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Title: Power in Anarchism
Author: Ruth Kinna
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: power
Source: Kinna, Ruth. “Anarchism, Power in.” In Encyclopedia of Power, edited by Keith Dowding, 18–19. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2011. Gale eBooks (accessed June 22, 2021).

Ruth Kinna

Power in Anarchism

Power is a central issue in modern anarchist thought. Whereas anarchism

was traditionally linked to authority—or its rejection—anarchists now

talk in terms of power and counterpower. The change in emphasis is

linked to the emergence of “postanarchist” theory: anarchism that draws

on postmodern and poststructuralist thought, associated with Todd May,

Lewis Call, and Saul Newman.

The leading figures of 19^(th)- and early 20^(th)-century

anarchism—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin—were

not unconcerned with power. On the contrary, even Proudhon, often

regarded as the most individualist of the three, talked enthusiastically

about the collective power of the workers. And many others defined

anarchism as the abolition of power. But the concept was not made

subject to sustained analysis—in contrast to law, authority, God, and

science, for example. When they talked about power, 19^(th)-century

writers usually had one of two things in mind: the repressive machinery

of the state or the liberating potential of collective actions. These

two aspects of power were typically counterposed such that collective

actions were believed to hold the key to the destruction of the state’s

capacity to repress. What was important in this analysis was the image

of power that it captured. On this account, power was about struggle

against physical force (or as Max Weber would put it, the state’s

monopoly of physical violence). Thus, the power of the state was

typically equated with police, armed forces, prisons, torture, corporal

and capital punishment—later on, surveillance—and the power of the

oppressed was variously identified with barricades, terrorist or

guerrilla actions, spontaneous revolt, the organization of peasants and

workers in syndicates, ethical change, and the development of other

nonhierarchical grassroots organizations. In the 1870s and 1880s, when

memories of the Paris Commune were still very fresh and optimism about

the prospects for European revolution high, the association between

power and physical force was strong (though Tolstoyan anarchists always

rejected the necessity and justifiability of this link). The same was

true in the early 20^(th) century, when anarchists were again engaged in

revolutionary war. Nestor Makhno, who led anarchist resistance against

counterrevolutionaries and Bolsheviks in the Ukraine during the civil

war, characterized revolutionary action as a capacity to conquer or

exterminate oppressors. The power of revolutionaries depended on overt

coercion. In the latter part of the 19^(th) century and again after the

defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, the emphasis shifted

to the ethical and communitarian aspects of collective power: the

ability of oppressed groups to find ways of living, organizing, and

behaving—often explicitly nonviolent—that did not mimic the repressive

practices of the state. This way of thinking about power was resurgent

in the 1960s in the work of such anarchists as Colin Ward, George

Woodcock, and Paul Goodman. Capturing the change, Woodcock described the

old-style anarchists as “bellicose barricaders.” The new anarchists, he

suggested, “had forgotten Spain and had no use for the romanticism of

the dynamitero.... They were militant pacifists” (Woodcock, 1992,

45–46).

One of the premises of postanarchist thinking is that classical

anarchism (Woodcock’s old and new anarchists) has a narrowly structural

idea of power and wrongly considers that power can and must be

abolished. May distinguishes between “strategic” and “tactical”

philosophical approaches to power. The first—which captures the

classical anarchist position—assumes that power refers to the central

problematic, that it derives essentially or for the most part from the

site on which that problematic focuses (the economic system, the state,

etc.). In contrast, tactical political philosophy suggests, “there is no

center within which power is to be located.” Power might conglomerate

around particular sites, but these points of concentration are not

points of origin, and power extends to multiple sites as well as to the

interplay between them. Like May, Call draws on Michel Foucault to

elaborate his idea. Finding classical anarchists guilty of an obsession

with capital and the state, Call rejects the simplistic top-down model

of power to argue that it is present in any social relation. Power, he

adds, always implies resistance. But resistance, counterpower, or

antipower is nothing like the struggle of the classical anarchist, which

was motivated by ideas of emancipation and wrongly assumed the existence

of a human subject with free will. Why? Because on the one hand,

postanarchists characterize the repressive nature of capitalism in novel

ways, taking their lead from surrealists and situationists, and on the

other hand, they deny the possibility of achieving a condition of

liberation. Resistance, then, is about experimentation in everyday life

and escaping the deadening discourses and consciousness of bourgeois

capitalism through permanent resistance or, following Gilles Deleuze,

rhizomatic action.

The difference between the classical and the postanarchist positions

should not be exaggerated. Although postanarchists challenge the

rationalist epistemology of much 19^(th)- and 20^(th)-century anarchist

thought, the political significance of the revision is not as great as

sometimes claimed. Insofar as arguments about power are concerned, the

comparison between the two positions is misleading. Postanarchists have

accurately characterized the 19^(th)-century conception of power, but

overlooked the analyses of related concepts—notably authority— in which

the relational issues so central to contemporary thought were first

probed.

Ruth Kinna

See also Bakunin, Mikhail ; Collective Action Problem ; Foucault, Michel

; Kropotkin, Peter ; Revolution ; Revolutionary Cell Structure

Ruth Kinna

Power in Anarchism

Further Readings