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Title: The New Anarchists Author: David Graeber Date: 2002 Language: en Source: Retrieved on May 14th, 2009 from http://www.newleftreview.org/A2368 Notes: Originally published in “New Left Review”, 13 — January-February 2002.
It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf
between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and
its practitioners. Writers who for years have been publishing essays
that sound like position papers for vast social movements that do not in
fact exist seem seized with confusion or worse, dismissive contempt, now
that real ones are everywhere emerging. It’s particularly scandalous in
the case of what’s still, for no particularly good reason, referred to
as the ‘anti-globalization’ movement, one that has in a mere two or
three years managed to transform completely the sense of historical
possibilities for millions across the planet. This may be the result of
sheer ignorance, or of relying on what might be gleaned from such
overtly hostile sources as the New York Times; then again, most of
what’s written even in progressive outlets seems largely to miss the
point — or at least, rarely focuses on what participants in the movement
really think is most important about it.
As an anthropologist and active participant — particularly in the more
radical, direct-action end of the movement — I may be able to clear up
some common points of misunderstanding; but the news may not be
gratefully received. Much of the hesitation, I suspect, lies in the
reluctance of those who have long fancied themselves radicals of some
sort to come to terms with the fact that they are really liberals:
interested in expanding individual freedoms and pursuing social justice,
but not in ways that would seriously challenge the existence of reigning
institutions like capital or state. And even many of those who would
like to see revolutionary change might not feel entirely happy about
having to accept that most of the creative energy for radical politics
is now coming from anarchism — a tradition that they have hitherto
mostly dismissed — and that taking this movement seriously will
necessarily also mean a respectful engagement with it.
I am writing as an anarchist; but in a sense, counting how many people
involved in the movement actually call themselves ‘anarchists’, and in
what contexts, is a bit beside the point.[1] The very notion of direct
action, with its rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to
modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state
power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative — all of this
emerges directly from the libertarian tradition. Anarchism is the heart
of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what’s new and hopeful
about it. In what follows, then, I will try to clear up what seem to be
the three most common misconceptions about the movement — our supposed
opposition to something called ‘globalization’, our supposed ‘violence’,
and our supposed lack of a coherent ideology — and then suggest how
radical intellectuals might think about reimagining their own
theoretical practice in the light of all of this.
The phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US media
and activists have never felt comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a
movement against anything, it’s against neoliberalism, which can be
defined as a kind of market fundamentalism — or, better, market
Stalinism — that holds there is only one possible direction for human
historical development. The map is held by an elite of economists and
corporate flacks, to whom must be ceded all power once held by
institutions with any shred of democratic accountability; from now on it
will be wielded largely through unelected treaty organizations like the
IMF, WTO or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be
possible to say this straight out: ‘We are a movement against
neoliberalism’. But in the US, language is always a problem. The
corporate media here is probably the most politically monolithic on the
planet: neoliberalism is all there is to see — the background reality;
as a result, the word itself cannot be used. The issues involved can
only be addressed using propaganda terms like ‘free trade’ or ‘the free
market’. So American activists find themselves in a quandary: if one
suggests putting ‘the N word’ (as it’s often called) in a pamphlet or
press release, alarm bells immediately go off: one is being
exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. There have been all
sorts of attempts to frame alternative expressions — we’re a ‘global
justice movement’, we’re a movement ‘against corporate globalization’.
None are especially elegant or quite satisfying and, as a result, it is
common in meetings to hear the speakers using ‘globalization movement’
and ‘anti-globalization movement’ pretty much interchangeably.
The phrase ‘globalization movement’, though, is really quite apropos. If
one takes globalization to mean the effacement of borders and the free
movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it’s pretty clear that
not only is the movement itself a product of globalization, but the
majority of groups involved in it — the most radical ones in particular
— are far more supportive of globalization in general than are the IMF
or WTO. It was an international network called People’s Global Action,
for example, that put out the first summons for planet-wide days of
action such as J18 and N30 — the latter the original call for protest
against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its
origins to the famous International Encounter for Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism, which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of
rainy-season Chiapas, in August 1996; and was itself initiated, as
Subcomandante Marcos put it, ‘by all the rebels around the world’.
People from over 50 countries came streaming into the Zapatista-held
village of La Realidad. The vision for an ‘intercontinental network of
resistance’ was laid out in the Second Declaration of La Realidad: ‘We
declare that we will make a collective network of all our particular
struggles and resistances, an intercontinental network of resistance
against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for
humanity’:
Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power wages on them.
A network of voices that not only speak, but also struggle and resist
for humanity and against neoliberalism.
A network that covers the five continents and helps to resist the death
that Power promises us.[2]
This, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an organizing structure; it
has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command or
hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.’
The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya Basta!
groups organized a second encuentro in Spain, where the idea of the
network process was taken forward: PGA was born at a meeting in Geneva
in February 1998. From the start, it included not only anarchist groups
and radical trade unions in Spain, Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian
socialist farmers’ league in India (the KRRS), associations of
Indonesian and Sri Lankan fisherfolk, the Argentinian teachers’ union,
indigenous groups such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador,
the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement, a network made up of
communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America — and
any number of others. For a long time, North America was scarcely
represented, save for the Canadian Postal Workers’ Union — which acted
as PGA’s main communications hub, until it was largely replaced by the
internet — and a Montreal-based anarchist group called CLAC.
If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its demands. The
three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance, calls for a
universally guaranteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing
free movement of people across borders, and free access to new
technology — which in practice would mean extreme limits on patent
rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism). The noborder
network — their slogan: ‘No One is Illegal’ — has organized week-long
campsites, laboratories for creative resistance, on the Polish — German
and Ukrainian borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activists have
dressed up as border guards, built boat-bridges across the River Oder
and blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to
protest against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of
suffocation on Lufthansa and KLM flights). This summer’s camp is planned
for Strasbourg, home of the Schengen Information System, a
search-and-control database with tens of thousands of terminals across
Europe, targeting the movements of migrants, activists, anyone they
like.
More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to the fact
that the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is pretty much limited to
the movement of capital and commodities, and actually increases barriers
against the free flow of people, information and ideas — the size of the
US border guard has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly
surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority
of people in the world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no
incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with.
Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would
collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about
the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world: the main
achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the
establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the
world. It is precisely this international system of control that we are
fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization.
These connexions — and the broader links between neoliberal policies and
mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism) — have played
a more and more salient role in our analyses as we ourselves have
confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders became a major
issue in Europe during the IMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings
in Nice. At the FTAA summit in Quebec City last summer, invisible lines
that had previously been treated as if they didn’t exist (at least for
white people) were converted overnight into fortifications against the
movement of would-be global citizens, demanding the right to petition
their rulers. The three-kilometre ‘wall’ constructed through the center
of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state junketing inside from any
contact with the populace, became the perfect symbol for what
neoliberalism actually means in human terms. The spectacle of the Black
Bloc, armed with wire cutters and grappling hooks, joined by everyone
from Steelworkers to Mohawk warriors to tear down the wall, became — for
that very reason — one of the most powerful moments in the movement’s
history.[3]
There is one striking contrast between this and earlier
internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting
Western organizational models to the rest of the world; in this, the
flow has if anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps most, of
the movement’s signature techniques — including mass nonviolent civil
disobedience itself — were first developed in the global South. In the
long run, this may well prove the single most radical thing about it.
In the corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind of
mantra — invariably, repeatedly — whenever a large action takes place:
‘violent protests’, ‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid headquarters of
violent protesters’, even ‘violent riots’ (there are other kinds?). Such
expressions are typically invoked when a simple, plain-English
description of what took place (people throwing paint-bombs, breaking
windows of empty storefronts, holding hands as they blockaded
intersections, cops beating them with sticks) might give the impression
that the only truly violent parties were the police. The US media is
probably the biggest offender here — and this despite the fact that,
after two years of increasingly militant direct action, it is still
impossible to produce a single example of anyone to whom a US activist
has caused physical injury. I would say that what really disturbs the
powers-that-be is not the ‘violence’ of the movement but its relative
lack of it; governments simply do not know how to deal with an overtly
revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into familiar patterns of
armed resistance.
The effort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite
self-conscious. Where once it seemed that the only alternatives to
marching along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil
disobedience or outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action
Network, Reclaim the Streets, Black Blocs or Tute Bianche have all, in
their own ways, been trying to map out a completely new territory in
between. They’re attempting to invent what many call a ‘new language’ of
civil disobedience, combining elements of street theatre, festival and
what can only be called non-violent warfare — non-violent in the sense
adopted by, say, Black Bloc anarchists, in that it eschews any direct
physical harm to human beings. Ya Basta! for example is famous for its
tute bianche or white-overalls tactics: men and women dressed in
elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner tubes to
rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white
jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles). As this mock
army pushes its way through police barricades, all the while protecting
each other against injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce
human beings to cartoon characters — misshapen, ungainly, foolish,
largely indestructible. The effect is only increased when lines of
costumed figures attack police with balloons and water pistols or, like
the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and elsewhere, dress as fairies and tickle
them with feather dusters.
At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)
dressed in high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to press wads
of fake money into the cops’ pockets, thanking them for repressing the
dissent. None were even slightly hurt — perhaps police are given
aversion therapy against hitting anyone in a tuxedo. The Revolutionary
Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their high bicycles, rainbow wigs and squeaky
mallets, confused the cops by attacking each other (or the
billionaires). They had all the best chants: ‘Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!’,
‘The pizza united can never be defeated’, ‘Hey ho, hey ho — ha ha, hee
hee!’, as well as meta-chants like ‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’ and
— everyone’s favourite — ‘Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant!’
In Quebec City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines (with help
from the left caucus of the Society for Creative Anachronism) lobbed
soft toys at the FTAA. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to
adopt for non-violent but very militant forms of confrontation: there
were peltasts and hoplites (the former mainly from the Prince Edwards
Islands, the latter from Montreal) at Quebec City, and research
continues into Roman-style shield walls. Blockading has become an art
form: if you make a huge web of strands of yarn across an intersection,
it’s actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped like
flies. The Liberation Puppet with its arms fully extended can block a
four-lane highway, while snake-dances can be a form of mobile blockade.
Rebels in London last Mayday planned Monopoly Board actions — Building
Hotels on Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of the Century in Oxford
Street, Guerrilla Gardening — only partly disrupted by heavy policing
and torrential rain. But even the most militant of the militant —
eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation Front — scrupulously avoid doing
anything that would cause harm to human beings (or animals, for that
matter). It’s this scrambling of conventional categories that so throws
the forces of order and makes them desperate to bring things back to
familiar territory (simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa, of
encouraging fascist hooligans to run riot as an excuse to use
overwhelming force against everybody else.
One could trace these forms of action back to the stunts and guerrilla
theater of the Yippies or Italian ‘metropolitan Indians’ in the sixties,
the squatter battles in Germany or Italy in the seventies and eighties,
even the peasant resistance to the expansion of Tokyo airport. But it
seems to me that here, too, the really crucial origins lie with the
Zapatistas, and other movements in the global South. In many ways, the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) represents an attempt by
people who have always been denied the right to non-violent, civil
resistance to seize it; essentially, to call the bluff of neoliberalism
and its pretenses to democratization and yielding power to ‘civil
society’. It is, as its commanders say, an army which aspires not to be
an army any more (it’s something of an open secret that, for the last
five years at least, they have not even been carrying real guns). As
Marcos explains their conversion from standard tactics of guerrilla war:
We thought the people would either not pay attention to us, or come
together with us to fight. But they did not react in either of these two
ways. It turned out that all these people, who were thousands, tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, did not want to rise
up with us but ... neither did they want us to be annihilated. They
wanted us to dialogue. This completely broke our scheme and ended up
defining zapatismo, the neo-zapatismo.[4]
Now the EZLN is the sort of army that organizes ‘invasions’ of Mexican
military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely unarmed to
yell at and try to shame the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions
by the Landless Workers’ Movement gain an enormous moral authority in
Brazil by reoccupying unused lands entirely non-violently. In either
case, it’s pretty clear that if the same people had tried the same thing
twenty years ago, they would simply have been shot.
However you choose to trace their origins, these new tactics are
perfectly in accord with the general anarchistic inspiration of the
movement, which is less about seizing state power than about exposing,
delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning
ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it. The critical thing, though, is
that all this is only possible in a general atmosphere of peace. In
fact, it seems to me that these are the ultimate stakes of struggle at
the moment: one that may well determine the overall direction of the
twenty-first century. We should remember that during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, when most Marxist parties were rapidly
becoming reformist social democrats, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism
were the centre of the revolutionary left.[5] The situation only really
changed with World War I and the Russian Revolution. It was the
Bolsheviks’ success, we are usually told, that led to the decline of
anarchism — with the glorious exception of Spain — and catapulted
Communism to the fore. But it seems to me one could look at this another
way.
In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed that war
between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial adventures
were a constant, but a war between France and England, on French or
English soil, seemed as unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the
use of passports was considered an antiquated barbarism. The ‘short
twentieth century’ was, by contrast, probably the most violent in human
history, almost entirely preoccupied with either waging world wars or
preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came
to seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure of political effectiveness
became the ability to maintain huge mechanized killing machines. This is
one thing that anarchists, by definition, can never be very good at.
Neither is it surprising that Marxist parties — who have been only too
good at it — seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison.
Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, and war between industrialized
powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism reappeared just where it
had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international
movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left.
If this is right, it becomes clearer what the ultimate stakes of the
current ‘anti-terrorist’ mobilization are. In the short run, things do
look very frightening. Governments who were desperately scrambling for
some way to convince the public we were terrorists even before September
11 now feel they’ve been given carteblanche; there is little doubt that
a lot of good people are about to suffer terrible repression. But in the
long run, a return to twentieth-century levels of violence is simply
impossible. The September 11 attacks were clearly something of a fluke
(the first wildly ambitious terrorist scheme in history that actually
worked); the spread of nuclear weapons is ensuring that larger and
larger portions of the globe will be for all practical purposes
off-limits to conventional warfare. And if war is the health of the
state, the prospects for anarchist-style organizing can only be
improving.
A constant complaint about the globalization movement in the progressive
press is that, while tactically brilliant, it lacks any central theme or
coherent ideology. (This seems to be the left equivalent of the
corporate media’s claims that we are a bunch of dumb kids touting a
bundle of completely unrelated causes — free Mumia, dump the debt, save
the old-growth forests.) Another line of attack is that the movement is
plagued by a generic opposition to all forms of structure or
organization. It’s distressing that, two years after Seattle, I should
have to write this, but someone obviously should: in North America
especially, this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not
opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization.
It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its
ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead
of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks
based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus
democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because
ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. But unlike many
other forms of radicalism, it has first organized itself in the
political sphere — mainly because this was a territory that the powers
that be (who have shifted all their heavy artillery into the economic)
have largely abandoned.
Over the past decade, activists in North America have been putting
enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups’ own internal
processes, to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy
could actually look like. In this we’ve drawn particularly, as I’ve
noted, on examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost
invariably rely on some process of consensus finding, rather than
majority vote. The result is a rich and growing panoply of
organizational instruments — spokescouncils, affinity groups,
facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns,
vibe-watchers and so on — all aimed at creating forms of democratic
process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum
effective solidarity, without stifling dissenting voices, creating
leadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which they have
not freely agreed to do.
The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting, you try
to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone — or at least, not
highly objectionable to anyone: first state the proposal, then ask for
‘concerns’ and try to address them. Often, at this point, people in the
group will propose ‘friendly amendments’ to add to the original
proposal, or otherwise alter it, to ensure concerns are addressed. Then,
finally, when you call for consensus, you ask if anyone wishes to
‘block’ or ‘stand aside’. Standing aside is just saying, ‘I would not
myself be willing to take part in this action, but I wouldn’t stop
anyone else from doing it’. Blocking is a way of saying ‘I think this
violates the fundamental principles or purposes of being in the group’.
It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposal completely by
blocking it — although there are ways to challenge whether a block is
genuinely principled.
There are different sorts of groups. Spokescouncils, for example, are
large assemblies that coordinate between smaller ‘affinity groups’. They
are most often held before, and during, large-scale direct actions like
Seattle or Quebec. Each affinity group (which might have between 4 and
20 people) selects a ‘spoke’, who is empowered to speak for them in the
larger group. Only the spokes can take part in the actual process of
finding consensus at the council, but before major decisions they break
out into affinity groups again and each group comes to consensus on what
position they want their spoke to take (not as unwieldy as it might
sound). Break-outs, on the other hand, are when a large meeting
temporarily splits up into smaller ones that will focus on making
decisions or generating proposals, which can then be presented for
approval before the whole group when it reassembles. Facilitation tools
are used to resolve problems or move things along if they seem to be
bogging down. You can ask for a brainstorming session, in which people
are only allowed to present ideas but not to criticize other people’s;
or for a non-binding straw poll, where people raise their hands just to
see how everyone feels about a proposal, rather than to make a decision.
A fishbowl would only be used if there is a profound difference of
opinion: you can take two representatives for each side — one man and
one woman — and have the four of them sit in the middle, everyone else
surrounding them silently, and see if the four can’t work out a
synthesis or compromise together, which they can then present as a
proposal to the whole group.
This is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of
democracy among people who have little experience of such things is
necessarily a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of
stumblings and false starts, but — as almost any police chief who has
faced us on the streets can attest — direct democracy of this sort can
be astoundingly effective. And it is difficult to find anyone who has
fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities
has not been profoundly transformed as a result. It’s one thing to say,
‘Another world is possible’. It’s another to experience it, however
momentarily. Perhaps the best way to start thinking about these
organizations — the Direct Action Network, for example — is to see them
as the diametrical opposite of the sectarian Marxist groups; or, for
that matter, of the sectarian Anarchist groups.[6] Where the
democratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a complete
and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and
tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely
authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek
diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; it’s
taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to
their point of view. The motto might be, ‘If you are willing to act like
an anarchist now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own
business’. Which seems only sensible: none of us know how far these
principles can actually take us, or what a complex society based on them
would end up looking like. Their ideology, then, is immanent in the
anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their practice, and one of
their more explicit principles is that things should stay this way.
Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the direct-action
networks raise about alienation, and its broader implications for
political practice. For example: why is it that, even when there is next
to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist
society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its project
consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some
form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between
the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them
into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision
social alternatives — particularly, the possibility of a society itself
premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest
that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance
between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual
revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two
categories most broadly overlap.
This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to be
peasants and craftsmen — or even more, newly proletarianized former
peasants and craftsmen — who actually overthrow capitalist regimes; and
not those inured to generations of wage labour. It would also help
explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people’s struggles in
the new movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least
alienated and most oppressed people on earth. Now that new communication
technologies have made it possible to include them in global
revolutionary alliances, as well as local resistance and revolt, it is
well-nigh inevitable that they should play a profoundly inspirational
role.
Previous texts in this series have been Naomi Klein, ‘Reclaiming the
Commons’ (NLR 9), Subcomandante Marcos, ‘The Punch Card and the
Hourglass’ (NLR 9), John Sellers, ‘Raising a Ruckus’ (NLR 10) and José
Bové, ‘A Farmers’ International?’ (NLR 12).
[1] There are some who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism
and open-endedness so seriously that they are sometimes reluctant to
call themselves ‘anarchists’ for that very reason.
[2] Read by Subcomandante Marcos during the closing session of the First
Intercontinental Encuentro, 3 August 1996: Our Word is Our Weapon:
Selected Writings, Juana Ponce de León, ed., New York 2001.
[3] Helping tear it down was certainly one of the more exhilarating
experiences of this author’s life.
[4] Interviewed by Yvon LeBot, Subcomandante Marcos: El Sueño Zapatista,
Barcelona 1997, pp. 214 — 5; Bill Weinberg, Homage to Chiapas, London
2000, p. 188.
[5] ‘In 1905 — 1914 the Marxist left had in most countries been on the
fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of Marxists had been
identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the
bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much
closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of
classical Marxism.’ Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’,
Revolutionaries, New York 1973, p. 61.
[6] What one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the
North East Federation of Anarchist Communists — whose members must
accept the Platform of the Anarchist Communists set down in 1926 by
Nestor Makhno — do still exist, of course. But the small-a anarchists
are the real locus of historical dynamism right now.