affinity group activism, and very little about the working class tradition of resistance. that’s becos they come out of the alterno scene. i think your work is definitely in that latter tradition — all that stuff about creating temporary autonomous spaces and dropping out and affinity groups and so on. this is nothing new. many of the sixties anarchists were big into this, and they failed. many of the individualist anarchists before them were big into this. they all failed cos they were isolated from the broader working class. its pretty easy to coopt or repress marginalised groups on the margins of society.
btw, insurrectionary anarchism is not pomo or post anarchist or postructuralist as you implicitly paint it but in fact a tendency within the anarchist communist current. You kind of realise this but then blur it a little. Why did Bonnano republish Kropotkin? All Bonnano did was to mix classical insurrectionary anarchist communism with some aspects of Italian Marxism. Bonanno believes in class struggle, and thinks workers are the major revolutionary subject. He is not a pomo. Recent stuff of Negri is much closer to your politics than Bonanno.
“Why this liberal interpretation of anarchism meaning solely the destruction of the State?”
“Well, I know of no liberal theory that advocates the abolition of the State!”
liberal as in neoliberal
“In any case, I use the destruction of the State as short hand, because it’s my belief that capitalism – or any exploitative economic system – requires systemic violence in the maintenance of property relations, and that the destruction of this systemic violence necessarily entails the destruction of capitalism. They’re quite inseparable, as far as I’m concerned.”
thats quite bizarre logic — if i write “the destruction of the state” and i actually mean “the destruction of the state and capital, because they are inseparable” then i would simply write “i believe in the destruction of the state and capital.” to be clear and avoid misunderstanding. the destruction of the state is not some sort of secret code for saying you believe in the destruction of capital too — just look at the anarcho-capitalists, mutualists like Tucker, and the libertarian capitalists.
“It should be obvious now that this is not the case. As I’ve already explained, I went to great lengths to show how milieus within the anarchist tradition had already arrived at the conclusions of post-structuralism.”
yes, fair enuf, but i dont think you go to great lengths at all — just summarising that elitist Landauer and quoting that anarchist communist Kropotkinist Colin Ward once and the quoting some australian anarcho-syndicalists anarchists in their pamphlet you cant blow up a social relationship (who btw, were opposed to the carnival anarchists who i think you would much more identify with). these are all snippets, and not a thorough investigation of this undercurrent at all.
sorry if i’m being too harsh or blunt or negative — i ve got limited time, gotta work on weekends now. i think your work is pretty good and well argued and clearly set out. i like parts of it, and found it challenging once i had got beyond the pomo jargon.
but i’m just coming from a completely different tradition than you. that is why we are arguing past each other, i thinks.
actually, my main disagreement with you is on this: classical anarchism needs to be updated. but to do this, i reckon there is no need to turn to the academic, middle class, abstract theories of poststructuralism, but instead creative versions of unorthodox yet non pomo marxism. That stuff is much more based on the current struggles of workers, hence far more relevant to the revolutionary utopian project.
i do see classical aanrchism as inherently flawed
but so is poststructuralism
February 11, 2009 at 4:59 am
Wayne Mellinger
Dear Anarchafairy,
I really enjoyed this piece of writing! I am a sociologist living in Santa Barbara, California, every interested in post-anarchism. I also do social work with mentally ill homeless individuals. I use Facebook for networking and would love to network with you.
Thanks for your scholarship and passion!
P.S. I was a Radical Faeirie in San Francisco some time ago.
March 8, 2009 at 2:17 pm
MevyMyncTwice
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March 27, 2009 at 4:40 pm
V
Great paper, I’ve been working on an article on anarchism and power for our local publication here, and your take on post-structuralist analyses has been super helpful.
Thanks!
July 15, 2009 at 5:55 am
orestis
Very good and fresh. I found it more useful than Richard Day’s book, which was fine, but was a litle bit too long for what it was saying. This was the book that showed me the way to find this pdf though. So thanx to Richard too!
I use to call the likeness of the classical anarchist and marxist project as the “conquer of (anti)/power” and this critic makes more accurate that which i was implying with that term.
I participate in a project of solidarity economy (http://sporos.org/en) and there are various ways that what is written in here can find application, with tension of course. Your pdf is now hosted to our e-library.
September 24, 2009 at 4:54 am
ankostis
There is a collective effort ongoing to translate your essay into Greek:
http://www.sid.gr/translate/doku.php/postanarchism
Having participated in this effort i can tell you that it is a rather strong text for providing a historical context to anarchism, for collecting various assumptions and generalizations of the anarchic project.
I’m certain that there would be many good-willed objections to it.
Mine is more of a suggestion:
I would prefer that it included more practices and paradigms of the anarchism of the 2nd wave.
I would love to see a more elaborate and never-ending collection of some forgotten or unseen alternatives.
Best wishes
July 5, 2013 at 2:49 am
Lilia
And it’s this negative association with dieting history which can often make it such a bad choice for losing weight because these fill up the stomach quicker. Science has proven it is a useful food, and highly nutritious, but is mainly aimed at doctors and researchers with adult American patients for now. Increase your dieting history vitamin B.
July 30, 2018 at 7:19 pm
#Anarchism is movement: Tomás Ibáñez (4) – Enough is Enough!
[…] 2007. Torrance: “Post-Anarchism and Social War: Post-Structuralism, and the Revival of an Anarchist Subterranean”. Available at: https://anarchafairy.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/post-anarchism-and-social-war/. […]