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Title: Whither Anarchism?
Author: Kristian Williams
Date: April 2018
Language: en
Topics: theory and practice, critique, AK Press
Notes: Published by To the Point, a Division of AK Press.

Kristian Williams

Whither Anarchism?

Introduction

In the three essays making up this pamphlet, I do my best to explain my

current thinking about anarchism.

In the first, “My Anarchism,” I try as simply as possible to say what

anarchism means to me, to convey my idea of what it is and my own

reasons for adhering to it as a political philosophy. The second,

“Whither Anarchism?” draws from recent histories and considers how

today’s anarchists relate to (or rather, fail to relate to) the ideas

that originally animated the movement. Logically speaking, it ought to

be possible to see a direct connection between these two pieces. But the

gap separating them is exactly the problem I’m trying to point to. For

my own short statement of belief in the first in no way answers the more

serious challenges of the second. What it might take to correct this

situation, to provide the necessary theoretical support for anarchist

positions, to bridge the gap between the idea and the movement, is the

subject of the third essay, “Revolutions, Scientific and Otherwise.” It

briefly considers the cultural and structural prerequisites for the kind

of reassessment I advocate, though it ultimately represents a challenge

rather than a solution. At the very most, it may mark a point of

departure.

I am not in these pages offering a theory of anarchism, or an anarchist

theory of society. I do not, for example, argue for freedom and

equality, but merely assume their value and explore some of their

implications. Likewise, these essays say little about the causes or

nature of coercion and inequality in our present society, and are almost

silent on questions of strategy and tactics. In one pamphlet of a few

thousand words, representing merely a single individual’s views, I trust

these omissions are forgivable. In a political movement, however,

especially one directed at destroying the existing power structure and

reshaping our entire society, such inadequacies may prove fatal.

I do not know if the liberation of humanity depends on the success of

the anarchist movement. On the whole, I hope that it does not. For that

movement at present does not serve its cause well. It is insular,

directionless, and often delusional, characterized internally by purity

tests and faction fights, externally by ineffectual militancy and moral

outrage. In both respects, one sometimes gets the feeling that the

movement is driven less by a political agenda than by the collective

dysfunction of its adherents. Judging from its current condition, one

finds it hard to believe that the anarchist movement could function as

an effective means for anything, and certainly not for the total

transformation of society and the creation of a more just world. It is

not even clear that movement is the right word for something so aimless,

amorphous, and prone to spontaneous collapse.

However, it is my hope that, despite everything, anarchism may someday

transcend its present limitations and once again come to represent the

highest ideals and aspirations of humanity, and that anarchists may make

a distinctive contribution to the struggle for freedom and equality, and

to the new world that the struggle seeks to create.

My Anarchism

I.

I am going to attempt a rather unusual thing. I am going to try to

explain why I am an anarchist—not in the autobiographical sense, telling

the story of how I became an anarchist, nor in the historical sense,

relating my beliefs to those of the philosophical traditions and

political movements composing anarchism. Those are the standard

narratives by which we justify our beliefs, either the Haymarket Affair

and the Spanish Civil War or “I was a teenage punk rocker.” Our reliance

on such stories, deeply personal or historically remote, is I think

related to both the theoretical and the political weaknesses of the

anarchist movement. These stories may encourage an audience to identify

with anarchism, either from nostalgia for its heroic period of struggle,

or in sympathy with the experience of alienation, but they do not as a

rule speak to either the content or the basis of our ideas.

What I want to offer instead is an attempt to outline my thoughts about

what anarchism is, and my reasons for adhering to it—as simply as I can,

in plain language, without reference to the major theorists, and without

attempting to authoritatively define or demarcate the boundaries of the

ideology.

II.

I believe the core of anarchism to be captured in the proposition that

decisions must be made by those most affected by them. That is, in

effect, the standard of autonomy, meaning self-guidance or self-rule.

That belief, in turn, relies on a pair of values, those of freedom and

equality.

Of course, equality does not mean that all people are the same, or even

that they are necessarily entitled to exactly the same things. Rather,

it means that we are all equally human, and equally entitled to the

respect and consideration worthy of a human being. That is, no

individual’s worth is inherently greater than that of any other, and

therefore in similar circumstances different people should be able to

expect like treatment, at least as far as the major institutions of

society are concerned. Any difference in treatment requires some

justification based on morally relevant considerations, such as

differences in need, skill, commitment, experience, etc.

Equality further suggests that, as all humans hold the same basic

dignity, there is some fundamental minimum of respect to which everyone

is entitled. This introduces the idea of rights—the notion that there

are limits to how human beings may be treated, and that those limits are

universal. It follows that there is some standard below which no one

should be allowed to sink. No one should suffer hunger, or homelessness,

or medical neglect, for instance. And likewise, everyone should enjoy

the opportunities and support needed to develop their intellect and

their talents, to perform meaningful work, and to share in both the

benefits and the responsibilities incumbent upon their community.

Congruently, by freedom I mean simply that people can live their lives

without interference, arranging their affairs according to their own

best judgment—and, what is more, that they enjoy practical opportunities

to widen the scope of their possible activities. Freedom suggests of

course that no one should be actually oppressed, that unnecessary

restrictions on individual choice be removed, and encumbrances to the

development of our full potential be lifted—but it does not suggest

action without limits. A value of freedom is in fact its own limit,

since freedom cannot, without contradiction, include the freedom to

impose one’s will on others, to bully and tyrannize, to exploit them, or

otherwise to undermine another person’s ability to experience and

develop their own freedom in their own way.

III.

From these two values—freedom and equality—it is possible to derive the

precept of autonomy I spelled out already. And, since human beings need

to be able to cooperate in order to survive, this standard must be

understood to apply at the collective as well as the individual level.

On the one hand, my own freedom of action is necessarily limited by the

rights, needs, activities, and perhaps even the very existence of other

people. On the other, the establishment of society practically enlarges

the range of one’s possible actions over a much wider territory. We can

achieve so much more together than any one of us could alone; in fact,

outside of prison or similar circumstances, each of us enjoys a greater

range of possible activity, owing to our social existence, than any of

us could in isolation. Even the most solitary of amusements—reading a

book in the bath, for instance—ultimately depends on the thought and

labor of innumerable other human beings, spread across time and

geography, ordered and coordinated within several types of organization.

Simply getting the water from its source to your faucet—hot, no less—is

a remarkable achievement both technically and socially.

Our society manages these tasks of coordination partly through

hierarchies of authority and partly through exchanges in markets. Though

there is sometimes debate as to which arrangement is best for a

particular kind of job, the two forms coexist as mutually reinforcing

mechanisms, and the result is that power and resources come to be

consolidated into relatively few hands. The accumulation of resources

brings with it a large measure of power, and to the degree that this

power is accepted as legitimate, authority as well. Likewise, the

accumulation of power grants one the ability to acquire and control

additional resources. Sometimes this power is used to directly coerce

individual people, but more routinely its application is impersonal,

establishing policies and making choices which shape the conditions

under which we all must live. From the layout of our cities, to the

quality of our air, the language we speak, the length of the workweek,

the college curriculum, the size of our families, the holidays we

celebrate, the music in the airport—all of these are determined,

directly or indirectly, by one or another kind of politics. They all

find a place within overlapping systems of power. And so, too, do you

and I.

In the tiered command structure, a relatively small number of

individuals are entitled to make decisions affecting the lives of many,

many others—and the more authoritarian the system, the less responsive

those in power have to be to the needs, desires, preferences, and

demands of the people they rule over. However, even those at the very

top often feel their decisions to be dictated by the internal logic of

the system itself. Market forces, bureaucratic inertia, political

realism, and above all, the need to maintain their own position in the

hierarchy all constrain their choices, such that even CEOs, senators,

and generals cease almost to function as distinct individuals and find

themselves increasingly defined by their roles, driven by the needs of

their organizations far more than their own desires or values. Such

arrangements are contrary to our ideas of freedom and equality, and

represent the precise opposite of our notion of autonomy.

IV.

Of course, if society is to survive there must be some means of

organization, but our organizations need not be hierarchical and need

not be driven by the profit motive. Decision making might be deferred to

the lowest practicable level, it could be made participatory and

democratic, and it could unfold through deliberation and negotiation

toward something approaching consensus. Importantly, this model could be

applied to all the institutions in our lives—public administration,

industry, neighborhoods, churches. To distribute power in this way, the

wealth of society would need to be held in common, to be managed and

apportioned by these same means.

The new society that results would be organized as a decentralized

network of democratically-run institutions and voluntary associations.

Neighborhoods would be controlled by the people who live in them,

workplaces by the people who work in them, schools by the people who

teach and learn there. These various groupings would be free to act

independently, or to affiliate and coordinate their activities,

according to which approach best suits their purposes.

But note that none of the terms I am proposing need be absolute. There

is no point in insisting on total decentralization, perfect equality,

unlimited freedom, and so on. There may yet be some sorts of activities

most effectively or efficiently pursued by creating a single central

clearinghouse, or adopting a level of standardization, or appointing a

steering committee. Leadership, supervision, and even coercive authority

may sometimes still be necessary. The important thing is that any such

position, or the exercise of such power, would need to be understood as

requiring at every stage a kind of justification. Minus such

justification, accepted by the people affected, there must be clear

mechanisms for eliminating these positions or lifting whatever

restrictions have been imposed. The norm, the default, would be the

equal, the participatory, and the free.

The democratization of both power and resources would spell an end to

capitalism and class society, with its pyramid of owners, bosses, and

workers. So too would it mean an end to the state, with its legislators,

bureaucrats, and police. And what may be more challenging still, it

would also demand of us all that we eliminate any stratification based

on race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry, sexual orientation,

age, physical ability, or any other prejudicial or extraneous

consideration. That effort will require a careful examination of the

ways power relations are encoded into our institutions, our cultural

practices, our personal relationships, and even our subjective attitudes

and the structures of our thought. These informal hierarchies are

pervasive and often indistinct; they may confine us in ways we do not

recognize or impel us in directions we neither choose nor understand.

They make up, to a surprising degree, the texture and atmosphere of

everyday life. And more so even than our laws, which can be repealed,

and our governments, which can be abolished, and our rulers, who can be

overthrown, our habits of deference and entitlement may rule us more

subtly and thus more firmly, and may prove the greater obstacle to our

own liberation. Equality, in other words, must be alive in our minds as

a positive ideal. It is not merely the absence of inequality or

subordination. It requires a new sociability, perhaps a new

subjectivity, formed both within and between us as we work together to

re-order society and discover new ways of relating—as we, in short,

learn both to exercise and to respect freedom.

V.

What it would be like to actually live in such a society it is

impossible to know and difficult even to imagine. Anarchy would likely

be as different from anything we have experienced as capitalism was from

feudalism. The future is as remote as the past, and uncharted. Any

attempt to imagine it in detail would surely be a task better suited to

a novel than a short pamphlet, and preferably not an overly utopian

novel (or an overly dystopian one). And yet the promise of a better life

is precisely the reason for pursuing radical social change. I will

venture, then, a couple general remarks.

We should start by admitting that, in strictly materialistic terms, for

many of us, especially for relatively privileged groups in the first

world, what is called the standard of living may see a decline. I hope

and expect that under conditions of worker power and local control the

sweatshops and strip-mines that presently make possible our steady

supply of cheap consumer goods would vanish. We would, as a result,

probably own many fewer things. On the other hand, those things that we

do own, being made by people invested in their work and being produced

with an eye to the pleasure of use rather than maximizing profits, would

also likely be of higher quality—more carefully made, more durable, and

more comely. (Imagine a pair of good boots made by a cobbler, measured

to your feet, and a few outfits, tailor-made to fit your body, rather

than racks of cheap sneakers and closets full of ill-fitting, badly-made

garments, mass-produced by near-slaves half a world away.) Likely, too,

we would look less to exchange economies to meet our needs and become

more self-reliant, both at an individual and a community level.

Gardening, both on personal and collective plots, may take on greater

significance. And we may see a resurgence of traditional handicrafts

such as quilting and woodworking, as well as the emergence of new

practical arts.

In any case, I think it near to certain that the pace of life will slow,

that we will spend less energy rushing from work to store to home and

back, and worrying about deadlines, punch-clocks, subway schedules, and

microwave dinners suitable for half-hour lunches. Our time will largely

be our own, our days largely filled with the activities we choose for

ourselves. No one need arrange his life in service of his job, when we

could arrange our jobs to fit well with our lives. Tedious,

uninteresting, disagreeable work will not of course vanish, but there

will be much less of it and, given the freedom to do so, workers may

find ways to make it much less tiresome and unpleasant.

We would, moreover, be relieved of the burden of worrying always about

money. The fear of the boss and the landlord—ultimately, the fear of

unemployment and homelessness—are nearly universal in our present

society and make up the background for almost every decision. In a

society organized such that everyone had their basic needs met, in which

no one was left destitute, such factors simply would not exist. Not only

would this free us from the small tyrannies that presently control much

of our day-to-day lives, it would also remove that constant sense of

low-level dread (and, occasional, high-level terror), the persistent

fear of losing our footing on whatever meager perch we have obtained and

plummeting into the gutter—homeless, hungry, cold, abandoned, with no

resources and no prospects. Free of such fear, even the narrow economic

side of life must take on a different air. Our choices about work, about

housing—really, about what we do and where we live—might be at last

freely chosen, rather than pressed upon us, or grasped out of

desperation.

So, too, our social relations must be very different. No one’s role

would be determined, or assumed, based on their race, gender, sexuality,

nationality, or what their parents did for work. Diversity of all kinds

should flourish, but differences of status would practically disappear.

To be able to look one another in the face and address one another

entirely as equals, even across difference, without barriers of

inequality, would change the entire context and perhaps even tone of our

quotidian interactions. Women, queers, people of color, and other

historically marginalized groups would at last participate in society as

full members. Such inclusiveness would, I strongly believe, benefit

everyone, even those white men who had previously enjoyed privileged

positions in the hierarchy. For as social barriers fall, as the stigma

of inequality fades, our ability to relate to one another improves,

becomes more natural, less fraught. We all profit from the contact with

a wider array of perspectives, experiences, insights.

As society becomes more diverse, both within and among communities, and

as it becomes more equal, it will, for that very reason, foster a

healthy individuation that in turn feeds its diversity. None of us are

free when we are locked in a framework of inequality; one’s very

position restricts one’s possibilities, narrows one’s vision, dictates

much of one’s behavior. Under conditions of equality, we are more free

to be, and to become, our fullest selves. Among equals, we become more

free.

VI.

The creation of this sort of society, or anything like it, would require

a kind of revolution, and that is true no matter what means are used to

bring it about. For revolution denotes the extent of social change, not

the method for achieving it. Likely the revolutionaries will employ a

wide array of tactics, experiment with competing and even contradictory

strategies, and aim at different outcomes in different places. Progress

will come erratically, unevenly, and not according to anyone’s

timetable. Likely it will not even look like a revolution as it unfolds,

but as a series of crises, small miracles, wrenching compromises,

painful defeats, stupid missteps, heroic sacrifices, frustrating

reversals, bold experiments, regrettable excesses, ridiculous

half-measures, reckless gambles, and righteous refusals—until finally,

slowly, the overall shape of the new society begins to emerge, and the

direction of events becomes clear. None of this is inevitable, however,

and there is no guarantee that the outcome will be what we want.

Our successes are likely to prove both inspiring and disappointing. The

reality will never exhaust the ideal: Our best attempts may approach it,

but will inevitably fall short. Yet even our failures offer us lessons,

if only we will learn them. Our successes, too, demonstrate the

possibility of improving human life, but will also reveal to us new

challenges—areas unexplored, injustices newly discovered and thus

unaddressed. No success is ever total, no failure ever final. What we

discover, in the interchange between them, is the idea of progress.

Even in the best society, life will often be hard. No doubt it will

still contain a great deal of suffering, much of it pointless or even

unjust. But in an anarchist society, for the first time, human beings

will face each other as equals and the mass of humanity will

collectively control the power by which we can create our own future.

The use of that power will bring with it new dangers, including the

temptation to create new tyrannies, especially those based in moral

purism, orthodox thinking, and social conformity. Therefore, even as we

establish and employ our collective power, we must yet remain deeply

skeptical about its justification and its claims. The use of power, even

popular power, always calls for a great deal of wisdom, and care, and

above all a growing sense of individual and collective

responsibility—including a responsibility to and for each other. What we

do then will be at last, and only, up to us.

VII.

The idea of anarchy is, I think, relatively simple, though I trust it is

not simple-minded. Yet you have likely noticed how many more questions

it poses than answers. Chief among these are those related to how the

new society is to be brought about and, once it arrives, how it can

defend and sustain itself. How are disputes to be settled, especially

challenges to the nature or structure of the society itself? How do we

prevent new tyrannies from arising, especially tyrannies established in

the name of liberté, égalité, and fraternité? It is all well and good to

say that authority must be able to provide a justification—but what sort

of justification? who determines whether it has done so, and how? and if

it fails, what means would be available to dismiss it? Contrariwise, how

do we interpret and elaborate the ideas of freedom and equality? How can

they be built into the mechanisms of our institutions and the fabric of

our culture? And can they be justified as limits to the actions of those

who fail to see their value?

These are not easy questions, and it cannot be adequate to say that they

will someday be worked out in practice, by others more free and

enlightened than ourselves. For our answers to these questions, however

tentative, must inform our actions in the present; they will shape our

movements and guide our efforts. To translate our ideals into reality

requires a strategy. It will not be enough to rely on our ethical sense

and our desire for freedom. Any attempt to articulate a vision of the

future will lead us quickly into questions, not only of politics and

economics, but of sociology, anthropology, even psychology. We need to

understand societies, cultures, people—how they function and how they

change, what they are and what they might be.

Whither Anarchism?

No matter how one feels about it, the current state of anarchism

represents something of a mystery: What was once a mass movement based

mainly in working-class immigrant communities is now an archipelago of

subcultural scenes inhabited largely by disaffected young people from

the declining middle class.

Two recent studies have examined that transition from different angles.

Andrew Cornell’s Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth

Century carefully traces the political movement’s trajectory from,

roughly, the end of World War I to the end of the 1960s. It uncovers an

organizational continuity between the earlier and more recent stages of

the movement. Working, in a sense, in the opposite direction, Spencer

Sunshine’s dissertation, “Post-1960 U.S. Anarchism and Social Theory,”

begins by identifying the major theoretical currents of anarchism in the

early twenty-first century, and tracks them back to their intellectual

origins. He reveals a sharp discontinuity between post-sixties anarchist

thinking and the social and political theories of the late-nineteenth

and early-twentieth century Classical period. Crudely put, he finds that

Zerzan, Bookchin, Graeber, and a number of lesser figures have little

identifiable connection to Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Bakunin, and in fact

draw their key concepts and arguments from entirely different

philosophical traditions. The stories Cornell and Sunshine tell are in

some sense complementary. Cornell tells of a political lineage obscured

by a sharp ideological shift, whereas Sunshine detects a philosophical

break hidden beneath the facade of a living political tradition.

Crucially, both authors find contemporary anarchism in a state of

confusion.

In what follows, I draw heavily from each of these histories to consider

what anarchism has become, to recall how it has arrived in its present

disordered state, and to propose a way forward.

Part One: How We Got Here

Class War to Counterculture

In the early part of the last century, as recounted in Unruly Equality,

American anarchism was predominantly, but by no means exclusively,

syndicalist. It saw itself as a movement of the working class, fighting

for the liberation of humanity from capitalism and the state, and it

presented the labor union as the means by which workers could both

overturn capitalism and organize the future society. The Industrial

Workers of the World were of singular import. But the Red Scare of

1917–1920 all but destroyed the IWW, and with it the movement.

What remained of syndicalism was occupied primarily with legal defense,

and other anarchists came to focus more on education and creating

counterinstitutions, rather than mass organizing. Hence, anarchists were

on the sidelines during the upheavals of the 1930s. Then, during the

Second World War, the remaining movement split over the question of

militarism, with pacifism becoming the dominant strain. At the same

time, increasingly much of anarchist activity was in the cultural

sphere, and the movement became wedded to the emerging counterculture.

“[R]eadings, performances, and exclusive parties moved to the center of

anarchist praxis,” Cornell writes, “In the 1940s Bay Area scene,

participating in such revelatory events became the primary activity

expected of an anarchist. Indeed, we might interpret this as the time

and place where an anarchist ‘scene’ emerged—exciting and socially

rewarding to participants, but easily perceived as insular and

exclusionary to those less connected.”

Anarchism came to comprise a set of cultural practices rather than a

coherent movement or body of thought.

On the positive side, the counterculture is what kept anarchism alive

after it was decimated by the Red Scare. However, class struggle largely

disappeared from the agenda and the movement became increasingly remote

from its traditional base, producing a series of missed opportunities.

Anarchists deserted the class war at precisely the moment that the

largest number of workers were clamoring to enlist in it, leaving it to

the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Communist Party to

benefit from the possibilities opened by the National Labor Relations

Act. Nor did large numbers of anarchists agitate for a better New Deal,

demanding additional benefits or opposing racial discrimination in the

federal relief programs. Of course, given their theories and

commitments—the view of the state as merely an instrument of the ruling

class, the suspicion of legislative and bureaucratic reform, and the

singe-minded emphasis on workplace organizing—it is not clear that

anarcho-syndicalists could have done much better. In the midst of the

massive changes brought on by the Great Depression, anarchists failed to

take account of the ways Keynesianism was reconstituting both the

economy and the state. Their doctrine thus became antiquated, their

analysis atrophied, and they failed to adapt themselves to the

opportunities and challenges of the new situation.

The Prefigurative Fallacy

The turn to pacifism also locked the anarchist movement in a particular

“prefigurative” orientation.

Prefiguration has always existed in three forms: 1- the notion that our

revolutionary organizations would later provide the means of

coordinating and managing society; 2- counterinstitutions like anarchist

schools, bookstores, co-ops, and utopian communities intended to

displace governmental, clerical, and commercial institutions; and 3-

lifestyle practices like free love and vegetarianism, which modeled

egalitarian relationships and new, liberated modes of being. These

different interpretations of “prefiguration” have received different

measures of emphasis at various points in time. The IWW stressed the

first; the Catholic Worker and the Modern School movement, the second;

and the counterculture, the third.

Cornell quotes Holley Cantine, editor of the journal Retort, writing in

1942: “Communities and various other kinds of organization must be

formed, wherein the ideals of the revolution are approximated as nearly

as possible in daily life. The new society must be lived out by its

advocates; both as a way of influencing the masses by example, and in

order to iron out weaknesses of theory by actual experiment.”

As it happened, little genuine experimentation resulted—either in the

artistic sense of playful improvisation, or in the scientific sense of

testing hypotheses against evidence. Instead, we have tried to

compensate for our underdeveloped politics with an overdeveloped

moralism, and anarchists became preoccupied with the minutiae of

individual choice rather than organizing collective action.

This attitude rested on a contradiction inherent to the prefigurative

idea. Morally, prefiguration demands that we act according to the

principles of the society we want to create; and as strategy, it

promises that we can create that society by doing so. The problem is

that we are in no sense immune to the demands of the society we inhabit.

Power relations and the barriers they erect are very real: legally,

socially, economically, and even psychologically, our lives are

constrained. Freedom cannot simply be chosen, it must be created. Were

we capable of behaving as we would in a society without capitalism and

the state, then there would be no need to abolish either. Instead, it is

only possible to act as free and equal beings under conditions of

freedom and equality; we cannot create those conditions simply by

pretending they exist. The effort, at least as a whole politic, is in

fact counter-productive since it turns our attention away from the

structural features of our society and toward the moral character of

individuals within the movement.

Moreover, the society that our present “anarchist communities” would

seem to prefigure is not on the whole a place where sensible people

would want to live. Such scenes are as status-obsessed, gossip-ridden,

and cliquish as any private school, as prying and sanctimonious as any

country church, as prone to splits and purges as the most rigid Leninist

sect. Their chief virtues are that they are too small and disorganized

to actually succeed in being particularly oppressive. Of course that is

only part of the picture, but it is the part that an emphasis on

prefiguration tends to foster. Trying to simply will the new society

into being by means of personal virtue and exemplary group processes, we

become harsh with each other for the smallest missteps. Every moment,

every action, every word, every thought takes on an outsized importance,

and a philosophy of total liberation produces instead a kind of

totalitarianism writ small.

Turn, Turn, Turn

In his first book, Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New

Society, Cornell documented a more recent iteration of the cyclical

exchange between pacifism and anarchism.

Beginning in 1971 the radical pacifist Movement for a New Society was

active in environmental, anti-nuclear, and anti-war campaigns, bringing

an explicitly anti-racist, feminist, class-conscious perspective to this

work while also building counter-institutions like food co-ops and

collective housing and training other groups in nonviolent direct action

and consensus-based decision-making. Gradually, though, the group’s

internal dynamics—its processes, structures, and culture—proved

incapable of meeting the demands generated by the group’s political

commitments. Consensus, prefiguration, and network structures were not

enough to address questions related to leadership, race and class

divisions, coalition-building, and informal hierarchies. These

challenges, compounded by a lack of either the structures or processes

necessary to resolve theoretical and strategic differences, ultimately

led MNS to dissolve in 1988, but its imprint on the anarchist movement

proved much longer lasting.

MNS never considered itself an anarchist organization, though it

borrowed freely from anarchist ideas, including the works of Kropotkin,

Berkman, and Bookchin. More striking, however, is the enduring effect

this relatively small group had on the generation of anarchists that

followed. In Cornell’s assessment, MNS was “a major innovator and force

in promoting, among other tools and approaches: multi-issue political

analysis, consensus process, collective living and political community

in urban areas, modeling political commitments in everyday relationships

and life choices, network structures, identity-based caucuses, cost

sharing and sliding-scale prices, direct action, and the use of

spokescouncils” as well as “calling other activists out on their

‘shit.’” This “litany of practices,” Cornell notes without exaggeration,

“seemed to define anarchists politics in the late 1990s and [early]

2000s.”

After a few decades of pacifist-anarchist cross-pollination—exemplified,

but by no means limited to MNS—we are left with the structure and

culture of the pacifist movement without its commitment to nonviolence.

Even when insurrectionary anarchism has come back into fashion,

anarchists have tended to adopt by default many of the conventions and

norms of the pacifists—only enlivened with fiery hyperbole and

occasional window-breaking. The tactics, goals, and ideology may be

different, but the style of politics is immediately recognizable. There

is an ethos common to all surviving brands of anarchism—pacifist,

syndicalist, platformist, nihilist, individualist, feminist, and green.

It consists of a prefigurative insistence on modeling in our lives and

our communities the values and practices of the society we wish to

create; a ritualized emphasis on “direct action” tactics selected more

for their expressive, symbolic, or cathartic qualities than for their

actual effect; a strong affinity for (if not quite identification with)

a specific subculture or counterculture; and a tendency to view

ourselves as outside of and apart from society as a whole. More than any

social theory or political objective, this cluster of traits tends to

characterize contemporary anarchism and we seem to adopt them

reflexively, almost automatically, and in some cases, even despite our

own vocal criticisms of these qualities.

Toward the end of Unruly Equality, Cornell offers this assessment of

“the legacy of U.S. anarchism”: “Anarchists excelled at developing broad

critiques of the social order. They were often ahead of the curve in

identifying social problems (the oppression of gays and lesbians,

environmental threats, the alienation of the affluent) and linking these

issues to modes of domination.… Yet significant limitations are also

apparent. In the twentieth century, anarchists were either uninterested

or unable to systematize their perspective, and they have not excelled

at engaging ideological opponents in an effort to win the war of ideas.”

In the end, he concludes, with a tone of disappointment: “I am not

convinced that anarchism possesses all the tools necessary to achieve

[its] far-reaching goals.”

No Logos

Picking up, in a sense, where Cornell leaves off, Spencer Sunshine’s

dissertation, “Post-1960 U.S. Anarchism and Social Theory,” examines the

course of anarchist thought (and, where relevant, political action) over

the past half-century. Anticipating Cornell’s conclusion, Sunshine

writes: “Anarchism has lost its theoretical grounding. It has become an

irreducible grab bag of elements, not just from the already fragmented

tradition of classical anarchism, [but] also from a variety of other

intellectual traditions.… Anarchists adopted ideas from movements as

wide-ranging as deep ecology, biocentrism, and bioregionalism; various

feminist and identity politics discourses; phenomenology; Kantianism;

populist socialism; animal liberation politics; anti-colonialism;

post-structuralism; chaos and emergence theory; situationism; and

various forms of marxism, including the Frankfurt School, Third World

Marxism, white privilege theory, autonomism, council communism, and the

autonome.”

Cornell’s history traces the process by which anarchism moved from one

phase to another while stressing the “clear line of continuity” between

its Classical and current periods. Sunshine focuses on the result of the

ideological shift: anarchist theory has become detached from its

foundations in Classical Anarchism and instead has increasingly relied

on ideas borrowed from other traditions, re-oriented toward anti-state

conclusions. Thus theorists like John Zerzan and David Graeber have

forwarded new, distinctive (and mutually incompatible) “anarchist”

politics without drawing from traditional anarchist conceptions.

Meanwhile, the major thinker of this period most connected to Classical

Anarchism, Murray Bookchin, was precisely the one who renounced

anarchism toward the end of his life.

At the same time, as Sunshine recounts, late-twentieth century anarchist

politics were moving in an increasingly ecumenical direction, operating

within and across other movements—environmentalism, organized labor,

animal rights, anti-war—and anarchists fostered cooperation with other

radicals, and even liberals, where it was possible to find common

ground. Action took precedence over ideology, for good and for ill. On

the one hand, the Teamsters-and-Turtles coalitions of the

anti-globalization movement provided exactly the right environment for

this approach to thrive, and anarchists enjoyed a moment of relevance

and influence far beyond what our meager numbers would have suggested.

On the other hand, the pragmatic emphasis on practices made it possible

to conclude that the ideas simply do not matter. In Freedom is an

Endless Meeting, an illuminating study of participatory decision-making

in left-wing movements, Francesca Polletta quotes an unidentified member

of the Direct Action Network as saying, “as long as you’re willing to

act like an anarchist now, we don’t care what your long-term vision is.”

(David Graeber was one of four DAN members participating in the

interview from which this quote is drawn.) In fact, as Sunshine notes,

Graeber takes this thinking a step further, to suggest that anarchism is

only a set of purely formal practices, and that any attempt to define

its substantive program is inherently “vanguardist.”

Sunshine doesn’t trace the story out this far, but one can discern two

further (bad) developments in the years following the anti-globalization

peak. First, the formalist anarchism-as-practice-not-theory approach

seems to have reached its logical conclusion in the 2011 Occupy

movement. There the focus on how activists do things completely eclipsed

any consideration of what they were doing or why, layering a

prefigurative idealism overtop a rough collection of symbolic (though

functional) tent cities and even more symbolic confrontations with

police, with no coherent strategy or even agreed-upon aims.

The second, somewhat countervailing result is the frustration and

impatience of more sectarian anarchists with the tame,

lowest-common-denominator politics of leftist coalition work. An

emerging tendency has sought to define anarchism primarily in terms of

its uncompromising militancy, divorcing it from popular movements and

positioning it not only outside of and apart from, but actively (and

sometimes mainly) against the organized left. Somewhat perversely, this

insurrectionist-cum-nihilist trajectory has proceeded with the same

eclectic approach to ideology, sometimes inviting in ideas from the

political right. Where efforts have been made to reconnect with the

Classical Anarchist tradition, it is almost exclusively through the

figure of Max Stirner—always a marginal contributor to the anarchist

canon, precisely because of his distance from the socialist movement.

Lifestyle Anarchism?

This is hardly the first time anarchism has suffered an identity crisis.

Two decades ago, in 1995, Murray Bookchin vented his frustration with

the direction the movement was taking, publishing a polemic titled

Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. In that

short book, he sought to reassert anarchism’s character as a mass

movement by counterposing it to a “lifestyle” pseudo-politics. In

describing “lifestyle anarchism” he denounced a whole range of

ideological opponents, sometimes conflating incompatible tendencies. He

also attempted to define away the entire individualist tradition in

anarchism, and presented himself as an old guard defending “The Left

that Was” against hucksters peddling zines and raves and vegan potlucks

as politics. Though the problems with Bookchin’s arguments were

immediately evident and much discussed in the anarchist press at the

time, “lifestyle anarchism” survives as a label affixed (always by

others) to a wide range of norms, attitudes, and practices associated

with the scene.

However, not only were the cultural and prefigurative aspects of

anarchism not new when Bookchin was writing, the complaints about them

were not new, either. Cornell quotes Harry Kelly, as far back as 1908,

worrying that anarchism was becoming “a movement for individual

self-expression rather than collective revolution.” Sunshine directly

links Bookchin’s social/lifestyle dichotomy to a debate in the 1907

Anarchist conference in Amsterdam, mischaracterized in short order as a

split between “individualists versus syndicalists”: In that dispute,

“Essentially all anarchists who were not focused primarily on organizing

the working class into unions became labeled as individualists,

regardless of their actual views about class struggle, the role of the

individual, etc.” Bookchin simply re-labeled “individualism” as

“lifestyle anarchism” and absorbed syndicalism into the broader category

of “social anarchism,” but otherwise preserved the structure of the

argument.

Naturally Bookchin could not acknowledge this intellectual debt. Not

only would it reveal his sophistry in reframing an already dishonest

argument from an earlier faction fight, but the very fact that there was

an earlier controversy would undercut his portrayal of the movement’s

Golden Age. Anarchism has always included “hard-bitten shop floor

organizers” and “new age hippie flakes” (to borrow Betsy Raasch-Gilman’s

terminology, quoted in Oppose and Propose). And the two types have not

always gotten along well together. Bookchin’s stoking of this perennial

conflict did nothing to clarify the particular problems of the moment,

though it did at least add a new term of abuse to the sectarian lexicon.

The anarchist concern with cultural and ethical questions was

long-standing and deeply ingrained, but what had changed over the course

of the century was the role of class struggle and the dominant character

of the cultural and prefigurative efforts. In the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, the cultural aspects of American anarchism

consisted largely of things like community theater and folk singing

groups; in the teens, anarchism became associated with the artistic

avant-garde; and after World War II, the counterculture. Likewise,

prefiguration came to refer less to the kinds of organizations

anarchists were building, and more to their individual choices. As a

result of this drift, Cornell observes, “In the postwar period …

anarchists’ prefigurative lifestyles and communities were less and less

embedded in broader working-class traditions and neighborhoods, and they

were not paired with confrontational class struggle.”

Cornell’s account—contra Bookchin’s—suggests that if anarchism is in a

bad state, that is not because of what was added in the postwar period,

but what was left out. The renewed emphasis on gender and racial

equality were crucial correctives to syndicalism’s implicit tendency

toward class reductionism. Likewise, the emerging ecological perspective

and the attention to the environmental and psychological effects of

industrialization fueled a sense of revolutionary urgency and suggested

an agenda far beyond social egalitarianism and worker self-management.

Bookchin, the chief theorist of “social ecology,” at least agreed with

that much.

Furthermore, the serious attention given the means of change,

distinctive of anarchism since Bakunin’s quarrel with Marx in the First

International, really became more important as the century wore on. Not

to put too fine a point on it, but in a period marked by two World Wars

and the permanent threat of nuclear annihilation, pacifism must have had

an inherent, immediate, intuitive appeal. And prefiguration, even of the

“be the change” bumper-sticker variety, does at least recognize the

necessity for individual transformation, though it happens to exaggerate

its social effects.

The problem is, as anarchists retreated—not capriciously, or from a

sense of superiority, but in direct response to the repression of the

IWW—the movement necessarily changed, and its self-conception changed as

well. Anarchists stopped thinking of themselves as a social force

potentially capable of organizing millions of people, destroying the

existing power structure, and reconstituting society. The language of

revolution remained, but the idea was largely lost. The anarchist vision

shrank, from the One Big Union and the General Strike, to the affinity

group and the poetry reading. At first simply adapting themselves to a

political reality—to the experience of defeat, alienation, and

marginality—anarchists started defining themselves by those same

features. They became enamored with their outsider status, at the

expense of their broad, popular aspirations.

Part Two: Where to Now?

Reinventing Anarchism, Again (and Again)

There is however a hopeful implication to this story.

Pacifism moved from the margin to the center of anarchism, owing largely

to historical circumstances: because anarchists and pacifists were

forced together into prisons and labor camps during the Second World

War. But the two tendencies did not merge automatically. Instead, the

anarchist philosophy was deliberately being reconsidered, revised, and

to a large degree reinvented by specific identifiable people—Ammon

Hennacy, Dwight McDonald, and other writers associated with the journals

Why? and Retort. Cornell quotes the poet Kenneth Rexroth: “Our objective

… was to refound the radical movement … to rethink all the basic

principles … to subject to searching criticism all the ideologies from

Marx to Malatesta.” That fact logically implies that anarchism could be

reinvented again.

Current attempts to create broad, public, formal anarchist organizations

are in one respect a hopeful sign. They represent efforts to raise

anarchism up from the underground, to break it out of its subcultural

confines, and to engage again with the public at large without the

mediating filter of the black mask. However, though such projects have

been gaining steam over the past few years, they are themselves outliers

in an already fragmented and marginal subculture. Groups like the Black

Rose Anarchist Federation and the May 1 Anarchist Alliance, with their

articulated principles and explicit strategies, are hardly typical of

anarchism as a whole. Furthermore, while new organizations may be

needed, they are clearly not all that is needed. For they will

inevitably have to answer in practice the exact questions that anarchism

has been evading with its peculiarly patchwork approach to theory.

Actual organizing may have the benefit of sorting the significant issues

from the superfluities, but it will for the very same reasons reveal how

lacking our answers generally are.

Some of the unanswered questions, about how we organize society and why

we favor the forms and strategies that we do, are fundamental and

therefore quite old. However, no “return” to Classical Anarchism, or

later variants like anarcho-syndicalism or insurrectionism, is possible

or even really desirable. Capitalism, the state, social stratification,

and the left have all changed—and both our theories and our movements

need to address themselves to those changes. Besides which, many of the

elements characterizing post-war anarchism—feminism, environmentalism,

and an emphasis on fighting white supremacy, especially—are positive

developments and brought needed emphasis to issues that were too often

treated as secondary. Moving forward, any anarchism worthy of the name

will have to incorporate these as essential features of its vision.

What we need is not a return, but a critical reevaluation—one that is,

at once, both a deconstruction and a renewal. I have only a vague idea

of what that reassessment would look like, but I do have some thoughts

about the tasks it should prioritize and along what lines it should

develop.

Old Ideals

I think the place any new anarchist theory should start is with

re-centering the old ideals of freedom and equality. It is striking how

little that language is used on the radical left anymore. Its neglect, I

suspect, is partly down to a desire to distance ourselves from

liberalism, and partly from the (related) postmodern suspicion of

universalist claims. However, while both terms—freedom and equality—are

abused by hacks and exploited in propaganda, that is precisely because

they remain inspiring ideals that speak to something deep and defining

in the human spirit. Furthermore they are, or at least they ought to be,

affirmative ideals—not merely rejections of something else. To give them

positive content, we need to be able to specify what we mean by the

words, and further still, how our politics will bring these ideals into

reality.

A positive formulation, I believe, need not be overly prescriptive—in

fact, I think it should be diverse, pluralistic, and innovative—but it

should offer some vision of what a diverse, pluralistic, and innovative

society might be like; or, returning to the original meaning of an

“anarchism without adjectives,” it might present a range of possible

models established according to some identifiable and common principles.

Better Critiques

Whatever form it takes, the very attempt at reformulation would demand a

fundamental shift in anarchism as it is presently conceived, as

essentially a philosophy of refusal. Furthermore, as it stands, what we

are refusing is surprisingly uncertain and contentious. Are we against

power, coercion, hierarchy, the state, government, privilege,

domination, sovereignty, civilization, society, “the extant”—or

something else entirely? None of those formulations quite do the job:

They would all seem to include some things we probably do not oppose,

and leave out some things that we certainly do oppose. The negative

formulation of anarchism, as being simply against one or all of the

above boogeymen, is responsible for a lot of our present theoretical

underdevelopment, and the well-intentioned but misguided efforts to

always stretch our tent further and cover more and more of the left’s

ideological circus.

Likewise, for a group so fixated on countering power and the state, it

is surprising how rarely today’s anarchists have bothered to put forward

a theory about either one. It is as though we determined that they are

bad, then decided to give the matter no further thought, as one might

take a sip of milk, discover it sour, and simply spit it out. The

inability or unwillingness to develop a theory of the state (or more

modestly, an analysis of states), one that can take account of both the

differences between governments and also the changes within them, has

repeatedly steered the anarchist movement into blind alleys. In the

thirties, the anarchists failed to take advantage of the opportunities

presented by the New Deal; in the 1940s, the movement split over the

question of whether democracy should be defended against fascism; and

under neoliberalism, many anarchists have seen the necessity of fighting

to defend and preserve welfare programs but lack any theoretical

justification for doing so.

This short essay is not the place for a thoroughgoing theory of the

state. But I suspect that such a project would need to begin with the

recognition that states comprise networks of institutions, and that

these institutions have different, sometimes competing—and even

conflicting—needs, functions, strategies, and agendas. I further suspect

that, even according to anarchist principles, different parts of the

state must be approached differently. I doubt that anyone, in real life,

has precisely the same attitude toward the police department, the water

bureau, the IRS, the EPA, state universities, and the public library;

there are some parts of the government we wish to abolish, and some we

might want to capture and democratize. Other conclusions, concerning the

differences between liberal and totalitarian governments, or the need to

defend specific programs under certain circumstances, likely follow. On

the whole, our opposition to the state would probably need to become

less total and more strategic—not so much a smashing as a dismantling,

with specified pieces to be recycled or repurposed.

At the same time, and congruently, anarchism needs to develop a broader

theory of power. It should interrogate and integrate its recent

borrowings from feminism, critical race theory, queer theory,

indigeneity, and so on, relating them all to both the new analysis of

the state and a (similarly updated) critique of capitalism and class

society, while also being careful to avoid the various pitfalls of

essentialism, nationalism, class reductionism, and the facile treatment

of “classism” as another brand of prejudice. The resulting theory must

be able to function at two levels simultaneously, understanding how

these various forms of oppression and systems of power operate

distinctly, on their own terms and by their own logics, and recognizing

how they fit together, how they reinforce and shape each other, how they

together structure the society we inhabit. That would require attention

not only to the intersections where power is applied most acutely, but

also to the cleavages where systems of power can be pried apart, and the

interstices where liberatory practices and egalitarian relations may

develop.

Theoretical Coherence

These tasks, which I have only roughly set out, would demand that we

draw connections between our various ideas as part of some larger

coherent body of thought. In contrast, as Sunshine details, the standard

(non)theoretical practice has been to selectively adopt conclusions from

disparate traditions without engaging the arguments for them. Individual

ideas have survived, but in isolation from any theoretical framework

that might give them support; they are advanced as principles, without

reference to the reasons behind them. As a result, these notions cease

to be working theories and become points of doctrine accepted on

something like faith.

Both Cornell and Sunshine argue this explicitly. Cornell writes in

Oppose and Propose: “Too often, aspects of political practice (for

instance, the use of consensus, communal living, rejecting leaders, or

following the leadership of those ‘directly affected’) are asserted as

articles of faith, or assumed to be transhistorical tenets that

anarchists … have always practiced and therefore always should. When we

don’t know the origins of such ideas and practices, we have a harder

time evaluating how useful they were under previous circumstances and if

they are the right tools for the job given conditions today.”

Arguing along the same lines, Sunshine is more cutting in his judgment:

When “anarchism jettisons its possession of a (or any) coherent

onto-epistemology” it risks morphing into “a faith-based movement.” The

result is both intellectual stagnation and political rigidity: “all

fundamental questions are proclaimed to be resolved at the outset, …

making it difficult (or impossible) to have internal debate regarding

the nature of the political movement itself. Which is to say:

self-reflection on why anyone should hold anarchist political ideas is

no longer possible.… If people do not recognize the basis of their

critique, it is impossible to have a discussion about it with them;

ideas end up being either accepted or rejected, but never really debated

or worked through. This is neither anarchist nor democratic; in fact

[it] is a serious intellectual devolution.”

As an alternative, Sunshine proposes that we learn to relate our ideas

to each other and to a more-or-less stable theoretical core, probably

derived from the Classical canon (Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin,

and maybe Stirner). Various observations, insights, concepts, and

analyses would still surely be taken on from other traditions—but they

would need to be approached at the level of argumentation and fitted

together with other ideas central to the anarchist project, not (as at

present) adopted as axioms and thrown together willy-nilly in what is

sometimes too optimistically termed a tool kit. Anarchism would

continue—as it always has—to incorporate innovations and insights from

other political traditions, from the sciences and social sciences, from

the arts and humanities, and to change and adapt our understanding of

the world in light of new arguments and new information. But we should

do so with attention to the reasons for these additions, their

implications, and the ways they cause us to affirm or revise our

previous theories.

The same care must be taken even when anarchists adopt anarchist ideas

that emerged in different contexts—the distant past, for example, or

other countries. Just as we cannot simply revive syndicalism (or, for

that matter, egoism) without attention to the changes of the last

hundred or so years, we likewise cannot just take a theory, practice, or

tendency that has developed elsewhere—Greek insurrectionism or Latin

American especifismo, for example—and adopt it in toto, without

considering both the theoretical and the social context in which it

arose, and the specific features that may or may not be translatable to

our own present circumstances. The willingness to look beyond our

borders and outside the anglophone world is in itself a hopeful sign,

but it is not a short-cut past the need for critical thinking.

Ethics and Politics

Finally, or in practice, most pressingly—we need to distinguish between

ethics and politics, recognizing that we do inevitably need both.

Ethics is concerned with matters of individual character, questions of

right and wrong, and standards of conduct. Politics, in contrast, is

concerned, both theoretically and practically, with the organization of

society, the distribution of power and resources—not only narrow

questions of policy, but more broadly the mechanisms by which those

questions arise, how they are framed, and how they are settled.

Political theory extends, importantly, beyond the ultimate shape of the

society we want, and covers also the efforts to bring it into being—the

organizations, institutions, movements, and even individuals that build,

fashion, and sustain the social world. Politics, in other words, is a

matter of both the means employed and the ends pursued.

There is obviously a relationship between the ethical and the political,

and justice is a concept common to both. In practice, at the very least,

our ethics should guide and constrain our politics, and our politics

should inform and shape our ethics. Each in a sense relies on the other.

Politics without ethics becomes indistinguishable from power-worship and

bullying, while ethics without politics tends toward either a kind of

saintly quietism or a meddling purism. However, though related, the two

fields are necessarily distinct. Because we need ethics as well as

politics, politics as well as ethics, it is necessary that we not

conflate them.

The relationship between these two spheres of value is complicated, and

cannot be reduced to questions of individual versus collective action,

or means and ends—but the larger mistake tends to generate confusion in

these other areas as well. It becomes too easy to believe that a good

society is just the product of good people, and therefore that our

movement’s political failings are down to the sins of some one or a few

of its participants. Likewise if (as the slogan goes) “the means are the

ends,” then radical means, like the moral virtues, are their own reward:

they need not produce any tangible effect in the world. The tendency

then is to view the movement itself as both the agent and the object of

change. Our collective attention turns increasingly inward—more

intensely scrutinizing the lives and attitudes of other anarchists

according to constantly shifting and ever more exacting standards.

Of course there is no question that ethics matter, that individual

actions sometimes affect large numbers of people, or that only by

justifiable means can we reliably serve the ends of justice. But surely

we can chart a course somewhere between Leo Tolstoy and Niccolò

Machiavelli. In fact, the anarchist love of freedom ought to warn us

against our own more puritan inclinations. Our prefigurative practices

should be guided by a strategic need to avoid establishing new

tyrannies, not by a moral demand that we fully realize some pristine

utopia. In fact, among the tyrannies we should avoid creating are those

based in perfectionism and moral purity.

Coda

I do not know what the outcome of this kind of critical reassessment

would be, or whether anyone in our present circles possesses the

philosophical acumen and political will to make the attempt. I do

believe that if the movement’s current condition persists—if anarchism

remains only a loose assortment of social scenes with distinctive and

often obscure norms and practices, collectively darting from one

ideological fashion to the next, always seeking the newest or most

radical-sounding slogans (rather like a crow chasing a bit of tinsel on

a windy day)—the movement will deteriorate until it is only an

historical curiosity, comparable to the Diggers or the Anabaptists.

Without substantive changes within anarchism, it will never produce

another revolution, much less a new society. It may, for all that, prove

to be a transformative force in the lives of individuals who come into

contact with it. Just as often, though, it will lead to exhaustion,

disillusionment, and cynicism.

History does not provide a remedy for our present malaise. It does,

however, help us to understand how it has developed. It invites us to

consider why we believe the things that we do, whether the anarchism we

have is the one that we want, and how we expect to make a better world.

These are basic questions, but so hard to answer.

Conclusion: Revolutions, Scientific and Otherwise

In the defining work of his career, The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn proposed a model of scientific

progress, whereby for long periods a field of study will advance through

the patient collection of evidence and the testing of hypotheses within

a dominant theoretical framework, a “paradigm.” Gradually, however, this

process of “normal science” produces and accumulates abnormal results,

“anomalies” and unanswerable questions, until the existing paradigm

becomes untenable. Science then enters a period of crisis, which is only

resolved when a new paradigm emerges, one that can take account of the

evidence, incorporate the anomalies into a coherent system, and

productively investigate the hitherto perplexing mysteries.

Anarchism is badly in need of just this sort of paradigm shift. We have

accumulated more than our share of anomalies, inconsistencies,

absurdities, and quandaries. Unfortunately, however, anarchists are not

engaged in normal science, even by analogy. The work of that stage (as

characterized by Ian Hacking in his commentary on Kuhn’s book) consists

of: “(1) determination of significant facts, (2) matching of facts with

theory, and (3) articulation of theory” (i.e., “bringing out what is

implicit in the theory, often by mathematical analysis”). Like

ideologues of all types, anarchists are instead prone to testing the

facts against the theory, and simply ignoring the evidence that does not

fit. Our unanswerable questions then become unaskable. To even pose them

may as well be heresy, and will surely be seen as disloyal. When our

theories are no longer tested against reality, they cease to be testable

at all; and soon, they cease to be theories.

Anarchism seems to have entered a phase that Kuhn did not describe, in

which one paradigm has collapsed, but no new paradigm has replaced it.

All that remains are propositions and platitudes lacking any unifying

structure, common premises, shared vocabulary, or agreed-upon

methodology.

In the first paragraph of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre imagines the

conceptual confusion following a society-wide purge of scientific

knowledge, producing a new Dark Age; then, decades later, “enlightened

people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what

it was.… all they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments

detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them

significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and

pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose

use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from

articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless

all these fragments are remembered in a set of practices which go under

the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology.”

The language of science—“expressions such as ‘neutrino,’ ‘mass,’

‘specific gravity,’ ‘atomic weight’”—would still be employed, but “many

of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have

been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and

even choice in their application which would appear very surprising to

us.” As a result, the possibilities for reason and proof are extremely

limited: “rival and competing premises for which no further argument

could be given would abound.” And, tragically: “Nobody, or almost

nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any

proper sense at all. For … those contexts which would be needed to make

sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.”

MacIntyre suggests that moral philosophy is in just such a state of

decay. It is intriguing, and somewhat disconcerting, to consider that he

began his project as a criticism of the moral failings of

Marxism—disconcerting, since the main attraction of Marxism over

anarchism is its claim to intellectual rigor and its ability to sustain

a coherent tradition over time.

Of course there are limits to this analogy of scientific revolution and

post-scientific entropy. My point is not that politics are a science or

that anarchism should be more scientific—except in the extremely broad

sense that we ought to check our ideas about the world against the

available evidence and revise accordingly. I merely mean to say that,

between Kuhn’s sketch of progress and MacIntyre’s picture of

intellectual disarray, today’s anarchism more closely resembles the

latter. What once promised to become a coherent philosophy capable of

inspiring individuals, guiding a broad movement, and restructuring

society, has become instead a collection of unsorted, half-remembered,

often borrowed axioms and arcane cultural practices delineating a

self-limiting in-group.

In this short pamphlet, I have tried to be frank about what I see as the

weaknesses of anarchist thought. However, I have also stated my own case

in favor of anarchism as a political position. The two points rub

together uncomfortably in my mind. I confess that while I find the ideas

of anarchism compelling, I recognize that my argument for them is

lacking in some fundamental respects. I have thus argued as forcefully

as I can manage that we must reinvigorate our tradition, beginning with

a careful and demanding examination of our own premises.

Unfortunately, it is hard to picture how such a reassessment might be

undertaken, and harder still to imagine that it might have the desired

effect. I do not believe that a renewed theory of anarchism is likely to

be born from the mind of an individual genius, nor from a distinct

faction or tendency trying to push their own line, nor even from a think

tank or other singular institution. All of these may of course have

their place, but I expect that the interchange between them will be more

important than any one participant or any single contribution. I think

that the revolution in anarchist thought will emerge, if at all, from a

loose association of politically engaged scholars in sustained dialogue,

building on one another’s theories, challenging each other’s ideas,

considering questions and addressing problems that sometimes overlap and

sometimes dovetail.

It is not important that such scholars agree. Indeed, to productively

disagree is part of their function. But how they disagree is important.

They should wonder, consider, probe, analyze, assess—gently or

forcefully, as appropriate. There are times when a budding notion needs

to be fed and sheltered until it builds its own strength; and other

times, when ideas will only gain definition and vitality by being

challenged, tested, and even attacked. What we need is an intellectual

community, joined together not by points of common doctrine, but by a

shared commitment to developing and refining our thinking. It should be

generally understood that our questions are as important as our answers,

and that winning an argument is less desirable than learning from it.

If that is hard to imagine, it is not because the idea is vague or

unrealistic; it is simply that that is almost the opposite of the

political culture that we inhabit. The culture that we actually have is

one characterized by norms borrowed from fundamentalism: the tendency to

assume conclusions at the outset, to disregard contrary evidence, to

refuse to consider competing views, to cast all those who disagree as

mortal enemies, to transmute every issue into a test of virtue, to

ignore all nuance and flatten all complexity and deny even the

possibility of doubt. This approach is limiting in innumerable ways. It

prevents us from hearing each other, from taking in new information,

from challenging ourselves, from learning. We can still cast aspersions,

dismissively sneer, talk past one another, or prejudge arguments without

considering them. But we have lost the ability to properly disagree.

Nearly every political discussion begins and ends as an exercise in

cementing or policing group loyalties.

This is not a problem unique to anarchism, or even to the left. It

characterizes our entire culture, from social media flame wars to White

House advisors citing “alternative facts.” Because these trends are so

pervasive, and because their results are so dire, it becomes

increasingly difficult for even small groups to preserve a space for

intellectual honesty. The atmosphere is poisoned; it is difficult to

breath.

This state of affairs is surely the result of numerous, disparate

causes, including new technologies, the concentration of media

ownership, shifts in the strategy and agendas of the two major political

parties, the neoliberal restructuring of education, and postmodern

skepticism (bleeding over into disregard, and then active hostility)

toward the very notions of evidence, reason, and truth. To halt and

reverse this vicious cycle, it is sadly not enough to produce tighter

arguments or to model better practices. It is not enough to develop the

ideas, we need also to develop the thinkers who are ready for the ideas.

That is to say, we have to create the structures that will enable us to

re-learn the necessary intellectual skills and to circulate, scrutinize,

and refine our theories about the world. At certain points in history,

those roles have been filled by newspapers, study groups, pamphlets,

public lectures, and liberation schools, often supported by labor

unions, political parties, and similar organizations. Far from being

elitist distractions from bread and butter issues, such intellectual

work is part of how political agency is formed, common interests

discovered, and solidarity built.

For instance, as E.P. Thompson ably demonstrates in The Making of the

English Working Class, Correspondence Societies, subversive

pamphleteers, reading rooms, Mechanics’ Institutes, ballad singers, and

radical publishers contributed importantly to the process by which the

working class came to conceive of itself, compose itself, and function

as a class. These individuals and institutions are as important to the

story he tells as are factories and looms. Thompson writes: “The making

of the working class is a fact of political and cultural, as much as

economic, history.... The changing productive relations and working

conditions of the Industrial Revolution were imposed, not upon raw

material, but upon the free-born Englishman—and the free-born Englishman

as Paine had left him or as the Methodists had moulded him. The factory

hand or stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered

village rights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft

traditions. He was the object of massive religious indoctrination and

the creator of new political traditions. The working class made itself

as much as it was made.”

Class-consciousness—that sense of “an identity of interests as between …

diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other

classes”—was the product of the intellectual culture as much as it was

of the economic system. And the ideas emerging from and circulating

within that culture animated the social movements and political

organizations of the day, just as the organs of those movements fostered

and fed both the traditional conceptions of liberty and the newfound

radicalism, giving them space to grow, and to evolve, and to spread.

Analogous processes were undoubtedly at work in the early stages of the

American civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement as

well. Think about the importance of Black churches and practices such as

group singing for the first, and consciousness-raising groups, locally

produced but nationally circulated newsletters, and prior (often, bad)

experience in the New Left for the latter. Such factors helped determine

the shape, tone, and direction—the organizational forms, internal

culture, and political strategy—of the emerging movements.

However, as Francesca Polletta argues in Freedom is an Endless Meeting,

these patterns ultimately prove constraining as well. Social movements

suffer crises when they outgrow their implicit models. As their

established structures and practices approach their limits, movement

participants are faced with an uncomfortable dilemma: either change

these features to allow for further development and risk losing the

distinctive character of the movement, or preserve the internal culture

and organizational form at the cost of becoming increasingly insular,

marginal, and stagnant.

Anarchism has faced similar crises repeatedly since it became wed to

pacifism during the Second World War. That merger reshaped anarchism in

a particular prefigurative and countercultural mode, organized along the

lines of a friendship network and sustained by cultural practices

distinguishing the scene from the surrounding society. Anarchists

largely resigned themselves to their outsider status until the demise of

the Soviet Union suddenly reshuffled the political deck. Then, for a

while, from the peak of the anti-globalization movement until the abrupt

collapse of Occupy, anarchism enjoyed a quasi-hegemonic position among

American radicals. Anarchist ideas filtered through broader movements,

but at the same time, they became diffuse, diluted, and indistinct.

In the early twenty-first century, some anarchists have doggedly tried

to make their ideas (or sometimes, simply, themselves) relevant to each

successive wave of popular unrest—anti-globalization, anti-war, Occupy,

Black Lives Matter, anti-pipeline, anti-fascist, anti-Trump. Others have

become increasingly wary, and sometimes hostile, toward activism,

movements, and the left, even as broad concepts, and have fought to

preserve a social and political distance between themselves and the

progressive mainstream. Curiously, neither the evangelizing nor the

sectarian impulse has served to clarify doctrinal issues. Instead, every

faction and sub-faction has come to identify anarchism with their own

special practices, tactics, and idioms—whether lock-downs, black blocs,

consensus meetings, community gardens, or accountability processes—while

retaining theories derived from other traditions (Marxist, nationalist,

etc). As a result, anarchism has devolved toward competing collections

of gestures signaling group membership—complex systems of means divorced

from any specific ends. We identify anarchism with particular tactics,

then we adopt those tactics to affirm our identity as anarchists.

Our failure, however, is not mainly intellectual, but organizational in

nature: The anarchist movement has not arranged itself in such a manner

that it can usefully grapple with the problems it faces—whether those be

theoretical, strategic, or interpersonal. It is probably even fair to

say that the word movement is a misnomer: There remain individual

theorists, who sometimes develop a cult-like following. There are

cadre-style sects, who carefully outline a program and a line. But by

and large the character of anarchism is determined by the vacillations

of an ill-defined milieu, which adopts and discards ideas according to

the mood of the moment. Greek anarchists tour America, insurrectionism

enjoys a vogue; Derrick Jensen reveals himself as transphobic,

primitivism becomes passé. Communization was hot in 2010; now it’s

decolonization; in five more years, surely, it will be something else.

Slogans, tactics, theorists, and organizational tendencies move in and

out of fashion, but they follow one another almost arbitrarily, a series

of abrupt shifts lacking any internal logic or sense of forward

progression.

Lacking any basis for debate, disagreement becomes exceedingly

dangerous. At present, the preferred means of managing it are

denunciation and ostracism. To challenge, question, or even to attempt

to analyze the prevailing dogma is politically suspect. This

defensiveness quickly leads to an overall anti-intellectualism, though

one sometimes disguised as a bullying and superior sophistication. We

pose as having seen through all possible objections, so that we can

avoid any careful examination of our views. Our rhetorical range shrinks

to that of a spoiled adolescent: it begins at moral outrage and ends at

eye-rolling disdain. A discourse conducted entirely in such a tone, and

with the ideas easily expressed in such a manner, may fulfill some

private emotional need for those who engage it; it will probably not,

however, build a movement capable of destroying the most powerful empire

in history.

Healthy movements nurture intellectual growth. They also need it. If

anarchism is to thrive, either as a political force or as a body of

thought, we will first need to take on the arduous task of creating the

circumstances under which honesty is possible, and decency expected, and

critical thinking part of the common work of the movement. We need to

build toward, not simply a revolution, but at the same time, a

renaissance.

Notes

The essay “Whither Anarchism?” began as a book review: Kristian

Williams, “Anarchism’s Mid-Century Turn,” Toward Freedom, May 3, 2016.

It also incorporates a short passage from a separate review: Kristian

Williams, “Politics, Plural,” Toward Freedom, March 5, 2015.

Thanks are owed to those who read and commented on earlier drafts of

these essays, including: Zach Blue, Luis Brennan, Amelia Cates,

Emily-Jane Dawson, Jamie Dawson, Peter Little, Claude Marks, Lara

Messersmith-Glavin, Paul Messersmith-Glavin, Tabatha Millican, Gabriel

Ryder, Josef Schneider, Spencer Sunshine, and Kevin Van Meter.

Works Cited

Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An

Unbridgeable Chasm (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995).

Andrew Cornell, Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New

Society (Oakland: AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies,

2011).

Andrew Cornell, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century

(Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

Ian Hacking, “Introductory Essay,” in The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions, fourth edition by Thomas S. Kuhn (Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press, 2012).

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, fourth edition

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American

Social Movements (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Spencer Sunshine, “Post-1960 U.S. Anarchism and Social Theory [PhD.

dissertation],” CUNY Graduate Center, Sociology, August 2013.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:

Vintage Books, 1966).

About the author

Kristian Williams has been active in the anarchist movement since the

early 1990s. He is the author, most recently, of Between the Bullet and

the Lie: Essays on Orwell (AK Press, 2017).