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Title: Anarchism reloaded
Author: Uri Gordon
Date: 2007
Language: en
Topics: introductory
Source: *Journal of Political Ideologies*, Volume 12, 2007. DOI: 10.1080/13569310601095598

Uri Gordon

Anarchism reloaded

Abstract

The contemporary re-emergence of anarchism on a global scale deserves

serious attention from students of ideology. As the defining orientation

of prominent activist networks, anarchism today is the principal point

of reference for radical social change movements in the North, and

represents a mature and complex genre of political expression. This

article offers a synchronic and diachronic analysis of contemporary

anarchist ideology, based on participant research on large-scale

ideological expression in anarchist movement networks. I identify and

discuss three major conceptual clusters which mark contemporary

anarchism’s stable ideological core: (a) the construction of the concept

of ‘domination’ and the active opposition to all its forms and systems,

(b) the ethos of direct action as a primary mode of political

engagement, both destructive and constructive, and (c) the open-ended,

experimental approach to revolutionary visions and strategies, which

endorses epistemological pluralism and is strongly grounded in present

tense action. From a diachronic point of view, it is argued that these

three elements are the product of network- and ideological convergence

among ecological, feminist, anti-war and anti-neoliberal movements,

associated with the multi-issue politics of alternative globalization

and local grassroots politics. The re-emergence of anarchism thus

highlights the continuity between movement networks, political culture

and ideological articulation, and draws attention to important processes

in the life-cycles of ideological formations.

Introduction

The past ten years have seen the full-blown revival of anarchism, as a

global social movement and coherent set of political discourses, on a

scale and to levels of unity and diversity unseen since the 1930s. From

anti-capitalist social centres and eco-feminist communities to raucous

street parties and blockades of international summits, anarchist forms

of resistance and organizing have been at the heart of the ‘alternative

globalization’ movement and have blurred, broken down and reconstructed

notions of political action and articulation. Despite this, but perhaps

unsurprisingly in view of its traditional marginalization in academia,

contemporary anarchism has not received any sustained scholarly

attention. This article offers an analysis of present-day anarchist

ideology from a movement-driven approach, which stresses a continuity

between the culture and life-cycles of social movements and the

development of large-scale, grassroots ideological expression.

Based on five years of empirical and theoretical research on the

political discourse of activist networks, the primary aim of this

article is to offer a framework for making sense of the ideological

expression that observably prevails in the radical, direct-action end of

the alternative globalization and anti-war movement—the site of

contemporary anarchism. At the centre of this article is a synchronic

analysis of contemporary anarchist ideology, which interprets the

ideational framework expressed by widespread trends in the praxis and

political language of anarchist activists. These, I argue, display three

major conceptual clusters which specify the meanings and relationships

between central keywords in anarchist political language, and constitute

the ideology’s emergent stable core. The first is the construction of

the concept of ‘domination,’ which clarifies how anarchists construct

what they object to in society. The second is the cluster ideas

associated with direct action and the ethos of ‘prefigurative politics,’

expressing anarchists’ thinking about their methodology for social

change. The third is a strongly open-ended conception of politics that

is detached from any notion of a post-revolutionary resting point,

expressing the experimental nature of anarchist strategies and their

focus on the present tense.

Threaded through the synchronic analysis are elements of a diachronic

account, which traces the sources of the present-day ideological

configurations I discuss to transformative processes in social movement

activity in recent decades. What emerges very clearly from this account

is that contemporary anarchism is only ephemerally related to the

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thread of libertarian-socialist

movements and ideas, which was effectively repressed out of existence in

the first half of the last century by Fascism, Bolshevism and the

American Red Scare. Instead, the mainspring of today’s anarchism can be

found in the network — and ideological convergence that has been taking

place among movements whose beginnings were never consciously anarchist

— in particular the cross-issue formulations of radical ecology, waves

of militant feminism, black and queer liberation movements, and the

anti-neoliberal internationalism launched by movements in the global

South, most celebrated of which are the Mexican Zapatistas. Here, I draw

attention to processes of cross-fertilization that have had a major

influence on the development of political discourse in these

ideology-producing groups. While a full genealogy is well beyond the

limits of the present article, mention is made of several interrelated

trends which have contributed to the emergence of a recognizable

anarchist process—the emergence of a multi-issue politics that addresses

overlapping oppressions, the proliferation of direct-action and its

strategical implications, and the rootedness of the movement in western

subcultural spaces.

More broadly, this article seeks to demonstrate what a movement-driven

approach can do for the study of ideologies. Approaching the ideologies

at work in social movements necessarily involves the examination of

mass, or at least large-scale, social thinking. Such an endeavour

involves asking how the participants make sense of their own praxis and

of the larger political world they inhabit, and investigating processes

of ideological production and evolution in dense social networks. The

grounding assumption is that an authentic picture of a movement’s

ideological articulation can only emerge from attention to the verbal

medium in which the bulk of it takes place. Thus, while books, pamphlets

and websites should not be ignored, the primary material for

interpretation is the continuous and polyphonic conversational activity

that takes place among the participants, whether in the form of

relatively abstract discussions of values and priorities or, more

frequently, as ideological statements that surface during the planning

and evaluation of campaigns, protests and direct actions—discourses in

which are refractured the opinions, beliefs, narratives, controversies

and myths that make up the activists’ ideological world. To gain access

to this discourse, a movement-driven approach to the study of ideologies

employs a strategy inspired by ethnography, which stresses first-hand

participant observation of the vernacular culture of activists.

My own strategy has involved five years of embedded research with

anarchist activists and collectives involved in diverse local campaigns

and projects, discussion groups, as well as mass international

mobilizations and protest actions. In the UK these included the local

anarchist network in Oxford, anti-authoritarian coalitions organising

for May Day actions and anti-war demonstrations, the British Earth

First! network (which unlike its U.S. counterpart is unambiguously

anarchist) and the Dissent! network resisting the 2005 G8 summit.

Participant observation was also conducted at international

mobilizations including anti-G8 protests in Genoa (2001), Evian (2003)

and Gleneagles (2005), and anti-EU protests at Nice (2000), Brussels

(2001) and Barcelona (2002), as well as several international activist

gatherings, including the international No Border protest-camp at

Strasbourg (2002), European meetings of the Peoples’ Global Action

network in Leiden (2002) and Dijon (2003), and the anti-authoritarian

sideshows accompanying the European Social Forums in Firenze (2002) and

London (2004). To further trace transnational connections, I have been

monitoring English and Spanish-language email lists and web discussion

groups, and maintaining contact with anarchist activity in North America

through email correspondence and meetings with organizers visiting

Europe.

The participant’s approach is pivotal for issues of reliability and

genuine representation. Without an embedded presence in anarchist

networks, the theorist may be led to vastly misguided judgements about

the relative importance of various anarchist ideas and

tendencies—resulting in an academic account that has little to do with

reality. As a counterexample, take the obvious starting point for the

non-participant researcher: the Internet. A great deal of anarchist

articulation takes place on the web, with literally hundreds of

web-sites dedicated to news, announcements and polemics from an

anarchist perspective available for consideration. However, without any

pre-set markers, how can the researcher know whether a certain anarchist

group, ideological configuration or set of arguments encountered on the

web is in any way representative or influential? Since anyone with

minimal web-publishing skills can set up a website and post there

whatever they want, it is very easy to present a great deal of material

in an attractive set-up that would give the impression of prominence and

importance while in fact being misleadingly ‘louder’ on the web than in

reality. Contrast the impression of clout given by the website of the

Industrial Workers of the World (www.iww.org) and its total U.S.

membership of 1298 comrades as of June 2005—a fact that is not disclosed

anywhere on the website, but only in its annual report to the US

Department of Labor.[1] Thus, while web-based research would present

anarcho-syndicalism as a prominent contemporary tendency worthy of

serious consideration, the embedded position of the participant allows

him or her to realize that it is in fact a very minor one. This

establishes the importance of the much richer orientation available to

the observing participant, who encounters the movement and its culture

as a habitus, rather than as an ‘other’ mediated by and limited to the

texts it produces.

The direct encounter with verbal ideological expression is augmented by

an analysis of anarchist texts, from books and essays to flyers,

brochures, and web-based news and opinion postings. Here too a

participant’s background is crucial in order to determine how

representative and/or influential a given text is, and the selection of

material for analysis must be based on a good prior acquaintance with

the population that writes and reads them. Only embeddedness in activist

networks can afford a sufficiently literate approach to activists’

written expression, supporting informed judgements on the relative

importance and contextual reading of texts.

Political culture and ideological content

One reason for academia’s blind spot for contemporary anarchism is that

it is a fairly recent phenomenon. A recognizable global anarchist

movement has only matured in the recent decade, and analysis should be

expected to lag behind the development of its own object of

investigation. Another, perhaps more important, reason is that the

presence of a large part of the anarchist movement today is submerged

rather than overt. While there do exist self-defined formal anarchist

organizations (such as the British and French Anarchist Federations),

the bulk of the movement operates through informal and ad-hoc political

formations, often without an explicit anarchist label, and obscured by

the broader alternative globalization, environmental and anti-war

movements in which it is embedded. There is also a reluctance to use the

label ‘anarchist’ on part of many groups whose political culture and

discourse obviously merit the designation. This stems not from any

political disagreement with what the word represents to activists, but

because of the will to avoid its negative baggage in public

consciousness. Thus, movement participants often speak of themselves as

‘autonomous,’ ‘anti-authoritarian’ or ‘horizontal’ (as in horizontal

rather than top-down organization)—words used for the sole purpose of

not saying ‘anarchist’ because of its popular connotations of chaos and

violence. This invites a failure to recognize the existence of an

anarchist movement as such, ignoring the dense patterns of communication

and cooperation between these formations, as well as their ideological

cohesiveness and shared collective identity.

However, the words anarchism, anti-authoritarianism and horizontalism

should not be seen as standing at odds with each other, but as synonyms

for one and the same thing: a clearly defined political culture which is

the entity most properly referred to as anarchism. Thus, it is indeed

possible coherently to speak of an anarchist movement in the present

day, as long as the networks- and culture turn in social movement theory

is taken into account—as in Mario Diani’s definition of a social

movement as a ‘network of informal interactions between a plurality of

individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in a political or

cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity.’[2] The

anarchist political culture that unifies this movement and infuses it

with content is best understood as a shared orientation towards ways of

‘doing politics’ that is manifest across its networks in common forms of

organization (anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical, consensus-based); in

a common repertoire of political expression (direct action, constructing

alternatives, community outreach, confrontation); in a common discourse

and ideology (keywords and their interrelations, arguments and

narratives—the focus of the present article); and in more broadly

‘cultural’ shared features of dress, music and diet.

The site in which these cultural codes are reproduced, exchanged and

undergo mutation and critical reflection is the locus of anarchism as a

movement, a context in which many very active political subjects can say

the word ‘we’ and understand roughly the same thing—a collective

identity constructed around an affirmed common path of thinking and

doing. The architecture of today’s anarchist movement can thus be

described as a decentralized network of communication, coordination and

mutual support among autonomous nodes of social struggle, overwhelmingly

lacking formal membership or fixed boundaries. This segmentary,

polycentric and reticular format of social movement organization has

been likened a rhizome—the stemless, bulbous root-mass of plants like

potato or bamboo—a structure based on principles of connection,

heterogeneity, multiplicity and non-linearity.[3]

While the network or rhizome is an apt metaphor for the movement’s

architecture on a macro level, it should be clarified that the bulk of

ongoing anarchist praxis and discourse takes place on the micro level of

face-to-face collectives and affinity groups, and the meso level of the

local milieu or (mini-)network of anarchists in a particular locale,

such as a town or city. The local milieu is a context in which most but

not all participants are closely familiar to one another, and may

include participants who are also organized as collectives among

themselves. The local milieu is the pool from which affinity groups are

drawn for particular actions, and under the auspices of which many

non-confrontational activities are organized without explicit affinity

groups (stalls, leafleting, small demonstrations, and

donation-generating events such as film screenings and parties). The

local milieu is also the scene in which anarchists most often coordinate

and collaborate with other actors, such as citizen associations, youth

groups, the more radical elements of the charity and NGO spectrum, and

local chapters of Green and even Communist parties.

Anarchist political culture can be seen to animate a fabric of tribal

solidarities in the movement, which proceeds from the face-to-face

context of the local affinity-groups and activist milieus—the small

‘bands’ and ‘extended families’ where primary solidarity is generated on

the most intimate level of personal trust and friendship. Larger-scale

solidarities are enabled through the further intersection of these local

milieus, that is, through the combined reproduction of networks of trust

and affinity among activists from diverse anarchist and non-anarchist

political backgrounds. The special dynamic attached to tribal solidarity

is that beyond the level of personal ties there is an instinctive

tendency to extend it also to perceived members of one’s extended family

or tribe. Here the feeling of identification, and the mutuality and

reciprocity it motivates, is premised on shared cultures of resistance

and visions for social change. In exchanges between activists from

different countries who meet for the first time, familiarity is often

probed through the presence of various cultural indicators of one’s

background and political orientation. Tribal solidarity thus exists as a

potentiality that can be self-actualized in a self-selected manner,

destabilising the boundaries of membership and non-membership.

This article focuses on the discursive aspect of anarchist political

culture—the political language that demarcates anarchism as an ideology.

The task here is to clarify the mental mappings that observably prevail

among anarchists, investigating the substance of the keywords that

feature in their oral and written expression, and the way in which

different keywords are positioned in relation to one another. In their

activist capacity, anarchists employ keywords like ‘domination’ or

‘direct action’ as cultural signifiers, which in turn function as

hyperlinks to broader semantic fields. This facilitates the expression

of ideas in the public sphere, and the establishment of markers for

common ground among activists themselves. Hence, inasmuch as anarchism

is being spoken of as an ideology, it should be remembered that in doing

so one is performing an act of extrapolation from cultural codes, one

which suggests certain ways to phrase and conceptualize the much more

intuitive and experiential constituents of anarchist discourse. Thus,

the discussion of the movement’s ideational apparatus should take place

within the context of the political praxis which it expresses and

influences, while investigating the ‘surplus of meaning’ that activists

generate in their discourse—implications of ideological utterances of

which the participants may not be fully aware.[4]

For heuristic purposes, I would suggest an understanding of anarchist

ideological morphology that approaches it from the outside in. Outside

are a set of ideological markers that define the basic rules of the

anarchist language game, a set of first-order decontestations whose

examination is at the centre of this article. These create perimeters

that envelope a ‘cytoplasm’ of much freer and experimental articulation,

where there is a diverse polyphony of ideas and approaches, marked by

resurfacing tensions around second-order decontestations of political

concepts (power, violence, modernity …), tensions which structure the

development of discursive trends within anarchism. As activists’ oral

debates and writings contribute to a circulation of ideas in the

movement, such concepts are re-framed and re-coded in a response to

world events, political alliances and trends in direct-action culture.

While the picture of anarchist ideology presented here is ultimately

grounded in the appreciation of verbal expression, a useful first

glimpse of it can be found in a special class of written documents which

constitute representative artefacts of activist discourse—documents

entitled ‘principles of unity,’ ‘mission statements’ and

‘hallmarks’—which almost all activist groups create or endorse. Such a

document is not intended as a constitution or a political programme, but

rather as a rhetorical space in which is indicated the ‘flavour’ of

politics that such groups represent—effectively a statement of

collective identity. Such statements fulfil three important political

functions. Looking inwards, they establish a frame of reference for

participants that can be invoked symbolically as a set of basic

guidelines for resolving disputes. Looking outwards, they attempt to

express the movement’s political identity to a general audience. And

looking ‘sideways,’ they define the lines along which solidarity is

extended or denied to other movement actors. As content-rich statements,

such documents provide a very useful starting-point for an ideological

analysis of anarchism.

The most widely utilized document of this kind are the ‘hallmarks’ of

the Peoples’ Global Action network (PGA)—a worldwide coordination of

anti-capitalist groups and movements launched at an international

encuentro organized by the Zapatistas in 1996. The hallmarks have served

extensively and worldwide as a basis for actions and coalitions, and

have been endorsed by a large number of groups as a basic expression of

their politics—though this fact is not well known outside the movement,

and the importance of the hallmarks as a grounding expression of

anarchist politics may well escape the external observer. The current

wording of the hallmarks is as follows:

A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all

trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive

globalization.

We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination

including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious

fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human

beings.

A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can

have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organizations, in

which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker.

A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social

movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize

respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the

construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.

An organizational philosophy based on decentralization and

autonomy.[5]

Now in spite of the clear resonances of its hallmarks, PGA has never

been defined explicitly as an anarchist network. Missing from the

hallmarks is the explicit rejection of the state, although they could be

interpreted with the addition that all governments ‘promote destructive

globalization’ by definition and should thus be rejected. This

intentional vagueness is mainly because, on the global level applicable

to the PGA network as a whole, an explicit reference to anarchism would

not do justice to the diversity of its participant groups, which include

numerous peasant movements from Asia and Latin America who have never

identified with anarchism nor with any other set of ideas rooted in a

by-and-large European historical experience. In a European or North

American setting, however, hallmarks like those of PGA establish the

perimeters of a decidedly anarchist political space by way of

elimination, so to speak. They exclude such a long list of features of

society and ways of approaching social change, that what is left, at

least in terms of public discourse in advanced capitalist countries, is

inevitably some kind of anarchism. This happens entirely without

reference to anarchism as a label, but the results remain the same. The

third hallmark, for example, explicitly distances the PGA political

space from the ones in which NGOs and advocacy groups operate, working

to change the WTO and other global trade systems from within the logic

of their own operation through lobbying. The fifth hallmark can easily

be understood as an exclusion of the centralized and hierarchical

organising methods of the authoritarian left, while reserving the space

for a diversity of non-hierarchical organising traditions, from the

tribal-based associations of Maori and Maya peoples through Indian

sarvodaya-inspired campaigns to the affinity-group-based structures of

Western anarchists.

The PGA hallmarks and other, similar documents express the three major

conceptual clusters that are present across anarchist oral discourse.

The first is the rejection of ‘all forms of domination’—a term

encapsulating the manifold social institutions and dynamics (most

aspects of modern society, in fact) which anarchists seek to challenge,

erode and ultimately overthrow. It is this generalization of the target

of revolutionary struggle from ‘state and capital’ to ‘domination’ that

most distinctly draws contemporary anarchism apart from its earlier

generations. Second, we find references to direct action, a multifaceted

term which reflects the do-it-yourself approach animating anarchists’

action repertoires and combines both dual power strategies (building

grassroots alternatives that are to ‘hollow out’ capitalism), and the

stress on realising libertarian and egalitarian social relations within

the fold of the movement itself. The third gesture is present in what

these statements overwhelmingly lack—detailed prognostic blueprints for

a desired future society. This does not mean that anarchism is merely

destructive, but that its constructive aspects are expected to be

articulated in the present-tense experimentation of prefigurative

politics—not as an a priori position. This lends anarchism a strongly

open-ended dimension, whereby it eschews any notion of a

‘post-revolutionary resting point.’ Instead, anarchists have come to

transpose their notion of social revolution to the present-tense.

Non-hierarchical, anarchic modes of interaction are no longer seen as

features on which to model a future society, but rather as an

ever-present potential of social interaction here and now—a ‘revolution

in everyday life.’[6] These three aspects form the stable core of

anarchist ideology in the present day, each of which I now move to

discuss in detail.

Struggle against domination

Since the late 1960s, social movements have been creating linkages in

theory and practice between various campaigning issues, pointing beyond

specific grievances towards a more basic critique of stratified and

hierarchical social structures. The rise in recent decades of

multi-issue movements campaigning on diverse agendas—economic justice,

peace, feminism, ecology—was accompanied by linkages among these agendas

which mitigated what would otherwise have been a fragmentation of

political energies, and provided platforms for solidarity and

cooperation on the ground. Movement activists progressively came to see

the interdependence of their agendas, manifest along various axes such

as ecological critiques of capitalism, feminist anti-militarism, and the

interrelation of racial and economic segregation. Special mention is due

here to ecological movements, whose agenda—by its very nature

encompassing the entire spectrum of interaction between society and the

natural environment—supplied it with a cross-cutting perspective that

inevitably touched on multiple social, economic and ideological spheres.

In passing it is interesting to note that, while the holistic approach

of the radical ecology movement initially led it to gravitate towards

the ‘consciousness shift’ formulations associated with deep ecology, the

latter’s lack of a robust social critique left many activists

unsatisfied. Throughout the 1990s, eco-radicals’ growing confrontation

with governments and corporations in the course of their struggles

infused the movement with a very strong anti-capitalist and anti-state

dimension, through which their green was darkened, so to speak, into a

recognizably anarchist black.

Accompanying the convergence of campaigning issues was the growing

emphasis, in the radical community, on the intersections of numerous

forms of oppression, taking struggle beyond what were previously

specific agendas. Black women, marginalized in overwhelmingly white

feminist circles and often facing blatant sexism in the black liberation

movements, began mobilising in autonomous black feminist movements

heralded by the founding in 1973 of the National Black Feminist

Organization and of Black Women Organized for Action.[7] These movements

were soon to highlight the concept of ‘simultaneous oppression’—a

personal and political awareness of how race, class and gender compound

each other as arenas of exclusion, in a complex and mutually-reinforcing

relationship. The 1980s saw an increasing diversification of the gay

rights movement in both Europe and North America, with lesbian and

bisexual organizations tying feminist and gay liberation agendas, and

claiming their place in a hitherto predominantly male field.[8] With the

advent of the HIV/AIDS crisis later that decade, these agendas took a

further radical turn when activist groups like the American ACT UP

introduced a strong emphasis on direct action and focused on the

pharmaceutical corporations keeping HIV medication at unreachable

prices.[9] These dynamics were carried forward under the umbrella of

Queer Nation, founded in summer 1990, which emphasized diversity and the

inclusion of all sexual minorities. By the mid-1990s, queer women and

men of colour had founded their own organizations and were structuring

their struggles explicitly around the intersections of racism,

heterosexism, patriarchy and class.

Contemporary anarchism is rooted in these convergences of radical

feminist, ecological, anti-racist and queer struggles, which finally

fused in the late 1990s through the global wave of protest against the

policies and institutions of neoliberal globalization. This has led

anarchism, in its re-emergence, to be attached to a more generalized

discourse of resistance. A century ago the struggles against patriarchy

and racism, for example, were relatively minor concerns for most

anarchists—yet they are now widely accepted as an integral part of the

anarchist agenda. As a result of this integration, anarchist discourses

of resistance have come to gravitate around a new concept, that of

domination.

The word domination occupies a central place in anarchist political

language, as evident from countless utterances I have witnessed in the

course of my research. It is, for anarchists, the paradigm governing

micro- and macro-political relations, maintained through the

‘reproduction of everyday life.’[10] Domination is not a value, like

freedom or equality or solidarity—it is a disvalue: what anarchists want

to negate. The word in its anarchist decontestation serves as a generic

concept for the various systematic features of society whereby groups

and persons are controlled, coerced, exploited, humiliated,

discriminated against, etc.—all of which dynamics anarchists seek to

uncover, challenge and erode. The function of the concept of domination,

as anarchists construct it, is to express the encounter with a family

resemblance among the entire ensemble of such social dynamics, or, more

precisely, among the articulations of these dynamics by those who

struggle against them.[11] This linkage is evident in manifold

utterances, such as the following communiqué from activists in Kvisa

Shchora (Black Laundry)—an Israeli LGBT direct action group against the

occupation and for social justice:

The oppression of different minorities in the state of Israel feeds on

the same racism, the same chauvinism, and the same militarism that

uphold the oppression and occupation of the Palestinian people. There

cannot be true freedom in an oppressive, occupying society. In a

military society there is no place for the different and weak; lesbians,

Gay men, drag queens, transsexuals, foreign workers, women, Mizrahi

Israelis [of Middle Eastern or North African descent], Arabs,

Palestinians, the poor, the disabled and others.[12]

The term domination thus draws attention to the multiplicity of partial

overlaps between different experiences that are struggled against,

constructing a general category that maintains a correspondence between

experiences that remain grounded in their own particular realities. The

term domination thus remains inclusive of the myriad articulations of

forms of oppression, exclusion and control by those subject to them, at

countless individual and collective sites of resistance. This does not,

of course, imply that the same mechanisms feature in all of these

relations, nor that they operate in identical ways. Nevertheless, it is

the discursive move of naming domination which enables anarchists to

transcend specific antagonisms towards the generalized resistance that

they promote. If there is one distinct starting point for anarchist

approach, it is this act of naming.

The systematic nature of domination is often expressed in reference to a

number of overarching ‘forms,’ ‘systems’ or ‘regimes’ of

domination—impersonal sets of rules regulating relationships between

people, rules which are not autonomously constituted by those

individuals placed within the relationship (including the dominating

side)—of which patriarchy, white supremacy and wage labour are prominent

examples.[13] Regimes of domination are the overarching context that

anarchists see as conditioning people’s socialization and background

assumptions about social norms, explaining why people fall into certain

patterns of behaviour and have expectations that contribute to the

perpetuation of dominatory relations. Because of their compulsory

nature, regimes of domination are also something that one cannot just

‘opt out of’ under normal circumstances. Women or non-white people

encounter discrimination, access barriers and derogatory behaviour

towards them throughout society, and cannot simply remove themselves

from their fold or wish them away. The attempt to live outside them is

already an act of resistance. As prominent anarchist writer Bob Black

has expressed this, domination is nobody’s fault, and everybody’s:

The ‘real enemy’ is the totality of physical and mental constraints by

which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the

spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real

enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life

by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its

personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks

and everyone else participating in the system that domination and

deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all

against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all

the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed

columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the

syndicalists and all the situationists.[14]

The relationship, implicit in contemporary anarchist thinking, between

the resistance to domination as social dynamic and the resistance to

social institutions (broadly understood) can now be articulated more

clearly. While what is resisted is, at the bottom of things, domination

as a basic social dynamic, the resistance is seen to proceed through

confrontation with the institutions through which this domination is

administered. On such a reading institutions such as the state, the

capitalist system of ownership and labour—and also institutions such as

the family, the school and many forms of organized religion—are where

the authoritarian, indoctrinary and disciplinary mechanisms which

perpetuate domination-regimes are concretely located. Resistance to

police repression or to the caging of refugees and illegal immigrants is

more broadly directed towards the state as the source of policing or

immigration policies. Act of resistance are, in the barest sense,

‘anarchist’ when they are perceived by the actor as particular

actualizations of a more systemic opposition to such institutions.

The preceding account of domination, as constructed by anarchists,

enriches our understanding of their action repertoires and broader

‘strategic’ orientations to social struggle. A ‘family’ concept like

domination reflects anarchists’ commitments to decentralization in the

process of resistance. It is widely believed among anarchists that

struggles against domination are at their most informed, powerful and

honest when undertaken by those who are placed within those dynamics

(though clearly it is possible for men to struggle against patriarchy,

for white folk to resist racism, etc.). Thus, the impulse to abolish

domination is valorised in the diversity of its enactments, explaining

the anarchist refrain according to which ‘the only real liberation is

self-liberation’ and grounding its rejection of paternalism and

vanguards. The tension between the specificity of dominations and the

need to articulate them in common is reflected in the (often positive)

tension between unity and diversity in the anarchist outlook on

struggle—the anarchist movement itself being a network of autonomous

resistances. The latter retain a privileged position in expressing their

oppression and defining their struggles against it, but are also in

constant communication, mutual aid and solidarity with each other.

Direct action/prefigurative politics

This leads us to consider the second conceptual cluster that

characterizes contemporary anarchism—the one surrounding anarchist

strategy or social-change methodology. Here what is overwhelmingly

encountered is an ethos of ‘direct action’—action without

intermediaries, whereby an individual or a group uses their own power

and resources to change reality in a desired direction. Anarchists

decontest direct action as a matter of taking social change into one’s

own hands, by intervening directly in a situation rather than appealing

to an external agent (typically a government) for its rectification.

Most commonly, direct action is viewed under its preventative or

destructive guise. If people object, for instance, to the clear-cutting

of a forest, then taking direct action means that rather than (only)

petitioning or engaging in a legal process, they would intervene

literally to prevent the clear cutting—by chaining themselves to the

trees, or pouring sugar into the gas-tanks of the bulldozers, or other

acts of disruption and sabotage—their goal being to directly hinder or

halt the project.

However, direct action can also be invoked in a constructive way. Thus,

under the premise of direct action, anarchists who propose social

relations free of hierarchy and domination undertake their construction

by themselves. This represents the broadening of direct action into a

‘prefigurative politics’ committed to define and realize anarchist

social relations within the existing society, not least so within the

collective structures and activities of the revolutionary movement—the

idea that ‘a transformative social movement must necessarily anticipate

the ways and means of the hoped-for new society,’[15] as anarchism’s

‘commitment to overturning capitalism by only employing a strategy that

is an embryonic representation of an anarchist social future.’[16]

Direct action is thus framed as a dual strategy of confrontation to

delegitimize the system and grassroots alternative-building from below,

translating into a commitment to ‘being the change,’ on any level from

personal relationships that address sexism and racism to sustainable

living and communes. The movement’s goals are thus ‘recursively built

into [its] daily operation and organizational style. This is evident in

affinity groups, decentralized organization, decision-making by

consensus, respect for differing opinions and an overall emphasis on the

process as well as the outcomes of activism.’[17]

The pursuit of prefigurative politics is an inseparable aspect of

anarchist strategy since the collectives, communes and networks in which

they are involved today are themselves the groundwork for the realities

that will replace the present society. Collectively-run grassroots

projects are, on this account, the seeds of a future society ‘within the

shell of the old.’ For social change to be successful, the modes of

organization that will replace capitalism, the state, gendered divisions

of labour and so on need to be prepared alongside (though not instead

of) the attack on present institutions. Thus, ‘the very process of

building an anarchist movement from below is viewed as the process of

consociation, self-activity and self-management that must ultimately

yield that revolutionary self that can act upon, change and manage an

authentic society.’[18]

An omnipresent hallmark of anarchist political expression, direct action

was inherent in historical anarchism’s insurrectionary traditions, in

sabotage and contestation ‘at the point of production’ (a refrain coined

by IWW militants), and in the formation of communes, free schools and

militias. It returned to prominence throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One

of the primary sites for this was the nonviolent blockades against

nuclear power and weapons, which drew together pacifists, early

environmentalists and feminists, though not the traditional Left.[19]

The Abalone Alliance, which in the early 1980s forced the Diablo Canyon

nuclear power plant in California to shut down, saw a prominent

involvement of women who explicitly called themselves anarcha-feminists.

Through their involvement,

the anarcha-feminists were able to do a great deal to define the

political culture that the Abalone would bequeath to subsequent

incarnations of the direct action movement. That political culture

helped to create more space for internal differences in the Abalone, and

in later organizations, than there had been in the Clamshell [Alliance].

It strengthened the role of the counterculture within the direct action

movement, and it opened the movement to the spirituality that later

became one of its most salient aspects … anarcha-feminism reinforced the

commitment to a utopian democratic vision and a political practice based

on the values it contained.[20]

Direct action under its ‘constructive’ aspect could be seen throughout

this period in the numerous self-organized urban and rural communities

that were set up in Europe and North America in this period. More

violent direct action was also present, primarily against the Franco

regime and in the bombings of the Angry Brigade in Britain. From the

1980s onwards, direct action also became the primary method of political

expression for radical ecological movements, as in the wilderness

defence of Earth First! or broader social and environmental struggles

such as the British anti-roads movement.[21]

At the same time, many activists were increasingly departing from the

top-down models of organization that characterized the old European Left

as well as in American groups such as the National Organisation of

Women, the large anti-Vietnam War coalitions or Students for a

Democratic Society (and, later, its would-be ‘revolutionary cadre’ the

Weathermen). From the 1970s on, movements increasingly began to organize

themselves in a decentralized manner without (formal) structures or

leaders, inspired by critiques of political centralization that emanated

in particular from the New Left in the late 1960s and feminist circles

in the 1970s.[22] Anti-nuclear blockades and sabotage actions, for

example, were often organized through the cooperation of decentralized

affinity groups, arguing that the movement should model the social

structures it looks forward to in its own organization. At the same

time, the involvement in these actions of Quakers and feminists

(anarcha- and otherwise) introduced consensus decision making methods

and ‘spokescouncil’ structures for coordination among affinity group

delegates—until then quite alien to anarchists, but today enjoying a

prominent, if contested, position in anarchist organising. Later,

‘autonomist’ movements in Italy and Germany would extend the

decentralized logic of collective action in antagonism to the state,

further cementing this aspect of an anarchist political culture.

Thus, direct action and prefigurative politics have been reconstituted

as a central element in the worldview of present-day anarchists. The

effort to create and develop horizontal functioning in any collective

action setting, and to maintain a constant awareness of interpersonal

dynamics and the way in which they might reflect social patterns of

exclusion, are accorded just as much importance as planning and carrying

out campaigns, projects and direct actions. In contemporary anarchist

discourse, considerations of efficiency or unity are never alleged to

justify a weakening of this emphasis. The development of

non-hierarchical structures in which domination is constantly challenged

is, for most anarchists, an end in itself.

A clear indication of the importance that anarchists attach to

prefigurative politics is its decisive role in defining their solidarity

and willingness to collaborate with non-anarchist movements. Anarchists

are quite often found allied, on an ad-hoc or pretty regular basis, with

self-organized movements of migrant workers, peasant associations,

anti-militarist initiatives, campaigns against police brutality etc.,

which do not have an explicitly anarchist orientation. Such groups may

have no radical critique of capitalism, entirely focus their work on a

single issue, or limit their political agendas to reforms in particular

institutions rather than seeking the type of social transformation that

anarchists endorse. But when asking activists why they are more

comfortable working with some non-anarchist groups rather than others,

the response I often received is that it is a factor of the internal

process of these groups. It is their general trajectory towards

internally democratic, face-to-face methods of organization, and their

striving to transcend sexist or racist patterns among their own members,

which in large part determine anarchists’ solidarity and will to

cooperate with them. This is not to say that anarchists will not surface

their differences with such groups or question what they see as their

limited perspectives—but this would usually take the form of a

(sometimes heated) debate among allies, rather than calling into

question the alliance itself. In a similar way, anarchists feel far less

comfortable cooperating with large, bureaucratic NGOs who do not put a

strong emphasis on horizontal internal structures, even if they do take

quite a radical position on capitalism, promote a multi-issue analysis,

or call for grassroots empowerment from the teeth outward.

Finally, it should be emphasized that the anarchist drive towards a

prefigurative politics of direct action is strongly related to

anarchism’s individualist aspect. Anarchists often explain their actions

and modes of organization as intended not only to help bring about

generalized social transformation, but also to liberate themselves to

the greatest degree possible. On such a reading, the motivation for

anarchists to engage in a prefigurative politics lies simply in their

desire to inhabit liberated social relations. In the words of US

anarchist publishing collective CrimethInc.,

It is crucial that we seek change not in the name of some doctrine or

grand cause, but on behalf of ourselves, so that we will be able to live

more meaningful lives. Similarly we must seek first and foremost to

alter the contents of our own lives in a revolutionary manner, rather

than direct our struggle towards world-historical changes which we will

not live to witness. In this way we will avoid the feelings of

worthlessness and alienation that result from believing that it is

necessary to ‘sacrifice oneself for the cause,’ and instead live to

experience the fruits of our labours … in our labors themselves.[23]

Diversity and open-endedness

The third and final conceptual cluster at the ideological core of

contemporary anarchism is the one associated with its future visions.

Here, anarchists’ discourse strongly expresses an open-ended tendency,

eschewing both the notion of revolutionary closure and unitary

blueprints for an ‘anarchist society,’ in favour of a project based on

diversity and perpetual experimentation. This is not entirely new—one

prominent antecedent being the following statement from Rudolf Rocker:

Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a

perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle

it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any

absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in

an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living

conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression,

and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set

any fixed goal.[24]

This type of thinking has, however, become much more prevalent in

contemporary anarchism, where the commitment to diversity and to free

experimentation with social and cultural alternatives in the present

tense has become a central grounding point. This is traceable to the

same process of convergence among social movements reviewed earlier, as

a result of which activists developed a pluralist orientation which

disemphasized unity of analysis and vision as a measure of appropriate

political affiliation, contributing to the possibility of diverse ad-hoc

coalitions. This was perhaps the result of the intriguing circumstance

whereby several movements simultaneously purported to provide

overarching, totalising perspectives as a vantage point for their

analysis and action, as in the case of certain strands feminism, deep

ecology, and post-war developments of Marxism such as Italian autonomist

theory. The rise of such paradoxically ‘competing holisms’ and their own

versions of the sources of the world’s problems (patriarchy,

industrialism and/or anthropocentrism, continuing class divisions, etc.)

sometimes led to entrenchment and unwillingness to acknowledge other

viewpoints. In other cases, however, activists turned away from aiming

at a single analysis and towards a ‘theoretical pluralism’ that was

prepared to accord equal legitimacy to diverse perspectives and

narratives of struggle. This displaced theoretical unity in favour of a

bottom-up approach to social theorising, and a parallel interest in

manifold creative articulations of social alternatives.

We should digress for a moment and note that such an orientation has

evident affinities with post-structuralist thought. Indeed, over the

past few years there has been a growth of interest in exploring the

correspondences between anarchist politics and the diverse intellectual

currents associated with post-structuralism. Saul Newman describes this

endeavour as ‘using the post-structuralist critique [to] theorize the

possibility of political resistance without essentialist guarantees,’

seeking fundamental critiques of authority in aspects such as

‘Foucault’s rejection of the ‘essential’ difference between madness and

reason; Deleuze and Guattari’s attack on Oedipal representation and

State-centered thought; [and] Derrida’s questioning of philosophy’s

assumption about the importance of speech over writing.’[25] Moreover,

it has been argued that anarchism has had an indirect influence on the

development of post-structuralism itself, seeing as major theorists

associated with this current—Baudrillard, Lyotard, Virilio, Derrida,

Castoriadis, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari—were all active participants in

the French May ‘68 events which had a strong libertarian dimension, and

went on to develop their theories in their aftermath.[26] Contemporary

post-structuralist anarchism (or simply ‘post-anarchism’) thus involves

drawing on post-structuralist resources to flesh out new critiques and

theories with a strong anarchist leaning, coupled with an explicit

critique of classical anarchism’s rootedness in essentialist

Enlightenment humanism and simplistic conceptions of social

dynamics.[27] For example, Todd May has pointed to classical anarchists’

tendency to conceive of power monolithically, as a capacity concentrated

in the state and the machinations of the ruling class.[28] Drawing on

Foucault and contemporary feminist and queer theorists, May and others

argue that the unfreedom of human beings is not reducible to the

presence of explicit hierarchical structures and overt coercion, but

often an insidious dynamic, reproduced through performative disciplinary

acts in which the protagonists may not even be conscious of their roles.

Foucault has famously explored how power is articulated in the

‘capillaries’ of social relations, in cultural grammar, routine

practices, social mechanisms and institutions—in a much more subtle and

potent form than in its rougher expressions as military violence. These

insights feed into a post-anarchist critique of power which transcends

the structural characteristics of hierarchy, while pointing to new

potentialities for resistance. It should be emphasized that

post-structuralist anarchism remains an intellectual preoccupation,

limited to a handful of writers rather than being a genuine expression

of, or influence on, the grassroots thinking and discourse of masses of

activists (which is not, of course, to detract from its importance as a

theoretical endeavour).

Returning to intellectual pluralism, another important contributing

factor should be mentioned—the rootedness of the emergent anarchist

movement in western subcultures. Throughout the 20^(th) century

anarchist ideas had attracted subcultural and artistic movements such as

Dada, Surrealism and the Beats. Since the 1960s, this attraction took on

a much larger scale with the advent of the ‘counterculture’ phenomenon.

The punk subculture has been the most significant breeding ground for

anarchists throughout the last two decades, due to its oppositional

attitude to mainstream society and close affiliation with anarchist

symbolism. Radical environmental groups such as Earth First! borrow from

many ‘spiritual’ traditions including paganism, Buddhism, and various

New Age and Native American spiritualities. Besides initiating multiple

spaces of alternative cultural and social reproduction—from communes and

squats to festivals and ‘zines—subcultures also provided an impetus for

the recognition of a great degree of diversity in the type of

sociocultural orientations that could be envisioned for a

post-capitalist, post-state society. Colin Ward’s focus on everyday

interactions without hierarchy and alienation,[29] and the many

Situationist-influenced explorations of an anarchist micropolitics of

resistance and reconstruction in daily life, were two further prominent

contributions to this process.

The self-distancing from unitary visions and an anticipated closure of

the ‘successful’ revolutionary project are very strongly apparent in

anarchist-inspired works of fiction and imagination, in which the

reorientation of the anarchist utopian horizon finds rich and poignant

expression. Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed portrays an

anarchist society that is far from perfect or unproblematic. The

protagonist, Shevek, is driven to leave his anarchist society on the

moon of Anarres, not because he rejects its core anarchist ideals but

because he sees that some of them are no longer adequately reflected in

practice, while others need to be revised in order to give more place to

individuality. In the 170 years since its establishment, following the

secession of a mass of revolutionary anarchists from the home-planet of

Urras, Anarresti society has witnessed the growth of xenophobia,

informal hierarchies in the administrative syndicates, and an apparatus

of social control through custom and peer pressure. All of these

contribute to a conformity that hinders Shevek’s self-realization in his

pursuit of his life project, the development of a ground-breaking

approach in theoretical physics. Shevek embodies the continuing

importance of dissent even after the abolition of capitalism and

government. Through his departure and founding of the Syndicate of

Initiative, he becomes a revolutionary within the revolution and

initiates change within the anarchist society:

It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to

shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask

questions. To behave like anarchists![30]

Shevek’s project renews the spirit of dissent and non-conformism that

animated the original creation of the anarchist society on Anarres in

the first place. As Raymond Williams observes, this dynamic portrays The

Dispossessed as ‘an open utopia: forced open, after the congealing of

ideals, the degeneration of mutuality into conservatism; shifted,

deliberately, from its achieved harmonious condition, the stasis in

which the classical utopian mode culminates, to restless, open,

risk-taking experiment.’[31]

A similar open utopia is the vision of an alternative society forwarded

in the book bolo’bolo by the Zurich-based author P.M. This book not only

acknowledges but treasures the type of instability and diversity of

social relations that can be ushered in by the removal of all external

control on the behaviour of individuals and groups. The world

anti-system called bolo’bolo is a mosaic in which every community (bolo)

of around five hundred residents is as nutritionally self-sufficient as

possible, and has complete autonomy to define its ethos or ‘flavour’

(nima). Stability is afforded by a minimal but universal social contract

(sila), enforced by reputation and interdependence.[32] This contract

guarantees, for example, that every individual (ibu) can at any time

leave their native bolo, and is entitled to one day’s rations (yalu) and

housing (gano), as well as to medical treatment (bete), at any bolo. It

even suggests a duel code (yaka) to solve disputes. However,

There are no humanist, liberal or democratic laws or rules about the

content of nimas and there is no State to enforce them. Nobody can

prevent a bolo from committing mass suicide, dying of drug experiments,

driving itself into madness or being unhappy under a violent regime.

Bolos with a bandit-nima could terrorize whole regions or continents, as

the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and adventure, generalized terrorism,

the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas,

plundering—everything goes.[33]

While not all anarchists would want to go that far, the point here is

that any anarchist orientation which looks to the absence of law and

authority must also anticipate a great deal of diversity in the way in

which communities choose to self-organize socially and economically.

Furthermore, the commitment to unfettered diversity must lead anarchists

to respond to the possibility of a re-emergence of patterns of

domination within and/or among communities, even if at a certain point

in time they have been consciously overcome. Thus, anarchists would be

drawn to accept that ‘the price of eternal liberty is eternal

vigilance.’[34] If one insists on the potential need for anarchist

agency under any conditions, then the notion of a closure of the

revolutionary project loses its meaning. At most, then, an ‘anarchist

society’ would be one in which everyone is an anarchist, that is, a

society in which every person wields agency against rule and domination.

To be sure, the frequency of the need to do so may hopefully diminish to

a great extent, in comparison to what an anarchist approach would deem

necessary in present societies. However, one has no reason to think that

it can ever be permanently removed.

The primary conclusion that anarchists can (and often do) draw from the

dissociation of their project form a post-revolutionary resting point is

to transpose their notion of social revolution to the present-tense.

Feeding back into the individualist grounding of prefigurative politics

discussed earlier, anarchist modes of interaction—non-hierarchical,

voluntary, cooperative, solidaric and playful—are no longer seen as

features on which to model a future society, but rather as an

ever-present potential of the here and now. Such an approach promotes

anarchy as culture, as a lived reality that pops up everywhere in new

guises, adapts to different cultural climates, and should be extended

and developed experimentally for its own sake, whether or not one

believes it can become, in some sense, the prevailing mode of society.

Also, it amounts to promoting anarchy as a feature of everyday life, in

mundane settings such as ‘a quilting bee, a dinner party, a black market

… a neighborhood protection society, an enthusiasts’ club, a nude

beach.’[35] The task for anarchists, then, is not to ‘introduce’ a new

society but to realize it as much as possible in the present tense.

Conclusion

Anarchism, in its re-emergence as a coherent global movement over the

past decade, has been the site of manifold reconfigurations that

distinguish it from previous cycles of left-libertarian political

expression. Networked structures replace formal federations and unions,

a stronger emphasis is given to direct action and cultural

experimentation, and the target of resistance is generalized from state

and capital to all forms of domination. This article has attempted to

break some initial ground in the investigation of contemporary

anarchism, delineating its emergent ideological core on the basis of an

intimate embeddedness in activist discourse and a literate selection and

reading of texts. The emergent picture of anarchist ideology was further

related to material processes of social movement development,

cross-fertilization and convergence, which have created a new

formulation of anti-authoritarian activity and political

language—‘anarchism reloaded.’

While this article has mainly explored the ideological core of

anarchism, whose conceptual clusters represent the broad consensus at

the back of anarchist organising, much more remains to be explored in

terms of the tensions that take place within the arena they demarcate.

The most prominent and recalcitrant among these are discussions around

‘internal hierarchies’ or ‘leadership’ in the movement; debates on the

definition, justification and effectiveness of violence; controversies

on anarchist positions around technology and modernity; and an emerging

set of dilemmas around international solidarity and support for the

‘national liberation’ struggles of peoples in the majority world. The

investigation of these tensions and the ways in which they propel

activists to generate creative and often confrontational discourses

within the perimeters defined by the ideological core remains a richly

interesting task for researchers.

However, if there is one message that this article would drive home it

is that contemporary anarchism is to be taken extremely seriously by

students of ideology. The re-convergence of anarchist politics has given

rise to what is arguably the largest and most coherent, vibrant and

rapidly-evolving revolutionary movement in advanced capitalist

countries. As such, it deserves close attention from researchers who

wish to unlock processes of political expression, agenda setting,

identity formation and ideological development in social movements, as

well as from socially-minded political theorists who want to relate

their conceptual endeavours to a broader and more integrated array of

social criticism and proposals for change.

[1] Data retrieved through search form on

http://erds.dol-esa.gov/query/getOrgQry.do

[2]

M. Diani, ‘The Concept of Social Movement,’ Sociological Review,40 (1),

1992, p. 13.

[3] The metaphor is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of

knowledge. cf. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota

Press, 1987), pp. 7–13.

[4] Cf. P. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the surplus of

meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).

[5] Peoples’ Global Action Network, Hallmarks. Internet:

http://www.nadir.org/nadir/ initiativ/agp/free/pga/hallm.htm

[6] This phrase was first coined by the Situationists—a radical group of

artists and writers that came to prominence during the May 1968 student

uprisings in France—and used as a title for one the key works it

generated: R. Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel

Press, 2001).

[7] Cf. B. Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2004); P.H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (London:

Routledge, 2000).

[8] Cf. E.A. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in

San Francisco, 1950–1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);

F. Martel, The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

[9] Cf. B. Shepard and R. Hayduk (Eds), From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban

Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (London:

Verso, 2002).

[10]

F. Perlman, ‘The reproduction of everyday life’ (Detroit: Black and

Red, 1969). Internet: http://www.spunk.org/library/

writers/perlman/sp001702/repro.html

[11] The concept of a family resemblance is drawn from L. Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), §§65–67.

[12] Black Laundry (2001) ‘Nails and feathers’

http://www.blacklaundry.org/pdfs/Wigstock_sept01.pdf

[13] The terms ‘patriarchy’ and ‘white supremacy’ are preferred here to

‘sexism’ and ‘racism,’ because the reference is to structural patterns

in social relations rather than to individual persons’ attitudes of

prejudice and bigotry.

[14]

B. Black, ‘The sphinctre of anarchism,’ in Beneath the Underground

(Portland, OR: Feral House, 1994), p. 33.

[15]

B. Tokar, ‘The enemy of nature’ (review), Tikkun,18 (1).

[16]

J. Carter and D. Morland, ‘Anti-Capitalism: Are we all anarchists

now?,’ in Carter and Morland (Eds), Anti-capitalist Britain

(Gretton: New Clarion Press, 2004), p. 79.

[17]

S. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), p. 207.

[18]

M. Bookchin (1980) ‘Anarchism past and present,’ Comment,1 (6).

[19] Cf. Midnight Notes, Strange Victories: The Anti-nuclear movement in

the US and Europe (London: Elephant Editions, 1985); and I. Welsh,

‘Anti-nuclear movements: failed projects or heralds of a direct action

milieu?’ Working Paper Series11 (Cardiff University: School of Social

Sciences, 2001).

[20]

B. Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Non-violent

direct action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1991), pp. 95–96.

[21] Cf. D. Wall, Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement (London:

Routledge, 1999); B. Seel, M. Patterson and B. Doherty, Direct Action in

British Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 2000).

[22] E.g. D. and G. Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism—The Left Wing

Alternative (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2001).

[23] CrimethInc collective, ‘Alive in the land of the dead.’ Internet:

http://www.crimethinc.com/library/english/alive.html

[24]

R. Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1938).

Internet:

http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/rocker/sp001495/rocker_as1.html

[25]

S. Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the

Dislocation of Power (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001), p. 158.

[26]

D. Kellner, Introduction to A. Feenberg and J. Freedman, When Poetry

Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany, NY: SUNY

Press, 2001), p. xviii.

[27] For further reading and online resources see

http://www.postanarchism.org/

[28]

T. May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism

(University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1994).

[29]

C. Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1973).

[30]

U. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (London: Gollancz, 2002), p. 316.

[31]

R. Williams ‘Utopia and science fiction,’ Science Fiction Studies,5

(3), 1978; Internet: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/

backissues/16/williams16art.htm

[32] P.M., bolo’bolo (New York: Autonomedia, 1985), pp. 68–70.

[33] P.M., bolo’ bolo (New York: Autonomedia, 1985), pp. 68–70, pp.

77–78.

[34]

W. Phillips ‘Speech in Boston, Massachusetts, January 28’; in Speeches

Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (Boston, R. F.

Wallcut, 1852), p. 13.

[35] Hakim Bey ‘The Willimantic/Rensselaer Questions,’ in Mike Gunderloy

and Michael Ziesing, Anarchy and the End of History (San Francisco, CA:

Factsheet Five Books, 1991), pp. 87–92.