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Title: Anarchism
Author: Anonymous
Date: March 31st, 2022
Language: en
Topics: anarchism, anarchy, history, Spain, academia, academic
Source: Retrieved on March 31st, 2022 from https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/tt046z/my_step_father_is_an_anarchist_academic_he_wrote/
Notes: Historical essay written by a reddit user's stepfather who is an 'anarchist academic'. Author's name is unknown.

Anonymous

Anarchism

Eric Hobsbawm said that before 1914 anarchism was the driving force of

revolution over large parts of the world – and he was a lifelong

Communist supporter and virulent critic of anarchist politics. How large

a force? Numbers are difficult for two reasons. One is that it is a

political category with no clear boundaries. There were followers of

Proudhon; of Bakunin, a rival to Karl Marx who died in Bern in 1876; of

Malatesta, exponent of ‘propaganda of the deed’, especially

assassination in the period round the turn of the 20th century (c.f

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent’); many forms of anarcho-syndicalism.

And later even some whatever-ish hippies. The second reason is that they

tended not to vote even when it was possible, (“It only encourages

them”) , often did not form a party, or have a trade-union, or be part

of any bureaucratic system that enabled counting.

Where were they most powerful? In Europe, principally Italy and Spain,

at least those are the countries I know most about… In Italy they were

strong throughout the country : in the industrialising north, in the

marble quarries of Tuscany, and on the great agricultural estates of

Puglia. Their activists took anarchism to the USA. They were probably

the major revolutionary force up until “the red years’ (1920-22), a

period of strikes and revolutionary activism, when the Communist Party

split away from the Socialists. I was struck when reading that when

Fascism took over, their militias had little trouble eliminating the

more hierarchical Left in northern and Central Italy, but it took years

longer in the more ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ south, which was relatively

‘headless’.

In Spain they were strongest in Andalusia, on the great agricultural

estates, and in the more prosperous, industrialising region of

Catalonia. In both cases there was continual friction with Socialist and

Communist parties, especially after the formation of the Soviet Union,

and this took a brutal turn in the Spanish Civil War. If you want more

information on that try Gerald Brenan “The Spanish Labyrinth” (1943),

George Orwell “ Homage to Catalonia” (1938). Or if something heavier,

Noam Chomsky’s “American Power and the New Mandarins”, written in 1967

mostly as a denunciation of the US state and the Vietnam war, with a

long section on how Liberal and Marxist scholarship has made the Spanish

anarchist movement and its revolutionary achievements totally invisible.

But anarchism was strong in many other places. For example the movement

led by Makhno and the narodniks in the Ukraine, an important outlier of

the Russian revolution, and another place where there was a bitter fight

with Communism. The book by Benedict Anderson , which I have not read,

discusses the situation in various parts of the colonial world. Even

Gandhi once pronounced himself an anarchist, after reading a book by

Tolstoy, another outlier…

In relation to Spain in particular : “What do we want? Freedom. When do

we want it? Now.

All authoritarian relations should be abolished, especially those of the

church and the state, that liberty will be achieved through

revolutionary acts which destroy those relationships, not by seizing

control of the state or trying to reform it. In Andalusia the so called

“men with ideas – mostly small-town artisans – created dozens of local

newspapers, encouraged literacy and the study of science; as opposed to

the pontifications of the Catholic Church. One product of this, by

Kropotkin and others – was a critique of Darwinism in its view of nature

as based on competition, “the survival of the fittest’, which became a

backbone of capitalist ideology. Instead they stressed co-operation,

interdependence, mutualism in the natural world: this has renewed

resonance today. Some more radical elements favoured the abolition of

money, since money gave rise to egotistical attitudes: goods and

services should be available to all on the basis of need. Even ten years

ago I was with field-workers stopping for their lunch break: each put

all the food they had brought on a table, everybody had their own fork

and instead of sitting down, moved around the table helping themselves,

sharing. The critique of authoritarianism was comprehensive. The

critical phrase “free-love’ simply meant that no man or woman needed the

permission of a priest to live with or have sex with somebody they

wanted. There was a strong feminist strand, evident in Jerez even in the

1870s, not bad for one of the ‘backward’ regions of Europe, and still

controversial for some.

The main form of insurrectionary action was the general strike. This

would involve both field-workers on the estates (jornaleros), and the

majority of their fellow townspeople organized around a centro or

sindacato. The roads in and out of town would be blocked and nobody went

to work – artisans shopkeepers or whoever. Then wait to see if the army,

the Guardia Civil were coming to restore order, usually enough to see

the approaching cloud of dust from their horses. They usually did

arrive, a sign that other towns had not gone on strike that day, and the

State forces had not been overwhelmed. They said “ If everybody crosses

their arms on the same day, capitalism would collapse”, the problem was

having an organisation which would make that happen, in a movement which

prioritised freedom and autonomy, not giving orders or delegating

decisions. A dilemma which has not gone away, as you can see from the

history of Podemos and movements elsewhere.

We want it now! Today, why wait? This is a break is with the more

familiar Marxist writing of history, of the evolution of different modes

of production and the development of class struggle, and progress. In

part this notion of today is as good as any other is related to the

economy of Andalusia, where there was no evolution of living standards

or political rights for the best part of a century. The last major

European famine was there in 1906, and even the 1940s, under the

vindictive Franco regime, were called the hungry years on what is now

called the “costa del sol”. It gave the movement what some, including

Hobsbawm, called a millennial flavour, we can create a totally

transformed, liberated society over night. We don’t have to assimilate

this to religion, as he does, but some elements of this have carried

over to the present day.

Finally there is the question of place and autonomy. The pueblo is both

a people and a place: the absentee landlords were not part of either,

and other parasitic social occupations were also excluded. There was a

long history of such units being economically self-sufficient (in food

and all the basics), and their future material autonomy was part of the

anarchist agenda. Some hippy populations from the 1960s on, continued

with this ambition in the UK and the USA, creating dozens of rural

communes where they kept goats and knitted yoghurt, but not one in a

hundred survives. Greater economic autonomy at an individual level was

one of the themes of Kropotkin’s work . When in London and Brighton

(where he died in1921) he spent much time promoting allotments, sharing

knowledge about how to increase their productivity from correspondence

across Europe.

History, place and organization are the long term themes that stand out

in looking at the influence of anarchist traditions on contemporary

social movements. There is no doubt that the radical traditions linked

loosely to Marxism have declined in importance. Much of the American and

European world has de-industrialised, shifting production to Mexico,

China and south-east Asia. There are far fewer concentrations of manual

labour in mines, steel-works, shipyards and factories, the power of

trades-unions (labour against capital) a pale shadow. Instead we have

sub-contracting, zero hours contracts, the gig economy, casualisation,

not least in the dominant “service sector”. With that has gone the more

familiar historical narrative about capitalism, its development and

crises. The British ”New Left Review” continues to publish some articles

about how the future of the world depends on the mobilization of the

Chinese working class, but without convincing many.

In its place new forms have emerged, but they are complicated. I learnt

much about them from two Ph.D students, Tadzio Mueller and Marianne

Maeckelberg, who did extensive fieldwork across Europe (and beyond) on

anti-capitalist struggles and the alterglobalization movement. They were

great, and I got David Graeber across from Yale University to be the

external examiner for both of them. Marianne’s was published in 2009, as

“The Will of the Many” (Pluto Press). I cannot do justice to all that

came up without re-reading all the stuff we were looking at, so for now,

just a few random comments.

The attitude towards time and history in the new social movements is

much closer to anarchism than the Marxist tradition. 1999 is often

referred to as year zero, the year when mass mobilizations disrupted the

WTO meeting in Seattle. These are anti-capitalist movements: they

include many initiatives to create economies outside the market based,

monetarised economy (Jose Bove and the Confederation Paysanne; the

Zapatistas, Manuel Castells : “Networks of Outrage and Hope” 2012;

Nelson and Timmerman “Life without Money” 2011) But they are not based

around trade-unions or ‘the working-class’ per se: they are attempts to

build wider coalitions, whether amongst all those affected by

international trade deals, or those affected by the gentrification of

city centres (rentier capitalism). The 99%. . This starts even before

the global consolidation of monopoly power through the internet (Google,

Facebook, Amazon, Airbandb etc) .

Organization? Using the new media for communication, demonstrations,

civil disobedience, occupations, people’s assemblies. Democracy as

horizontalism, from the conduct of meetings to deciding the council

budget in Porto Alegre. Internationalism is combined with localism, but

there are still issues and debates about place and the ‘units’ which are

trying to create their autonomy democratically. There are still strands

of activism which are nostalgic for versions of the small-scale pueblo,

but how does that work out when all of us want access to a mobile phone,

a wind-farm and a trained doctor? Or in a world where wealth, resources,

knowledge and technology are so unevenly distributed? David Harvey who

is supportive of many aspects of these new social movements is quite

sharp about the whole question of scale. Which brings us back,

inevitably, to the old question of political movements which value

freedom and autonomy above all things and has to try to find forms of

co-ordination, and synergy between all the various initiatives.

One last point. Some activists and commentators on new social movements

have drawn once again on study of the natural world to illustrate, or

explain their political strategies. In this case a version of what is

called complexity theory in the study of certain parts of the animal

world. The key aspects are connectivity, communication, feedback,

amongst animals which at one level are “free agents” but collectively

create another level of activity. This “higher level pattern arising out

of parallel complex interactions between local agents” is called an

“emergence”. Here we are talking about bee hives, termite mounds or

shoals of fish, not a wolf-pack, with its behavioural patterns of

dominance and subordination. The idea is to explain how and why

self-organisation, and networks, without any centralisation or master

plan, might lead to something comparable to an emergence in our social

world: a different order of politics. There are problems with borrowing

this model, not least in terms of what constitutes agency (Maeckelberg

2009 chapter 5), but I find it rather poetic, especially when watching a

murmuration of starlings coming home to roost.

My background reading also includes some rather more ambitious and

specialist anthropology.

James Scott: “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” 1990 “Seeing like a

State”. 1998 “The Art of Not Being Governed” 2009

David Graeber: “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value”, 2001 “The

Democracy Project” 2013 (on Occupy Wall Street) “The Dawn of Everything

“2021 (with Wengrow)

Graeber also wrote “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” (2001),

lovely short book which covered everything from the escaped slave

communities in the Caribbean to choosing a captain on pirate ships. I

used to have a copy, but see it has been nicked by one of my students.

Or my son.

Property is Theft.