Anarchism and Art

Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins

Mark Mattern

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438459219
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

Situated at the intersection of anarchist and democratic theory, Anarchism and Art focuses on four popular art forms—DIY (Do It Yourself) punk music, poetry slam, graffiti and street art, and flash mobs—found in the cracks between dominant political, economic, and cultural institutions and on the margins of mainstream neoliberal society. Mark Mattern interprets these popular art forms in terms of core anarchist values of autonomy, equality, decentralized and horizontal forms of power, and direct action by common people, who refuse the terms offered them by neoliberalism while creating practical alternatives. As exemplars of central anarchist principles and commitments, such forms of popular art, he argues, prefigure deeper forms of democracy than those experienced by most people in today's liberal democracies. That is, they contain hints of future, more democratic possibilities, while modeling in the present the characteristics of those more democratic possibilities. Providing concrete evidence that progressive change is both desirable and possible, they also point the way forward.

1

Introduction

“We don’t believe in waiting until after the revolution. … If you want a better world you should start acting like it now.”

—Unbound Bookstore, Chicago1

“We need not conquer the world. It is enough to make it anew.”

—Subcomandante Marcos2

“All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical. … The ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”

—Emma Goldman3

In this book, I argue that some forms of popular art exemplify anarchist principles and commitments that, taken together, prefigure deeper forms of democracy than those experienced by most people in today’s liberal democracies. Prefiguration has two meanings, one descriptive and the other prescriptive. First, it means descriptively that current social forms contain hints of future possibilities. In this book I will explore hints found in popular art forms of specifically more democratic future possibilities. Second, and prescriptively, prefiguration means that the ways we organize our lives in the present should model the characteristics of the world we want to create in the future. Our means should match the ends we seek.4

The forms of art that I address in this book include DIY (Do It Yourself) punk music, poetry slams, graffiti and street art, and flash mobs. Marked as they are by tensions and contradictions, none prefigure utopian worlds. Yet each directs us toward alternative possibilities and new horizons. Each embodies commitments and practices that challenge contemporary political, economic, and cultural forms of domination while offering promise of more creative, satisfying, and democratic worlds. People involved in these alternative worlds of popular art expressly or implicitly signal to the world their unwillingness to play by (all) the rules imposed on them by others and by institutions and structures of domination. They instead carve out spaces—both physical and temporal—where they live parts or all of their lives according to central anarchist principles. My task in this book is to describe their efforts and show how they prefigure a different, more democratic world.

Before turning to those art forms, I outline in this chapter the rationale for pursuing a prefigurative strategy and defend a focus on popular arts and culture. In the second chapter, I address anarchism and democracy, exploring their affinities and tensions while identifying analytical footholds for interpreting the case studies that follow. Chapters 3 through 6 are case study chapters addressing, in order, DIY punk music, poetry slams, graffiti and street art, and flash mobs. In chapter 7, I return to the themes of prefiguration and political strategy.

Strategies for Progressive Change

Sociologist Erik Olin Wright identifies three general strategies for progressive change that he calls ruptural, symbiotic, and interstitial. Ruptural strategies, which Wright identifies primarily with revolutionary socialism, entail a direct assault on the state and capital, and are considered successful to the degree that a wholesale and complete rupture with those institutions is achieved. The vestiges of state and capital must be decisively destroyed or abandoned for a new order to emerge. Revolutionary individuals and groups seek not to engage productively and positively with existing institutional forces; rather, they seek to destroy them via direct confrontation. Wright characterizes this bluntly as a “Smash first, build second” strategy.5 Social classes are the main historical actors in this war of competing forces, with the working class serving as the primary agent for driving ruptural change.

Some theorists and activists continue to view this ruptural strategy as viable, despite the apparently long odds. The dissolution of the former Soviet Union took with it the most obvious threat to neoliberalism, capitalism, and liberal democracy; and, anyway, few progressives viewed the former Soviet Union as an example worth emulating. Worldwide, the primary agent of revolutionary change in Marxist theory, the working class, has largely not fulfilled expectations. According to Marx, the working class would eventually recognize the exploitation it experiences and its own class interest in overturning capitalism. Marxists anticipated that workers’ widespread disenchantment with capitalism would lead to revolt to overturn capitalism in favor of socialism and, eventually, communism. Instead, most workers in industrialized countries have largely abandoned whatever revolutionary goals they may have at one time embraced in favor of higher wages, better working conditions, and social welfare spending that mitigates the harsher edges of capitalism. Many have become enthusiastic believers in ideologies that naturalize capitalism and its attendant inequalities. Overall, workers in the United States and elsewhere hardly seem poised to assume a revolutionary role.

On a smaller scale, some activists engage in ruptural strategies such as social banditry and sabotage in various forms. James Buccellato, for example, describes the social and political role of outlaws in U.S. history in terms of their direct assaults on institutions of state and capital.6 According to Buccellato, despite—or perhaps because of—their illegality, these outlaws were widely viewed favorably by common people who saw them as representing struggles against the odds that resonated with their own struggle to attain material security. Buccellato also cites cyberjamming, factory occupations, graffiti art, rioting, and squatting as examples of outlawry in direct attack on the state or capital. At least some contemporary anarchists embrace these forms of outlawry. As noted by Pattrice Jones, “Outlaws routinely disregard the authorities and boundaries established by people while working cooperatively with one another to pursue their own purposes in the context of human exploitation and expropriation. This is anarchy in its purest form.”7 Whatever success one can ascribe to these outlaws, it is largely temporary, brief, and falls far short of achieving significant ruptural change. Those who view this ruptural strategy skeptically advocate some form of gradualist, evolutionary strategy that would produce desired changes through a process of metamorphosis. Wright’s second two strategic categories reflect this shift to gradualism.

Wright’s symbiotic strategy, which he associates with social democracy, accepts that, at least in the present, the state and capital must be reckoned with; they cannot simply be ignored or frontally assaulted. They must be engaged, while seeking to gradually transform them. This engagement requires the forging of coalitions between progressive forces and regressive forces of state and capital, and a process of collaboration with them.

A symbiotic strategy requires at least some willingness to work “within the system.” Attempts to work within the current political system to democratize power and challenge domination have occasionally met with some success. For example, social democracy in Europe, and the New Deal and Great Society programs in the U.S., rounded off the rougher edges of capitalism with social welfare spending to limit the deprivation experienced by millions on the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Also, President Obama’s support for gay marriage, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, also point to marginal steps forward.

Despite gains, there are nevertheless reasons to avoid relying entirely on this strategy. First, as Wright notes, gains achieved using a symbiotic strategy are always “precarious and vulnerable to counterattack.”8 Since the surge of neoliberalism during the 1980s and beyond, many of the previous decades’ gains have been reversed. In the United States, social welfare spending has been attacked successfully by Republicans and centrist Democrats, resulting in the partial dismantling of public assistance welfare, the steady decline of spending on education, constant threats to Social Security and Medicare, and an increasingly regressive tax code.

Second, despite undeniable gains in progressive directions, most steps forward are marginal victories that fail to fundamentally challenge elite domination. Many progressives understandably question whether significant change can occur within the existing liberal democratic framework. Third, success within a liberal democratic political framework often comes with high costs. For example, electoral victory today requires enormous expenditure of time and money. It also increasingly requires negative campaigning, dissimulation, propaganda, lies, half-truths, and pandering. The costs to civic and public life are often steep, resulting in widespread cynicism, distrust and enmity against public leaders, and deep, often-hostile fractures separating members of the public from each other and from any hope of common ground.

The likelihood of progressive symbiotic change in the near future appears remote, and may instead decline. Electoral politics in the U.S. appear to promise little more than slight variations on the Democrat-Republican centrism that occasionally offers progressives small victories, but overall they yield the same end result: domination by entrenched economic and political elites. Moreover, what passes for centrism has shifted dramatically to the right since the 1980s. While these variations are important at the margins, they stop short of moving in the transformative direction favored by most progressives. Without dismissing this strategy outright, it appears to many progressives that, in the foreseeable future, this symbiotic strategy offers scant hope and promises little movement forward.

In this context of declining confidence in ruptural and symbiotic strategies, some theorists and activists are turning to a third strategy, one that Wright calls interstitial, referring to those efforts occurring “in the spaces and cracks within some dominant social structure of power.”9 The notion of an “interstitial” space emerged earlier in the writing of anarchist Colin Ward: “Far from being a speculative vision of a future society … [anarchy] is a description of a mode of human organization, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with, and in spite of, the dominant authoritarian trends of our society. … [T]he anarchist alternatives are already there, in the interstices of the dominant power structure. If you want to build a free society, the parts are all at hand.”10

Interstitial strategies begin from the recognition that dominant institutions contain contradictions and weaknesses; they are riven with fissures, discontinuities, and inconsistencies. Pursuing an interstitial strategy entails identifying existing cracks and fissures, while opening new ones where possible. Over time, these cracks and fissures can be widened, drawing new and more participants into them. In theory, these cracks and fissures may grow to the point that they threaten major institutions of domination. This strategy focuses on the present, but with an eye to the future of gradual emancipation.

Although social movements represent the paradigmatic interstitial form of collective action, Wright also offers as illustrations of existing interstitial strategies and activities “worker and consumer co-ops, battered women’s shelters, workers’ factory councils, intentional communities and communes, community-based social economy services, civic environmental councils, community-controlled land trusts, cross-border equal-exchange trade organizations, and many others.” Each of these has in common “the idea of building alternative institutions and deliberately fostering new forms of social relations that embody emancipatory ideals and that are created primarily through direct action of one sort or another rather than through the state.”11

Sociologist John Holloway explores themes similar to Wright’s interstitial strategy in his Crack Capitalism. According to Holloway, there is a growing awareness that we “cannot wait for the great revolution.” Instead, we must begin now altering the conditions of our lives. He emphasizes the necessity of beginning with a great refusal, of saying, “Enough! Ya Basta! We have had enough of living in, and creating, a world of exploitation, violence and starvation.”12 But “cracking capitalism” entails more than simply refusing to play by established rules. It also involves creating a different world by seizing the initiative and setting the agenda. Holloway advocates an experimental approach to develop new forms that will represent “the embryos of a new world, the interstitial movements from which a new society could grow.”13 These new forms are to be created in the interstices and cracks that can be found within capitalism. Over time, this process will “expand and multiply the cracks and promote their confluence,” leading eventually to systemic change.14

These cracks can be either spatial or temporal, or both. Spatial cracks are new spaces within which new forms of life can be identified and created. Individuals find each other within these spatial cracks, and embark together on the creation of alternative forms of life. Temporal cracks entail going off the clock, resisting the dominant pressures and narratives of efficiency and instrumental rationality, substituting instead the possibility of doing things more for their own sake. As Max Horkheimer earlier lamented,

Less and less is anything done for its own sake. A hike that takes a man out of the city to the banks of a river or a mountain top would be irrational and idiotic, judged by utilitarian standards; he is devoting himself to a silly or destructive pastime. In the view of formalized reason, an activity is reasonable only if it serves another purpose, e.g. health or relaxation, which helps to replenish his working power.15

Resisting this logic of instrumental rationality and action opens a temporal crack; it challenges the logic of efficient use of time for production and consumption. Holloway’s vision anticipates that as these cracks multiply, there will be “radiating waves of rebellion” that can ultimately threaten the viability of capitalism.16

Like Wright, Holloway associates “crack capitalism” at least partly with anarchism. Like Wright, he links an interstitial strategy to larger transformational change, arguing that living and working within the cracks can create the conditions for large-scale progressive change. And like Wright, he demonstrates empirically that the interstitial experiments he condones are already well under way. The bulk of Crack Capitalism includes descriptions of existing interstitial efforts.

Neither Wright nor Holloway, however, focuses on artistic and popular cultural eff...