Anarchism today

1. Anarchism today With the discrediting of Stalinistic "socialism" and the atrophying of parliamentary social democracy, anarchism has become a popular political identity for young people. Anarchism today is an umbrella term for a variety of libertarian and anti-capitalist views.

2. It would be sectarian to sneer. People making a first move to the left usually try to construct some "left" version of relatively mainstream ideas around them. Around 1968 young people on first becoming left were usually left Stalinoids - "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" Trotskyists had to learn to win them over. Today we have to learn how to win over young people who first reach for "anarchism" as an identity.

3. "Classical" anarchism "Classical" anarchism agreed with Marxism in looking to mass action to overthrow the ruling class and replace it by a communist society. It differed in: • Rejecting "politics" (campaigns for political reforms, electoral politics) • Saying that the state and money could and must be abolished immediately after anti-capitalist revolution • Looking to peasants and the "lumpenproletariat" (people who live by begging, theft, etc.) as much as or more than to the core wage-working class.

4. Many strands in anarchism There were many strands in classical anarchism, from individualistic anarchists who brought only disruption if and when they had to do with the labour movement, through to anarcho-syndicalists - people who focused on building revolutionary trade unions which they thought could take over society without any need for politics, and who in some ways were a healthy but one-sided reaction to the parliamentarist drift of "official" Marxism before 1914. Today’s anarchism has many strands too.

5. Strands in anarchism today In the anarchist milieu today ideas from "classical" anarchism mingle with influences from contemporary mainstream culture. Inevitably, young people becoming radicalised when the political left is weak tend toadapt ideas current in themainstream culture aroundthem. • Consensus decision-makingand "affinity groups" • Post-modernism • Identity politics The idea of "liberated space"is also big, with roots in: • Zapatismo • Autonomism

6. Consensus decision-making Many young radicals identify anarchism with opposition to decision-making by majority vote, election of representatives, and formal structures of any kind, which they see as bureaucratic. They prefer “consensus decision-making" in small, informal groups. This idea originates not from "classical" anarchism but... from a strand in capitalist management theory, especially in Japan.

7. The idea of organising through "affinity groups" and consensus decision-making has some roots in anarchist ideas about individual autonomy, contract, mutualism, federalism.

8. Historically revolutionary anarchists have not fetishised consensus decision-making, or informality, or operating only in small groups, or even opposition to leadership. Jura anarchists in the 1870s produced a paper called The Vanguard Errico Malatesta: "One finds a lot more actual authoritarianism in the groupings noisily invoking 'the absolute freedom of the individual' than in the ones ordinarily regarded as authoritarian on the grounds that they have a committee and take decisions".

9. In The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) Jo Freeman argued that "structureless" organisation led to:• ineffectiveness;• and the "tyranny" of the quickest pen or loudest voice.www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htmConsensus decision-making can work for capitalist management because it stifles and co-opts minorities. They can’t dissent without blocking all action, so are under huge pressure to assent. It doesn’t work well for subversive movements.In practice anarchists propose it only for small and informal groups. But a movement to overthrow capitalism has to be wider than that.You can’t make a revolution by consensus!

10. No anarchist would see herself or himself as inspired by Blairism, but much soft-anarchist talk reads as a left version of Blairite stuff about "empowerment", "diversity", "partnership", "inclusion", and "stakeholders"

11. We shouldn’t have a “negative fetish” on this issue. Often in short-term mobilisations, autonomy for self-selected groups to do what they develop a consensus for is good sense.

12. And it was Marx who wrote: "Centralist organisation, no matter how valuable it may be for secret societies and sectarian movements, contradicts the essence of trade unions.... Where the worker is subject to bureaucratic discipline from his infancy and believes in officialdom and higher authority, it is above all a question of teaching him to walk by himself". (Letter from Marx toJ B Schweitzer, leader of the workers’ movement in Germany founded by Lassalle (right))

13. But micro-federalism can't work for building open, mass-organising, long-term movements... Which is why the political effectiveness of anarchists today is so much less than their numbers and the sum of their individual energies

14. "Affinity-group fetishism" is anarchism dissolving into liberal piecemeal protest or counter-culture

15. The post-modernist theme of reality being no more than a composite of everyone’s different stories is widespread in universities, and has influence in the broad anarchist mood, even though "harder" anarchists would reject it.

16. Intertwined with postmodernism, "identity politics" is also an influence.

17. The postmodernist and "identity politics" influence connects with the "individualist-anarchist" strand in classical anarchism. (Max Stirner, the original individualist-anarchist of the 1840s,was "rediscovered" byanarchists in the late 19thcentury). According tothe quasi-Marxist anarchistDaniel Guérin: "Anarchismis, above all, a gut revolt"by the individual.

18. The more "traditional left" strands feeding into today’s anarchism are Zapatismo and autonomism.Reacting against Castroism and Stalinism, John Holloway's influential book proposes a political approach based on what he takes to be the ideas of the Zapatista movement in Mexico.

19. It focuses on creating "liberated space" within existing society, rather than destroying the State.

20. That strand has existed in anarchism before. Paul Brousse, who was a leading member of the core group of anarchists round Mikhail Bakunin in Switzerland in the 1870s. In the 1880s he pushed propaganda of the deed - an approach centred on attempts to kill kings, presidents, etc., in the hope that this would disrupt the state and rouse the people. After that he went over bit-by-bit to a focus on local activity, and travelled gradually to the right wing of electoralist socialism. He became President of the Paris Municipal Council. Now the model is not Brousse but the Zapatistas.

21. The Zapatistas started with an attempt in 1994 to spark a Mexico-wide uprising against the North American Free Trade Agreement

22. They moved to an accord with the government under which they get autonomy for some small municipalities of indigenous people in southern Mexico

23. Another influence in today’s anarchist mix is "autonomism", which has roots in Marxism

24. Its roots are in Italian "workerism" of the 1960s: left critics within the Italian CP and SP In fact one of the main "workerist" writers, Mario Tronti, never left the CP

25. Other "workerists" mixed their ideas in the early 70s with bits of Maoism and "ultra-left Marxism". In our jargon, they were "spontaneists". At first they said the big factory strikes of 1968-9 were immediately and "completely" revolutionary. When abashed on that front, they condemned the factory workers as bought off, and said that now the "socialised worker" (including students, housewives, unemployed) was "completely" revolutionary. Now they talk about "the multitude" as the revolutionary force.

26. The most-read autonomist book is "Empire", by Toni Negri. He declares that by "refusal, desertion, exodus and nomadism", the "multitude" can produce "a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism"

27. The strategy is "the affirmation of the movement itself as an 'alternative society'... To conquer and control its own 'spaces'..."

28. The practical politics of autonomism can vary from caricature anarchism ("we want to riot, not to work", as one autonomist tract put it) to mild reformism

29. Another influence: "social ecology" - Murray Bookchin "Social ecology envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy toward a world that fully celebrates diversity... organic gardening... permaculture"

30. According to Bookchin the working class is no longer revolutionary in a "post-scarcity" society He recommends "libertarian municipalism" to "hollow out" the State

31. To complete the picture: some "classical anarchist" themes today are found more among.... self-proclaimed Marxists ONE SOLUTION,REVOLUTION!

32. "One solution, revolution" is just a platonic version of the strand in anarchism which says "the only answer is to destroy the State now”, or of the Black Bloc anarchists who focus on trying to maximise violence, looting, etc. on demonstrations.

33. Nihilist "anti-capitalism”, applauding Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, etc. is a vicarious version of "destroy the State now"… You hail someone else doing destroying some state or other, or at least making gestures that way.

34. Because they do not see the socialist future as rooted in capitalist development and class struggle, anarchist ideas always tend to flip between two poles Destructive (burn down government buildings and churches, and it will all come right so long as we can stop people forming a new government afterwards). Thus: Black Bloc or (platonically) SWP etc. Constructive (create little autonomous communes within capitalism, "hollow out" the State, bypass it). Thus: lifestyle anarchism, NGO-ism, etc.

35. Both bend towards secret-cliquism. Destructive anarchism, because it calls on the activists to be a paramilitary gang.

36. If the "destruction" moves beyond small-scale, "destructive anarchist" doctrine calls for the activists to be "invisible pilots" to give shape to the anarchic destruction and disrupt attempts by the workers Bakunin: "We must bring forth anarchy, and in the midst of the popular tempest, we must be the invisible pilots guiding the Revolution... a dictatorship without tricks, without official titles, without official rights, and therefore all the more powerful, as it does not carry the trappings of power". http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1870/albert-richard.htm

37. Constructive anarchism tends to secret-cliquism because it’s about creating ideal enclaves in which people live very differently from in society at large.

38. Less intense "constructive anarchism" today fades over into NGO-ism, liberalism, localist reformism, lifestyleism, food coops...

39. The broad idea of anarchism has lasting roots in the counterposition of the individual to society created by bourgeois society. "Only in... 'bourgeois society' do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity... This individual [is] the product of the new forces of production developed since the 16th century..." (Marx, Introduction to the Grundrisse)

40. According to Marx, the romantic-anarchist reaction to capitalism will "accompany it as legitimate antithesis" to "its blessed end"."In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end". (Marx, Grundrisse)

41. Bourgeois society organically generates doctrines which construct the ideal society from the atom of the "natural" individual; they are eclipsed only in times of mass working-class struggle and organisation which imbed the process of collective struggle forming and shaping the individual into mass consciousness.

42. Those who see the "natural" individual as oriented to economic gain idealise free-market capitalism...

43. Those who see the "natural" individual as more social and egalitarian tend more to anarchism

44. We can make a rough map of variants of anarchism Fascism Mutualism Contractualism Black blocs Free Market libertarians Individualist anarchism Marxism Anarcho-syndicalism Anarcho-communism Autonomism Zapatism "Marxist" ultra-leftism Municipal reformism "Liberated spaces" Liberalism NGO-ism Consensus-ism Postmodernism Post-Marxism

45. The Marxist alternative: organising on the basis of the logic of the class struggle (on all its fronts)