The Anarchist Turn

by Jacob Blumenfeld (Editor), Chiara Bottici (Editor), Simon Critchley (Editor)

Overview

The concept of anarchy is often presented as a recipe for pure disorder. The Anarchist Turn brings together innovative and fresh perspectives on anarchism to argue that in fact it represents a form of collective, truly democratic social organisation.

The book shows how in the last decade the negative caricature of anarchy has begun to crack. Globalisation and the social movements it spawned have proved what anarchists have long been advocating: an anarchical order is not just desirable, but also feasible.

The contributors, including leading anarchist and critical theorists, argue that with the failure of both free markets and state socialism the time has come for an 'anarchist turn' in political philosophy. In doing so they relate the anarchist hypothesis to a range of other disciplines such as politics, anthropology, economics, history and sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745333427
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	03/14/2013
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jacob Blumenfeld is a researcher in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. He has taught at various schools in the City University of New York.

Chiara Bottici teaches Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. Her recent publications include A Philosophy of Political Myth (2010) and Men and States (2009). She is editor of The Politics of Imagination (2011) and co-author of Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, and Identity (2012) and The Myth of the Clash between Civilizations (2010).

Simon Critchley teaches Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. He is the author of many books including The Faith of the Faithless (2012), Impossible Objects (2011), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) and Infinitely Demanding (2007).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BLACK AND RED: THE FREEDOM OF EQUALS

Chiara Bottici

Today the immense development of production, the growth of those requirements which can only be satisfied by the participation of large numbers of people in all countries, the means of communication, with travel becoming a commonplace, science, literature, businesses and even wars, all have drawn mankind into an ever tighter single body whose constituent parts, united among themselves, can only find fulfilment and freedom to develop through the wellbeing of the other constituent parts as well as of the whole.

(Malatesta, Anarchy)

Omnia sunt communia.

(Luther Blissett, Q)

In 1967, Italian anarchist Belgrado Pedrini wrote a poem entitled 'The Galleon'. The image is that of a miserable galleon, in which everybody works as a slave, deprived of freedom. Days and nights pass but nothing changes, until someone starts to incite their fellow slaves to revolt by pointing out that they have nothing to lose and all to gain from the rebellion. As the poem reads:

Siamo la ciurma anemica We are the anaemic crew d'una galera infame of an infamous galley su cui ratta la morte which quick death miete per lenta fame. cuts down slowly as we grow hungry.

Mai orizzonti limpidi Never do clear horizons schiude la nostra aurora open up our dawn e sulla tolda squallida and on the squalid deck urla la scolta ognora. cries the guard all day long.

I nostri dì si involano Our days pass as we sail fra fetide carene, in fetid-bottomed boats,
Sorge sul mar la luna The moon rises above the sea ruotan le stelle in cielo stars revolve in the sky at night ma sulle nostre luci but, for us, a funeral veil steso è un funereo velo. lies draped over our lights.

Torme di schiavi adusti Swarms of scorched slaves chini a gemer sul remo bent to groan over the oar,
Cos'è gementi schiavi Tell me, groaning slaves,
Remiam finché la nave Let us row until the ship si schianti sui frangenti, dashes upon the reef,
E sia pietosa coltrice And let the frothy wave l'onda spumosa e ria be a pitiful place to lay ma sorga un dì sui martiri but let the sun of anarchy il sol dell'anarchia. rise o'er the martyrs one day.

Su schiavi all'armi, Rise, slaves, to arms, to arms!
Su schiavi all'armi, Rise, slaves, to arms, to arms!
The image of the galleon conveys a crucial political message. If you are on the side of the oppressed, you do not have anything to lose from the revolt. On the contrary, you have all to gain, as slaves are the overwhelming majority that makes the galleon work. This is because on a galleon, we are so dependent on one another that it becomes impossible to be free alone. Even if you are the master, you will constantly be threatened by the slavery of others. There is no intermediate: we are either all free or all slaves.

Pedrini's biography is similar to that of many anarchists who lived through the troubled years of the Italian fascist regime. Chased for his antifascism, he was finally imprisoned for the death of a fascist policeman in a clash between a group of anarchists and the fascist secret police (Pedrini, 2001b). A few years later, he was liberated by the partisans and fought with the Resistance against fascists and the Nazi's army for a couple of years. After the end of the war in 1945, the newly constituted Italian Republic recognized the importance of his fight against fascism, but then put him back in jail. He remained there for 30 years, notwithstanding the numerous international campaigns for his liberation. Why?

For the Italian state, Pedrini was a criminal, a normal murderer. The fact that he had killed the policeman because he was a fascist and was just about to shoot Pedrini and his comrades did not matter. His crime: being an anarchist. Like many of his anarchist comrades he had to be banned. The fact that the minister of justice was then the communist Palmiro Togliatti did not help: quite the opposite. In those days, the hostility between communists and anarchists was perhaps even stronger than that between communists and fascists.

Yet, precisely in Pedrini's galleon, in his invitation to raise the black and red flag, we find the symbol of a peculiar view of freedom which, so I will argue, represents the platform for the convergence of anarchism and Marxism. Pedrini's metaphor tells us two important things: first, that we are all in the same boat, and second, that the freedom of every individual strictly depends on that of all others. You cannot be free alone, because freedom can only be realized as freedom of equals. With this expression, I do not mean that we have to be free and equals, but that we cannot be free unless we are all equally so.

The aim of this chapter is to argue that there is a significant convergence between Marxism and anarchism in that they both conceive of freedom in this way. After first exploring the meaning of this conception of freedom, and second, distinguishing it from that of autonomy, I shall, third, argue that today's social, economic and political conditions render this view particularly timely, and fourth, call for an overcoming of the historical divisions between anarchism and Marxism. The ban on the black and red that led Pedrini to prison is still there, but time has come to lift it.

THE FREEDOM OF EQUALS

At the beginning was freedom. It is commonplace to say that freedom is the crucial issue for anarchism, so much so that some have claimed that this word summarizes the sense of the entire anarchic doctrine and credo. There are good reasons to argue that freedom is also the crucial concern for Marx, who from his very early writings is concerned with the conditions for human emancipation. Indeed, the entire path of his thought could be described as a reflection on the conditions for freedom, understood first as a more general human emancipation, and later on, as freedom from exploitation in light of his theory of surplus value. In this section, I illustrate this view of freedom and distinguish it from that of freedom as autonomy, and in the following one, I will show that Marxism and anarchism can provide each other with the antidote to their possible degeneration.

But why freedom at the beginning, and moreover what freedom? Max Stirner has a very helpful way to phrase the answer. In The Ego and its Own, he observes that most theories of society pursue the issue of 'What is the essence of man? What is its nature?' (1990), and as such, they either expressly begin with such a question or take it as their implicit starting point. However, Stirner observes, the question is not what is the human being, but rather who: and the answer is that 'I', in my uniqueness, am the human being (1990). In other words, we should not start with an abstract theory about a presumed essence or (which is equivalent) the nature of the human being, but with the simple fact that 'I' am, here and now, in my uniqueness. Otherwise said, there is no other possible beginning because, as an answer to the 'who?' question, 'I've set my cause on nothing' (Ich hab' mein' Sach' auf nichts gestellt) (Stirner, 1990, pp. 41, 351).

It may appear paradoxical to start with a quotation from Stirner, an author who has been very much criticized within both Marxism and anarchism for his strong individualism. But it is nevertheless a helpful starting point to think about the centrality of freedom: freedom is at the beginning, because at the beginning there is the 'who?' question, and thus every being endowed with the capacity to say 'I am'. The ego is at the beginning as activity, as the capacity to move and speak, and here lies the root of its capacity to be free. And yet, if this interpretation is correct, and the being who says 'I am' cannot but be a being endowed with language, then it follows that Stirner's deduction of a radical individualism, which depicts a continual war between the individual and society, is potentially contradictory. To put it in a nutshell, the individual cannot be at 'total war' with society as Stirner claims, because the individual is to a large extent its own product.

The ability to speak, and thus language, presupposes a plurality of 'egos' because language can never be learned without a plurality of beings. An entirely asocial being, such as the one that Stirner depicts, would be a speech-less being. So if Stirner is right in identifying this primordial activity of consciousness as the starting point for thinking about freedom, he is nevertheless wrong in deducing from it such a radical egoism. His individualism, which he presents as a rigorous logical deduction, may then well be the historically identifiable egoism of the then emerging European bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels suggested (1976: I, III, 'Saint Max'). To use another Marxian expression, we can say that the very idea of an individual separated from all other individuals is a 'Robinsonade' (Marx, 1978c, p. 221), the fantastic representation of an isolated individual lost on a desert island, which is nothing but the imaginary representation of the concrete economic development of a specific epoch.

But such an isolated and unrelated individual cannot exist, because the human being does not become social at a discrete point in time and for the sake of particular purposes, but is so from the very beginning. We do not create society, but are rather created by it. In one of his lectures on anarchy, Bakunin illustrates this point through the following example: take an infant endowed with the most brilliant faculties (Bakunin, 1996, p. 28). If thrown in a desert at a very young age, such a being will perish (as it is very likely) or else survive but become a brute, deprived of speech, and all the other traits that we usually associate with humanity. Together with speech, the infant will also be lacking in the development of proper thinking, because there cannot be any thought without words. Sure, people can also reflect through images, but in order to articulate a complex thought they need words, words that can only be learnt by interacting with other human beings.

As we shall see, this view lies at the heart of Bakunin's idea that you can be free only if everybody else is free (Bakunin, 1996, 2000). Otherwise stated, freedom can only be a freedom of equals. If this view appears paradoxical, this is so because we have so internalized the ideological construction of human beings as independent individuals that we have difficulties representing freedom as a relation, rather than as a property with which separate individuals are endowed. Let me illustrate this view in more detail.

According to Bakunin, since human beings are so dependent on one another, you cannot be free in isolation, but only through the web of reciprocal interdependence. Although quite refined in its developments, it is not a view very far from common sense. Freedom, in Bakunin's view, consists 'in the right to obey nobody other than myself and to determine my acts in conformity with my convictions, mediated through the equally free consciousness of everybody' (1996, p. 81). Freedom is therefore the capacity to do what I want, to act in conformity with my convictions, but – and here it comes the refinement – in order to know what my own convictions are I need the mediation of the 'equally free consciousness of everybody.' This is a view of freedom that clearly resonates with Hegelian themes. However, as it will be clear later on, it is a view that Bakunin will bring well beyond Hegel (and the Hegelians) by extending it to the whole humanity – beyond any border, be it social, political or even historical.

On the other hand, we can clearly see how such a view differs from the mainstream liberal view of freedom as self-determination. While Marx observes that the image of the isolated individual is not at the beginning, but rather at the end of history (1978c, p. 222), Bakunin, in a passage that echoes contemporary theorists of the technologies of the self such as Foucault, observes that it is not individuals who create society, but the society that, so to speak, 'individualises itself in every individual' (Bakunin, 2000, p. 85). Bakunin is well aware that freedom as self-determination is empty, if there is no such thing as a 'self' that can choose autonomously. The crucial point is not simply doing what I want, but to be sure that what I believe to be the fruit of my free choice actually is. If I am led by the circumstances of my life to believe that my servitude is immutable or even desirable, there is no way I can be free. It is the dilemma of voluntary servitude, and therefore of the techniques through which compliant subjects are created, that has been at the centre of anarchist thinking for a long time.

In Bakunin's view, human beings are determined by both material and representational social factors. When still in the womb of their mother, every human being is already determined by a high number of geographical, climatic and economic factors which constitute the material nature of their social condition (Bakunin, 2000: 86). In addition to such a series of material factors, which Marx investigated in far greater detail, Bakunin also mentions a series of beliefs, ideas and representations that are equally crucial. Again, in an extremely timely passage, Bakunin observes that every generation finds as already made a whole world of ideas, images and sentiments that it inherits from previous epochs (2000, p. 87). These do not present themselves to the newborn as a system of ideas, since children would not be able to apprehend it in this form. Rather, such a world of ideas imposes itself as a world of 'personified facts', made concrete in the persons and things that surround them, as a world that speaks to their senses through whatever they see and hear since their very early days (Bakunin, 2000, p. 87).

Put in more contemporary words, the individual becomes such only through a process of socialization that begins immediately, at least with their very first encounters with language and the presence of other human beings. As psychoanalysis has shown, it is through such a process that the individual is led to internalize and assimilate the imaginary significations of that particular society they live in (Castoriadis, 1987). To put it in Castoriadis's words, individuals are at the same time instituting and instituted by society: society does not exist without the individuals that constantly create and re-create it, but, at the same time, individuals exist only as a product of society itself (1987).

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction, Simon Critchley
I. SUBVERTING BOUNDARIES
1. Black and Red: The Freedom of Equals, Chiara Bottici
2. The Politics of Commensality, Banu Bargu
3. Friendship as Resistance, Todd May
4. An-archy between Metapolitics and Politics¸ Miguel Abensour
II. PAINT IT PINK: ANARCHISM AND FEMINISM
5. Subverting Patriarchy, Subverting Politics: Anarchism as a Practice of Caring, by Mitchell Cowen Verter
6. Of What is Anarcha-feminism the Name?, Cinzia Arruzza
7. Black, Red, Pink and Green. Breaking Boundaries, Building Bridges, Laura Corradi
III. GEOGRAPHIES OF ANARCHY
8. The Anarchist Geography of No-Place, Stephen Duncombe
9. The Fighting Ground, Alberto Toscano
10. Reiner Schürmann’s Faultline Topology, Stephanie Wakefield
IV. THE ANARCHIST MOMENT
11. The Anarchist Moment, Andrej Gruba i
12. Palestine, State Politics and the Anarchist Impasse, Judith Butler
13. Spread Anarchy, Live Communism, The Alleged Authors of The Coming Insurrection
14. Postface on Occupation and Revolution, Jacob Blumenfeld
Index

Editorial Reviews

'An important signpost on our new political and ethical terrain. It affirms anarchism as the unmistakable horizon of our present condition. - Saul Newman, Reader in Political Theory, Goldsmiths University of London.

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