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CHAPTER 1
What Moves the Movement?
Anarchism as a Political Culture
What is anarchism? What does it mean to be an anarchist? Why? Because it is not a definition that can be made once and for all, put in a safe and considered a patrimony to be tapped little by little ... Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone ... It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, old people or children, is not something definitive: it is a stake we must play day after day.
— Alfredo Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension
In October 2004 the European Social Forum convened in London. During that week the British capital hosted a micro-cosmos in which the tensions within the so-called 'alternative globalisation movement' were on full display. On the one hand there was the official ESF, actively supported by the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone and dominated behind the scenes by his Socialist Action group, along with large NGOs, trade unions and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party. Many of the organisations involved in the ESF were operating recruiting stalls in a bid to increase their membership, informed by a strategy of building political power within the state-sanctioned realm of civil society politics, so as to challenge neo-liberal policies and global trade rules at a parliamentary and governmental level. The debates and plenaries at the ESF were largely in the format of lectures, with several speakers on the podium and an audience in the seats. The content was determined in closed meetings, and a registration fee was required to enter the event. Food was supplied by corporate caterers with underpaid staff (cf. Reyes et. al. 2005).
But elsewhere in London, numerous Autonomous Spaces were buzzing with activity. Attendance was free, workshops were less formal and everyone could organise one. The content was more radically anti-capitalist, feminist and ecological. The spaces were also different in their organizational model: decentralised, participatory and consensus-based. The participants in the autonomous spaces were very clear about their opposition to the top-down, recruiting logic of parties, NGOs and unions. Their own shared identity is produced by an ethos of active resistance to capitalism, the state, racism, patriarchy and homophobia; they endorse horizontal organisation based on a network model, largely without formal membership or hierarchies; and their struggle does not seek to take power or restructure society from above – they want to build it from below, with means that are of the same substance as the ends. As far as labels and titles were concerned, the hundreds who filled the autonomous spaces didn't really like them. But they did call themselves 'autonomous', 'antiauthoritarian' or, in explicit opposition to the top-down model of the official ESF, 'horizontal'. Notice anything conspicuously absent from this list?
THE A-WORD
There is something risky about using the words 'anarchist' and 'anarchism' to talk about a group of people many of whom do not normally call themselves anarchists, and sometimes actively shun the label. Words are, after all, important – and the fact that all these euphemisms are invented for the sole purpose of not saying 'anarchism' deserves closer attention.
Now there are some very obvious reasons why many of us are reluctant to call ourselves anarchists, even though we might be attracted to the word. As Bob Black put it,
To call yourself an anarchist is to invite identification with an unpredictable array of associations, an ensemble which is unlikely to mean the same thing to any two people, including any two anarchists. (The most predictable is the least accurate: the bomb-thrower. But anarchists have thrown bombs and some still do). (Black 1994: 31)
For many people the words anarchy and anarchism still automatically evoke negative images of chaos, mindless violence and destruction, not least so since libertarian ideas continue to be actively demonised through the 'anarchist scares' in the corporate media (Sullivan 2004, O'Connor 2001). Using 'anarchism' as an explicit banner when trying to engage the general public can be a liability. Anarchism has had so much negative PR that people are closed off before they give themselves a chance to listen to what activists are saying. Others, however, find power in the provocation:
I might not even choose to apply the word 'anarchism' to my own beliefs, but I think there's a value in using it, the same value and the same reasoning that has led me to call myself a Witch for all these years. And it's this – that when there's a word with so much charge attached, that arouses so much energy, it's a sign that you are transgressing on territory that the arbiters of power do not want you to tread, that you are starting to think the unthinkable, look behind the curtain ... to reclaim the word 'Anarchism' would be to wrest the stick out of hand that's using it to beat us, that very much does not want us to deeply question power. (Starhawk 2004)
However, the most common source of resistance to the anarchist title is that many anarchists do not enjoy adopting any label at all. People identify with many political and cultural strands, and believe that circumscribing their beliefs under any one 'ism' is unnecessarily constricting and implies (however unjustly) that they have a fixed and dogmatic set of beliefs. In the words of Not4Prophet:
Personally I am not down with any titles, tags, or designations. I've spent most of my adult life trying to find ways to do away with genres and borders and envelopes, so I think we are always better off if we don't label ourselves or allow anyone to label us. Anarchy or anarchism is really something we seek and live and struggle for, so it doesn't matter what we call ourselves (or don't) if we are in the midst of action doing it. (Imarisha and Not4Prophet 2004)
So is there really such a thing as an 'anarchist movement' out there in the present day? And what is 'anarchist' about it? David Graeber (2002) tries to overcome this tension in his own way:
I am writing as an anarchist; but in a sense, counting how many people involved in the movement actually call themselves 'anarchists', and in what contexts, is a bit beside the point ... The very notion of direct action, with its rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative – all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition.
While Graeber is very right in pointing to direct action and prefiguration as core anarchist ideas, he also needs a euphemism – the 'libertarian tradition' (as in 'libertarian socialist', read: 'anarchist') – to establish guilt by historical association. This invites talk of a movement that is 'broadly' anarchist or 'inspired by' anarchism – which reifies anarchism and expects 'really' anarchist movements to conform to some pre-conceived ideal type. In contrast, I would suggest that we can indeed coherently speak about an 'anarchist movement' plain and simple – as long as we look at it through the lens of political culture, with all the richness and flexibility that implies.
The term political culture is used here to refer a set of shared orientations towards 'doing politics', in a context where interaction takes on enough regularity to structure the participants' mutual expectations. In their cultural context, political events, behaviours, institutions or processes can receive an intelligible and 'thick' description (Geertz 1975:14). The prism of political culture gives us a useful way to talk about anarchism that does not imply theoretical unity, ideological conformity or linear movement structures. As far as one-word labels go, this political culture could certainly be called anarchist.
The site in which these cultural codes are reproduced, exchanged and undergo mutation and critical reflection is the locus of anarchism as a movement, a context in which many very active political subjects can say the word 'we' and understand roughly the same thing – a collective identity constructed around an affirmed common path of thinking and doing.
As indicated in the introduction, I would suggest organising our thinking about the orientations that make for a distinctly anarchist political culture in four broad categories: models of organisation, repertoires or action, cultural expression, and political discourse.
Models of organisation
The anarchist movement, like other social movements, can be described as a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations, engaged in a political and cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity (Diani 1992: 13). The architecture of the movement is that of a decentralised global network of communication, coordination and mutual support among countless autonomous nodes of social struggle, overwhelmingly lacking formal membership or fixed boundaries. This reticular model of social movement organisation has been likened to a rhizome – the stemless, bulbous root-mass of plants like potato or bamboo – a structure based on principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity and non-linearity (the metaphor is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of knowledge – see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7–13). Networks do not have defined limits but rather overlap each other, and expand or contract as groups interact or part ways (Gerlach 2001). Anthropologist Jeff Juris, who conducted participatory research with anti-capitalists in Barcelona, introduces the idea of a 'cultural logic of networking' to explain how activists reproduce movement networks. Rather than recruitment, the objective is horizontal expansion and enhanced 'connectivity' among diverse movements, within flexible and decentralised information structures that allow for maximal coordination and communication. As a result,
network-based forms of political organization and practice are based on nonhierarchical structures, horizontal coordination among autonomous groups, open access, direct participation, consensus-based decision making, and the ideal of the free and open circulation of information ... network-based politics involves the creation of broad umbrella spaces, where diverse organizations, collectives and networks converge around a few common hallmarks, while preserving their autonomy and identity-based specificity. (Juris 2004: 68)
We should distinguish between the anarchist networks in the proper sense – the decentralised structure of communication and coordination among activists – and self-defined 'Networks' like Earth First!, Dissent! or Anti-Racist Action. The latter could equally be called 'banners' – umbrellas under which certain parts of the anarchist movement act in a particular area. A banner, in this sense, is a convenient label for a certain goal or type of political activity, which can also – though not always – be accompanied by a concrete network, in the sense that people operating under the same banner in different locations have a significant level of communication tools (meetings, email lists, websites, a newsletter). Banners are even more fluid than networks. For example, a given group of activists in Britain might operate a free vegan street-kitchen today under the Food not Bombs banner, meet to design a leaflet against the G8 under the Dissent! banner tomorrow, and confront a far-right march through their town under the Anti-Racist Action banner the following week.
While networks, rhizomes and banners express the movement's architecture on a macro level, it should be clarified that the bulk of ongoing activity takes place on the micro level. In this context, the most oft-mentioned constituent of anarchist organising is the 'affinity group'. The term refers to a small and autonomous group of anarchists, closely familiar to each other, who come together to undertake a specific action – whether in isolation or in collaboration with other affinity groups. The expression stems from the Spanish grupos de afinidad, which were the basic constituents of the Iberian Anarchist Federation during the Spanish Civil War (though the FAI was a very structured organisation, with controlled membership, and the affinity groups were generally long-lasting rather than ad hoc). Typically, an affinity group will consist of up to roughly 15 participants, and individuals within it often take on specific roles for an action (medic, legal observer, driver, etc.). The participants in an affinity group form a self-sufficient unit, plan their action down to the smaller details and look after each other on the streets. Whereas the term 'affinity group', as used by anarchists today, tends to designate an ad hoc formation, the term 'collective' is often used when speaking of a more permanent group. Collectives again have a small face-to-face 'membership', and may exist for any ongoing task: a land-based collective operating an agricultural commune, an editorial collective of an anarchist publication, a collective running a particular campaign or research activity, or a trainers' collective dedicated to teaching skills to other activists – anything from bio-diesel production to stencil-art to consensus decision-making. A collective may also act as an affinity group for a particular protest or direct action outside its normal activities.
While affinity groups and collectives represent the micro level of anarchist organising, whether ad hoc or permanent, the bulk of ongoing anarchist activity takes place on the meso level of local networks, typically in one city. The local network is a context in which many participants are used to working together, whether in an affinity group, collective or coalition. This is the venue for organising everyday activities like stalls, leafleting, small demonstrations, screenings and benefit events, as well as direct action in an affinity group. It is also an area where anarchists are most involved in coalitions – with citizen associations, youth groups, radical NGOs and even local chapters of Green and Socialist parties (though many anarchists absolutely refuse to collaborate with any political party).
On the macro level (from the regional to the continental and global), the network form is the prevalent mode of organisation. Much has been written of the contribution of the Internet to the development of the anarchist and broader anti-capitalist movements and their resulting ability to define a global terrain of solidarity (Cleaver 1998, Klein 2000). But web-based networking is only the most abstracted expression of the real-life process of forming cooperation and trust on the ground. The ties that hold anarchist networks together begin from the primary affinities of face-to-face groups and collectives, extending through a dense web of personal connections and virtual nodes to form an international context for cooperation and solidarity. This gives the patterns of solidarity in the anarchist movement a tribal quality. The closest affinities exists on the level of small groups and local milieus – the 'bands' and 'extended families' where there is the closest level of friendship and trust. Further affinities are created when activists from diverse places and backgrounds cooperate. This can happen in an ongoing project with occasional conferences and online communication – a prominent example being the key European anti-neoliberal network that was created around organising the popular education caravan of Indian peasants in 1999. It can also happen during brief and intense 'plateaus' of organic network convergence, such as the coordination of an international summit protest (Chesters and Welsh 2005). A special feature of tribal solidarity is the instinctive tendency to extend it to perceived members of one's extended family or tribe. Here the feeling of identification, and the mutuality and reciprocity it motivates, is premised on shared cultures of resistance and visions for social change. In exchanges between activists from different countries who meet for the first time, familiarity is often probed through the presence of various cultural indicators of one's background and political orientation. Tribal solidarity thus exists as a potential that can be actualised selectively, destabilising the boundaries of membership and non-membership.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Anarchy Alive!"
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Copyright © 2008 Uri Gordon.
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