The Revival of Anarchism as Politics, Methodology, and Its Presence in Academia
Anarchism is a political concept and social movement associated with future or here and now politico-social projects without the state. It is informed by a commitment to the autonomy of the individual and the quest for voluntary consensus. In historical overviews of anarchism, it is often presented as possessing family resemblances to political, intellectual, and cultural innovations in classical Greece, ancient China, medieval Basra and medieval Europe, Civil War England, and Revolutionary Paris. Equally, anthropologists will point to ‘stateless peoples’ throughout the world and throughout all of human history as evidence of the deep pedigree that informs anarchist rejections of the state as an organising principle, and, indeed for most of humankind’s existence, the state did not exist. As a self-conscious ideology—as an ‘ism’—anarchism may owe its existence to the political formulations and intellectual currents that shaped Europe in the wake of the dual revolution, but it is also, crucially, a global and not merely European tradition. Anarchism’s history—its tenets, concepts, approaches, arguments, and style—was thus nurtured by global currents that spread people and ideas around the world, and its local manifestation was often shaped by domestic cultural and intellectual traditions that make anarchism an elusively protean ideology.1
The sub-schools that are a feature of anarchism—its admixtures of ‘individualism’, ‘collectivism’, ‘communism’, and ‘syndicalism’, which are cross-cut by differing attitudes towards the economy and organisation—add a layer of complexity to fathoming the nature of this ideology. And more recently, as we shall see, new takes on anarchism have become significant presences: anarcha-feminism, Green anarchism, and postmodern or postanarchism, draw on or refine ideas and practices which had always been present in the anarchist canon.
Since the Second World War , three waves of anarchist revival have occurred in the wake of the collapse of the Spanish Republic and the march of Franco’s troops into the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona in early 1939. Although certain formations of syndicalist action, particularly in the Global South from the 1940s, may be said to carry forward much of the spirit of pre-Second World War anarchism. But these movements, at least until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition of the People’s Republic of China from a Leninist to a capitalist state, tended to be overshadowed by national liberation movements drawing their inspiration from the so-called socialist world.2
The first wave of the anarchist revival of the 1940s and ‘50s was primarily composed of coteries of intellectuals, artists, students, and bohemians, and included, in the Anglophone world, people such as Paul Goodman, Colin Ward, Ursula Le Guin, Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Judith Malina, and Murray Bookchin. Much of their intellectual and imaginative labours were not, at first, joined to mass movements, even if they may have been inspired by their histories, or drawn energy from observing the various political and social movements that began to move to the centre of radical political life. Similarly, despite their occasional dismissal by rival anarchists for their bookish elitism, neither did they exert much influence in mainstream academia, or even mainstream political and civil society more broadly. But their anarchist methodologies, anarchist provocations, and anarchist imaginations, did stimulate new pathways in a host of academic disciplines including sociology, pedagogy, psychology, geography, urban planning, literature and historical studies, and they occasionally found coverage in various media outlets as ‘public intellectuals’, chiefly commenting on the cultural issues on which their modest fame tended to rest.3 C. Wright Mills, a figure moving in these circles, is a case in point.4 Famous for his role in defining this ‘new’ left in opposition to the ‘old’ which was seemingly discrediting itself in various totalitarian experiments, he articulated an anti-Cold War sociology that attempted to break out of the straitjacket of ‘Bomb Culture’5 functionalist sociology. More than an academic distraction, he wanted to warn the peoples and elites of the East and West of an impending nuclear catastrophe, seeing in the Cold War antagonists self-reinforcing, mirror-image, military-industrial complexes in operation. Wright Mills’ work, urgent in the context of mutually assured destruction, drew its power from an older tradition of thinking and activism: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), through his signal intellectual influence Thorstein Veblen, an admirer of the IWW in its 1910s pomp, and the nineteenth-century anarchist tradition of social enquiry that had, amongst other things, launched a powerful moral critique of capitalism and the state.
Voices like Wright Mills’ were muffled but slowly gained traction with the dual crises of Suez and Budapest, and the emergence of the African American Freedom Movement.6 Nevertheless, when the first edition of George Woodcock’s seminal general history of anarchism appeared in 1962, the author saw fit to issue a sombre obituary for anarchist politics. This book, Woodcock told his readers, analysed a movement which was dead.7 In the wake of the unexpected events of 1968, and the broader period of social change and turmoil that stretched from the middle of the 1950s to the 1970s, Woodcock, in a second edition, conceded his death notice may have been premature.8 His shift from pessimism to optimism was partly a product of the fact that he drifted out of anarchism’s orbit when he left austerity Britain for a new life on the west coast of Canada in 1949, but it was also a reflection of the changed circumstances for a movement that had seemingly drifted into redundancy after the tragedy of Spain.9 Black flags were spotted anew from Paris to Berkeley, with the events in Paris in the spring of 1968 suggesting that, apparently, spontaneous events founded on direct action and grassroots occupations could paralyse an advanced capitalist democracy within a matter of days.10
During the 1970s and 1980s, the spin-offs from the 1960s and ‘1968’ were embodied in a variety of new social movements highlighting new, second-wave, anarchist-inflected groupuscules, activists, and thinkers. These included second-wave feminism, the Greens, the anti-nuke movements, and Gay Rights, all of which practised forms of small ‘A’ anarchism that invoked participatory democracy, affinity groups, the personal as political, consensual forms of democratic governance, prefiguration, and direct action.11 Despite the clear resurgence of interest in anarchist ideas that these groups represented, it is important not to replace Woodcock’s 1962 obituary with eulogy. These waves of ‘New Anarchism’, or new politics with an anarchist flavour, style, theory, and methodology, were still overshadowed by social democratic, socialist, Eurocommunist, and Global South radical populist and Leninist-Nationalist competitors. Moreover, the intellectual and organisational bases of these movements could be varied, drawing strength and inspiration from a potpourri of historical and contemporary actors.12 But something had, nevertheless, changed.
The greatest impulse for a more publicly noticeable revival of anarchism as action, theory, and methodology emerged from a complex of historical ruptures. The penetration of varieties of neo-liberalism in the West and the Global South; the downfall of the Soviet Union and the Marxist-Leninist model in its former bloc, and in its iteration as the ‘heroic guerrilla’ or radical post-colonial governments in the Global South; and the astounding rise of the Chinese model of Leninist Capitalism in place of Maoism, all informed an unstable political universe in which anarchism was rediscovered.13 Besides the rise of political Islamism, the greatest challenge to the New World Order were forms of anarchism or anarchist-type movement that point to a third wave of anarcho-activism. This new radicalism was embodied in the rising in the Lacandon jungles of Mexico’s Chiapas in 1994, under the banner of the post-Leninist Zapatistas and cognate movements in urban and rural areas of Latin America. This sparked a series of mobilisations that culminated, via the War on Terror/Iraq War, with the crisis of 2007/2008, the Occupy/Square movements, and associated social aftershocks from 2010 to 2014, which have unsettled mainstream politics in a similar manner to 1968, globally reshuffling the deck in unanticipated and unpredictable ways. This 20-year wave of social movements is a complex story of several strands. The Global Justice Movement, the networking of social forums, the War on Terror after 9/11 and the invasio...