Anarchist Studies Journal 20.1

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Anonymous
Anarchist Studies; 2012; 20, 1; Alt-PressWatch
pg. 2
Editor
Ruth Kinna
Department of Politics, History and International Relations, University of Loughborough,
Loughborough LE1 1 3TU
Book reviews editor
Dave Berry, Department of Politics, International Relations and European Studies,

Loughborough University, Loughborough LE1 1 3TU
Associate editors
L. Susan Brown (Independent), political and social theory

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds), Spanish and Portuguese
Carl Levy (Goldsmiths College), social policy/politics
Jon Purkis (Independent), human and health sciences
Sharif Gemie (School of Humanities/Social Sciences University of Glamorgan)
Lewis Call (California Polytechnic State University), intellectual history
Art editor
Allan Antliff (University of Victoria), h isto ry of art

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Table of contents
Anonymous
pg. 3
Contents
About this issue's cover
Editorial
'Nothing is Permitted Anymore': Postanarchism, Gnosticism, and The End of

Production Brian James Schill
Building 'Another Politics': The Contemporary Anti-Authoritarian Current in the

U.S. and Canada Chris Dixon
32
Interpersonal Ethics in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed Daniel
P. Jaeckle
61
Louisa Sarah Bevington's Letters t o Ethel Rolt Wheeler: A Catechism in

Communist Anarchy John A. Quintus
80
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism lain McKay
89
REVIEWS
Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the
Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940. The Praxis of National Liberation,
Internationalism, and Social Revolution Reviewed by Constance Bantman
1 06
Sean Birchall, Beating the Fascists: the Untold Story of Anti-Fascist

Action
Reviewed by Keith Hodgson
1 08
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary

On The Gospel
Reviewed by Paul Chambers
Saul Newman (ed.),
1 09
Max Stirner Reviewed by Seth Crownover
111
Kathy Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets
113
Reviewed by Laura Greenwood

Crispin Sartwell (ed.), The P ractical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren
Reviewed by Nathan Jun
Theresa Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada:
1 15
Art and
Criticism, 1914-1924 Reviewed by Gavin Grindon
116
Jared Davidson, Remains to be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill's Ashes in New

Zealand
Reviewed by Toby Boraman
1 18
Paul
Froli ch Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action

,
Reviewed by Christian Garland
119
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology,

edited by lain McKay
Reviewed by K. Steven Vincent
121
David Berry and Constance Bantman (eds.), New Perspectives on Anarchism,

Labour and Syndicalism: the Individual, the National and the Transnational
Reviewed by Lucien van der Walt
123

Antliff, Allan
pg. 6
This issue's cover, 'Money Talks Too Much', was created by anarchist print artist Josh
MacPhee of theJustseeds artists' collective and handed out at the first mass demonstra
tion held by the Occupy YVall Street General Assembly. MacPhee writes:
The posters were printed at the behest and with the help of a group of cultural
workers calling themselves Artists and Writers Exhausted by Capitalism and
Inspired by the Occupation, and we thought 300-400 posters would make an
impact for the contingent, but instead, the posters were distributed within
seconds, and disappeared into a crowd of over lO,OOO ... But it didn't take long
for the image to appear again. It was reproduced as the back cover ofthe first
n+ 1 Occupy! Gazette, and was posted as a free, high-res downloadable pdf on
both the Justseeds.org website and Occuprint.org, and has been downloaded thou
sands of times from these sites. In addition, it turns out many people who sucked
up the printed posters on Oct. 5th kept them, and they have been showing up to
related OWS events, such as anti-foreclosure demonstrations and student actions,
with the posters tacked to pickets, or even laminated.
The design of the poster itself was inspired by the proliferation of hand-painted
cardboard signs in Zuccotti Park. Each of these signs was unique and created
from an individual perspective, and while I knew I couldn't recreate that in a
mass-produced poster, I could attempt to capture the spirit of it. The movement
consciously developed in the shadow of Wall Street, and the bull sculpture that
sits there as a monument to capitalism was a popular target of derision in the
early days of OWS. So I had my object, what the poster was against. The more
complicated part was who the 'we' is, how ro represent our attack on the bull and
capitalism? By using scrappy hand-drawn letters, and literally writing on rop of
the image of the bull graffiti-ing on it I tried to harness the power ofself-expres
sion and the intersection of individual voices and mass articulations in the Park.
The hand-writing and harness strapping the hull's mouth shut are my creation,
but I also wanted the image to be a stand in for all the voices in the park. all the
hand-writing on the signs. The poster is an attempt to graphically capture the
struggle between 'our' voice and the voice of capital.
The Occupy movement is an example of how the politics of radicalism are shifting away
from old forms and becoming more meaningful in the process. Anarchism is at the crux
of this development, which is drawing a clear line between those who seek power over
others and those who seek to empower themselves.
Allan Ant/iff
Editorial
Anonymous
pg. 7
Anarchist Studies 20.1
2012 ISSN 0967 3393
www.lwbooks.co.ukljoumalslanarchiststudiesl
Editorial
W hy should we think about the past? In his appreciation of Rudolf Rocker, to be
published in the next issue of AS, Brian Morris finds a compelling answer in a comment
by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah: 'the present is where we get lost - if we forget
our past and have no vision of the future'. And the gloss we put on the past and on
particular figures within it is also illuminating. In anarchist history, familiar portrayals
of Bakunin as a gargantuan, destructive (self-destructive), fanatic and Kropotkin as a
kindly saint have contributed to the construction of a past that continues to exercise a
profound effect on contemporary thinking. How useful is it, then, to be reminded of
the humanity of our political leaders, their skill and prowess in negotiating barriers to
power, their courage in challenging biological constraints (like being born female)? In a
Guardian blog David Cox warned that 'Progressives like to equate their own cause with
righteousness, but all right-wingers aren't out simply to protect privilege. Some are as
eager as their rivals to benefit the disadvantaged, but have a different view of what this
will entail'. He continued: ' The relative modesty of the right's political project leaves
scope for human feeling ... On the left, things are different. The justice of the cause
brooks no sentimental aberration. Love of the human race may preclude love for actual
human beings, as Dickens noted 1 50 years ago when he invented Mrs. Jellyby' ( ' Is the
Iron Lady's heart of gold quite right?: ).
The danger of being subsumed by a cause lies at the heart of John Henry Mackay's
fictionalised account of individualist and anarcho-communist politics The Anarchists
and is the central theme in the relationship he paints between his two characters,
Conrad Auban and Otto Trupp. Like Cox, Mackay suggests a simple trade-off between
political cause and human feeling and associates causes exclusively with the left. Because
they are not treated as 'causes: Mackay's own brand of individualism, like Margaret
Thatcher's 'modest political projects' (liberating markets, investing in security,
expanding choice, injecting enterprise values into public services, stimulating growth ...)
are painted in ideologically neutral terms, and the effects they have on the groups and
individuals that they are seemingly designed to help are passed over without comment.
Many who position themselves on the left will remember that the human feelings
that the Iron Lady (as opposed to the ironing lady) expressed during her political career
extended beyond ordinary courtesies to Downing Street workers, to camaraderie with
General Pinochet. Not only did she go out of her way to embrace him as a friend but,
giving the lie to the idea that causes are the left's preserve, she also identified herself
Editorial
18
with his concept of justice - something she called 'democracy in Chile' O. It is, then,
worth remembering the past and the part played by iconic individuals within it - not in
the sense that icons refer to persons or things revered, but insofar as they embody the
essential characteristics of an era or group.
In this issue: Brian Schill presents a critique of anti-copyright in a theoretical
analysis of contemporary postanarchism; Chris Dixon looks at anti-capitalist protest in
the U S and Canada to explore the links between anti-authoritarianism and anarchism;
Daniel Jaeckle explores the anarchist ethical imagination of Ursula Le Guin, in a discus
sion of The Dispossessed; John Quintus ploughs the archives to examine the anarchism
of Louisa Bevington and lain McKay reconsiders the anarchist influence on syndi
calism, in a reply to Ralph Darlington's article published in A S 1 7:2.
'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore': Postanarchism, Gnosticism, and The End of Production

Schill, Brian James
pg. 9
Anarchist Studies 20.1 2012
ISSN 0967 3393
www.lwbooks.co.uk/joumalslanarchiststudiesl
'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore':

Postanarchism, Gnosticism, and
The End of Production
Brian James Schill
ABSTRACT
Despite its emergence as a serious field of academic study. postanarchism harbours a
number of ontological, epistemological. and even theological hang-ups - at least if
Crime thine., primitivism, and cy berpunk are any indication. Using a pair of postanar
chism's more celebrated references - Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault - against it,
then. this essay explores how many postanarchists' refusal of copyright and intellectual
property in the digital age rather than helping free and/or empower postmodern
subjects instead obscures their subjectivity, and perhaps their very humanity. In so doing.
postanarchism too often panders to an elitist and naive contemporary version of
Gnosticism. which has itself re-emerged alongside the networked economy in the form
of scientology. Kabbalah, and other 'secret: anti-world fundamentalisms in the West.
Keywords: Post anarchism, Gnosticism, cyberpunk, Lacan

He had tried when possible to pass over these thoughts ... to see no more than
what was in front of his face and to let his eyes stop at the surface of that. It was
as if he were afraid that if he let his eye rest for an instant longer than was needed
to place something ... the thing would suddenly stand before him, strange and
terrifying, demanding that he name it and name it justly and be judged for the
name he gave it. He did all he could to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation.
Flannery O'Connor.l
In a widely reproduced post to a Z Magazine Internet forum in the mid-1990s, Noam
Chomsky decries what he sees as the crumbling of Western intellectual culture. specifi
cally the emergence of ' postmodernist cults' led by. among others, Jacques Derrida. Gilles
BrianJames Schill
Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault.2 Because the discourse of these writers too
often fails to meet the minimal standards of evidence-based argumentation required in all
other academic fields, and exhibits 'appalling' scholarship 'based on pathetic misreading:3
Chomsky considers any conclusions regarding mind and culture reached by these 'theo
rists' as so much nonsense, admitting elsewhere that 'no one seems to be able to explain to
me [what] the latest post-this-and-that is ... other than truism, error, or gibberish:4
Chomsky's colleague Murray Bookchin likewise feels postmodemism has had a 'disqui
eting effect on the need for a coherent and rational body of radical political ideas' through
its obtuse discourse which stifles debate and thus 'cannot be justified'.s If such criticism
were isolated to anarchism's elder statesmen, the advocates of postmodemism could
perhaps ignore the challenge to their programme; however, the shift away from 'practical'
theory and toward postmodem or poststructuralist readings of anarchism has annoyed
many younger voices within the anarchist community too, as any glance at several anar
chist websites and 'zines' suggests. The pseudonymous Waldorf and Statler (named for
The Muppet Show's balcony critics), for instance, argue in Green Anarchy that '"Post-"
anything should be used for hitching horses:6 Or, as one user put it to the well-read forum
'Anarchism and Poststructuralism' on the anarchist clearinghouse Infoshop.org, 'I hate
poststructuralists and deconstructionists, it seems like they can say the most ridiculous
and confuSing things and somehow they tell you that they are correct:7
Not to be deterred, several scholars have contributed heavily to this emerging field in
recent years, developing a body of academic literature dedicated to exploring what has
come to be called 'postanarchism'. The Pluto Press anthology Post-Anarchism: A Reader
is only the most obvious in this regard, offering essays by many of the discipline's
seminal voices, including Todd May and Hakim Bey.8 Also in the anthology are Saul
Newman and Lewis Call, who contributed important book-length pieces to the field in
the last decade. In Postmodern Anarchism, for example, Call sought to surpass a 'danger
ously inaccessible' body of nineteenth-century theory by exploring the anarchism
embedded in Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson
and Bruce Sterling.9 These postmodern thinkers, Call explains, offer a more productive
critique of the political economy than Proudhon, Bakunin, or Kropotkin by grounding
'all manifestations of capitalist exchange: 10 rejecting Enlightenment conceptions of the
unified subject, reframing power as 'micropolitical' and 'always already present in any
social relation', and advancing radical symbolic theory. I I Such praxis resurrects an
indigenous 'gift' economy - prestation or potlatch - explored by Marcel Mauss, Raoul
Vaneigem, and Marshall Sahlins wherein products and knowledge are exchanged freely
between gifters.12 And in The Politics ofPostanarchism, the latest of three books on the
subject, Newman argues ultimately that it is the 'postanarchism' of contemporary radi
calism, be it anti-capitalist, environmental, or indigenous in timbre, that best invokes 'a
new "anarchic" understanding of democracy which is no longer tied to the sovereign
state order: 13
'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

This all sounds radical in theory, Chomsky or Bookchin might counter, but how does
it look in practice? Rejecting such 'either-or' essentialism - to which power gravitates,
Newman argues - is Gabriel Kuhn, who shows several instances where the theories of
Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida have made their way into anarchist praxis for years,
introducing into anarchism's critique of authority questions of subjectivity, gender,
identity, and language. Kuhn notes, for example, a German infoshop called 'Rhizom'
among other cases. 14 Such examples and the field's increasing academic respectability
notwithstanding, Chomsky's and Bookchin's critiques remain prescient: in spite of its
chic status and productive epistemological and ontological suppositions, it is often in the
practice of postanarchism that the theory's more problematic outcomes emerge. If one
takes Call's notion of the 'revolutionary' gift as symptomatic, for instance, postanar
chists' frequent rejection of intellectual property
(IP)
and authorship in the digital age
presents contemporary anarchism with a sober ethical, and ultimately theological,

problem: how to rationalise its increasingly discriminating, and perhaps totalitarian,
Gnosticism. At this point, postanarchist aesthetics and politics - described below - sour
its theory so far as such practice heralds the end of two staple anarchist principles:
community and freely-associated social production. Or so I shall argue by critiquing
several on-the-ground versions of postanarchism, including Crimethlnc., Call's cyber
punk, and, ironically, anarcho-primitivism,
through the very postmodernists Chomsky
and Bookchin reject, particularly L acan and Foucault, whose value will become clear.
FOUNDATIONS
Before proceeding to copyright and theology a brief distinction should be made.
Nominally, postmodernism and poststructuralism, often used synonymously by their
critics, suggest the advent of a cultural and intellectual landscape that surpasses
modernism and structuralism, respectively. These bygone 'movements' are typically
distinguished by the fact that the former describes a broad sociocultural tendency in art,
architecture, and even politics that rejects the Romanticism that preceded it.
Structuralism, on the other hand, was a narrower, and particularly French, hermeneutic
adopted by linguistics, literary theory, and anthropology that focused on systems of
language and signs toward the interpretation of culture. The case is similar for postmod
ernism and poststructuralism: the former is an all-encompassing western cultural
condition; the latter a loosely-knit hermeneutic. As products of a particular epoch, post
modern 'texts' - not only novels and films, but architecture, advertisements,
corporations, and 'terrorist' networks - tend to delegitimise the 'metanarratives: in Jean
Francois Lyotard's words, which isolate the Cartesian subject and totalise 'Truth:15
Building on Lyotard, whose focus was science and epistemology, Fredric Jameson
explored the political economy of postffiodernity, equating it with the disorienting lOgic
of late capitalism itself so far as postmodernism advocates style over substance and the
BrianJames Schill
elision of boundaries between high and low art, culture and commerce, and the Real and
Baudrillard's hypen-eal.16 Indeed, to many contemporary anarchists' delight, loitering
among the defining features of postmodern texts, in Ihab Hassan's literary reading, is
their general formlessness and their open, disjunctive concept of 'origin: which advocates
participation, spontaneity, and decentralisation over their opposites: hierarchy, ' finished'
production, distanceP Is Hassan not correct, postanarchists might ask, in equating post
modernism with anarchism generally?18
Encompassing elements of postmodernity, poststtucturalism is less a sociocultural
condition than an interpretive framework that seeks, in a critique of structuralism, to
decentre the ontological, literary, or political subject. Not only is the unified cogito
abandoned in poststructuralist thought, but rejected is structuralism's valorisation of the
signifier as a rational, totalising meaning-maker; so do all signs and subjects themselves
become associated with a surplus of meaning. Through the poststructuralist lens, writes
Derrida, ' One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign ...
replaces the center ... [and] occurs as a surplus, as a supplement: 19 So it is that poststruc
turalism articulates a certain excess of signification whereby any signification itself is
always-already suspect.
Combining cyberpunk, a 'postffiodern' genre of fiction, with poststructuralist theory,
Call once summarised postmodern anarchism as 'Anarchy of the subject, anarchy of
becoming, transrational anarchy, and micropolitical anarchy:20 Or, in Newman's later
definition, postanarchism might be seen as a 'politico-ethical' strategy which 'no longer
relies on the epistemological foundations of Enlightenment humanism, or on essentialist
conceptions of subjectivity'.21 Such a strategy, for Newman, 'interrogates the metaphysics
of presence that continues to haunt anarchism' and seeks to 'destabilise the foundation
alism on which the discourse of classical anarchism rests:22 Regarding aesthetics more
speCifically, 'really-existing' postanarchism, in articulating political statements, tends to
rely on a 'nomadic' use of voice and perspective and the detournement of art and culture
toward the interruption of narrative, authorship, and symbolization, resulting in a 'slip'
in the signifci ance of images and language altogether.
One feature of poststructuralist thought important here has been its conversion of
texts from 'readerly' productions, where meaning is fixed by an author, to 'writerly' ones,
where each reader determines a text's connotation. Important in this regard are Roland
Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, who argued for the author's functional
elision in postmodernity.23 Ontologically speaking, Barthes feels that the author is 'dead',
having been replaced by the 'scriptor: who emerges alongside the text and exists only at
the moment of enunciation - never before or after - tracing 'a field without origin - or
... no other origin than language itself.24 Similarly, in developing their theory of the
'rhizome: a decentralised, nonsignifying epistemological system, Deleuze and Guattari
posit their own - and their readers' - ineluctable multiplicity. Particularly in A
Thousand Plateaus the pair argue that if modern writers are to take not only the author's

death, but intellectual, cultural, and ontological freedom seriously they must 'reach not
the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any impor
tance whether one says 1:25 Referring to their own co-authorship, Deleuze and Guattari
add that to 'attribute the book to a subject is to ... fabricate a beneficent God to explain
geological movements:26
In the wake of such pronouncements postanarchism finds considerable traction.
After all, as many contemporary anarchists or advocates of decentralised social and
cultural ptoduction realise, posrmodernism, hypertext, and what former Kibbutznik
Yochai Benkler calls the 'networked economy' themselves all intersect with (post)anar
chism in important ways, particularly in how they devalorise any 'original'
creator-subject and simplify collaboration, appropriation, and dissemination.27 Take, as
exemplary, the work of Mark Amerika, whose net.art projects, including Grammatron
and Filmtext, combine hypertext, appropriated words and images, and multiple authorial
'voices' to reinterpret the political economy of the signifier in a networked environ
ment.28 This evolving approach to production spurred Benkler's poignant suggestion
that it is today 'more fashionable to be anarchist than it has been in a century:29
This statement is especially true in the context of intellectual property law, which has
seen a robust challenge to its authority emerge alongside the networked economy. And
for obvious reasons - in an effort to control a network that not only revolutionised
communication, culture, and politics, but further imploded the character of copyright
and 'authorship: government and corporate elites across the globe have fashioned several
policies in the last two decades that benefti incumbent industrial interests at the expense
of nonproprietary producers. In the United States alone these include the No Electronic
Theft Act (1997), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998), and the Family
Entertainment and Copyright Act (2005). Each of these measures followed passage of the
Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), an inter
national agreement codified during the 1994 round of World Trade Organisation talks
that regulates IP internationally. The consequence of this often reactionary legal largesse
for creative moderns has been the redoubled criminalisation of copyright infringement,
the virtual eradication of ' fair use' tolerance, and the extension of copyright term.
So it is that in an increasingly copy-protected twenty-first century a variegated
collection of voices calling for the revision, if not full demise, of IP have grown louder,
especially online. And while the overall anarchist attitude toward copyright is mixed,30
especially sharp within the broader anti-copyright camp is the anarchist yowl. Murray
Bookchin, for instance, long ago advocated the concept of 'usufruct: a scenario that
provides 'freedom of individuals in a community to appropriate resources merely by
virtue of the fact that they are using them'}l W hen a user no longer needs a resource or
product, even one she may have produced, it passes freely to another, much like the 'gift'
culture advanced by Mauss and Call. Usufruct is particularly appropriate in the case of
IP where one person's 'use' of data does not limit its use by another.
BrianJames SchiU
Such is the position of Australian social anarchist Brian Martin, who in Information
Liberation highlights two key problems copyright creates: it impedes innovation and
creativity, and exploits developing nations. W ith regard to the former argument, Martin
provides a Jeffersonian critique32 of IP, arguing that 'intellectual products' are less the
product of individual authors than they are social ideas whose genuine origin is untrace
able.33 For this reason alone the notion of the 'marketplace of ideas' is a paradox since
ideas should not be subject to markets. Given ideas' social construction, says Martin,
copyright law, ironically, contributes to an increase in plagiarism, 'intellectual theft: and
inequality.34 The solution is simple though: intellectual products should not be owned,
but available to be used by anyone. An example of this freedom in action is language,
Martin notes, which is free to 'use: irrespective of others' use, and is modified daily by
each of us.35
CASE STUDIES: CRIMETHINC., PRIMITIVISM, CYBERPUNK
Although Bookchin and Martin make important contributions to the fight against copy
right tyranny, it is clear that their 'rational' arguments have done little to curb the
expansion of intellectual property statutes. So it is that postanarchism has responded
with a nomadic, transrational vengeance - redoubling its detournement of copyrighted
symbols; decoding, decentering, deterritorialising, and disseminating protected films,
music, and literature;36 and persistently peppering the virtual and real worlds with anti
copyright bluster, all in an effort to affirm, in Newman's words, 'the contingency of
political identity, the indeterminacy of history and the new possibilities of emancipation
offered by postmodemity'.37 Take, as the most obvious example, the work of 'audio
collagists' Negativland, whose anarchist sympathies have been evident for decades. Long
defenders of fair use, the musical group included the fifty-six page anti-copyright tract
' Two Relationships to a Cultural Public Domain' in their 2005 album No Business.38
And as the minders of lnfoshop.org put it, ' We thinks [sic] that copyrights, trademarks,
and intellectual property should be abolished ... intellectual property simply gets in the
way of communication and the sharing of ideas, be it in the arts or in biology:39 Or
consider the 'Ex- Workers' Collective' Crimethlnc., a fragmented collection of postanar
chist sympathisers which one-ups Negativland's rhetoric in their anti-capitalism. The
network's 'beginners' book Days ofWar Nights ofLove, for example, calls the concept of
IP a 'collective psychosis' which cuts 'even deeper than the concept of material
property'.40 So should IP be abandoned. Or, as the collective's ' field manual' Expect
Resistance notes on its 'anti-copyright' page, ' N! ... Anything composed in any language
is obviously the handiwork of the millions who developed the words and ideas that
constitute it, not just the experts listed in the credits'.41
Beyond Crimethlnc.'s decentralised structure and Foucauldian emphasis on 'the
polities of our everyday lives:42 the reason for locating the network's polities and texts in

the postmodern space is their cut-up - rhizomatic - aesthetic, which, like Negativland,
relies heavily on formlessness, detournement, and nonlinear narratives both online and in
print. Expect Resistance, for example, features multiple interwoven narratives, one in red
ink, mixed with plagiarised phrases, trademarks, and images throughout. Emboldened by
their postmodern style, the group posits in Days o/U7ar that the easiest solution to the
problem of copyright is to defy it - plagiarise, copy, infringe, and challenge the sacralisa
tion of authors by remaining anonymous in one's appropriated reproduction. According
to CrimethInc.,'When an individual plagiarizes a text which those who believe in intel
lectual property would have held "sacred," she denies that there is a difference in rank
between herself and the thinker she takes from:43 Like Martin and the anonymous
author of Ecclesiastes, CrimethInc. contends that there is nothing new under the sun,
rejecting what they see as the cult that has developed around the notion of'originality'.
This attitude is echoed by various CrimethInc.-affiliated groups such as the Curious
George Brigade.44
Not to be outdone, the broader anarcho-primitivist thread within anarchism, which
rejects technology and civilisation in defence of'rewilding: regularly rejects intellectual
property as well. As such, producers within the movement - including John Zerzan and
the editors of Green Anarchy, Earth First!, and Green Anarchist - tend to be explicitly
anti-copyright, or at the very least champions of pseudonymity and anonymity.4S A more
revealing element of primitivism, however, can be found in its focus on Call's gift culture,
which the movement sees as central to both primitivism and anti-capitalism. For
instance, contributors to the semi-annual Green Anarchy generate essays, poems, and
other polemics critical of science and technology, often citing a return to'gifting' as an
admirable goal. In a recent issue, Zerzan, one of the journal's editors, refers to Mauss in
arguing that the dearth of gifting in postffiodernity is a primary cause of war.46 Or, as
Denmark Trace argues in 'The Madness of the Astronaut', through civilisation'our
yearnings for the natural state of humanity (zero-work, gift economy, wonder, intimacy
with each other and the natural world) are redirected toward consumption .. .'.47 The
Green Anarchy Collective that publishes the journal also distributes books and essays by
prominent'gift' advocates such as Sahlins and John Moore.
Reading CrimethInc. and primitivism concomitantly illuminates the first of many
problems with postanarchist praxis, specifically its burlesque tendency to reject all things
broadly referred to as'postmodern: in spite of the fact that their aesthetics, if not
politics, embody the postmodern, as defined by Call and others above, in several ways,
including their anti-Cartesian (ir)rationality; refusal of totalisation, metanarrative, and
authorship; and marked formlessness and plagiarism. In the highly stylised, cut-up eigh
teenth issue of Green Anarchy, for instance, Zerzan dismisses postmodernists''play' with
signification as a type of authoritarianism, noting that:'Ethical indifference and aesthetic
self-absorption join hands with moral paralysis, in the postmodern rejection of resist
ance'.48 This critique of postmodernism follows Zerzan's own rejection of Cartesian
BrianJames Schill
subjectivity in the same essay.49 Zerzan notwithstanding, evidence of primitivism's prob
lematic'anti-postmodernist postmodernism' can be witnessed as far back as the 1980s
where Detroit-based anarchist paper Fifth Estate sought to'see the primitive as a source
of inspiration and as a practical basis for postmodern anarchy'.5o
Fifth Estate's effort to connect primitivism to postmodernity serves as a useful segue
to cyberpunk's version of postanarchism. Particularly attentive to cybernetics and alien
ated hacker-anti-heroes, cyberpunk novels often describe poststate worlds that have
experienced a breakdown in social order and the postindustrial emergence of faceless
multinationals. According to Call, many of the themes of French poststructuralism
reappear in American cyberpunk, which 'simultaneously develops a new concept of
human subjectivity ... profoundly different from the Cartesian model:51 Gibson's
Neuromancer alone, for instance, convincingly offers multiple characters whose subjec
tivity outpaces the Cartesian. Wintermute, a self-conscious artificial intelligence, and
The Dixie Flatline, a'dead' 'cyber-cowboy' whose consciousness exists exclusively as read
only memory (ROM), both delimit subjectivity, dispensing with the need for a fixed,
material self Later in Neuromancer, protagonist Case'jacks in' to the consciousness of
Molly, the novel's samurai-heroine, via their mutual link to cyberspace, literally feeling
her emotions and physical sensations. Raising the question of whose-subjectivity-is
whose in cyberspace, one character sleazily winks to Case,'So now you get to find out
just how tight those jeans really are, huh?'52 All of this, Call argues, makes cyberpunk a
'profoundly political genre,S3 so far as it brings anarchism to a wider audience and articu
lates anarchism to a postmodern culture 'in which power is as much linguistic and
epistemological as it is economic or political'.54
What Call fails to explore in Postmodern Anarchism, however, is that this postanar
chism, which hinges upon Gibson's and Sterling's versions of cyberspace, is far less
critical of authority than he suggests, and, indeed, is often indistinguishable from the
more egregious aspects of anarcho-capitalism. From Case to Cayce Pollard in Pattern
Recognition to Johnny Mnemonic, for example, Gibson repeatedly develops plots and
protagonists whose own commitment to capitalism is outdone only by the various
mobsters who are also violently pursuing profit in an unregulated, stateless economy. In
other words, while the ontological postanarchism of cyberpunk is rather straightforward,
the genre's broader attitude toward property, not to mention its authors' often melodra
matic style, is less so, making Call's reading of the genre perhaps too optimistic.
Furthermore, clearly the bulk of cyberpunk writers, from Gibson and Sterling to later
novelists like the Neal Stephenson of Snowcrash, copyright their stories, which are often
conservatively structured; the case is similar for many pieces of'hyperfiction' which exist
only online, for example Michael Joyce's Afternoon. a story or Stuart Moulthrop's Victory
Garden, both of which are copy-protected (but whose literary structure at least deviates
from convention).55 Combine this fact with the words of'crypto-anarchist' Timothy C.
May, and the problem with Call's postanarchism emerges even more clearly: as May
'Nothing Is PermittedAnymore'
17 1
notes in his copyrighted digital manifesto
The Cyphernomicon, although cyberspace
retains the potential to obliterate both the state and other forms of hierarchy, it ironi
cally does so by reserving all rights. 'Some of us believe various forms of strong
cryptography will cause the power of the state to decline, perhaps even collapse fairly
abruptly: May smiles. 'We believe the expansion into cyberspace, with secure communi
cations, digital money, anonymity and pseudonymity, and other crypto-mediated
interactions, will profoundly change the nature of economies and social interactions:56
As Benkler and others have shown in their discussions of the increasing imbalance
between public law and private fences ('code' being the fence that marginalises law),57
May is right - cyberspace has challenged the state, to the glee of most anarchists;
WikiLeaks is a case in point. But embedded within much of postanarchism is the fact
that beliefs such as May's or Julian Assange's - the decentralised network will increase
freedom and creative production and atrophy the state - can only be maintained by
embracing copyright.58 This conclusion has long been central to cyberpunk: Gibson,
Sterling, and Stephenson all locate their copyrighted, linear fiction in competitive, non
consensual poststate worlds that are still enclosed and hierarchical, only with
multinationals and the mob (which are far less accountable) rather than governments
controlling technology, information, and resources. And even where this situation is
critiqued, its 'rationality' and inevitability are rarely challenged by the novels' characters
or authors; even cyberpunk (at least in its earliest form) requires capitalised production
and distribution to provide a forum for its advocates. The tragedy of cyberpunk.
Moulthrop (who acknowledges his Marxist predilection) then notes in his essay on
hypertext, is that it turned cynical very quickly and rarely questions literary custom or
the material reality of production and distribution:
Directly or indirectly, most development of hardware and software depends on
heavily capitalized multinational companies that do a thriving business with the
defence establishment. [ ...] Thus to the clearheaded, any suggestion that
computer technology might be anything but an instrument of this system must
seem quixotic - or just plain stupid.59
ETHICS AND THE POSTMODERN END OF PRODUCTION

Moulthrop was, of course, writing in a time before Facebook and the Arab Spring. Still,
following the critique of Call, primitivism, and CrimethInc., two related issues arise:
what the abolition of IP would/does mean in terms of the subject's creative impulse, and
how abolition affects the 'author' as an ontological category. Generally speaking, the
paradoxical logic (which they might argue is the point) of postanarchists' rejection ofIP
results, ironically, not only in the erasure of human creators in lieu of an unaccountable,
absent creator-God, but serves to douse the very desire to create. This rejection, and its
Brian James Schill

relation ro desire,also paves the way for Lacan,whose blending of language, law, and
production not only provides for a more productive reading of the artistic value of IP,
but illuminates the ethical, and ultimately theological, nature of the discussion at hand.
To first get a sense of what Lacan can tell us about production itself in the informa
tion age, and perhaps postanarchism broadly, we first recall his reversal of Dostoevsky's
famous Karamazov chestnut,often paraphrased as 'If God is dead, everything is
permitted'. This is absurd,observes Lacan, positing that the existence of God - Lacan's
Name-of-the-Father or 'big Other' - produces psychopathology, crime, and vice.
Inverting Dostoevsky,Lacan says that if God is dead 'nothing is permitted anymore:60
Lacan's rationale for this reading of law begins with Kant's
Critique ofPractical
Reason: if desire is a medium that emerges from the gap separating self and other, as
Lacan posits throughout his work, Kant shows how 'law and repressed desire are one and
the same thing' so far as law 'fills the gap' between an imperfect reality and the desired
'Highest Good' in Kant's ethics.61 As an 'object' of desire, law roo dwells within the
Symbolic order of Lacan's Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad. The case is the same for
language and,as such, the signifier
(logos). This is all relevant for desire-law-logos so far as
all generate,or symbolise, the 'lawgiving' big Other: an unidentifiable otherness incom
prehensible by human consciousness that transcends the pedestrian otherness of, say,my
neighbout. This radical big Other - whether a state bureaucracy,legal code, corporation,
or Yahweh - is untranslatable, the Torah's 'I will be what I will be' signifier
without a
signified that can only come into being through the language or Symbolic law that iden
tifies prohibited knowledge.
In the absence of law, then, humankind is not free to act with impunity,but
'punished' by a crippling loss of freedom and the pursuit of what Lacan callsjouissance
(enjoyment),which accompanies transgression of the big Other's law-logos. Following
Kant, who argues that freedom, knowledge, and morality all emerge from the law,Lacan
explains that law acts thus as an external version of the Superego, which likewise
represses the desire that is always linked ro an object-other. In a tweak of both Kant and
Freud, however,Lacan adds that law,in simultaneously generating and forbidding
knowledge,goads the subject into a certain perverse pleasure in pursuing the prohibited
object.62In Newman's view, for Lacan:
law does not prohibit ... pleasure; on the contrary, it produces it, bur produces it
as 'repressed' '" [E]njoyment is never a spontaneous transgression of the law, bur
rather an injunction of the Law.63
Since,for Lacan,the repressed always 'returns: law demands transgression,in a sense,
creating not only a desire for the prohibited object,but the freedom to pursue it.64 But if
law evaporates,so does joy,knowledge,and freedom. Moreover,this vanishing Signals a
change in the Superego's mission,turning the Superego-conscience - which formerly found

itself in opposition to the external law - from a balanced arbiter (challenging the subject to
break unjust or symbolic laws and move the subject for ward intellectually) into a tyrant
commanding 'transgression' from the subject, who, without an object-other to desire, finds
herself frozen: 'Transgress how - where and what is my joy/knowledge/desire?' (Or in
Kantian terms, 'What is my duty? What should I do? Where is the Good?') In other
words, without an external law or big Other to push up against, the subject's desire withers
away entirely alongside its access to knowledge and freedom.
Returning to intellectual property law, then, we can see how although Dostoevsky
might suggest that in the absence of copyright all production is permissible, including
that which is 'unethical' or the result of theft or plagiarism, the postanarchist might
counter that freedom, creativity, production, and exchange all increase in both quality
and quantity in the absence of repressive law. But through Lacan's ethics, which take
from but go beyond Kant, we see how both views are misguided. At minimum, if copy
right law is dead, production does not become wholly democratised, nor does creativity
'increase' to the degree that anyone with a laptop and Win becomes a robust gifter of
culture. Rather, if IP dies production stops. Production stops not for the reasons cited by
the framers of the u.s. Constitution - that failing to protect copyright means individ
uals and groups will not produce if they cannot control or profit from their work - but
for the reason that if copyright is dead, freedom and creativity vanish just as production
becomes an implicit super-egotistical demand: 'You must appropriate, steal, and mash because you now can, freely'. Such an imperative kills not only thejoy of transgressive
production but signals the subject's dialectical collapse - desire and the big Other
having both vanished - resulting in the subject's loss of access to prohibited knowledge
and freedom.65
Anticipating Dostoevsky and Lacan in this regard was Paul of Tarsus, who admits in
several of his epistles the unjustifiability but ethical necessity of law: although 'no human
being can be justified by keeping the law:66 through Christ 'we are released from the law,
to serve God in a new way, the way of the spirit in contrast to the old way of a written
code:67 As Slavoj Zizek interprets him: 'for St Paul, precisely since there is the God oflove,
everything is permitted to the Christian believer - that is to say, the Law which regulates
and prohibits certain acts is suspended'.68In Zizek's reading of Lacan, to maintain but
challenge the human law that breeds alienation and death, but also creates freedom to
choose and the desire for subversion andjouissance in seeking a higher moral code, is to
embrace an ethical engagement with both big and petit Other: humankind. But the law
must remain in order to keep the tyrannical Superego at bay and preserve the subject's
desire. As Paul insists in his letter to the Romans: 'Does [our Christian agape] mean that
we are using faith to undermine the law? By no means: we are upholding the law.'69 He
upholds the law in order to challenge it, exploit it, and to make Christ's 'radical egalitari
anism: in the words of New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan, relevant for the
very reason that it is more 'productive' to do so - both in evangelical and epistemolog-
Brian James Schill

ical terms. In this way Paul shows CrimethInc., Infoshop, and Zerzan why the law's exis
tence is fruitful. This is why Lacan, in
The Ethics oJ'Psychoana/ysis, equates creative
production itself with desire-Iaw-logos.70 T hrough this rationale, Lacan, in a reiteration

of Freud, goes so far as ro call transgression of law the foundation of human develop
ment and 'worthy of our praise ... since it is at the origin of a higher complexity ... to
which the realm of civilization owes its development'.?) But without law, Lacan implies,
there is no desire, freedom, or production.
Speaking of production, the reader will recall Martin's idea that copyright, ironically,
contributes to an increase in plagiarism and 'intellectual theft': Yes - and this is useful!
The caveat is that it is law, and the offense of it, that spurs creativity, the desire to
produce and parody, and an engagement with the ethics of law and production. Whereas
postanarchists tend to endorse a retreat from the ethics of the productive-transgressive
act in which they themselves engage
by virtue ofthe law's existence - Lacan shows how
IP creates the conditions for the subjects' reclamation of agency in the wresting of the
Lawgiver's surplusjouissance for herself So it is that IP can be read asfreeing the subject
rather than binding her. With law extant the subject must engage the big Other, consider
the morality of her decision to submit or not to the repressive external authority, and
accept the freedom she has been given to challenge the logos - the very object of her
desire. The absence of law, on the other hand, forces a self-interested (im)morality on
the subject only, squashing her desire and freedom to create. Or, as narrator Elliot puts it
in his journal as he abandons his 'straightedge' collective in the novel Tales ofa Punk
Rock Nothing: 'Had the urge to smoke a cig, eat a burger, shoot some smack, read some
porn. But the fact that I could do any of this stuff and not get yelled at by my house
mates suddenly made it seem unappealing again. Ahhh, freedom.'n
Moving on to the ontological issues postanarchism's rejection of copyright raises,
note that we have already seen Deleuze's and Guattari's reference to the author as a
' beneficent God: To this Barthes adds, 'We know now that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the Author-God) but a multi
dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash:73 Finally, CrimethInc. continues where Barthes ends by claiming that the very
notion of authorship is itself a spurious mysticism:
Thus we can throw out all the superstitions surrounding the author's signature the question of so-called authenticity, the glorification of self-expression, the
concept of intellectual property - and see the signature for what it really is:
another element of the composition itsel74
For CrimethInc., authorship as a practice implies a certain spiritualisation of producers
as well as products, a disembodying of the author who comes to resemble a sort of god
conjuring up sacred objects from nothing.

This all sounds an awful lot like the Marx of not only the Manifesto, which calls the
bourgeoisie's endless revolutionising of production a 'spectre' that melts all solids into
air,75 but Capital, wherein Marx describes the commodity as a mystical object dripping
with 'metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties'.76 Marx's concern in the latter
reference is with the labourer's alienation from herself (represented by her product) and
humans' 'fetishism' for such magical commodities, which Marx compares to other 'mist
enveloped ... productions of the human brain' such as religionP Copyright law,
CrimethInc. posits, merely redoubles this spiritualisation through the legalized divina
tion of authors and their work . So do Barthes, CrimethInc., Deleuze, and Marx all allude
to the 'theological' character of production. In so doing, however, each of these thinkers
(even Marx who at least recognised such sacralisation as an illusion) gloss the fact that it
is actually authorship and law that solidifj - materialize - producers and creations rather
than mystifying them (a fact accepted by cyberpunk, to its credit). Lacan and Foucault
show us why.
Take Crimethlnc., which continues in Days of War, ' [i]f one wanted to be honest,
one would sign the name of one's entire civilization to one's poetry or pottery, and add
to that the seal of the cosmos from which it arose'.78 Note the disrespect for humankind
embedded in this statement, which is the logical consequence of the aforementioned loss
of humanjouissance and desire: when there is no longer enjoyment in transgression, and
production, much like desire, experiences a certain detumescence, production is only
possible through the big Other. To clarify, if this essay's postanarchists have their way, the
new world would be one in which not only does the creative impulse disappear, but
human creators vanish as well. In commodities - especially digital ones made anony
mously by nonproprietary everymen - we would see not representations of our alienated
selves, as Marx surmised, but Spirit itself Following Lacan, and thinking theologically,
CrimethInc., Zerzan, and even Marx are backward: it is not the elimination of capi
talism, copyright, and authorship that will undo the 'sacralisation' of producers and
commodities; dumping copyright and authorship will further spiritualise both as all
production simply 'materialises' or appears to consumers as begotten not made, as the
Catholics say, the mystical 'product' of a Lawgiver-consciousness with no Signified and
thus no actuality or accountability.
Is this not the argument Foucault makes against deconstruction in 'What is an
Author ?' According to Foucault, those who would scrap law and authorship ignore the
notion of ecriture or 'the conditions of the text' that precede writing and 'preserve the
author's existence: in spite of Barthes, Green Anarchy, and CrimethInc.79 In making this
statement Foucault shows how deconstruction itself - which he feels has inverted the
meaning of ecriture - falls into the divinity trap, not only rendering itself mere sophistry,
but ultimately aligning itself with multinational capitalism. In a jab at Derrida, Foucault
feels that 'dead author' advocates like Barthes or Zerzan merely:
-
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transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental
anonymity [ ... ] To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition ...
of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and
the aesthetic principle of the work's survival, its perpetuation beyond the author's
death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him.8o
Put another way, postanarchists' desire to abolish law and encourage anonymity merely
rearticulate the deconstructionists' 'spiritualisation' of aesthetics, making the producer
and her products
as
transcendent and inaccessible as the law or big Other postanarchists
reject - exactly the allegation CrimethInc. makes of copyright and authorship. And
although most copyright abolitionists and anarchists of all stripes sympathise with
Foucault in his critique of power, their refusal of copyright and authorship ultimately
function as the 'deconstructionist' anarchism he rightly rejects, which mystiBes rather
than reiBes authors and texts, making all created objects the 'theological' products of the
cosmos alone - humans no longer enter the equation.
For Foucault, furthermore, authorship is functional in that it serves
as
a means of
classiBcation of discourse which regulates, for better or worse, the manner in which and
by whom texts are circulated and 'consumed: So it is that Foucault, in spite of his alleged
poststructuralism, distances himself from postanarchism in order to defend the 'author
function: about which he makes several points, two of which are important here. First,
texts were assigned human authors, as opposed to being considered divine, 'to the extent
that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be
transgressive'.SI Acknowledging that authorship, the concept of which emerged alongside
capitalism, commodiBes discourse, Foucault insists, in a Lacanian tum, that a world
where discourse has been commercialised
requires the construction of an author in order
to keep discourse dangerous. Authorship does not simply emerge with capitalism to
encourage propertisation; it is the consequence of the objectiBcation of discourse. But to
eschew authorship - and perhaps copyright - is to make all discourse banal, 'mystical',
and hardly a threat to power.
With Foucault in mind, then, the reader cannot help but cringe when on the 'N!'
page of Expect Resistance CrimethInc. dares copyright holders of material plagiarised in
the book to 'Come and get us, motherfuckers'. Come and get whom? Another mythical
big Other or faceless bureaucracy with no object ? Without taking possession of the
provocative material in their book, CrimethInc. effectively positions itself as its professed
enemy: an unsigniBed or 'prohibited' multinational Lawgiver, access to whom the reader
is never given. Just as K is always 'before the law' in Franz Kafka's novels, for example, so
does CrimethInc. sequester itself from the vety subjects it hopes will 'write' its texts. In
so doing, much of postanarchism neuters its own message, which it could only create
through the existence and suspension of the law, and fails to seize creation itself as a
weapon that might actually challenge the commodiBcation of human discourse.

Furthermore, authorship in particular (but desire-law-logos as well) is vital because
textual signifiers such as personal pronouns, signs of time/place, and verb use (even
slang) condition discourse. Even if the author is a construct developed through a
complex interplay of historical, psychological, and cultural factors, if discourse is
nameless key signifiers and stylistic elements - what linguists call 'shifters' - are riveted
to the discourse in question, referring only to a specific, if absent, speaker. Ironically,
when discourse is attached to an author, shifters are more complex and variable; that is,
they could refer to several creator-egos, to a 'multiplicity' as Deleuze and Guattari put it:
the 'actual' creator, a narrator whose voice is inauthentic (as in fiction), or a third voice
common to academics - the (royal) 'we' of the investigator(s) or essayist. As such, says
Foucault, authorship does not refer 'purely and simply to a real individual'; rather, it
gives rise to 'several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of indi
viduals'.82 Put another way, assigning a name to discourse (e.g., Kafka wrote Amerika)
actually makes a text's authorship more slippery: which 'Kafka' is the referent of this
name - the consumptive 'novelist: the recurring fictional-yet-autobiographical character
K, or Kafka's posthumous revisionist Max Brod? On the other hand, anonymity refers to
a specific, if unnamed, producer, an anonymous singularity developed through various
untraceable linguistic or stylistic clues. But where this specific producer is absent and
unnamed, she can be nothing except some numinous, even meaningless, void.
POSTANARCHISM AS GNOSTICISM
The Lacanian reading of postanarchist aesthetics paves the way for a more formal
conclusion regarding the problematic theology such anarchism ultimately advocates.
What Call also fails to note in his reference to the 'gift economy' and its efficacy for
postanarchism is that for Mauss's indigenous subjects, the gift was both a requirement
(enforced by authority) and total, meaning it was a pan-cultural and particularly reli
gious phenomenon. In other words, for Mauss, whose influence on the early Baudrillard
is palpable, the notion of gifting is theological in that the gifter 'redistributes' his Spirit
to fellow humans and sacrifices his production to propitiate the gods.83 What the
Lacanian reading of the postanarchists' refusal of authorship and law within Bakunin's
anti-religious tradition gestures toward, then, is not only an ironic 'anti-giftism' (having
sought the end of all human products/gifts in lieu of the big Other), but postanar
chism's late, Gnostic, religiosity, which emerges from its 'glOrification' of anonymity and
its 'other-worldism'.
Although the parameters of Gnosticism have been debated for decades, with recent
scholars challenging the seminal reading of ancient Gnosticism supplied by Hans Jonas,84
the typical coordinates of this dualist narrative run thus: Earth is the centremost
dungeon of an evil universe fashioned by a demiurge, who leads a caste of 'Archons'
created to collect the pneuma (divine substance) thrown, at some prehistoric moment,
BrianJames Schill
into the darkness from the Pieroma or realm of light wherein the True God exists. 'The
religious significance of this cosmic architecture: explains Jonas, 'lies in the idea that
everything which intervenes between here and the beyond serves to separate man from
God, not merely by spatial distance, but through active demonic force:85 Recognising
their alienation from God, humans, whose material bodies contain this pneuma,
endeavour to escape the material world, via secret knowledge, and return to the Pieroma.
So it is in Gnosticism that incarnation itself - the material world which seeks to destroy
the soul - is terminally evil; and the soul's only hope of salvation is escape from theflesh
via the internalised knowledge of God.
With this theology in mind, consider both the title page of CrimethInc.'s Days of
J-far, featuring an appropriated woodcut of a robed nomad penetrating the barrier sepa
rating his dark universe from the light beyond (with the caption 'your ticket out of this
world'), and the following from Expect Resistance:
This world ... is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you'll see . . all that talk of
practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching
out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.86
.
Coupled with the refusal of authorship and copyright, what do such symbols suggest but
Crimethlnc.'s resurrection of the Gnostic origin myth wherein creation itself coincides
with the Fall? Anarcho-primitivism, likewise, maintains a vigorous, 'secret', anti-world
dualism which considers the postmodern material world as, in itself, altogether corrupt.
Even Bookchin, despite his critique of so-called 'deep ecology', lauds Jonas, calling his
work 'matchless'.8? Thus are anarchism's broader Gnostic predilections evident; as
Bookchin adds in The Ecology ofFreedom, 'When we speak of the "wisdom of the body"
... [w]e enter into a realm of "knowingness" from which our strictly cerebral processes
have deliberately exiled themselves'.88 In this fallen world of darkness that distorts
humans' 'natural' essence in the form of capitalism or religious orthodoxy, even
Bookchin implies, there is nothing for anarchists to do and nowhere to go except back
wards. Or inwards. And it is in this context that an anonymous admirer of Expect
Resistance, rumoured to be Greil Marcus, notes that what CrimethInc. is really doing 'is
telling the creation myth backward as the symmetrical conclusion to the history of the
world. Escaping exile in an alien dystopia, human beings storm paradise and, upon re
entering, tear off their clothes without shame.'89
Pseudo-Marcus is spot on. What (s)he fails to acknowledge in this appraisal,
however, is not only this theology's necrophilia, but that CrimethInc. is merely one in a
long line of moderns, particularly in the increasingly automated twentieth century, to
turn to this Manichean tradition of seeking antique, esoteric knowledge within the self
Conservative philosopher Eric Voegelin saw Gnosticism in many intellectual and polit
ical movements to arise since the nineteenth century: Marxism, National Socialism, even

psychoanalysis.90 Literary critic Harold Bloom too saw traces of 'the Gnostic religion' in
novel religious developments in the West: Mormonism, Kabbalah, and the fundamen
talist movements in the West that emerged in the last century.91 We could easily add
several other traditions to this list: Scientology, Rhonda Byrne's cult of'The Secret: and
the Rastafari faith. Important to note is that each of these 'Gnosticisms: which all chal
lenge orthodoxy and materialism by referenCing historical and 'inner' knowledge,
sprouted up within, as Jameson notes, a mechanised, automated postmodern era 'that has
forgotten how to think historically:92
And if Benkler is right to connect the rise of an information economy with the
resurgence in anarchist thought, we should not be surprised to see Gnosticism flourish
alongside digitisation; for as Bloom describes it, 'Gnosticism was (and is) a kind of infor
mation theory' wherein matter is rejected outright: 'Information becomes the emblem of
salvation; the false Creation-Fall concerned matter and energy, but the Pieroma ... the
original Abyss, is all information'.93 As Call and Timothy May show, much of postanar
chism not only panders to such discourse, but appears to have been 'produced' by the
delimiting and sublime 'new economy' itself
For example, in his essay on the Temporary Autonomous Zone, 'ontological anar
chist' and Sufism scholar Hakim Bey illustrates, almost effortlessly, the techno-fetishism
(not to mention rhetorical ambiguity) of the postanarchist 'anti-world' style :
As Rootless Cosmopolitans ... we demand a technology which transcends agri
culture, industry, even the Simultaneity of electricity, a hardware that intersects
with the wetware of consciousness, that embraces the power of quarks, of parti
cles travelling backward in time, of quasars & parallel universes. [ . . ] There are no
.
other gods before or after us. We are free in TIME - and will be free in SPACE
as well.94
Given Bey's mystical bent and thirst for a digital transcendence, the analyst can be
forgiven for rolling her eyes upon learning that Bey's publisher, Autonomedia, is a
routine producer of 'anti-copyright' texts. Nor are we surprised to read in Bey's treatise
an admiration for Muslim mystic Hassan-i-Sabbah,95 who is reported to have declared,
on his deathbed, 'nothing is true ; everything is permitted'.96
Or consider again cyberpunk, which Call admits 'describes a world in which
humans are nothing more or less than flesh terminals, the biological end nodes of vast
data flows which exist and function quite independently of any human agency:97 Call is
right; as Gibson describes Case's reaction to having his central nervous system desic
cated, thus purging his bodiless cyber-connectivity, 'it was the Fall. In the bars he'd
frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for
the flesh. [ .. ] Case fell into the prison of his own flesh: 98 This line of thinking follows
.
Jonas's traditional definition of Gnosticism swimmingly given its refusal of the bleak
BrianJames Schill
material universe, into which we have been thrown against our will, in favour of the tran
scendent P/eroma. But as cyberpunk and Timothy May illustrate, where gnosis of the
Pieroma beyond has failed in material terms, the world of information and light that
attracts modern Gnostics is the Ethernet. So it is that such an anarchism, which many of
its defenders would arg ue celebrates life and the potential of human collectivity, inge
nuity, and free association, ends up loathing the world. For what does the 'disembodying'
experience of cyberspace ultimately do but complicate the 'reality' of our nonvirtual
world ? As Zizek puts it, in a critical revision ofBaudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation,
'the claim that cyberspace contains a Gnostic dimension is fully justified: the most
concise definition of Gnosticism is precisely that it is a kind of spiritualized materialism'
the lesson ofwhich is not that we can finally abandon our bodies, but that 'there never
was such a body'.99 In so thinking, this version of anarchism, like Gnosticism, endorses
little more than spiritualised solipsism, at least in technique. Moreover, this attitude, as
Gibson notes above, is only available to the select few. In Bloom's words, Gnosticism
'consistently leads to a denial of communal concern, and so perhaps to an exploitation of
the helpless by the elite: 100
Such a theology intersects with law and authorship in that when Crimethlnc.,
Infoshop, and primitivism demand an end to all copyrigh t and signature in the 'new'
economy, they assume an ontology whereby all creation has come to pass
nothingfor the corporeal selfto do
that there is
and only data counts. One can understand the allure
of this view, of course; as Marshall McLuhan put it long before cyberpunk,

The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of
universal understanding and unity. The next logical step would seem to be, not to
translate, but to bypass languages in favour of a general cosmic consciousness ... 1 0 1
Such an infinite state of consciousness is compelling. But what postanarchism's advocates
too often fail to note in coming to a similar conclusion is that in spite of its allegedly
revolutionary subjectivity, the theology of much postanarchism, borne out in its
aesthetics and ontological assumptions, ultimately advocates if not stasis, regression to
nonbeing. For as Call even admits with apparent delight in his introduction to the inau
g ural issue of the journal Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, postanarchists 'are
the whatever-singularity that lurks behind the black kerchief We might look like
Sub commander Marcos, or Guy Fawkes, or your weirdo history professor. We are every
body and we are nobody. We can't be stopped, because we don't even exist.'1 02 At least
Call is honest: it is postanarchism's failure to exist that not only makes its relevance
suspect but places it in the irresponsible, even reckless, position of the watchful big
Other to whom I have no access and who seems, to the average observer, hardly different
than, if not some amorphous deity, global capitalism.
.Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

This is both the compelling aspect and fatal error of postanarchism: it allows its
advocates to behave like its enemies and illustrates why Call's claim that postanarchism is
an anarchy of becoming, that it compels us to 'reprogram or redeSign ourselves' via the
gift, is backward.103 In advocating anonymous, deregulated (re)production or the
'fteedom' of the networked economy, then, cyberpunk, Bey, cryptoanarchism, and
CtimethInc. do not even seek Spirit either within the self or beyond but in a manufac
tured {self-)consciousness that allows them to assume the role of Lacan's shapeless,
oppressive, big Other. In this way much of postanarchism cultivates rather than chal
lenges a burgeoning, and often selfish, western 'pantheism' that can be nothing other
than a retreat from ethics and production rather than a critical engagement with both,
despite Newman's rejection of such a charge. 104 Thus should the postanarchist remember
her Saint Paul. While Paul argues for the maintenance of a repressive law in order to
force the subject to engage with the other (big or small) and, in so doing, make humans
and their choices relevant, postanarchism increasingly decries being itself. often encour
aging what Deleuze and Guattari called the 'technonarcissist' to rediscover her long-lost
god-self through digital escape and mystical nonbeing. lOS Ironically, by relying on
material production for its very existence this theology amounts not to a serious engage
ment with production, law, freedom, and political economy, but detachment,
reduplicating the worst aspects of a western culture postanarchists seek to amend: atomi
sation, self-interest, explOitation. It simultaneously exhumes Marx's eleventh thesis on
Feuerbach: the philosophers, Gnostics, and postanarchists have only (re)interpreted the
world and self; the point is still to change them.
Brian James Schill teaches a variety of interdisciplinary courses for the University of
North Dakota Honors Program and has research interests in Literary Theory and
Criticism, Media Studies, and issues in Healthcare history, policy, and administration.
Email: brian.schill@email.und.edu
NOTES
l . O'Connor, The V
IOlent Bear it Away (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1960), 21-22.
2. Chomsky, 'On Postmodernism: 1995. See the letter on Chomsky's website,
http://www.chomsky.info/letters.htm. via a link to the University of Michigan.

Retrieved 9 Dec.
20 11.
3. Ibid.
4. Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education (London: Rouclegde Falmer, 2003),
93.
5. Bookchin, The Ecology ofFreedom (1982; San Francisco: AK Press, 2005), 19.
6. Green Anarchy 14 (Fall 2003 ), 33.
Brian James Schill

7. Retrieved from Infoshop.org on 9 Dec. 20 1 1. See http://forums.infoshop.orglview
topic.php ?f=9&t=72 1 3&start= 1 o.
8. Duane Rousselle and Siireyyya Evren, Post-Anarchism: A Reader (London: Pluto
Press, 20 1 1 ). See also Nathan Jun's and Shane Wahl's New Perspectives on Anarchism
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009).
9. Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002), 1 17.
1 0. Ibid., 14.
1 1 . Ibid., 22.
1 2. See Mauss, The Gift ( 1 950; Glencore, IL: Free Press, 1 954), Vaneigem, The
Revolution ofEveryday l,ife ( 1 967; Christchurch, New Zealand: Rebel Press, 200 1 ),
and Sahlins, Stone Age Economics ( 1 974; London: Routledge, 2003).
1 3. Newman, The Politics ofPostanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 20 10), 14. See
also From Bakunin to Lacan (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 200 1) and Power and Politics
in Poststructuralist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2005).
1 4. See Kuhn's narchism, postmodernity, and poststructuralism' in Contemporary
Anarchist Studies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 18-25.
I S. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1 984).
1 6. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Logic ofLate Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP,
1 990).
1 7. Hassan, The Dismemberment ofOrpheus (New York: Oxford, 1 97 1 ).
1 8. Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1 987), 45, 9 1 .
1 9. Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 289.
20. Call, Postmodern Anarchism, 92.
2 1 . Newman, Power and Politics, 49.
22. Newman, Politics ofPostanarchism, 5.
23. See Barthes, S/Z ( 1 970; New York: Hill and Wang, 1 974), 4, and Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 987).
24. Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' from Image-Music-Text ( 1 969; New York: Hill
and Wang, 1 977), 142- 148.
25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3.
26. Ibid.
27. Benkler, The Wealth ofNetworks (New Haven: Yale, 2006).
28. See http://www.grarnmatron.com/ and http:/ /www.markamerika.com/6lmtext/.
Retrieved 9 Dec. 20 1 1.
29. Benkler, Wealth, 21.
30. Ellie Clement and Charles Oppenheim, 'Anarchism, Alternative Publishers and
Copyright: Anarchist Studies 10 (2002): 41-69.
3 1 . Bookchin, EcololO', 1 16.
32. In 1813 Thomas Jefferson wrote 'That ideas should freely spread from one to another
over the globe ... seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by

nature .. .' See Adrienne Koch and William Peden, The Life and Selected Writings of
Thomasjefferson (New York: Random House, 1944), 629-30.
33. Martin, Information Liberation (London: Freedom Press, 1998), 37-38.
34. Ibid., 48, 50.
35. Ibid., 46.
36. See The Pirate Bay (http://thepiratebay.org) or OneBigTorrent (http://onebigtor
rent.org). Last retrieved 9 Dec. 2011.
37. Newman, Power and Politics, 49.
38. Negativland, No Business (Seeland 025 Book/CD, 2005). As the booklet suggests
('N 2005 by Negarivland. Some rights reserved'), Negativland does not call for the
full abolition of copyright.
39. 'Against Intellectual Property.' Infoshop.org. Retrieved 9 Dec. 2011 from
http://infoshop.orglpage/Against-Intellectual-Property.
40. Crimethlnc., Days of War Nights ofLove (Crimethlnc. Ex-Workers' Collective, 2001),
179.
41. Crimethlnc., Expect Resistance (Crimethlnc. Ex-Workers' Collective, 2008).
42. Crimethlnc., Days of War, 190.
43. Ibid., 181.
44. See the Brigade's Anarchy in the Age ofDinosaurs (anticopyright: Yellow Jack, 2003).
45. Clement and Oppenheim, 56-58.
46. 'On the Origins of War: Green Anarchy 21 (Fall/Winter 2005/2006): 12-15.
47. Green Anarchy 7 (Fall/Winter 2001/02): 8.
48. Green Anarchy 18 (FalllWinter 2004/05): 17.
49. Ibid., 16: 'It's hardly necessary to point out that none of the claims of
modernity/Enlightenment (regarding freedom, reason, the individual) are valid.'
50. Quoted in John Moore's 'A Primitivist Primer' (originally published in Green
Anarchist, but available via Green Anarchy Distribution and online).
52. Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 53.
54. Ibid., 134.
55. To be fair to Moulthrop, in a personal conversation with me in March 2010, he
admitted that he regrets having copyrighted Victory Garden.
56. May, 'What is Ctypto Anarchy?' The Cyphernomicon. Retrieved 9 Dec. 2011 at
http://www.cryptoanarchy.net/cyphernomicon.txt.
57. See Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (New York: Penguin, 2004) and Code Version 2.0
(New York: Basic, 2006), or Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Anarchist in the Library (New
York: Basic, 2004).
58. Lessig adds, 'If copyright did not govern free software ... free software could not
impose the same kind of requirements on its adopters: Free Culture, 265.
Brian James Schill

1 30
59.
Moulthrop, 'You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext & the Laws of Media:
Essays in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1 993), 92.

60. Lacan, Ecrits ( 1 977; New York: WW Norton, 2006), 1 30.
6 1 . Lacan, Ecrits, 660, or The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis ( 1960; New York: Norton, 1992),
82-84.
62.
63.
64.
Lacan, Ecrits,
671 -70 1 .
Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan,
144.
Note how this differs from Kant, for whom the law generated the sense of duty in the
subject to pursue morality or the Good. See Book
65.
1 of Kant's second critique.
While there is no space to pursue the issue here, this conclusion is not to be confused
with Baudrillard's celebration of the 'end of production' in Symbolic Exchange and
Death ( 1 976; London: Sage, 1 993), 9-30. Our conclusions differ greatly in their
effect.
66. Galatians 2: 1 6, Revised English Bible.

67. Romans 7:6, REB.
68. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1 999), 1 50.
69. 3:3 1 , REB
70. Lacan, Ethics, 73.
7 1 . Ibid., 6. Among other texts, see also Freud's Civilization and its Discontents ( 1930;
New York: Norton, 1 961) and Totem and Taboo ( 19 13; New York: Vintage, 1960).
72. Abram Hirnelstein and Jamie Schweser, Tales ofa Punk Rock Nothing (New Orleans:
New Mouth from the Dirty South, 1 998), 57.
73. Barthes, Image-Music-Text, 142-148.
74. CrimethInc., Days of War, 1 84. Emphasis added.
75. Marx and Engels, The Communist Maniftsto ( 1 848; London: Penguin, 1 985), 83.
76. Marx, Capital ( 1 867; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 19 12), 82.
77. Ibid., 83.
78. CrirnethInc., Days of War, 1 85.
79. Foucault, 'What is an Author?' ( 1 969) from The Essential Foucault (New York: The
New Press, 2003), 379.
80. Ibid., 379-80.
8 1 . Ibid., 382.
82. Ibid., 379.
83. Mauss, The Gift, 12- 1 5.
84. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1958). Recent challenges to Jonas
include Michael Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996),
and Karen King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 2003).
85. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 43.
86. CrirnethInc., Expect Resistance, 1 8.
87. Bookchin, Ecology, 258.
Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

88. Ibid 32 1.
89. Crimethlnc Expect Resistance. front cover fold.
90. Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism ( 1959; Washington D C : Regnery
Publishing, 1 997). Voegelin had apparently not read Lacan, who understood the
.
'Gnostic' air surrounding psychoanalysis itself, wondering early in his career if 'Freud's
discovery represent [ s] the confirmation, at the level of psychological experience, of
(Ecrits, 435). Writing well in advance of postanarchism, however,

Lacan's answer in 1 957 was a resounding 'No.'
9 1 . Bloom, Omens rfMillennium (London: Fourth Estate, 1 996).
92. Jameson, Postmodernism, ix.
93. Bloom, The American Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1 992), 30.
94. See Bey's TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, anti
copyright 199 1 ), 46-47. Ironically, while Bey admits that 'recent defections &
desertions from anarchism' might be hailed as a 'gnostic elite' (61 ) in a section of his
book entitled 'Post-Anarchism Anarchy; he only labels other movements to emerge
alongside technology as 'reactionary' (83).
95. Ibid., 1 3-14.
96. Quoted in William S. Burroughs, Cities rfthe Red Night (New York: Picador, 1 98 1 ),
1 58.
97. Call, Postmodern Anarchism, 1 3 1 .
98. Gibson, Neuromancer, 6 . One should also note Gibson's and Sterling's affinity for
Rastafari in their novels, not to mention Mark Amerika's Grammatron, which he
Manichaeism?'
describes as a retelling of the Kabbalah. Emphasis added.
99.
100.
101.
102.
Zizek,
On Belief(London : Routledge, 2001 ), 54-55.

The American Religion, 58. Bloom repeats this sentiment in Omens, 237.
McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet, 1 964), 84.
Call, 'Editorial - Post-anarchism Today; Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1
Bloom,
(2010): 9- 1 5.
1 03.
1 04.
Call, Postmodern Anarchism,
52.
See Newman's rejection of postanarchism as nihilist and relativist in
The Politics rf
Postanarchism, ch. 5.
1 05.
Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, 24.
Building 'Another Politics': The Contemporary Anti-Authoritarian Current in the US and Canada1
Dixon, Chris
pg. 32
2012
ISSN
0967 3393
www.lwbooks.co. ukljou rnals/anarchiststudies/
Buildi ng 'Another Pol itics' : The

Contemporary Anti-Authoritarian Cu rrent
i n the US and Canada1
Chris Dixon
ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen the convergence of a variety of anti-authoritarian politics and
broader-based movements in the US and Canada. Coming out of this convergence, a
growing set of activists and organisers are developing shared politics, practices, and sensi
bilities based in overlapping areas of work. Those creating these politics compose a
political tendency, what I call the anti-authoritarian current, which cuts across a range of
left social movements. Broadly conceived, what distinguishes this current is its commit
ment to combining anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics with grassroots organising
among ordinary, non-activist people. I argue that the anti-authoritarian current, in
effect, builds on the best features of the anarchist tradition while drawing on substantial
contributions from other political formations and movement experiences. Based on in
depth interviews with organisers in six North American cities, this essay traces the
strands that have led into the anti-authoritarian current and explores the deSning princi
ples of its politics.
Keywords: anarchism, another politics, anti-authoritarian, organising, prefigurative politics,

prison abolitionism, women of colour feminism
INTRODUCTION
The period leading ro the Srst United States Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia, during
the summer of 2007 saw a flowering of enthusiastic discussions in and across movements
in the US Under the slogan 'another world is possible, another US is necessary: this
hisroric gathering brought rogether more than
1 0,000 people for learning, sharing, and
building movements.2One important contribution ro these discussions was a perceptive
Building :Another Politics'
33 1
article featured in the activist magazine Left
Turn by one of its editors, Max Uhlenbeck.
An experienced organiser, Uhlenbeck is someone with his finger on the pulse of a lot of
dynamic movement activity in North America. He observed:
Those of us who are not interested in starting a political party, and have even
shied away from cadre organizing of any kind, have found it hard to articulate
what exactly it is we would want to see on the local, regional, or even national
level, much less how we might organize towards such a goal ... We know we are
critical of the non-profit world - increasingly integrated into the corporate
model - as a major vehicle for structural social change. We are critical of the
centralized political party structure, whether it be the neoliberal Democrats or
the small leftist 'revolutionary sects' that continue to operate in near anonymity
atound the country. On the other side of the spectrum, the frustrating anti
organizational and sectarian tendencies within many of the contemporary
anarchist movements, coupled with the predominantly white subcultures
surrounding them, have left much to be desired. The alternative for many of us
has been to continue to identify with a broad-based, but still rather vague,
political tendency - sometimes described as the 'anti-authoritarian, anti-capi
talist, non-sectarian left')
Uhlenbeck, in these precious few phrases, managed to put words to something that
many have been discussing, but few have written about at any length.4 Building on his
description, this article is about the 'anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, non-sectarian left'
actoss the United States and Canada. This tendency pulls together a growing set of
activists and organisers who are developing shared ideas and approaches based in over
lapping areas of work. At the core, what distinguishes them is their commitment to
combining anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics with grassroots organising among
ordinary, non-activist people. In doing this, they use many labels to describe themselves
- abolitionists, anarchists, anti-authoritarians, anti-capitalists, autonomists, and radicals,
among others - and some choose to organise without political labels. Yet, together, they
are a political current that cuts actoss a range ofleft social movements in North America.
For shorthand, I call this the 'anti-authoritarian current: though I recognise this is not a
self-description that everyone would choose.5 And for reasons I explain below, I call the
emerging shared politics, practices, and sensibilities in this current 'another politics'.
Those in the anti-authoritarian current collectively engage in a wide range of organ
ising efforts across multiple movements. As part of these, they have been building
networks, campaigns, and organisations that reflect their politics and sensibilities.
Examples include the No One Is Illegal and No Border networks, the Mobilization for
Climate Justice, the Peoples' Global Action Bloc in Eastern Canada, national organisa
tions such as Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and
Chris Dixon
1 34
networks around publications such as Left Turn, Make/Shift, and
Upping the Anti. They
are also involved in initiatives which perhaps less explicitly enunciate their politics but
are no less important in developing and circulating them: grassroots reconstruction
efforts on the US Gulf Coast; radical anti-poverty groups; women's centers and other
feminist institutions; community-based racial justice organisations; Indigenous and
international solidarity efforts; workers' centres and labour unions; radical queer
networks; environmental justice groups; and student activist organisations.
Depending on your vantage point, the anti-aurhoritarian current is part of contem
porary anarchism, an attempt to move beyond it, or a different political formation
altogether. In my view, it is all of these things at once. There are many in this current
who are anarchists or are sympathetic to anarchism, and this current takes much from
the anarchist tradition. However, not all anarchists identify with the anti-authoritarian
current, and some are sharply critical of it. Meanwhile, as I describe further below, there
are many activists and organisers in this current who, though anti-capitalist and anti
statist, wouldn't call themselves anarchists and whose politics have developed through
other traditions and trajectories of struggle.
In this essay, I foreground the complicated relationship between anarchism and
another politics. I argue that the anti-authoritarian current, in effect, builds on the best
features of anarchism while drawing on substantial contributions from other political
formations and movement experiences. And in practice, I suggest, this current contends
with the limitations of much North American anarchism as it is presently manifested.
The most significant of these limitations include a sectarian orientation, a debilitating
aversion to strategy and organisation, a largely subcultural character, and a profound
disconnection from the lives and struggles of people who are not already part of self
identified activist milieus. While the anti-authoritarian current has not resolved these
problems, it is fruitfully grappling with them and generating promising forms of theory
and practice. In this way, it points to new directions for anti-statist, anti-capitalist
politics in the US and Canada.
I have structured what follows as a genealogy of the anti-authoritarian current and
an exploration of its central political features. I start by briefly discussing the recent
convergence of politics and movements that has catalysed this current in North America.
I argue that the anti-authoritarian current bears the imprint of a variety of political
strands, and I trace some that are especially crucial. I then turn to another politiCS,
unpacking what
I see as its defining principles.
In clOSing, I suggest that the anti-authori
tarian current is setting a political pole in anarchism and the left more broadly, and I
look at some of the crucial unresolved questions that anti-authoritarian activists and
organisers still face.
A note on my research approach:
write as a participant in this current, not a disin
terested outsider. Using a term from radical anthropologist Jeffrey Juris, I take an
approach of 'militant ethnography' - researching from within and with the anti-authori-
35 1
tarian current in order to further collective reflection.6 The core of my research practice
is identifying and engaging key movement discussions. Ranging from conversations
about day-to-day organising to large-scale debates about strategic direction, these types
of discussions constitute what I call 'movement-generated theory' - the self-reflective
activity of people engaged in struggle.? This analytical work is frequently collective and
enormously generative. What I present and argue here is primarily based on in-depth
interviews I conducted with nearly fifty organisers actoss Canada and the us who gener
ously shared their ideas and experiences with me.8 I have also drawn on late night
conversations, magazines, meetings, online exchanges, books, protests, political events,
trainings, and many of the other ways that activists and organisers engage in reflection
and discussion.9
THE CONVERGENCE
So, where did the anti-authoritarian current come from? It builds on many lineages of
struggle and movement, stretching back to early fights against colonisation and slavery as
well as the initial development of the libertarian wing of socialism. In this sense, the anti
authoritarian current is simply the latest upsurge of a longstanding set of ideas and
traditions of resistance. Still, there is also something new here. Particularly over the last
two decades, a variety of anti-authoritarian politics and broader-based movements have
converged. This convergence has provided space for the mutual articulation and influ
ence of anti-authoritarians and popular struggles in ways that have transformed both.
Crucially, the specific historical strands leading into this convergence have shaped its
character. Here I focus on four that are particularly important: anarchism, global resist
ance to neoliberalism, prison abolitionism, and women of colour feminism.
Anarchism
The first strand begins in the anarchism of the 1990s. The mostly young people involved
in this anarchist politics and activism were connected through a series of predominantly
white and middle-class subcultural scenes, often rooted in punk rock, across the US and
Canada. They set up local Food Not Bombs groups,10 learned direct action skills
through militant queer organising and radical environmentalist campaigns, supported
US political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, worked to inject art and imagination into
activism, organised anarchist convergences and conferences across North America, and
developed a network of anarchist bookstores and political spaces known as infoshops.
These anarchist scenes and networks were animated not only by a shared counter
culture, but also by shared politics and practices. The politics, drawn from classical
anarchism and more recent forms of radicalism, included a commitment to egalitari
anism, mutual aid, and freedom as well as a far-reaching critique of domination. The
Chris Dixon
1 36
practices, especially influenced by the North American nonviolent direct action
movement and European autonomous movements, included engaging in confronta
tional direct action, organising through collectives and affinity groups, and making
decisions using consensus process. Signifkantly, both the politics and the practices
were framed by what is sometimes known as 'prefigurative politics': a focus on
creating, in the process of struggle, liberatory social forms and relations that 'prefigure'
a new society. 1 1
This period also saw important attempts to break out of the anarchist subcultural
milieu, formulate strategic approaches, and orient toward building broad movements.
Anarchist publications such as The Blast! in Minneapolis intentionally tried to move
beyond the punk scene and connect with community-based struggles. The US-based
Love and Rage anarchist network, which started in 1989 and solidified into a formal
membership organisation in 1993, began to identify strategic priorities and areas of
common political work, wrestled with key political questions around white supremacy,
and attempted to construct a continental revolutionaty anarchist federation. And anar
chists organised two groundbreaking 'Active Resistance' conferences - in Chicago in
1996 and Toronto in 1998 - that explicitly centered themes such as community organ
ising and movement-building. All of these efforts, in different but overlapping ways,
tried to develop and push anarchism in the US and Canada into a more intentional
orientation toward popular struggles and movements. Although largely forgotten now,
this work in the 1990s pulled together many of the features that are now central to the
anti-authoritarian current. 12
Global Resistance to Neoliberalism

A second strand has its origins in the international revolt against neoliberalism, espe
cially growing from the global South. Building on legacies of anti-colonial and
anti-imperialist struggles, this started in the 1980s with widespread popular mobilisa
tions against austerity measures mandated by the International Monetary Fund. By the
early 1990s, meetings of neoliberal institutions like the World Bank and the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) faced massive protests from Bangalore to Berlin.13 And
then, on 1 January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation stepped onto the
world stage by seizing seven cities in Chiapas. ' Ya Basta! ('Enough!'), they said in oppo
sition to the Mexican government and neoliberalism. Bringing together aspects of
Marxism, anarchism, and Indigenous traditions, the Zapatistas offered an autonomous
politics and practice based on listening and dialogue, building democratic power from
below, and creating self-governing communities. And instead of ideological certainties,
the Chiapas-based rebels offered an approach of collectively asking questions, of
exploring and experimenting together. 1 4
The Zapatistas also facilitated important transnational connections among moveAnarchist Studies 20.1

ments. In 1 996 and 1 998, they sponsored face-to-face global Encuentros (Encounters)
that served as key meeting points for what was to become the global justice movement.
The second of these led to the formation of the Peoples' Global Action (PGA) network.
The PGA brought together massive movements in the global South, like the Landless
Workers' Movement in Brazil and the Karnataka State Farmer's Movement in India,
along with generally smaller organisations and collectives in the North, to develop hori
zontal links in the struggle against neoliberalism. This network was a key node through
which an emerging anti-capitalist current in the global justice movement was able to
engage in discussion and planning, and relate with liberal and social democratic
currents.IS The PGA Hallmarks, developed and amended through early conferences,
came to define this anti-capitalism in anti-authoritarian terms. They included a rejection
of 'all forms and systems of domination and discrimination: 'a confrontational attitude:
'a call to direct action: and 'an organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and
autonomy'. 16
Anarchism in the Global Justice Movement
By the late 1 990s, these two strands - anarchism in the North and autonomous move
ments in the South - were increasingly connected. In the US and Canada, anarchist and
anarchist-influenced activists were deeply inspired by the Zapatistas and some of the first
to work with the PGA. Following the example of their European counterparts, many
began organising around the PGA's calls for 'global days of action' involving coordinated
international protests against institutions leading and legitimating neoliberalism. And
though there were previous summit protests, it was the week of successful demonstra
tions and direct actions against the 1 999 WTO ministerial in Seattle that grabbed
significant attention in North America. Anarchists played leading roles in planning and
coordinating the mass blockades and street battles in Seattle, blending direct action
tactics, consensus decision-making, and affinity groups with the anti-authoritarian, anti
capitalist politics circulating through the PGA.17
In the wake of the successful disruption of the ministerial in Seattle, this blend of
practices and politics came to characterise an anti-capitalist current in North America.
Bringing together veterans of 1 990s anarchism and those who were much newer to
radical politics, this current rapidly moved to carry the movement coalitions and
momentum into other demonstrations against major summits and meetings. The next
few years saw showdowns between protestors and police from Washington, DC, to
Windsor, Miami ro Quebec City, and North American activists also traveled to mobili
sations at major summits around the world. IS
Through the global justice movement, thousands of people participated in anti
authoritarian approaches and politics. At the same time, this cycle of struggle provided
opportunities for anarchist and anarchist-influenced activists to wrestle with their own
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limitations in the context of a growing movement. Longtime radical and writer
Elizabeth 'Betita' Martinez raised some of these with her widely circulated essay
' Where was the color in Seattle ?'19 This critical intervention and subsequent ones
fostered widespread discussion. While the conversations were most visible around the
racial composition of summit mobilisations, they opened up a range of crucial issues:
the relation between global justice mobilising and community-based organising; the
question of building strategic and effective broad-based radical movements in Canada
and the US linked to other movements across the globe; and how to confront hierar
chies of race, gender, class, age, and experience as they were being reproduced in
movement spaces.20
As activists influenced by anarchism grappled with these issues, some began to
develop deeper, more complex political analyses and approaches. These combined anti
authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics with an orientation toward organising to build
popular power and broad-based movements.21 By the early 2000s, the global justice
movement was waning in North America due to both its inability to fully resolve the
challenging questions it faced and the profound shift in political climate after the events
of 1 1 September 200 1 . However, many activists have taken these increasingly sophisti
cated politics with them into other campaigns, struggles, and movements. In doing so,
they have continued to look to autonomous movements, particularly in Latin America,
that are exploring revolutionary alternatives to seizing state power.22 And in the
Canadian context especially, many have also been powerfully impacted by Indigenous
struggles for self-determination that refuse colonial models of government and call the
state into question.23
The convergence of anarchism and global struggles against neoliberalism thus
fostered a vital space for the development of the contemporary anti-authoritarian
current. Indeed, many anti-authoritarian projects and formations have corne from this
convergence. For instance, the US-based Left
journal
Turn magazine and the Canada-based

Upping the Anti each grew out of the anti-capitalist current in the global justice
movement. Both have become key sites for discussion within and around the anti
authoritarian current as activists and organisers reflect on their work and refine shared
politics.24 Another crucial example is the network of No One Is Illegal collectives across
Canada. Developing out of anarchist-influenced organising against neoliberalism, No
One Is Illegal groups work to challenge borders by directly supporting and organising
with migrant communities in their struggles with the Canadian state. No One Is Illegal
collectives ground their efforts in an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial politics, emphasising
the connections between migrants from the global South and Indigenous peoples in
North America.25 In these and many other cases, the roots of initiatives and organisa
tions in the anti-authoritarian current lie in anarchist experiences in the global justice
movement.
BuilJing :Another Politics'
Prison Abolitionism
A third crucial strand leading into the anti-authoritarian current has its origins in
popular struggles against policing and prisons, especially in communities of colour. The
1 990s saw the emergence of a movement that named its enemy as the prison industrial
complex (PIC), the interlocking set of institutions and social relations based on surveil
lance, policing, and imprisonment. Significantly emanating from the Black freedom
struggle, the movement against the PIC developed out of prisoner organizing, dating
back to the 1960s, efforts to end the death penalty in the US, organising against police
brutality in communities of colour, and longstanding networks of support for political
prisoners, among other streams of struggle and resistance. It was crucially catalysed by
skyrocketing rates of incarceration, which disproportionately affect racialised communi
ties, poor people, and those who don't fit within dominant gender norms.26
In 1 998, the radical edge of this movement came together at an ambitious confer
ence in Berkeley, California called Critical Resistance (CR), out of which developed an
organisation of the same name. Since then, individuals and groups affiliated with and
inspired by CR have played a vital role in the movement against the PIC, whether
through C R chapters in places such as Oakland or New Orleans or organisations such as
the Prisoners Justice Action Committee in TorontoP
Building on ideas first developed in the 1 970s, organisers inspired by CR have
advanced a unique set of politics and practices aimed at the complete elimination of the
PIC. They call this prison abolitionism, self-consciously drawing on the struggle against
slavery. Highlighting that the PIC is crucial for maintaining existing systems of explOita
tion and oppression, prison abolitionists argue that safe and healthy communities are
only possible in a world without cages and cops.28 Anti-prison organisers thus pursue
strategies based not on reforming institutions of incarceration, but getting rid of them
altogether. These include fighting construction of prisons and other detention facilities
and helping incarcerated people get out and stay out. Many abolitionists also have begun
to explore alternatives to state-based strategies for dealing with violence in communities
and interpersonal relationships. This approach has opened small but significant spaces
for organisations and communities to experiment with ways of reducing harm and
resolving conflict.29
In calling for a world without prisons, the abolitionist politics developing through
CR and allied groups fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of the state to regulate,
police, and punish people. In this way, it has opened into a critique of all forms of state
violence and their deep interconnections with gender, race, and class relations)O At the
same time, this politics has provoked activists and organisers across North America to
imagine and build organisations, institutions, and ways of relating that aren't oriented
around the state)) Abolitionist organisers and organisations have thus played a crucial
role in the anti-authoritarian current as they have begun to construct a generally anti-
Chris Dixon
statist politics with anti-capitalist undertones grounded in community-based racial
justice struggles and, increasingly, feminist and queer organising}2
Women of Colour Feminism

Both the anti-capitalist current in the global justice movement and prison abolitionism
draw upon and connect with a fourth strand, which is usually known as anti-racist
feminism or women of colour feminism. This sort of feminist politics has roots in earlier
struggles, but it bloomed in the liberation movements of the 1 960s and carne into its
own more fully in the 1 970s and 1 980s. And although this politics took many roures,
they all started in a similar place: radical women of colour, many of them lesbians, criti
cising the limitations of existing movements to account for their experiences of
oppression. Corning together in groups, conferences, publishing collectives, and social
scenes, these activists began creating shared politics grounded in their lives and struggles.
Through these collaborations, they also constructed the category 'women of colour' as a
new radical political identity}3
The Combahee River Collective, a germinal Black feminist group in Boston, offered
one of the most significant articulations of these emerging women of colour feminist
ideas in a 1 977 statement. 'The most general statement of our politics at the present
time', they wrote, 'would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial,
sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development
of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppres
sion are interlocking'.34 This 'integrated analysis', which subsequent efforts have
developed further, suggests that the ways that women of colour simultaneously experi
ence systems of oppression illuminate the interconnections among these power relations
in everyone's lives. In other words, social relations of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and
heterosexism operate with and through each other - they are 'interlocking'. Following
from this, truly revolutionary politics is necessarily a multilayered fight against oppres
sion.35
This form of analysis has circulated widely over the last few decades. Partly, this is
thanks to a cohort of women of colour feminist scholars and others who have struggled
to make space for these ideas in frequently hostile academic contexts. Drawing on early
movement conceptions, these scholars' writing, teaching, and organising efforts have
elaborated what has corne to be called an 'intersectional' analysis.36 This analysis has
permeated many activist contexts too. One particularly crucial route has been through
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, which grew out of a 2000 conference at
the University of California at Santa Cruz called ' The Color of Violence: Violence
Against Women of Color: Initially intended as an intervention in the movement against
intimate violence, INCITE! has since blossomed into a vital space for further developing
integrated analysis and practiceY

Through conferences, publications, collaborative organising efforts, and a network
of local groups, INCITE! has importantly connected more university-based thinking
around intersectionality with community-based work of all sorts. Groups connected to
INCITE!, as part of this process, have introduced important new modes of struggle
against oppression. For example, the Brooklyn-based INCIT E ! affiliate Sista II Sista has
pioneered vibrant community organising methods focused on young working-class
women of colour, including collective forms of leadership development, political educa
tion through story-telling, and public interventions in interpersonal and state violence.38
Meanwhile, INCITE! has also articulated an influential critique of what they call the
'non-profit industrial complex' - the circuit of state funding, foundations, and nonprofit
organisations - as containing and undermining radical movements. As part of this, indi
viduals and organisations involved with INCITE! have begun to explore alternatives to
these forms of funding and organisation.39
In these and many other ways, the work of INCITE! has elaborated a set of politics
and practices based on an intersectional analysis that includes an oppositional stance
toward capitalism and the state, especially state violence against women of colour.40
These polities and practices have influenced reproductive justice organising, the immi
grant rights movement, and radical queer activism, among others.41 As well, INCITErs
work has significantly shaped how many others in the anti-authoritarian current think
about power relations, organising, and struggle.42
These four strands converge and increasingly intertwine in the anti-authoritarian
current. It is important not to exaggerate their connections or coherence, as they are
distinct and at times in tension with one another. Indeed, these strands have different, if
overlapping, political vocabularies and approaches, and as a result, there are crucial
unsettled questions among them. However, it is just as important to understand that
most anti-authoritarians come out of one or more of these strands, braiding them
together as they work and build relationships across politics, struggles, and movements.
This ongoing development of the anti-authoritarian current operates in two directions.
On the one hand, deep political affinities across these strands enable connections and
relations among them. On the other hand, these connections and relations create the
basis for a shared set of politics, practices, and sensibilities. I turn to these now.
ANOTHER POLmCS
A significant part of what defines the anti-authoritarian current is what it is not. As Max
Uhlenbeck indicated at the beginning of this essay, this current is attempting to create a
political space that is not bound up in the parties or parry-building of liberals, Leninists,
or social democrats; the non-profit and social agency sectors, all too often constrained
by foundations, state funders, and grant cycles; or the insularit y, composition, and
aversion to strategy and organisation of many forms of contemporary anarchism. Anti-
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authoritarian activists and organisers, in short, are working to make something other
'another politics:
This is the term I use to describe shared politics, practices, and sensibilities in the
anti-authoritarian current. It came into somewhat wider use in the US based on the
'Another Politics is Possible' delegation and workshop track at the US Social Forum in
2007. The delegation brought more
than
100 New York-based grassroots organisers to
Atlanta, and the workshop track pulled together fifteen organisations from across the
US around shared political principles.43 In choosing the name 'another politics', the
organisers were explicitly acknowledging the influential role of the Zapatistas and their
Otra Campana (the Other Campaign).44 Like 'anti-authoritarian', the term 'another
politics' is not something that all or even many activists and organisers in this current
would necessarily choose. In the Canadian and US contexts, though, I think it is useful
because it gestures, poetically, to something in process and unfinished, something that
consciously pushes beyond currently available political categories, and yet something that
can be shared, held in common.
Another politics has no party line. Indeed, it is in many ways a politics suspicious of
'correct lines' offered by identifiable leaders and centralised organisations. Still, it does
have key features. Based on my interviews with anti-authoritarian organisers and drawing
on other attempts at self-definition, I see four core principles to the politics, practices,
and sensibilities of this current: refusing exploitation and oppression, developing new
social relations, linking struggles and visions, and grassroots nonhierarchical organ
ising.45 While building from anarchism, these features also move in new directions.
Refusing Exploitation and Oppression

The first key principle of another politics is a rejection of all forms of exploitation and
oppression. The foundational 'no' of the anti-authoritarian current, this principle is
frequently the feature that comes across most immediately. In Montreal, for instance, the
No One Is Illegal collective states that they act 'to expose and educate against injustice
from an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal, anti-authoritarian and a queer
positive perspective, while asserting a vision for open borders and social and economic
justice'.46 In New Orleans, Jennifer Whitney, a white health care worker originally from
Louisiana and a veteran global justice organiser, shared similar sentiments. 'I don't like
always defining myself as "anti": she said, 'but my politics are anti-authoritarian, anti
capitalist, anti-imperialist, anarchist, and internationalist'.47 These 'antis: in fact, are
widespread among those working to develop another politics. Building on long lineages
of struggle and resistance, they name a commitment to transforming intersecting rela
tions of hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and the state, among others.48
While these 'antis' stake out a politics, they also indicate a twofold approach to
struggle. On the one hand, this approach means confronting the ways that people repli-
43 1
cate power relations in their movements and day-to-day lives. This comes from an under
standing that, even as activists fight social hierarchies, they have been shaped by such
hierarchies and participate in reproducing them. New York Critical Resistance organiser
Pilar Maschi, a Latina and mother who was politicised through her own incarceration,
summed up this perspective: 'We're trying to break down the system, and it lies in all of
us'.49 With this understanding, the challenge is to deal with these power relations as they
infiltrate even intentionally liberatory spaces. This entails what Sarita Ahooja, a
Montreal-based migrant justice organiser from a South Asian background, called 'reor
ganising ourselves socially'.50 As organisers increasingly point out, this is not principally
about changing individual behaviours. Rather, it means consciously working, through
political education and intentional structures, to shift relations of power as they play out
in organisations and communities.
On the other hand, this approach means making visible and transforming systems of
oppression and exploitation in broader society. White queer anti-war organiser Clare
Bayard, who works with the Catalyst Project in San Francisco, put this as a question:
'How do we shift the fundamental power relationships that our society is built on?'S I
While many anti-authoritarians understand the strategic value of struggles aimed at
inclusion and representation in existing systems, another politics is primarily oriented
toward social transformation. In practice, this orientation means centering the struggles
of those who are exploited and oppressed - working-class people, people of colour,
women, and queers, among others - in movements, organisations, and campaigns. As
many anti-authoritarians see it, these struggles, particularly when they combine, have the
potential to rupture power relations and open new ways of relating and organising them
selves. This orientation thus crucially directs the kinds of organisational cultures,
strategic approaches, coalition-building efforts, and tactical choices that anti-authoritar
ians are crafting. 52
While this principle clearly builds on the critique of domination within the anar
chist tradition, it has developed more fully through the influence of women of colour
feminism. We can see this both in the focus on multiple, intersecting forms of oppres
sion and exploitation, and in the concern with relations of power and privilege at every
level of social organisation. In these and other ways, the analYSis and approaches bound
up in this principle are quite sophisticated. But how to translate them, with both effec
tiveness and integrity, into campaigns, organising structures, and strategies continues to
be a crucial site of discussion for activists and organisers.
Developing New Social Relations

The second key principle of another politics is what many organisers call 'developing
new social relations' or 'prefigurative politics: These terms name activist efforts to
manifest and build, to the greatest extent possible, the world they would like to see
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through their means of fighting in this one. As the foundational 'yes' of the anti-authori
tarian current, developing new social relations takes many forms in organising.
One of the most frequently discussed is nonhierarchical decision-making process.
Anti-authoritarian activists and organisers try ro create and use methods of making deci
sions in which all involved have a direct say, are accountable ro the broader group, and
have a sense of collectivity. San Francisco-based organiser Rahula Janowski, a mother
from a white working-class background who was part of the now-defunct Heads Up
collective, expressed the widely shared goals behind these practices: 'The world 1 want to
live in is people collectively making decisions about the day-to-day operations of our
lives; everybody is able to participate, and "able" meaning both that they're allowed to
and that they have the capacity - the skills, the time, the access. That's the world 1 want
to live in, so the ways 1 want to struggle for that world is by trying, as much as possible,
to do that now in the spaces where 1 can:53
Another prefigurative dimension in another politics is creating new ways of living,
loving, and working together based on relationships of trust and care. Developing
another politics, for many activists and organisers, means developing another way of
doing politics - one with neither the masculinised 'hardness' that so often dominates the
left nor the self-engrossed individualism that too frequently infuses discussions of how
people treat one another. Part of this is recognising and valuing an often overlooked
activity in movements: the labour of care. Paula Ximena Rojas-Urrutia, originally from a
rural working-class family in Chile and a founding member ofSista II Sista, called this
the 'other kind of work that makes society run: which involves 'caring for others - not
just parenting, but taking care of each other, taking care of our elders, our children, or
anyone who needs it'. Usually associated with women, she argued, 'that invisible labour
isn't accounted for in these models [that dominate left political work] :S4 And yet this
labour - whether in the form of preparing food, mediating conflicts, or nurturing burnt
out activists - is absolutely crucial for building and sustaining movements. In the
anti-authoritarian current, activists and organisers are attempting to be more intentional
and explicit about this kind of work.55
One other important form of prefigurative politiCS in the anti-aurhoritarian
current is building alternative institutions through which people can self-organise to
meet popular needs. James Tracy, a white community organiser and writer from a
working-class background, highlighted this in relation to his work with the San
Francisco Community Land Trust, which creates inexpensive, resident-controlled
hOUSing for poor and working-class people on community-owned land.56 As he put it, 'I
really want to embody feasible solutions in the here and now because, ifyou're able to
unlearn capitalist social relations, that's great. When people actually learn how to share
a social, vital resource like hOUSing, they can learn to share a city and they can learn to
share a world eventually.'57 Whether providing housing, health care, or food, such insti
tutions can help develop social relations based on cooperation, self-management, and

equality. For many anti-authoritarian organisers, building these sorts of alternatives is a
major priority.
This second principle grows, in many ways, from the anarchist tradition historically.
PreSgurative politics also builds from the constellation of practices and priorities with
which anarchism became connected during the second part of the twentieth century,
particularly through the radical wing of the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, the
Women's Liberation Movement, and the nonviolent direct action movement.
Meanwhile, the notion of 'developing new social relations' comes out of the recent expe
riences of autonomous movements in Latin America, which have prioritised building
new kinds of relationships among people in struggle as well as institutions apart from the
state and capitalism. Women of colour feminism has also crucially affected this principle
through its emphasis on a politics to which people can bring all parts of themselves.
Emerging out of these influences, activists and organisers in the anti-authoritarian
current are working to practice prefigurative politics while struggling with some of the
consistent problems of this approach, such as fetishising particular prefigurative forms
(consensus deciSion-making, for instance) and disconnecting prefigurative activities from
fights for tangible gains within the currently existing system.
Linking Struggles and Visions

The third key principle of another politiCS is linking struggles for improvements in the
lives of ordinary people to long-term radical visions. The way I understand this is
through a formulation from Ashanti Alston, a former Black Panther and political
prisoner who is now a widely respected movement elder and organiser in New York. In
talking about vision and strategy, Alston said, 'it's like the biblical thing: we can be in
this world, but not necessarily of it. So, we're here. The concrete is that we're here. But
we don't have to live as ifwe're trapped in it.'58 This notion - 'in the world but not of it'
- is a powerful one. It emphasises both the circumstances in which people struggle and
their capacity to collectively imagine and push beyond them. We see here a core
approach to strategy in another politics: building movements in the world as it is while
cultivating strategies based on visions of a transformed world.
The first part of this approach - 'in the world' - means engaging with where and
how people are struggling, including around reforms. Harjap Grewal, an organiser with
No One Is Illegal-Vancouver who comes from an immigrant background, called this
'being grounded in the struggle of people: Like No One Is Illegal collectives across
Canada, the Vancouver group offers direct support to migrants resisting deportations
while building community-based campaigns to destroy the Canadian border regime alto
gether.59 Building on Sghts around particular cases, these sorts of struggles, Grewal
argued, are not 'just ideological' but rather about 'people's day-to-day lives: He
continued, 'That's actually what the struggle's about. That's where movements get their
Chris Dixon
capacity ... People are being affected by something in their day-to-day lives and they're
going to struggle against it. And most of those people may not consider themselves to be
political or activists.' 60 In various ways, anti-authoritarian organisers across North
America are attempting to put this engagement into practice through organising with
oppressed and exploited people, including migrants, low-wage workers, prisoners, racial
ized communities, and many others.
The second part of this approach - 'not of it' - means developing strategies based
on radical vision, not on what seems 'possible' or even necessarily 'winnable'. Prison
abolitionists have made particularly important contributions to this aspect as they've
aimed not for 'better' or more 'humane' prisons, but for something seemingly unimagin
able: the complete elimination of the prison system. Rachel Herzing, an African
American organiser with Critical Resistance and a former editor of [,tift Turn, offered
some very useful reflections on this kind of visionary organising . 'For me: she said,
what that looks like in practice is acknowledging that we need to be engaged with
the world around us today. We spend a lot of time [in abolitionist organising ]
trying to convince people that we're not utopians, that we're not living in some
fantasy world, but that what we want is good for people today . So, we're always
struggling to figure out which battles to fight, like any other organisation is. The
main thing for us, though, is: Is this going to create some obstacle that we're just
gonna have to tear down later?61
..
Herzing's comments point to the importance, in this approach, of demanding and

building the desired society while staying carefully vigilant of the ways that reforms can
co-opt struggles or create obstacles to achieving visions. Many anti-authoritarian organ
isers echo this, particularly as they combine direct support work and broader campaigns .62
This third principle has been deeply influenced, as I have mentioned, by prison
abolitionism and also by the experiences of activists in the global justice movement as
they came up against their own limitations and began orienting toward organising and
movement-building. In this way, the approach of linking everyday struggles and visions
pushes at the aversion to strategy so common in North American anarchism. More
importantly, it opens up crucial questions about how radical movements might actually
achieve a fundamentally transformed society. In the anti-authoritarian current, many of
these questions do not have adequate answers yet, but it is a Significant step forward that
activists and organizers are wrestling with them .
Grassroots Nonhierarchical Organizing
The fourth key principle of another politics is a commitment to organising approaches

that are both grassroots and nonhierarchical. W h ile those in the anti-authoritarian

current engage in many forms of organising in many different circumstances, this
commitment is quite consistent.
Grassroots organising names an orientation toward building power strategically
rather than merely expressing periodic outrage. This orientation draws on a distinction
that many make between 'activism' and 'organising'.63 Activism is based on mobilising
individuals around particular issues and events, and frequendy involves demonstrating
opposition to specific policies and institutions. Organising has a more sustained and
constructive focus. Rosana Cruz, a queer Cuban-American deeply involved in work
against the criminal justice system in New Orleans, defined it as 'bringing people
together in ways that link them in a long-term struggle and build their power:64 For anti
authoritarian organisers, this generally means developing relationships and working with
people in order to confront and transform the institutions (families, schools, workplaces,
prisons, and more) and social relations that affect their lives. This involves work in
communities of various kinds and is usually ongoing, multi-layered, and built through
sustained personal connections. And in this organising work, anti-authoritarians put a
particular emphasiS on supporting and building the power of those who are direcdy
affected by systems of exploitation and oppression. In basic terms, the underlying idea is
that when people come together through struggle, they can develop their collective
capacity to challenge dominant power relations and reorganise society.
Nonhierarchical organising, meanwhile, names a set of practices and forms of organ
isation based on direcdy democratic decision-making, collective leadership, and
intentional structure. LA COIL (formerly known as the LA Crew) , a collective of organ
isers in Los Angeles, is usefully explicit about this dimension of their organising, which
involves work in the garment industry, public education, and the health care sector. As
they explain,
we try to build a day-to-day practice and example of participatory democracy.
Essential to this is undoing current realities and ideas ofpower and building new
ideas that emphasise what we call 'throwing power back: a different culture of
leadership and consciousness that has the development of political analytical
skills, technical skills, and leadership skills and the sharing of power at its core.6S
In the anti-authoritarian current, this kind of organising includes practices such as

consensus decision-making, training focusing on building people's abilities to organise
and take initiative, and participatory political education often using interactive, group
centered models of history-telling and critical analysis. It takes forms such as democratic
membership organisations, popular or community assemblies, and collectives linked to
broader movements.
In combining these aspects, grassroots nonhierarchical approaches tend to involve

what I call 'non-instrumental organising'. This means building relationships with people
Chris Dixon
1 48
as collaborators in struggle rather than as instruments to achieve already determined
political ends. Non-instrumental organising, for many anti-authoritarian organisers, is a
reaction against an organising model that often dominates in labour and community
organising sectors. In the latter model, organising is about building relationships with
people mostly to get them to do something. Michelle O'Brien, a white transwoman and
veteran organiser around gender, poverty, housing, and HIV/AIDS struggles, was blunt
in her criticisms of this model: 'when it comes right down to it, it relates to people in
profoundly manipulative ways. It relates to people as these chips on a board'. Against
this, non-instrumental organising prioritises things such as sharing stories, listening, and
long-term trust-building. It focuses on the analysis, strategies, and actions that people
can create when they come together collaboratively. In O'Brien's words, the consistent
question here is 'what do you think? And that's not really about getting everyone to a
fIxed point. That's about opening up the imagination.'66 Fundamentally, organising
approaches in another politics grow from this way of relating to ordinary people as
creators, as catalysts.67
This fourth principle connects, in signifIcant ways, with an historic organising tradi
tion within anarchism that has been mostly marginalised since the fIrst part of the
twentieth century. This was the class struggle, mass movement approach associated,
perhaps most famously, with the Industrial Workers of the World.68 More directly, this
principle is inspired by the kinds of horizontal community-based organising approaches
that have emerged in the global South, especially in the context of struggles against
neoliberalism. Prison abolitionism, meanwhile, has demonstrated the importance and
possibility of grassroots organising with people experiencing the immediate effects of
oppression and exploitation. Still, this kind of organising needs much more practical
experimentation and elaboration. A particularly pressing issue is how to develop non
hierarchical organising models adequate to the vast range of communities, sectors, and
struggles across North America. The anti-authoritarian current is only beginning to
grapple with this.
SmlNG A POlE
The anti-authoritarian current is forging shared politics, practices, and sensibilities that
are increasingly shaping social movements in the US and Canada. In doing this, the
current grows from and draws upon four main strands. Anarchism supplies nonhierar
chical practices, prefIgurative values, and a confrontational orientation. Autonomous
struggles in the global South offer living examples of movements developing large-scale
alternatives to state and capitalist relations, along with fresh approaches to horizontal
organising. Prison abolitionism puts forward an analysis connecting state violence and
dominant social relations (particularly racial oppression), a non-reformist approach to
strategy, and experiments aimed at reducing harm and resolving conflict without

resorting to the state. And women of colour feminism provides a set of politics and prac
tices for understanding interrelated systems of oppression and exploitation, linking
interpersonal and systemic forms of domination and violence, and developing intersec
tional strategies for social transformation. Another politics bears the imprints of all of
these strands, as well as others.
One useful way to understand another politics, it seems to me, is as an emerging
political pole within anarchism and the left more broadly. A growing set of anti-authori
tarians are staking out this pole through work significantly based in the four principles I
laid out above. With these politics and related practices, this pole draws many activists
and organisers who are fed up with the problems and limitations of much contemporary
anarchism in North America and yet remain committed to the best of the anarchist
tradition: a far-reaching critique of domination, a dedication to prefigurative politics, a
commitment to building popular power, and an unbending belief in people's capacity to
create a world where we can all live with dignity, joy, and justice.
Another politics, as pole, is thus both outside and inside anarchism. Some organisers
in the anti-authoritarian current, including several quoted in this article, do not under
stand their work and politics in relation to anarchist politics; indeed, for some,
anarchism is at best irrelevant. Many, however, see themselves as working within or from
the anarchist tradition. All, I would argue, have something vital to contribute to anar
chism specifically and anti-statist, anti-capitalist politics more generally. Perhaps the
most significant of these contributions is a desire for forms of politics and struggle that
matter
that have real roots and relevance in the lives of a majority of people and that
have real effects on the prospects for peace, justice, and sustainability in the world. This
contagious desire, I suspect, will continue to make another politics an attractive political
pole in the coming period.
But even as it is emerging as a pole of attraction, another politics faces significant
unresolved questions. I believe there are some resources within the anarchist tradition to
address these, but they remain sites for ongoing work and require fresh, non-dogmatic
thinking and practice. Here, I offer six such areas that particularly stand out to me:
1. How can anti-authoritarians both recognise the interconnections among
multiple forms of oppression and, at the same time, make strategic choices
about what fights they take up?69 If resisting a hierarchy of oppressions is central
to an intersectional analysis, how should another politics develop priorities in
on-the-ground struggle ?
2. How can prefigurative politics be intentional and yet avoid reinforcing insular
activist communities ? In what ways can organisers root the development of new
social relations organically in the world as it is and cultivate already-existing
prefigurative dimensions in popular struggles ?
3. How should the anti-authoritarian current relate to electoral politics ? Is a

Chris Dixon
1 50
complete disengagement from the voting booth viable when millions of people
are being inspired and energised through such campaigns, and when a denial of
the vote has been a key means to sustain oppression and marginalisation, partic
ularly of people of colour, women, Indigenous people, prisoners, and
immigrants ?
4. How can another politics help foster visionary and non-instrumental organising
approaches that are relevant and meaningful to ordinary, non-activist people ?
And how can such approaches build from everyday lives and popular struggles
into revolutionary movements ?
5.
What kinds of organisations and institutions should this current build to

further movements, consolidate gains, and develop infrastructure for a new
society? How can these organisations be resilient, self-managed, and self
funding ?
6. How should anti-authoritarians relate to liberal, social democratic, Leninist,

and other left political currents ? In what ways can another politics contribute
to creating a lively, multi-tendency North American left that has a broad appeal
and real power ?
Part of what distinguishes the anti-authoritarian current from some contemporary forms
of anarchism is its commitment to winning. Not content to be righteous but perpetually
marginal resisters, organisers in this current are increasingly contemplating what it will
take to turn back a tide of reaction and achieve real gains on a scale that will affect the
lives of millions. This is positive. A commitment to winning forces activists and organ
isers to wrestle with hard questions, to continually attempt to address them even when
no easy answers or easy victories are within reach, to look beyond comfortable and
customary political frameworks, and to not sit with self-satisfied answers. Any prospects
for viable revolurionary politics in the US and Canada will require just this sort of
relentless, open-ended reflection and experimentation. There are, of course, no guaran
tees. But to the extent that the anti-authoritarian current continues to wrestle with
unresolved questions and chart new directions, it offers this hope.
Chris Dixon, originally from Alaska, is a longtime anarchist organiser, writer, and
educator who recently received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
His writing has appeared in periodicals such as Clamor, Left Turn, Social Movement
Studies, and Upping the Anti, and book collections such as Global Uprising (New Society
Press), Lettersfrom Young Activists (Nation Books), Toward A New Socialism (Lexington
Books), Men Speak Out (Routledge), and The Battle ofthe Storyfor the Battle oJSeattle
(AK Press). He is currently completing a book, tentatively titled Against and Beyond,
based on interviews with anti-authoritarian organizers across the U.S. and Canada
involved in broader-based movements. Dixon is an active member of the board of the
--
--
------

511
Institute for Anarchist Studies and the advisory board for the journal
Upping the Anti.
He lives in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, where he is involved with Occupy Sudbury and
Indigenous solidarity organising.
Email: chrisd@resist.ca
ENDNOTES
1.
This article would not have been possible without the generosity, shared reflections, and
ongoing work of all of the organisers I had the pleasure of interviewing. As well, I want
to specifically acknowledge clarifying conversations I had with comrades from the
Catalyst Project, the Institute for Anarchist Studies, Left
Turn, Team Colors, and Upping
the Anti, all of whom helped me sharpen the analysis here. I also wish to thank the indi
viduals who offered feedback on material in this article: Dan Berger, Andy Cornell,
Chris Crass, Angela Davis, Barbara Epstein, Craig Hughes, Scott Neigh, Paul Ortiz,
Maia Ramnath, James Rowe, Andy Sernatinger, Alexis Shotwell, Kevin Van Meter, and
two anonymous readers. I presented the first version of this argument at the 2008 Great
Lakes Political Economy Conference at York University in Toronto. I thank the confer
ence organisers for that opportunity and the attendees for their feedback.
2.
For analyses of the first USSF, see Stephanie Guilloud and the Executive Leadership
Team of Project South,
The First US. Social Forum: Reportfrom the Anchor

Organization (Atlanta, Georgia: Project South, 2009); Jeffrey Juris, 'Spaces of
Intentionality: Race, Class, and Horizontality at the United States Social Forum:
Mobilization 13, no. 4 (2008): 353-371 ; The USSF Book Committee, ed., The United
States Social Forum: Perspectives ofa Movement (Chicago: Changemaker Publications,
2010).
3. Max Uhlenbeck, 'A Light Within: Left Turn, no. 25 (2007): 10.
4. One important exception to this is Daniel Lang/Levitsky's recent description of this
current in relation to Jewish anti-Zionist organising: Daniel Lang/Levitsky, 'Jews
Confront Zionism: Monthly Review 61, no.
5.
2 (2009): 51.
To be clear, 'anti-authoritarian' is a term that is used widely and quite loosely o n the
radical left in North America. I specifically use it as an abbreviation for the 'anti
authoritarian, anti-capitalist, non-sectarian left' to which Uhlenbeck refers and which
I describe in more detail in what follows. As a result, there are individuals and groups
that self-identify as 'anti-authoritarian' who fall outside of the current that I discuss in
this article.
6.
Jeffrey S. Juris, 'Practicing Militant Ethnography with the Movement for Global
Resistance in Barcelona, in
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations II

Collective Theorization, eds Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle
(Oakland: AK Press, 2007), 171-174.
Chris Dixon
1 52
7. For a more developed account of 'movement-generated theory: see Douglas Bevington
and Chris Dixon, 'Movement-Relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement
Scholarship and Activism: Social Movement Studies 4, no. 3 (2005): 1 85-208.
8. As part of the research for my doctoral dissertation, I conducted interviews with
organizers in Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Montreal, Toronto, the San
Francisco Bay Area, and Vancouver during 2006 and 2007.
9. My approach particularly draws on Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, eds, Learning
From the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge
Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Caelie Frampton et al, eds,
Sociologyfor Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (Halifax:
Fernwood Publishing, 2006); Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle,
eds, Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization
(Oakland: AK Press, 2007).
10. Food Not Bombs is an international network of autonomous local groups that collect
and prepare discarded food to feed people for free while advocating against militarism
and for social justice. See http://www.foodnotbombs.net and C.T. Lawrence Butler
and Keith McHenry, Food Not Bombs: How to Feed the Hungry and Build Community
(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992).
1 1. My brief account here makes use of Barbara Epstein and Chris Dixon, 'A Politics and a
Sensibility: the Anarchist Current on the U.S. Left', in Toward a New Socialism, eds
Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 452453. See also Abby Scher, 'Anarchism Faces the '90s: Dollars and Sense, no. 222
( 1 999): 30-34. On the nonviolent direct action movement, see Andrew Cornell,
Oppose and Propose! Lessonsfrom Movementfor a New Society (Oakland: AK Press,
20 1 1 ) ; Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct
Action in the 1 970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 99 1 ). On
European autonomous movements, see George Katsimcas, The Subversion ofPolitics:
European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization ofEveryday Life (New
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1 997).
1 2. There is unfortunately very little written about these publications, formations, and
events. On Love and Rage, see the developing online archive at http://www.lovean
drage.org as well as Roy San Filippo, ed., A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of
Writingsfrom the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (Oakland: AK
Press, 2003).
1 3. On the emergence of this global revolt against neoliberalism, see George Caffentzis
and Silvia Federici, 'A Brief History of Resistance to Structural Adjustment: in
Democratizing the Global Economy: The Battle Against the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, ed. Kevin Danaher (Monroe, ME: Common Courage
Press, 2001 ), 1 39- 144.
14. For an historical account of the Zapatistas, see Gloria Munoz Ramirez, The Fire and
Building 'Another Politics'
53 1
the Word: A History oJthe Zapatista Movement (San Francisco: City Lights Books.
15.
16.
17.
18.
2008). On their significance for the global justice movement. see Notes from
Nowhere. 'Emergence: An Irresistible Global Uprising: in 1f'e Are Everywhere: The
Irresistible Rise ofGlobalAnticapitalism. ed. Notes from Nowhere (London: Verso.
2003). 19-29. And on the importance of the Zapatista politics and approach for
movements in North America. see Alex Khasnabish. Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New
Imaginations oJPolitical Possibility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2008); RJ
Maccani. 'Enter the Intergalactic: The Zapatistas' Sixth Declaration in the US and the
World: Upping the Anti, no. 3 (2006): 105-21.
In the U.S. and Canada. liberal and social democratic currents in the global justice
movement included labour unions and federations such as the American Federation of
Labor and the Canadian Labour Congress. mainstream environmental organizations
such as the Sierra Club. and citizen and consumer advocacy groups such as the
Council of Canadians and Public Citizen.
Peoples' Global Action. 'Hallmarks of Peoples' Global Action: n.d
http://nadir.orglnadir/initiativ/agp/free/pga/hallm.htm . For more on the PGA. see
Olivier de Marcellus. 'Peoples' Global Action: the grassroots go global: in 1f'e Are
Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise oJGlobalAnticapitalism. ed. Notes from Nowhere
(London: Verso, 2003). 97-101.
For grounded accounts ofthe blending of politics and practices around the Seattle
protests. see Stephanie Guilloud. 'Spark. Fire. and Burning Coals: An Organizer's
History of Seattle: in The Battle oJSeattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist
Globalization, eds Eddie Yuen. George Katsiaficas. and Daniel Burton Rose (New
York: Soft Skull Press. 2001); Starhawk. Webs ofPower: Notesfrom the Global Uprising
(Gabriola. B.c.: New Society Publishers. 2002). 16-20.
For some collections that document this history. see Dissent Editorial Collective. Days
o/Dissent: Reflections on Summit Mobilisations (London: Dissent! Network, 2004);
Notes from Nowhere. ed 1f'e Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise oJGlobal
Anticapitalism (London: Verso. 2003); Eddie Yuen. George Katsiancas. and Daniel
Burton Rose. eds. Confronting Capitalism: Dispatchesfrom a Global Movement (New
York: Soft Skull Press. 2004).
Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez. 'Where was the Color in Seattle? Looking for reasons
why the Great Battle was so white: ColorLines 3, no. 1 (2000):11-12.
These discussions generated many articles and interviews. Some especially influential
contributions include Chris Crass. Collective Liberation on My Mind: Essays by Chris
Crass (Montreal. QC: Kersplebdeb, 2001); Pauline Sok Yin Hwang, 'Anti-Racist
Organizing: Reflecting On Lessons from Quebec City: in Under the Lens ojthe
People: Our Account oJthe Peoples'Resistance to the FTAA, Quebec City, Apri1 200J, ed.,
The Peoples Lenses Collective (Toronto, ON: The Peoples Lenses Collective, 2003).
48-52; Helen Luu. 'Discovering a Different Space of Resistance: Personal Reflections
.
19.
20.
Chris Dixon
1 54
Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and
on Anti-Racist Organizing: in
Build a Better World, ed., David Solnit (San Francisco : City Lights, 2004), 41 1 -426.
For a crirical response, see Amoty Starr, 'How Can Anti-Imperialism Not Be Anti
Racist ? The North American Anti-Globalization Movement: Journal of World Systems
Research x, no.
1 (2004): 1 1 9- 1 5 1 .
2 1 . For an excellent statement and synthesis of this developing direction, see Kim Fyke
and Gabriel Sayegh, 'Anarchism and the Struggle to Move Forward',
Perspectives on
Anarchist Theory 5, no. 2 (Fall 200 1 ),

http ://flag.blackened.net/ias/ l 0fyke&sayegh.htm.
22. These have included not only the Zapatistas but also movements in Argentina,
Bolivia, and other countries. For discussions of some of these movements, see
Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism:
Press, 2006) ; Raul Zibechi,
Voices ofPopular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK

Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State
Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 20 1 0). For a more general analysis
of autonomous movements in Latin America, see Raul Zibechi, 'Social Change and
Building the Ties That Bind:
North American Congress on Latin America,
1 5 May
2007, http : //nacla.orglnode! l 473.

23. For accounts of some of these struggles, see Tom Keefer, 'Declaring the Exception :
Upping the Anti, no. 7

Alanis Obomsawin, Kanehsatake: 270 Years o/Resistance
Direct Action, Six Nations, and the Struggle in Brantford',

(2008) : 1 1 1 - 128;
(Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1 993); Shiri Pasternak, '''They're

Clear-Cutting Our Way of Life": Algonquins Defend the Forest:
Upping the Anti,
no. 8 (2009): 1 25- 1 4 1 . On affinities between anti-statist, anti-capitalist politics

and Indigenous struggles for self-determination, see Taiaiake Alfred,
Indigenous Pathways 0/Action and Freedom
sdse:
(Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press,
2005); Ward Churchill, 'lndigenism, Anarchism, and the State',
Upping the Anti
1,
no. 1 (200 5 ) : 30-40.

24. Online, see I,eft
Turn at http ://www.leftturn.org and Upping the Anti at
http://uppingtheantLorg.
25. On NOlI analyses and organising approaches, see Macdonald Scott et al, 'Fighting
Borders: A Roundtable on Non-Status (Im)migrant Justice in Canada:
Anti, no. 2 (2005):
Upping the
1 5 1- 1 59; Harsha Walia, 'No One is illegal : Confronting the
Apartheid System of Migration in Canada:
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, no. 5
(2006): 56-65.
26. To get a sense of the histories and politics that converged in this movement in the
1 990s, see Elihu Rosenblatt, ed.,
Criminal Injustice: Confronting the Prison Crisis
(Boston: South End Press, 1 996).

27. For more on CR, see http:// www.criticalresistance.org as well as CR- l 0 Publications
Collective, ed., Abolition Now!
Ten Years ofStrategy and Struggle Against the Prison
Industrial Complex (Oakland: AK Press, 2008). On abolitionist organising in
the
55 1
Canadian context. see Caitlin Hewitt-White et al. ' Prison Abolition in Canada:
Upping the Anti. no. 4 (2007):
1 25- 1 46.
28. Critical Resistance. 'Our Vision: n.d..

http://www.criticalresistance.orglarticle.php?id=5 1 . For an excellent introduction to
the abolitionist critique of prisons. see Angela Davis. Are Prisons
Obsolete? (New York:
Seven Stories Press. 2003). On the origins of these politics in the 1 970s. see Liz
Samuels. 'Improvising on Reality: The Roots of Prison Abolition: in
The Hidden
1970s: Histories ofRadicalism. ed. Dan Berger (New Brunswick. NJ: Rutgers
University Press. 201 0). 2 1 -38.
29. Much of this work has been sparked through collaboration with primarily radical
women of colour in the movement against intimate violence. For the statement that
created a basis for collaboration. see Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color
Against Violence. 'Gender Violence and the Prison-Industrial Complex: in
Color of
Violence: The INCITE! Anthology. ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
(Cambridge. MA: South End Press. 2006). 223-226. Other contributions to that collec
tion offer instructive accounts of community-based approaches to dealing with violence.
30. For influential elaborations of this critique. see Joy James. Resisting State
Violence:
Radicalism, Gender, and Race in US. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. 1 996); Andrea Smith. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
(Cambridge. MA: South End Press. 2005).
3 1 . For a good example of some of this visionary thinking and work. see Alexis Pauline
Gumbs. 'Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham. North Carolina: in
Abolition Now! Ten Years ofStrategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial
Complex. ed. CR- I 0 Publications Collective (Oakland: AK Press. 2008). 1 45- 1 55.
32. On the growing queer and feminist dimensions of this work, see INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence and FIERCE!. ' Re-Thinking "The Norm" In Police/Prison
Violence & Gender Violence: Critical Lessons from the New Jersey 7: Left
Turn. no.
30 (2008): 26-3 1 ; Beth Richie. 'Standing with DuannaJohnson Against Police

Brutality: A Challenge for the Gay and Civil Rights Movements: Left
Turn. no. 32
(2009): 57-60.
33. On the construction of this category. see Angela Davis and Elizabeth Martinez.
'Coalition Building Among People of Color: in
The Angela
Y. Davis Reader. ed. Joy
James (Malden. MA: Blackwell Publishers. 1 998). 297-306. For accounts of the devel
opment of women of colour feminism. see Enakshi Dua. 'Canadian Anti-Racist
Feminist Thought: Scratching the Surface of Racism: in Scratching the Surface:
Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought. eds Enakshi Dua and Angela Robertson
Ten Thousand Roses: The Making
ofa Feminist Revolution ( Toronto: Penguin. 2005). chap. 9- 1 1 and 1 9; Benita Roth.
Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in
America's Second Uiave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004); Kimberly
(Toronto: Women's Press. 1 999). 7-3 1 ; Judy Rebick.
Chris Dixon
1 56
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
Springer, Livingfor the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Combahee River Collective, 'The Combahee River Collective Statement: in Home
Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table:
Women of Color Press, 1 983), 272.
There are many important publications that have helped to develop women of
colour feminist politics. Germinal works include Himani Bannerji, Thinking
Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (Toronto: Women's Press,
1 995); Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1 98 1); bell
hooks, Feminist Theoryfrom Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press,
1 984); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1 996);
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women oJColor (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press,
1 983).
Although the concept of intersectionality has roots in earlier women of colour
feminist work, it was nrst introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw, 'Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color: Stanford
Law Review 43, no. 6 (199 1 ) : 1 241-1299.
For more on INCITE!, see http://www.incite-national.org as well as the INCITE!
collections cited in notes 29 and 39.
See Sista II Sista, 'Sistas Makin' Moves: Collective Leadership for Personal
Transformation and Social Justice', in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed.
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
2006), 196-207.
On this critique and these alternatives, see INCITE! Women of Color Against
Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial
Complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007).
As INCITE! collective members write, 'The challenge women of color face in
combatting personal and state violence is to develop strategies for ending violence that
do assure safety for survivors of sexual/domestic violence and do not strengthen our
oppressive criminal justice apparatus. Our approaches must always challenge the
violence perpetrated through multinational capitalism and the state: Andrea Smith et
al, 'The Color of Violence: Introduction: in Color of Violence: The INCITE!
Anthology, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South
End Press, 2006), 2.
For indications of the influence of women of colour feminist politics on other move
ments, see Jael Miriam Silliman et al, Undivided Rights: Women ofColor OrganizeJor
ReproductiveJustice (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004); Matt Bernstein
Sycamore, That's Revolting: Queer StrategiesJor Resisting Assimilation (Brooklyn: Soft
Skull Press, 2004).

42. INCITE! co-founder Andrea Smith has been particularly important in developing
these politics within the anti-authoritarian current. See, for instance, Andrea Smith,
'Beyond Inclusion: Recentering Feminism: Left Turn, no. 20 (2006): 66-69.
43. For descriptions of the Another Politics is Possible delegation and workshop track, see
Juris, 'Spaces of Intentionality: 367-368; RJ Maccani, 'Another Politics is Possible!
Zapagringo, 25 June 2007, http://zapagringo.blogspot.com12007/06/another
politics-is-possible.html. The delegation and workshop track were also connected to a
study group in New York City, which is ongoing. On this, see Dan Berger et al,
'Navigating the Crisis: A Study Groups Roundtable: Upping the Anti, no. 8 (2009):
159-177.
44. For more on the Other Campaign, see El Kilombo Intergalactico, Beyond Resistance:
Everything (Durham, NC: Paperboat Press, 2007); Munoz Ramirez, The Fire and the
Word, 317-334.
45. To be clear, I did not develop these themes on my own. Rather, they come out of
broad, ongoing discussions within the anti-authoritarian current. Some of the inspira
tion for this set of four features also specifically comes from the Another Politics is
Possible study group in New York City.
46. No One Is Illegal-Montreal, 'No One Is Illegal-Montreal's Basis of Unity: 27
December 2006, http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com12006/12/no-one-is
illegal-montreals-basis-of.html.
47. Jennifer Whitney, interview by author, New Orleans, LA, 7 December 2007. Whitney
was a coordinator and health care provider for the Latino Health Outreach Project
(LHOP), which provides free bilingual health care to for Latinos, including both resi
dents and the growing population of migrant workers involved in clean-up activities in
the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For more on LH 0 p, see
http://www.cghc.orgllhop.html as well as Catherine Jones and Jennifer Whitney,
'Dissolving Barriers: New Orleans' Latino Health Outreach Project: Left Turn, no. 21
(2006): 50-52.
48. Upping the Anti was explicitly founded on the intention to explore and critically
examine three of these 'anti's': anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialism.
See Upping the Anti Editorial Committee, 'Editorial: Upping the Anti, no. 1 (2005):
7-14.
49. Pilar Maschi, interview by author, New York, New York, 14 March 2007.
50. Sarita Ahooja, interview by author, Montreal, Quebec, 31 January 2007. Ahooja is
active with No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders (SAB), a Montreal-based
network of migrant justice groups and migrant communities. For more on SAB, see
http://www.solidarityacrossborders.org.
51. Clare Bayard, interview by author, San Francisco, California, 11 June 2007. With
roots in the global justice movement, the Catalyst Project offers training and support
for left organizations with a particular focus on developing anti-racist analysis and
"
Chris Dixon
1 58
52.
53.
practice among white activists and organizers. For more on Catalyst, see
http://www.collectiveliberation.org.
For some provocative discussion about integrating these commitments into movement
practices, see Sharmeen Khan et al, 'Roundtable on Anti-Oppression Politics in Anti
Capitalist Movements: Upping the Anti, no. 1 (2005): 76-88; Upping the Anti
Editorial Committee, 'Breaking the Impasse', Upping the Anti, no. 2 (2006): 1 4-2 1.
RahulaJanowsk, interview by author, San Francisco, California, 8 June 2007. The
Heads Up Collective was a group of white anti-racist and anti-imperialist activists and
organisers in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group grew out of the global justice
movement and came together in the context of anti-war mobilizations. In addition to
working in the direct action wing of the anti-war movement, Heads Up was involved
in fundraising and support work for a number of radical community of colour-led and
-based organisations, as well as Palestine solidarity and migrant justice organising. For
more on Heads Up, see
http://collectiveliberation.org/index.php ?option=com content&task=view&id=79
&Itemid= 100.
Paula Ximena Rojas-Urrutia, interview by author, New York, New York, 1 2 March
2007. Although not always acknowledged by organisers, this notion of 'invisible
labour' grows especially from feminist interventions in Marxism, and the left more
broadly, during the 1970s. These interventions crucially highlighted women's unpaid
caring work, often called 'reproductive labour', as foundational for capitalism.
Germinal texts include Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women
and the Subversion ofthe Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1 975); Ellen Malos,
ed., The Politics ofHousework (London: Allison & Busby, 1980).
For a suggestive discussion of care in contemporary organising, see Conor Cash et aI,
'To Show the Fire and the Tenderness: Indypendent Reader, Spring/Summer 2009,
http://indyreader.org/content/to-show-fire-and-tenderness-by-teams-colors-collec
tive-conor-cash-craig-hughes-stevie-peaceFor more on the San Francisco Community Land Trust, see http://www.sfclt.org as
well as James Tracy, 'Victory in Chinatown: The San Francisco Community Land
Trust', Left Turn, no. 24 (2007): 6 1-62.
James Tracy, interview by author, San Francisco, California, 8 June 2007.
Ashanti Alston, interview by author, New York, New York, 8 March 2007. Alston
became an anarchist while serving prison time for alleged activities with the Black
Liberation Army in the 1970s. Among many other activities, he has worked as an
organiser with Critical Resistance and he was a member of the now-defunct Estacion
Libre, a formation of US.-based radical people of colour in support of the Zapatistas.
For more on No One Is Illegal Vancouver, see http://noii-van.resist.ca.
Harjap Grewal, interview by author, Vancouver, British Columbia, 25 October 2006.
Rachel Herzing, interview by author, Oakland, California, 1 3 June 2007. Herzing also
_
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
Building /lnother Politics'

works with Creative Interventions, an organisation that develop community-based
strategies to end interpersonal violence. For more on Creative Interventions, see
http://www.creative-interventions.org.
62. This principle oflinking struggles and visions has some broad resonances with the
strategy advocated by the New Left thinker Andre Gorz, which was based on what he
called 'non-reformist' or 'structural' reforms. For the original presentation of this
approach, see Andre Gorz, A Strategyfor Labor: A Radical Proposal, trans. Martin A.
Nicolaus and Victoria Ortiz (Boston : Beacon Press, 1 967). Gorz's ideas have had an
influence on some prison abolitionist work. For an early example, see Thomas
Mathiesen,
The Politics ofAbolition (New York: Wiley, 1 974). For a more recent
example, see Julia Sudbury, 'Maroon Abolitionists: Black Gender-oppressed Activists

in the Anti-Prison Movement in the U.S. and Canada, Meridians:feminism,
transnationalism 9, no.
race,
1 (2009): 1 -29.
63. James Mumm, a U.S.-based community organiser and an anarchist, played an influen
tial role in refining and popularising this distinction in the late 1 990s among
anti- authoritarians. See James Mumm, 'Active Revolution: New Directions in
Revolutionary Social Change: 1 998, http ://www.nefac.net/node/ 1 20. 1n my view,
this distinction is important analytically, but it often gets messier as radicals relate to
these concepts in ways that erase the complexities and uncertainties necessarily bound
up in them.
64. Rosana Cruz, interview by author, New Orleans, LA, 1 3 December 2007. Cruz is the
associate director ofV.O.T.E., a grassroots membership based organisation of formerly
incarcerated persons that builds political and economic power for individuals families
and communities most impacted by the criminal justice system in New Orleans,
Louisiana. For more on V.O.T.E., see http://vote-nola.org.
65. LA Crew, 'Ideas in Action: An LA Story: Left
Turn, no. 3 1
(2009): 53.
66. Michelle O'Brien, interview by author, New York, New York, 1 3 March 2007.
67. For some further elaboration of grassroots nonhierarchical organising, see Another
Politics is Possible and Communities Organizing Liberation, So That rVt: May Soar:
Horizontalism, Intersectionality, and Prif'gurative Politics (New York & Los Angeles:
Self-Published, 20 1 0); Coalition of Immokalee Workers, 'Consciousness +
Commitment
Change: in Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and
Build a Better "World, ed. David Solnit (San Francisco : City Lights, 2004), 347-60;
=
Chris Crass, 'But We Don't Have Leaders: Leadership Development and Anti
Authoritarian Organizing: Infashop.org, n.d., http://www.infoshop.orglpage/But-We
Dont-Have-Leaders; Madeline Gardner and Joshua Kahn Russell, 'Praxis Makes
Real Utopia: Participatory Societyfor the 21st

Century, ed. Chris Spannos (Oakland: AK Press, 2008), 338-346.
Perfect: The New Youth Organizing: in
68. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt usefully characterise this approach as 'mass
anarchism.' See Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame:
The
Chris Dixon
1 60
Revolutionary Class Politics ofAnarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2009),
chap. 4.
69. This question comes out of the important discussion in Joel Olson, 'The problem
with infoshops and insurrection: US anarchism, movement building, and the racial
order: in Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology ofAnarchy in the
Academy, ed. Randal Amster et al (New York: Routledge, 2009), 35-45.
Interpersonal Ethics in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed

Jaeckle, Daniel P
pg. 61
201 2
ISSN 0967 3393
www.lwbooks.co.ukljournalslanarchiststudiesl
Interpersonal Ethics in Ursula K. Le Guin's

The Dispossessed
Daniel P. Jaeckle
ABSTRACT
In
The Dispossessed Ursula K. Le Guin layers three ethical values in order to create an
interpersonal ethics designed to meet the needs of an anarchist society. Le Guin borrows
the foundational layer of mutual aid, with interesting adaptations, from the work of the
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The second layer includes both the recognition that
mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation of a community based
on shared suffering. Although it is tempting to see this layer as the high point of the
ethical thought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type of life-long
partnering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The loyalty and
sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life as
constructed in this fiction. Although this interpersonal ethics is open to charges of
idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and
commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of
life, nevertheless Le Guin's thought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist
ethics that improves upon the views of Kropotkin.
Keywords: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed, Peter Kropotkin, ethics, mutual aid
Ursula K. Le Guin has claimed that her novel
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

( 1974) is an attempt to embody anarchy (The Wind's Twelve Quarters 1 975: 232). This
embodiment is to be found on Anarres, a moon/planet populated by anarchists who

emigrated from their home planet Urras over a century before the earliest action in the
novel. Upon their arrival on Anarres the settlers fashioned a society which at least in
theoty had no established government and no coercion within the economic sphere. As a
result, the creation of Anarresti society within the novel becomes a thought-experiment on
the viability of anarchism and the need for permanent revolution to counter such threats as
an incipient bureaucracy and a tendency toward dominance games. Although previous
studies have investigated various facets of this anarchist society, more might be said specifi-
Daniel P. Jaeckle
cally about the ethics within it.) In what follows I do not distinguish ethics from morality,
address all the features of a complete ethical system, or consider whether oppressive power
and its attendant evils would evenrually creep into any anarchist society. I am instead inter
ested in the limited question of what one of the most brilliant minds of our time, coming
fresh from extensive reading in anarchism and utopianism, thinks an interpersonal ethics in
an anarchist culture would look like. The answer, I suggest, is a layering ofethical values
that together comprise a complex system designed to meet the needs of an anarchist
society.2 Le Guin borrows the foundational layer of mutual aid, with interesting adapta
tions, from the work of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. The second layer includes
both the recognition that mutual aid cannot always be rendered and the resultant creation
of a community based on shared suffering. Although it is tempting to see this layer as the
high point of the ethical thought in the novel, Le Guin adds one more by imagining a type
of life-long parmering bond in a society in which legalised marriage does not exist. The
loyalty and sense of home that such a bond provides are crucial to the idea of the happy life
as constructed in this fiction. Taken together, these three layers present a fuller and more
satisfactory ethics than those that Kropotkin envisioned. They include not only reliance on
mutual aid, but also responses to the inevitability of suffering and the need for commit
ment in interpersonal relationships. Although the resulting ethic is open to charges of
idealism in over-emphasising human cooperation, passivity in accepting suffering, and
commitment to traditional heterosexual monogamy as essential for the full enjoyment of
life, nevertheless Le Guin's thought-experiment makes a strong case for an anarchist ethics
that improves upon the views of Kropotkin.
THE ETHICS OF MUTUAL AID

During his time on the planet Urras - simultaneously the moon, sister planet, and feared
enemy of Anarres - Shevek has a particularly revealing conversation with Yea, a high
society woman and sister of a reputable Urrasti physiCist. In the course of this talk the
two confront the most important question of evolutionary theory, that of the key factor
in the success of a species. Shevek raises the issue:
'We [the Anarresti] follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution.'
' The law of evolution is that the strongest survives !'
'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are
most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor
enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained
from hurting one another. Only weakness' (220).
Shevek's comments are reminiscent of an often repeated idea in Kropotkin that, contrary
to a common interpretation of Darwin's survival of the fittest as uniformly competitive,
63 1
'under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life'
{MutualAid 2006:
55).3 T he fact that Shevek and Kropotkin both enend the range of
sOciability to species beyond the human, those that Shevek here calls the 'social species: is
important because it indicates that sociability is not born of a religious impulse or
limited to historical consciousness. If humanity is only one of many species to live under
the law of sociability, then it is as natural for people to cooperate as it is for bees. As a
result, for Shevek a competitive society like that in A-Io at its own peril focuses on the
will to domination and ignores the equally biologically-based sociability of the human
species. In doing so, it commits an ethical mistake by misunderstanding the relative
importance of the forces that dtive humanity just as they drive the other social species
within nature.
A second similarity between Kropotkin and the ethics of the Anarresti involves the
definition of sociability. Both define it specifically in terms of mutual aid. T hat phrase is
not only the title and theme of one of Kropotkin's most famous books but also the term
used no fewer than seven times within the novel to describe the first principle of
Anarresti society. T he idea of mutual aid is Simple. A social species survives better when
its members cooperate rather than compete against one another because the group
provides its members such advantages as support in securing the necessities oflife,
protection from enemies, and care in case of illness, disability, or old age. Le Guin makes
the idea of all helping all the starting point for an ethics of cooperation. In its embodi
ment in Shevek's version of Anarres, it is meant to challenge the competitive principle
that informs life on Urcas.
But as long as one remains on the biological level of sociability, mutual aid can
serve as no more than a foundation for an anarchist ethics. One has to go beyond the
biological to the specifically human to articulate a complete ethics of mutual aid.
When elaborated to apply to human society, in this novel mutual aid expands to
define the entire economic and political structure that Kropotkin envisions and the
Anarresti have created. Specifically, it means that communism structures the economy
because it is seen as the system that most perfectly embodies cooperation in the
production, distribution, and consumption of the necessities of life. T he idea behind
the slogan 'From each according to ability, to each according to need' is the logical
consequence of organising economic life according ro the principle of mutual aid. In
addition, extending mutual aid to human society means that anarchism is to be the
political system because only anarchism promotes mutuality by freeing people from
authoritarianism. No matter what form an established government takes, it under
mines mutual aid because its first principle is its own survival as the political power,
not the survival of the group. Only when aid is given voluntarily as well as mutually
does it truly work. T hus, as with Kropotkin so too with the Anarresti: a communist
anarchism based on mutual aid is the best economic and political system precisely
because it develops from the natural sociability of the species. Understood in this
Daniel P. Jaeckle
elaborated way, mutual aid is the most powerful foundational value within Anarresti
anarchism.
The similarities between Shevek's ethics of mutual aid and that ofKropotkin are not
limited to those defining what sociability and mutual aid are. They also agree on what
they are not, namely, a form of love. In the 'Introduction' to Mutual Aid Kropotkin has a
fine passage showing the limitations of love and human sympathy, part ofwhich runs as
follows:
[T]o reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its gener
ality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal
sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral
feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbor - whom I often do not know at
all - which induces me to seize a pail ofwater and to rush towards his house
when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct
of human solidarity and sociability which moves me
(MutualAid 2006: 1 1).
For her part, Le Guin saves Shevek's comments on love for a most dramatic moment in
the novel, his speech to the rally of the Urrasti disenfranchised immediately before the
government troops open fire on the crowd: 'It is not love. Love does not obey the mind,
and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers
... We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if
we do not reach out our hand'
(300). The force holding society together in order ro
ensure its survival and success is not a human passion, not even love. It is beyond choice,
to use Shevek's phrase, a vague feeling or instinct, to use Kropotkin's. The survival of the
fittest may not depend primarily on individual adaptations, much less physical strength.
But it also does not depend on love, even in the most generalised Christian sense of the
term. It instead relies most completely on the solidarity that mutual aid requires and
fosters.
Although Le Guin has learned a great deal from the ethics of Kropotkin, in the
novel she does not embody his views unconditionally. The most important ethical issue
upon which Kropotkin and the Anarresti disagree concerns the value of altruism. For
both writers mutual aid does not necessarily include self-sacrifice. But for Kropotkin
altruism is more than merely compatible with murual aid; it becomes the highest ethical
value erected on the foundation of sociability
(Ethics 1947: 30). Self-sacrifice for the
sake of others is as valuable within human society as it is within the animal kingdom,
and for the same reason: it promotes the chances ofgroup survival. In
The Dispossessed,
however, altruism is not viewed as an important consequence or corollary of mutual aid,

at least as Shevek comes to understand it. On the contrary, he twice denies the value of
altruism. When Sabul, the physicist who has been controlling Shevek's career, accuses
him of ,nonaltruism'
(266) by working on physics problems outside the dominant scien-
65 1
tific theory on Anarres, Shevek responds by appealing to the ethical system created by
Odo, the philosopher of Anarresti anarchism: 'Since when was altruism an Odonian
virtue ?' Later in the novel when Keng, the Terran ambassador to the Council of World
Governments, asks Shevek if he wants to stay on Urras, he says no because, as he puts it,
'I am no altruist' (350). Shevek clearly does not mean that he has given up on mutual aid
as the ethical foundation of the anarchism on Anarres. He means rather that mutual aid,
properly understood, does not include altruism.
From the perspective of ethics the distinction between altruism and mutual aid is
the most subtle philosophical moment in the novel, and 1 am not sure that Le Guin
completely escapes contradiction in her treatment of it. But there can be no doubt about
the ethical basis on which she sees it to rest. The distinction goes back to the anarchist
theory of Odo, and specifically to her thoughts on the relationship between the indi
vidual and society. Late in the novel, Shevek thinks through this relationship in the
terms of Odo's book entitled Analogy. Based on his many experiences he has come to
understand his need to be completely himself in his choice of actions. Odo would call
this need his 'cellular function:
the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contri
bution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum
function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability
and strength (333).
The idea is clear enough: by pursuing what one wants to do and does best, one fits into
the larger society in the best possible way. Even violating social expectations, for example,
by doing physics against the grain of the dominant science, is a way of helping society
adapt and grow stronger. Although before the paragraph is over Shevek admits that
society might require sacrifice on the part of the individual, that admission is misleading
and even inconsistent with the rest of his thought in the passage. For by the next page it
becomes clear that he believes he never has to give up his individuality or his work or in
any way compromise his values. Sacrifice instead becomes a sign that one has shirked
one's primary responsibility to the group, the responsibility to do what one wills. This is
certainly the novel's most difficult ethical position to accept. For it seems to presume
that the will of the individual and the needs of the group will not ultimately clash and
lead to disaster. But whether we believe that this harmonious relationship between indi
vidual freedom and social responsibility is tenable or not, Shevek has resolved all doubts.
His unwavering commitment to that belief goes a long way toward making him the
moral exemplar that he becomes by novel's end.
Sociability and a form of mutual aid distinguished from altruism might provide a
firm foundation for the ethical system of Anarres. But by themselves they cannot consti
tute a complete system of interpersonal ethics. For within the novel there are two
Daniel P. Jaeckle
1 66
obvious limitations of an ethics of mutual aid. First, however successful it might be in
alleviating human pain and providing the greatest chance for the interdependence of
personal freedom and social responsibility, there is always a residue of suffering that no
amount of mutual aid can eliminate. The question therefore arises concerning the way of
dealing with that pain. Second, as the Kropotkin quote on love given above makes clear,
mutual aid is as operable among strangers as it is among family and friends. So what then
are the special ethics of living in intimacy with others ? These two questions lead Le
Guin to layer Shevek's ethics in the novel and take her beyond Kropotkin in under
standing the complexities of ethics in an anarchist society.
THE ETHICS OF SHARED PAIN
As an unidentified young person explains in one of the most important ethical discus
sions in the novel, 'the whole principle of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering'
(6 1 ). No doubt Shevek agrees. But he has also thought through and beyond this view.
Although mutual aid has value as a means of reducing suffering, he knows that nothing,
not all the sOciability in the world, can completely eliminate it. Mutual aid therefore
needs to be supplemented by a more complex view of suffering. The view that Shevek
develops and that the novel explores is called the brotherhood of shared pain.4
On at least four different occasions in the novel Le Guin exemplifies the limits of
mutual aid by placing Shevek in a situation in which he could not help another person in
his immediate environment or another person could not help him. The first of these
cases occurs when he stayed with a man who lived for two hours before succumbing to
bums from an aircar crash. No doctors or anesthetics were available to ease the man's
pain. Shevek and the girls with him could not even touch the man to comfort him for
fear that his skin would fall off. Shevek's conclusion from the incident exaggerates the
uselessness of mutual aid in order to drive home the point that in extreme cases it
becomes irrelevant. 'You couldn't do anything for him. Then I saw ... you see ... I saw
that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves' (62; the
ellipses are Le Guin's) . The second example comes in the description of the aftermath of
the workers' rally on Urras. When the oppressive authorities of A-Io opened fire on the
workers, Shevek ended up fleeing with a man who was shot in the hand. They hid in the
basement of a warehouse for three days until the man died of his wounds. While they
were in hiding Shevek asked the man not to moan, not because he was afraid that the
sounds would give away their location but because 'he could not bear to hear the man's
pain and not be able to do anything for him' (306). The third example is the most diffi
cult to bear. When Shevek and his friend Bedap walked Shevek's daughter Sadik back to
her dorm after dinner one evening, Sadik asked if she could stay with Takver and Shevek
for the night. She explained that her dorm mates hated her because they saw her father
as a traitor for communicating with the enemy on Urras. When Shevek grabbed her to
Interpersonal Ethics in UrsuLz K. I.e Guin's The Dispossessed

hold her and she broke down in tears, tears filled Shevek's own eyes and he sent Bedap
on without him. There was no escaping the pain of the moment for either father or
daughter. Finally, when a convalescent Shevek refused his mother's offer of a renewed
relationship and began crying when she left, an older man in the hospital came over to
console him. But Shevek was not comforted: 'Even from the brother there is no comfort
in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall' ( 1 25).
Le Guin does not provide these examples of situations in which mutual aid is irrele
vant because she thinks it is meaningless for the creation of an anarchist ethics. On the
contrary, she believes that mutual aid is indispensible to the anarchist society she is
trying to embody. But in her characteristic way she also wants to test the limits of the
idea. In the course of this test not only does she exemplify the kinds of situations in
which it becomes irrelevant but she also has a precocious teenaged Shevek explain those
limits to his friends:
Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it.
You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger
and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of
existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain.
A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest
remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live
fifty years, we'll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we'll die
(60).
The choice of words here is interesting. Social suffering I suppose means the inequities
and injustices that governments and private property cause. We have seen that mutual
aid can, in theory at least, eliminate that type of suffering by underpinning a communist
and anarchist society. Unnecessary suffering may refer to any kind of pain that is
preventable in theory and manageable when it appears. Such pains can range from
headaches to homelessness. But beyond social and unnecessary suffering is the necessary
suffering that each person must confront. It is the pain before death, the hunger in a
famine, the alienation in an inimical social situation. This kind ofpain, Shevek argues, is
inevitable and universal It does no good to ignore it or to pretend it can be avoided or
treated. To minimise this type of suffering would be to belie the actual conditions of life
with which an anarchist society has to deal. And the ever critical Le Guin refuses to do
that. Instead, she insists on the reality of necessary suffering.
Once she has established that reality, however, she is free to show how an anarchist
society can try to turn it to its advantage. The key idea in the ethics of shared pain is that
the very inevitability and universality of suffering create the possibility for a tighter bond
among people than the sociability of the species could ever provide. For if all people are
going to live their lives in the knowledge that suffering is ultimately inescapable regard
less of how much aid they render to each other, they recognise too that they are united
Daniel P. Jaeckle
1 68
by the common experience of the human condition. And that recognition ties people
together not only because all experience the pain but also because they all endure it untU
their ends.
The novel speaks about this bond on three occasions. The fust occurs right after
Shevek describes the death of the burned man and his recognition that humans cannot
save others or even themselves. When an unnamed character accuses him of denying
brotherhood, a worthy enough inference from what he has just said, he responds that he
is not. On the contrary, he is redefining brotherhood in a higher key than that of mutual
aid: 'it begins in shared pain' (62). The idea of shared pain is, at least on the surface,
paradoxical because, as Shevek rightly says later, each person suffers his or her pain alone
(300). But Shevek is not talking about sharing the exact pain that the other person is
experiencing. He does not feel the pain of the burned man. He has instead learned that
all of us suffer alone in our pain all the time. It is the one thing we can be sure we will all
experience. And because we inevitably suffer necessary pain that no one can eliminate we
are brothers and sisters. The second passage comes from the speech that Shevek gives to
the workers rally in A-Io. The passage is rather tangled as it speeds from the brotherhood
of shared suffering to Shevek's frequently used figure of empty hands, to mutual aid, to
each person's being the revolution inside himself or hersel But within that stream of
thoughts he makes the following helpful remarks: 'We are brothers in what we share. In
pain ... in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because
we have had to learn it' (300). One expects that the bond of shared pain would include
hunger and poverty among its particulars. But the introduction of shared hope is some
thing of a surprise. It is characteristic of this novel that the idea of hope appears without
specifying an object (see p.348). But in this context it probably includes both the reduc
tion of all but the most necessary suffering and the reinforcing of community. In fact, the
creation of a truly anarchistic society, one that believes in permanent revolution, might
very well depend on the hope that issues from a common recognition of shared pain.
The third example involves the moment when Shevek is holding his daughter Sadik,
who feels alienated from her dorm mates. Both may be crying and both may be unable to
relieve the suffering of the other. But the scene does not end with them. Instead it is told
from Bedap's perspective as he walks away from the father and daughter. What he recog
nises is that the two are sharing something which he, as one without a partner, can only
share in part, 'the intimacy of pain' (370). Both suffer, the girl from abuse, alienation,
and shame, and the father from the knowledge of his share of responsibility for her pain
and his inabUity to help. That last type of suffering, the full recognition that in cases of
necessary pain one can do nothing to help the other, may be the most characteristic and
profound type of pain to be explored in this novel. But on the positive side of this situa
tion Bedap understands that neither suffers alone and that the bond between them can
only be strengthened by this intimacy of pain. So, too, in human society at large :
community and solidarity are deepened by the common condition of suffering.

The ethics of shared pain then creates a sense of solidarity felt within each indi
vidual member of the social unit. That inward feeling is not empathy ifby empathy we
mean that people must experience the same kind of pain as the other person. But if we
take the idea more broadly, the individual's experience of any pain not ameliorable by
mutual aid can provide an understanding of the suffering of others sufficient to say that
the ethics of shared pain centers on a form of generalised empathy. Unlike most under
standings of empathy, however, this one does not necessarily lead to social action. The
recognition of the universality of necessary pain instead acts within the person to tie her
to all other humans. The result is akin to that of watching a performance of King Lear.
Although Lear dies after experiencing intense suffering, we feel closer to him than to the
other characters because Shakespeare has taught us, among other things, that all of us
will experience pain and will be more tightly bonded with each other as a result. In this
respect, the novel presents a positive spin on a tragic view of life.
Shevek's theory of shared pain as the basis for human solidarity makes Kropotkin
seem almost naive by comparison. It is not that Kropotkin had not seen his own share of
pain, or felt it personally, for that matter. He endured stays in the Peter and Paul Prison
in St Petersburg and a French prison as well. But the pervasiveness and enormity of
suffering in Le Guin's novel demands a supplement to the ethics of mutual aid if the
anarchism of Anarres is going to handle the worst. That being said, Kropotkin would
understand the need for this revision, as he shows in the most memorable of his
examples of mutual aid in his contemporary society, the Lifeboat Association that
attempts to save those whose ships have foundered or sunk along the British coast. One
cannot help but be struck by the comments of one lifeboat crew survivor of an extraordi
narily heroic rescue attempt. It occurred during a snowstorm. After hours of listening to
the pleas for help from a ship grounded on a sandbar, the crews could not stand it
anymore. They manned the lifeboats and went out onto a dangerous sea, knowing full
well the risk they were running. Although one boat managed to save those on board the
ship, another boat capSized twice and a member of its crew drowned. One of the
survivors of the ill-fated boat commented that the worst part of the whole experience
was to watch his fellow crewmember drown and not be able to help him
(MutualAid
2006: 2 1 2-13). Kropotkin may have been trying to denne the heroism of those in such
voluntary and unpaid associations. But along the way he exposes the ultimate limits of
mutual aid - that even those risking their lives cannot all be saved. The story could have
come straight from Le Guin's novel. She would have known how to capitalise on this
opportunity to distinguish between the ethics of mutual aid and the even deeper ethics
of shared pain.
Shevek makes one further point on the ethics of shared pain that requires comment.
In the highly revealing passage in which the teenaged Shevek nrst tries to articulate his
sense of ethics, right after he defines the idea of necessary pain he provides a most
positive view of the results of inevitable suffering:
Daniel P. Jaeclde
And yet, I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding - this grasping after happi
ness, this fear of pain ... If instead of fearing it and
ing from it, one could ...
runn
get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that
suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases. I don't know how to say it. But
I believe that the reality - the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in
comfort and happiness - that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get
through it. If you can endure it all the way (60-6 1 ; ellipses are Le Guin's) .
Despite the promise of this passage, in the course of his moral education Shevek never
loses his sense of self Nor does he reach the point where the reality of pain is not pain.
But as he foresees, there may be something positive within the experience of pain,
although maybe not in the way he anticipates here. What emerges within pain is a
certain kind of joy that is most fully experienced in the bond of partnership. To that
bond we now tum.
THE ETHICS OF THE BOND

In an interview conducted in
1 980, six years after the publication of The Dispossessed, Le
Guin was asked about gender relations in the anarchist society within the novel. Her
response was interesting. She said that she grew up in 'a very closely pair-bonded family'
and went on to comment: 'this is, to some extent, still an ideal to me. Two people who
are really happy together is a lovely thing, and I guess I was interested in showing that.
And because I was trying to write a utopia, a happy place, a good place, I wanted a happy
couple in it' ( Mellor in Freedman
2008: 9).
It may be something of a surprise that a writer as concerned with feminism and

anarchism as Le Guin should present a rather traditional happy couple. But two things
need to be borne in mind. First, she does not mean to say that such coupling is the only
road to happiness. And second, the 'happy' couple of the novel, Takver and Shevek, are
only happy despite all kinds of suffering, including long separations and at times opposi
tion from their community. It is an enormously difficult happiness and one worth
examining in some detail in order to understand an important dimension of Le Guin's
thought on the ethics of interpersonal relationships.5
The core of the relationship between Takver and Shevek is partly defined by
Takver when the first time they are alone together Shevek asks her what she needs. She
calls it simply 'the bond': '"I need the bond", she said, "The real one. Body and mind
and all the years oflife. Nothing else. Nothing less'"
( 1 80). However inadequate this
statement may be as a definition Shevek immediately understands what she means, and
for the rest of their lives neither of them ever questions the notion of the bond or its
power over them. It is as if both of them had been waiting all their lives for the moment
in which the bond was created, and nothing could break it once it was formed. On one

level, the bond means that the couple has committed to sexual Sdelity, even though
their society places no value on it. On a second level, though, it means that they are
partners - the word used for this type of relationship - again despite the fact that their
society is not set up for partnering. Partnering includes lifelong loving each other, living
together when possible, having children for whom both partners take responsibility,
and creating the Anarresti equivalent of a home. It is the most complete and intense
relationship that either of the two partners could imagine.
Given the experiences ofTakver and Shevek in the novel, two features of their part
nership emerge as the most important. The Srst is loyalty. The kind ofloyalty that
Shevek values includes sexual 6delity but is not limited to it. On the contrary, it depends
on his whole view of time as both sequential and simultaneous, the General Temporal
Theory that he has created. One promises to another and then stays faithful to the
promise. Shevek recognises the full power of that idea only after the severe drought has
kept him from Takver and their daughter Sadik for four years. As he processes their
experience, he concludes as follows: 'It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of
the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of
past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no
good to be done without it' (335).
Loyalty achieves the miracle of simultaneity within sequence. It means that,
although time may drive ever forward, nevertheless the bond endures and thus provides a
form of signi6cant sameness within the difference. The past is maintained within the
bond, just as the future is assured. All moments of the bond, in that sense, are the same.
This endurance of the relationship is what gives it its value. At the same time it provides
human existence with its highest level of meaning.
For Shevek, it should be noted, loyalty is not limited to one's partner. It becomes
instead his standard for all interpersonal relationships. Throughout the novel, he has
difficulties with his mother but pure admiration for his father. The reason is that when
he was a child his mother left them to pursue her engineering career while his father
stuck with Shevek throughout. Although in the anarchist society of Anarres the action
of his mother was common and perhaps even to be expected, Shevek always thought of
her departure as a betrayal. Conversely, he saw his father's decision to stay with him as
praiseworthy, even ifhe did not think that all parents should do the same. Takver
explainS Shevek's position to Bedap in these terms:
She [Shevek's mother Rulag] left when he was two. The father stayed with him.
Nothing unusual, of course. Except Shev's feelings. He feels that he lost some
thing essential - he and the father both. He doesn't make a general principle out
of it, that parents should always keep the children, or anything. But the impor
tance loyalty has for him, it goes back to that, I think (364).
Daniel P. Jaeclde
1 72
It is as if Shevek wants it both ways with respect to family relationships.
In an anarchist
society, in which sexual relations are completely free, the relationships of parent-child
and husband-wife have no intrinsic power and certainly cannot be legislated. But the
two types of ties still have value for the most ethical person in the novel and so make a
powerful addition to the bonds of mutual aid and shared pain.
The other feature of the parmership between Takver and Shevek involves the idea of
home.
In fact, though, it may not be another feature but rather the same feature as
loyalty between parmers looked at in a different way. For the home that Takver and
Shevek share has nothing to do with owning a house together. Nor does it include an
extended family, since traditional families do not hold a high place in Anarresti society.
(We learn nothing, for example, ofTakver's parents.) But Takver and Shevek, and even
tually their children, form a home of an emotional kind. I say that this idea of home may
be similar to the loyalty between parmers because loyalty is best seen as the cause that
creates the effect of home. It is their mutual commitment to each other that allows the
idea of home to exist at all for them. As Shevek concludes soon after being reunited with
Takver after their four-year separation, without the bond between them one cannot
know what it is to come home
(334).
Much has been made of another passage in the novel about home, the one that
presents the paradox ofShevek's theoty of physics applied to personal life: 'You can go
home again, the General Temporal Theoty asserts, so long as you understand that home is
a place where you have never been'
(55). Without meaning to reduce the mystery of this
passage or what it reveals about time as both sequential and simultaneous, I would like to
add that home is only partly a matter of place in this novel, and place is not the most
imponant part. More often and more completely, home is an interpersonal relationship, or
a set of them.
In fact, with the possible exception ofShevek's return to Anarres at the end
of the novel, the most imponant instance of going home in the novel is Shevek's return to
Takver and Sadik after their four-year separation during the drought.
In that instance, he
literally goes to a place he has never been before, because Takver had moved to a remote
corner of Ananes during their separation. But it is no less a return home than ifShevek had
gone to his place of birth - more so, in fact. After a long period of intense suffering, made
all the worse by his longing for Takver and their daughter, he re-unites with his parmer and
thereby re-affirms the bond that has given so much meaning and direction to his life. His
relationship with Takver forms an ethical ground that allows the attainment of the highest
joy in life. As Shevek lies in bed shortly after his return to his family, he contemplates the
meaning of their mutual commitment even during the separation:
For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth ofTakver's sleep, it was joy
they were both after - the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also
evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be
fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home
(334).

This passage indicates the close connection between the ethics of suffering and the ethics
of the bond. In this case, enduring absence and evenrually going home are the signs that
one can go to a place where pain is overshadowed by joy. But it takes the bond with
another to create the home that gives full meaning to inevitable suffering. Only with
one's partner can one know the completeness of being that includes suffering without
privileging it. This is the ultimate statement of the meaning oflife in the novel, well
beyond the creation of a theory of time or an opening ofworlds. Those are important
parts oflife, perhaps, but they could not on their own bring the joy within suffering that
completes being.
INTERPERSONAL ETHICS AND ANARCHISM

Le Guin would never claim to be a moral philosopher, nor would she want to suggest
that the three layers of ethics reviewed in this paper present a coherent ethical system.
On the contrary, writing an engaging novel like
The Dispossessed places demands on an
author that defy the tidiness of philosophical system-building. That being said, it is also
true that Le Guin is recognised for her moral messages, especially when they are not
reducible to a single sentence that one can circulate as the thematic coin of the realm. In
the case of The Dispossessed, a one-sentence moral message would clearly be inappro
priate because the interpersonal ethics of the novel are too sophisticated for easy
reductionism. But at the same time the multi-layered ethics that emerges in the novel is
worth consideration because it provides viable answers to the questions of suffering and
partnership that supplement the ethical foundation of mutual aid.
Although mutual aid functions well as the guiding ethical principle of Kropotkin's
anarchism, it was never intended to eliminate suffering completely. As a result, even in
the most perfected anarchist sociery there would be an important element of suffering in
each human life. Le Guin is smart enough to know that to ignore suffering would be to
belie anarchism by painting too rosy a picture of the world it would create. Moreover,
she does not shrug and say that the pain is inevitable and therefore simply to be borne.
She instead incorporates it into a larger framework of solidarity and even joy. It may be
that Shevek's youthful theory of going through pain to the point that it is no longer pain
is not achievable. Anarres, after all, is not a naive utopia in which all achieve happiness.
However, at the very least suffering can bind human beings together in a community of
pain. At best one can attain the state that Shevek apparently reaches by novel's end, in
which suffering has become a necessary step on the way to the completeness of life.
If Le Guin addresses the issue of suffering, she also attends to the dyadic dimension
of ethics. By writing a novel in which the partnership between Takver and Shevek is an
integral part of the radically better world she is trying to achieve, Le Guin allows a space
for sexuality, love, loyalty, and home within the anarchist world of Anarres. There are
risks with this strategy, two of them very obvious. The first is that it might appear as if
Daniel P. Jaeckle
Le Guin does not believe a life can be complete without a lifelong bond with a partner.
Clearly, she values such bonds extremely highly, but she would never say that they are
essential for all people. The other risk is the possibility that the mandates of mutual aid
and those of the bond could come into opposition. What does one do when the partner
and society are both in a critical moment and need one's complete efforts ? Le Guin does
not provide an answer, and rightly so. Life is complex, the two ethical values were never
intended to be completely compatible, and one can only do in the moment what one
thinks is best. But when compared to the possibility ofjoy and a complete life, these
risks are hardly worth mentioning. For most human beings do not live between the
social and the individual without also feeling the need for intimate interpersonal rela
tionships. Le Guin's layering of ethics wisely addresses that third factor.
Before we conclude, it is important to address three principal objections to the
interpersonal ethics of The Dispossessed. The first concerns the elevation of cooperation
above competition in the presentation of mutual aid. For mutual aid to work effectively
on Anarres, individuals are not supposed to compete for scarce resources or goods. But
as the ever critical Le Guin reveals, both in practice and in theory competition has its
own claims to make. The novel shows not only how characters like Sabul accumulate
power if not possessions by competing with and co-opting others, but also how Shevek
himself competes with Sabul when he is forced to negotiate with him (Curtis
2005: 274-
75). The implication is that any society that tries to indoctrinate youth in such a way as
to eradicate competition altogether is bound to suffer from the return of the repressed in
a myriad of masked forms of competition.
In theory too competition demands its due
attention, as both Kropotkin and Le Guin themselves would admit. It is more realistic
therefore to show that some competition would survive in the most cooperative society.
But for Le Guin, as for Kropotkin, cooperation must be stronger than competition if
anarchism is to have a chance. And as long as the competition does not overwhelm coop
eration, its inclusion allows Le Guin to increase the level of credibility of the novel and
still answer social Darwinism by insisting on the priority of cooperation.
The second question concerns the brotherhood of shared pain. Leaving aside the
gender issues raised by the term 'btotherhood', some may see the community of shared
pain as being too passive. One is reminded of Bowring's comments on Le Guin's 'The
Ones Who Walked Away from Ornelas' (Bowring
1998: 35-36). In this famous story of
a utopian society made possible by the suffering of one child, the people who cannot
stand to live there after learning of the child's pain simply leave. But why, Bowring asks,
don't those same people instead try to help the suffering child? If Shevek were to assume
that the child's pain falls into his category of necessary suffering, he might respond that
some suffering is simply inescapable and so we had better make the most of it by
converting it into the foundation of a powerful social bond. Even though it is hard to
know what suffering cannot be helped in advance and in fact the motivating goal of a
successful anarchist society might be to try to reduce even that suffering which has tradi-

tionally been considered necessary, nevertheless Le Guin's realism includes the
inevitability of pain. It simply is not going to go away, no matter how optimistic one
might be about the future. And as long as it continues to exist, it makes perfect sense to
use it as the basis of a shared social bond.
The third question, that of the prominence given to the bond ofpartnership, has
long been a sore spot among critics of the novel (for example, Moylan 1986: 90- 1 20, and
Lefanu 1 989: 1 30-46). The relationship between Shevek and Takver appears to be too
much like traditional martiage to appeal to those for whom conventional heterosexuality
and monogamy are powerful forms of oppression. Although no response is likely to
dispel all concerns about the partnership bond in the novel, still a case can be made that
it successfully operates on multiple levels. First, it strengthens the novel's premise that all
genuine ethics rely on a theory of time. Le Guin cannot completely show the power of
the complementarity between sequence and succession without revealing one version of
that complementarity in the loyalty and promise of the partnership between Takver and
Shevek. Their continuity over changing circumstances is a potent image of the unified
theory of time that Shevek develops. Second, the bond creates the possibility of home.
Characters like Bedap appear to drift except to the extent that they attach themselves to
the solidity of the bond between Takver and Shevek ( 188-89). Perhaps Le Guin's point is
that without some bonding mechanism freedom can easily lapse into loneliness and
alienation. Third, for some characters at least, the bond allows sexuality to retain its
meaning. Although the eventual loss of pleasure in promiscuous sex does not affect
everyone on Anarres (245), it certainly affects Takver and Shevek (179). They want
more than pleasure, and even more than children. They want the sex to confirm their
loyalty to each other. Thus, while those for whom traditional marriage seems to be the
very symbol of oppression may not be persuaded by the salutary effects of the partner
ship bond that the novel features, it is hard to deny that the bond is integral to the
embodied anarchist ethics that Le Guin presents.
In closing, let me add one further point about the ideological underpinnings of the
ethics in the novel. In the wake of poststructural, postmodern, and indeed postanarchist
definitions of new ethical positions, the fact that the interpersonal ethics of The
Dispossessed relies on a notion of the integrated subject may make the novel seem anti
quated. But it is not yet time to dismiss the novel as no longer relevant. I would defend
its presupposition of the integrated subject on the grounds recently sketched by David
Graeber. According to Graeber, in order to counter the alienation that seems inevitable
in capitalist society, one should theorise not only an integrated subject but an imagina
tion that creates and maintains reality. The fear that one person's imagined reality is
another's worst form of oppression can be countered by the paradox that Graeber articu
lates so skilfully: 'One must be able to imagine oneself and others as integrated subjects
in order to be able to produce beings that are in fact endlessly multiple; imagine some
sort of coherent, bounded "society" in order to produce that chaotic, open-ended
Daniel P. Jaeckle
network of social relations that actually exists' (Graeber 2009: 526). The approach to the
subject to be found in Graeber's musings, I would argue, is precisely the kind that under
lies Le Guin's novel and allows her to create Shevek's ethical stance. If The Dispossessed
continues to attract readers, it is no doubt in part because its ethics answers their alien
ation. Of course, that this ethical layering is not the final answer to contemporary
alienation will surprise no one, least of all Le Guin hersel Nevertheless, the novel
continues to exemplify a most creative ethical imagination and to stimulate renewed
consideration of what would constitute an optimal anarchist ethics.
I wish to thank Laurence Davisfor his careful suggestions on how to improve this essay.
Daniel P. Jaeclde is
Professor of English at the University of Houston-Victoria. Recent

publications include an article on embodied anarchism in Ursula K. Le Guin's The
Dispossessed and a study of the Ranter Jacob Bauthumley's pamphlet The Light and Dark
Sides ofGod. He is currently writing an essay on Peter Kropotkin's 'Anarchist Morality'.
Email: jaeckled@uhv.edu
NOTES
1 . For a sense of the range of readings of the anarchism in the novel, see V. Urbanowicz,
'Personal and Political in The Dispossessea. Science-Fiction Studies, 5 (1978), pp. l l 017; P. E. Smith, II, 'Unbuilding Walls: Human Nature and the Nature of Evolutionary
and Political Theory in The Dispossessea. in J. D. Olander, and M. H. Greenberg, (eds)
Ursula K. Le Guin (New York, 1 979), pp.77-96; J. Moore, 'An Archaeology of the
Future: Ursula Le Guin and Anarcho-Primitivism', Foundation, 63 (1995), pp.32-39;
the three essays in the anarchist section ofL. Davis and P. Stillman, (eds), The New
Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (lanham, MD, 2005): D.
Sabia, 'Individual and Community in Le Guin's The Dispossessea, pp. 1 1 1-28; M.
Tunick, 'The Need for Walls: Privacy, Community, and Freedom in The Dispossessea.
pp. 1 29-47; and W. Elliott, 'Breaching Invisible Walls: Individual Anarchy in The
Dispossessea. pp. 149-64; L. Call, 'Posrmodern Anarchism in the Works of Ursula K.
LeGuin: SubStance 36 (2007), pp.87- 1 05; and D. Jaeckle, 'Embodying Anarchy in
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessea. Utopian Studies, 20 (2009), pp.7S-9S.
2. Among the many general discussions of ethics in the novel, see E. Cummins Cogell,
'Taoist Configurations: "The Dispossessed": in J. De Bolt, (ed.) Ursula K. Le Guin:
Voyager to Inner Lands and Outer Space (Porr Washington, NY, 1979), pp. l 53-79; M.
T. Tavormina, 'Physics as Metaphor: The General Temporal Theory in The
Dispossessed: Mosaic: AJournalfor the Comparative Study oj'Literature, 13 ( 1980),
pp.5 1-62; J. Bland, 'Up against the Wall: The Ethical Limits of Rational Objectivity:
77 1
Science Fiction,
5 ( 1 983), pp.96- 1 0 1 ; J. W. Bittner, 'Chronosophy, Aesthetics, and
Ethics in Le Guin's
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia: in E. S. Rabkin, M . H.

Greenberg, andJ. D. Olander, (eds) No Place Else: Explorations ofUtopian and
Dystopian Fiction (Carbondale, 1 983), pp.244-70; and T. Burns, Political Theory,
Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature: Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed
(Lanham, MD, 2008), pp. 1 8 1 -2 1 5.
3. On at least four different occasions Le Guin talks about having read Kropotkin in
The Wind's Twelve Quarters (New York, 1 975),

The Language ofthe Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. S. Wood, ed.
preparing to write the novel. See

p.232;
(New York, 1979), p. l l l ; 'An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin: in L. McCaffery,
Across the Wounded Galaxies (Chicago, 1 990), p. 1 66; and C. Bigelow and].
McMahon, 'Science Fiction and the Future of Anarchy: Conversations with Ursula K.
Le Guin:
Oregon Times (December 1 974) , pp.24-29.
4. For other discussions of suffering in the novel. see B. ]. Bucknall,
Ursula K. Le Guin.
(New York, 1981), pp. 1 l4- 1 5 ; S. Finch. 'Paradise Lost: The Prison at the Heart ofLe
Guin's Utopia, Extrapolation, 26 ( 1 985), pp.240-48; and V. Urbanowicz, 'Personal
and Political in
The Dispossessed: Science-Fiction Studies, 5 ( 1 978), p. l l 5.
5. Of the many discussions of the bond between Takver and Shevek, the following have
most informed this discussion: D. M. Hassler, 'The Touching of Love and Death in
Ursula Le Guin with Comparisons to Jane Austen: University ofMississippi Studies in
English, 4 ( 1 983), pp. 1 68-77; M. Tunick, 'The Need for Walls: Privacy. Community,
and Freedom in The Dispossessed: in L. Davis and P. Stillman, (eds) The New Utopian
Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (Lanham, MD, 2005), pp. 1 40-43; and
T. ]. Remington, 'The Other Side of Suffering: Touch as Theme and Metaphor in Le
Guin's Science Fiction Novels: in ]. D. Olander, and M. H. Greenberg, (eds)
I.e Guin (New York,
Ursula K.
1 979), pp. 1 7 1 -77.
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anarchy: conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin'.
Oregon Times 24-29.
Bittner, James W. 1983. 'Chronosophy, aesthetics, and ethics in Le Guin's
The Dispossessed:
An Ambiguous Utopia: In Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D.

Olander, (eds) No Place Else: Explorations of Utopian and Dystopian Fiction pp.24470. Carbondale. Southern Illinois University Press.
Bland, Jay 1 983. 'Up against the wall: the ethical limits of rational objectivity:
Science
Fiction 5(3): 96- 1 0 1 .

Bowring, Finn 1 998. 'An unencumbered freedom: Ursula K. Le Guin's
The Dispossessed:
Anarchist Studies 6( 1 ) : 21 -37.
Bucknall, Barbara ]. 198 1 . Ursula K. Le Guin. New York, Frederick Unger.
Daniel P. Jaeckle
Burns, Tony 2008. Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature: Ursula K Le
Guin and The Dispossessed. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.
Call, Lewis 2007. 'Postmodern anarchism in the works of Ursula K. LeGuin: SubStance
36(2): 87- 1 05.
Cogell, Elizabeth Cummins 1 979. 'Taoist configurations: 'The Dispossessed": In Joe De
Bolt, (ed.) Ursula K Le Guin: voyager to Inner Lands and Outer Space pp. 1 53-79.
Port Washington, NY, Kennikat.
Curtis, Claire P. 2005. 'Ambiguous choices: skepticism as a grounding for utopia'. In
Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman, (eds) The New Utopian Politics ofUrsula K Le
Guin's The Dispossessed pp.265-82. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.
Elliott, Winter 2005. 'Breaching invisible walls: individual anarchy in The Dispossessed: In
Laurence Davis, and Peter Stillman, (eds) The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K Le
Guin's The Dispossessed pp. 149-64. Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.
Finch, Sheila 1 985. 'Paradise lost: the prison at the heart ofLe Guin's utopia'.
Extrapolation 26(3): 240-48.
Graeber, David 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh, AK Press.
Hassler, Donald M. 1 983. 'The touching oflove and death in Ursula Le Guin with
comparisons to Jane Austen: University ofMississippi Studies in English 4: 168-77.
Jaeckle, Daniel 2009. 'Embodying anarchy in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed:
Utopian Studies 20( 1 ) : 75-95.
Kropotkin, Peter 1 924; rpt. 1947. Ethics: Origin and Development. Tr. Louis S. Friedland
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-- 1 902; rpt. 2006. MutualAid: A Factor ofEvolution. N.p., Bibliobazaar.
Lefanu, Sarah 1 989. Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1 974; rpt. 1 994. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York,
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-- 1975. The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York, Harper & Row.
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Wood, (ed.) New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons.
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Galaxies pp. 1 5 1 -75. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Mellor, Ann 1980. 'Ursula Le Guin: In Carl Freedman, (ed.) 2008. Conversations with
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primitivism: Foundation 63: 32-39.
Moylan, Tom 1 986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination.
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Sabia. Dan 2005. 'Individual and community in Le Guin's The Dispossessea. In Laurence
Davis. and Peter Stillman. (eds) The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's The
Dispossessed pp. I I I -28. Lanham. MD. Lexington Books.
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Tavormina. M. Teresa 1980. 'Physics as metaphor: the general temporal theory in The
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.
Louisa Sarah Bevington's Letters to Ethel Rolt Wheeler: A Catechism in Communist Anarchy
Quintus, John A
pg. 80
Anarchist Studies 20.1 2012 ISSN 0967 3393

www. lwbooks.co.uk/jou malslanarchiststudiesl
Lou isa Sarah Bevington 's Letters to

Ethel Rolt Wheeler: A Catech ism in
Com m unist Anarchy
John A. Quintus
Although not a household name either in her own time or in ours, Louisa Sarah
Bevington
( 1 845-95) was a writer who gained some recognition in late nineteenth
century England for both her poetry and her political writings, and is currently enjoying
a renaissance of interest - particularly for her essays on anarchism, a collection of which
was published in
20 1 0.1 This article presents, for the first time, an important series of
letters Bevington wrote in the last two years of her life.

The recipient of the correspondence was Ethel Rolt Wheeler
( 1865-1 958), an
aspiring author. In the letters, Bevington, an avowed revolutionary, explains in detail her
commitment to anarchy in an effort to persuade her younger friend to join what
Bevington describes as a gtowing and vibrant movement against the repressions of state
and church. The sixteen letters are now part of Mark Samuels Lasner's collection of
Victorian materials on loan to the Morris Library of the University of Delaware, and have
not been published. They bear dates from
dated in
1 893 and 1 895. Oddly, there are no letters

1 894 in the collection, probably because they are lost, since it seems unlikely that
the correspondence took a year's hiatus. Wheeler's letters to Bevington are also not extant,
although she obviously wrote several to the author of many essays and pamphlets that
shaped the definition of anarchism in late nineteenth-century Britain. Indeed, Bevington's
letters echo the arguments made in her published pieces as she defends her generally
(though not exclusively) non-violent approach to uprooting a system she finds unnatural,
devoted solely to Mammon, and inimical to human development.
Bevington's letters to Wheeler present a number of editorial challenges. Several are
not dated. Two in the Samuels Lasner collection are not addressed to Wheeler, and two
are not by Bevington. One of these two is a brief, discursive note railing against govern
ment oppression. It ends with a signature that is illegible, although the French closing -
' Vive l'anarchie!' is clear enough. The last letter in the grouping is from George
Lawrence, Bevington's comrade and housemate, informing Wheeler of Bevington's
death.
Louisa Sarah Bevington's Letters to Ethel Rolt Wheeler

8d
Another problem is Bevington's handwriting, which is often difficult to decipher.
Her cramped style was deSigned to fill each page of her octavo paper with as many words
as possible. She wrote on the margins, and occasionally she amended the letters with red
ink, inserting new observations or commenting on her own remarks. There is, in effect,
virtually no white space on the letters.
What I propose here is not to offer the text of the letters, but to explore their
content in terms of Bevington's belief in the wisdom of anarchy, her thoughts on other
major figures in the movement, and her responses to Wheeler's correspondence. Rolt
Wheeler went on to be a prolific, successful writer, the author of seven volumes of verse
1903 and 1 937, and a contributor to periodicals such as the Dome,

the Academy, Harper's, and the Theosophical Review. She devoted much of her energies
to London's Irish Literary Society (founded in 1891 by her friend w.B. Yeats and
published between
others), and was also an ardent supporter of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.
But, despite Bevington's urgings, she did not become a communist or an anarchist.
LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON

Louisa Sarah Bevington was born into a well-to-do Quaker family on
18
May
1 845, at
St. John's Hill, Battersea. She gtew up in comfortable as well as intellectual surroundings,
the eldest of eight children. She began writing poetry at an early age, publishing her fist
1 876 under the name of Arbor Leigh. Her second volume,

Poems, Lyrics and Sonnets, appeared in 1 882 under her own name. Louisa's father had
book of poetry, Key-Notes, in
encouraged her to steep herself in nature's laws and appreciate all living things, and refer
ences to nature occur not only in her poetry, but in Bevington's political essays as well as
in her letters to Wheeler. That which Bevington opposes can be seen from her perspec
tive as 'unnatural'.2
Bevington moved to Germany (she was fluent in both French and German) in
1 883
and married Ignatz Felix Guggenberger, a painter, in that year. Her going abroad and
marrying a German artist suggest a degree of non-conformity, and Bevington's disdain
for government control probably took stronger shape in Bavaria, as is evidenced by her
1 887 essay, 'Dogs in Germany: (The health of dogs is rigidly managed in Germany; the
health of people is not.) Bevington left both her husband - and Germany - after seven
1 890. She soon became a known personality in the

The Torch, The Commonweal
(which Bevington abbreviates as 'Weal' in her letters to Wheeler), Liberty, and Freedom
years and returned to London in
anarchist movement as she published a number of pieces in
- as well as other journals associated with communist or progressive thought. She
Common-Sense Country, in 1 890, and another, An Anarchist's

Manifesto, appeared in 1 895, along with a small book of political verse, Liberty Lyrics.3
published a pamphlet,
Unfortunately, Bevington was never able to accomplish fully what she set out to do.
Her letters to Wheeler often mention her health, which was so fragile that on many and
John A. Quintus
1 82
long occasions she was prevented from working. She died on
28 November, 1 895, of
edema and heart failure with a host of proposed projects uncompleted. The funeral was
attended by many of her comrades, including Helen and Olivia Rossetti (daughters of
William Michael Rossetti and nieces of Dante Gabriel and Christina), who edited
The
Torch; and Prince Peter Kropotkin. Her only brother, Alexander, also attended in order
to represent the family, although by the time of Bevington's death her espousal of
atheism and anarchy had alienated her parents and siblings, and thus Alexander's
presence was largely proforma. In keeping with Bevington's instructions, the funeral
ceremony did not include any religious observation.
According to Jackie Dees Dominque, who is the most authoritative Bevington
scholar nowadays, Alexander destroyed the letters he found in Bevington's house after
her death. This act explains the absence of Wheeler's letters. Moreover, if Bevington kept
copies of her own letters or somehow recorded what she had written and to whom she
wrote, then Alexander's destruction of the correspondence makes the letters in the
Samuels Lasner collection especially valuable.4
THE CORRESPONDENCE
In a 25 July letter of 1 895, written some four months before her death, Bevington
advises Wheeler that the way to change peoples' minds is to 'Educate, educate; don't
preach, don't proselytize, don't dictate: And yet the overall purpose of Bevington's corre
spondence with Wheeler is to convince the younger woman that anarchy represents the
natural evolution of human society and should be embraced by all thinking individuals.
In an 8 June letter of 1 893, Bevington writes that she was 'sorry' that Ethel was 'still in
the dreary preliminary stage of social inquiry', having 'not yet found any satisfactory
solution to all the social problems that seem to press more heavily day by day'. Bevington
adds: 'You will see the light sooner or later:
The tone here is more haughty than is usually the case in the letters. Bevington's
language indicates that Wheeler was not easily persuaded, and raised issues in her own
letters that elicited defenses from her friend. Yet the women clearly liked and valued one
another. Wheeler visited Bevington on at least one occasion, and Bevington's visit to
Wheeler in April of 1 893 is cited in the letters. They also exchanged photographs as
remembrances of one another. Moreover, Bevington made an interesting request that
Wheeler obviously did not honour, probably out of admiration for the older writer: the
'hazy hardly grammatical rambling 1 have covered these sheets with 1 will ask you to
destroy, after getting any entertainment you can out of it ! '
In a 30 November 1 893 letter Bevington expresses her regret that Wheeler was
'giving up that post in the High School', and writes that she cannot aid Wheeler in her
efforts to publish: '1 wish 1 could help in the matter of editors
I know no editors
except those who pay their contributors nothing'. Other personal comments in

83 1
Bevington's letters relate to her friends George Lawrence and his wife, Alice; to
Bevington's living accommodations, and to her health. In the main, the letters are
devoted to Bevington's thoughts about the future of the communist-anarchist movement
in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, while she focuses her attacks on 'Pope and
Kaiser' and the disgraces of capitalism. But a 1 6 July 1 895 letter offers an intimate note
that perhaps explains her leaving Guggenberger. She writes that her Mother, obviously
concerned about her daughter's deteriorating health, 'wants [me] to spend winter in the
Tyrol on condition that I do not attempt a disturbed & disturbing home-life with my
rather impossible, legalized lord & master: Bevington did not tolerate being controlled
by anyone, including her husband. And her marriage had become simply another form
of tyranny.
On Violence
It is possible that the letters of 1 894 have disappeared because of the inflammatory
events of that year, about which Bevington and Wheeler must have exchanged views.
Anarchists' bomb attacks in Barcelona (7 November 1 893) and Paris ( 1 2 February
1 894) killed and wounded scores of people and preceded the 1 5 February 1 894
Greenwich Park explOSion in London, which killed only the bomb's handler, Martial
Bourdin, a young Frenchman. H.B. Samuels, editor of The Commonweal, praised in
particular the Barcelona blast, saying 'we expect no mercy from these men (the capi
talist victims) and we must show them none'.S Londoners were especially on edge,
fearing the European trend would move to Great Britain, as had a number of
Continental anarchists who sought refuge from persecution in their home countries.
And incendiary remarks like Samuels' only made matters worse in the eyes of the estab
lished.
Bevington knew Samuels well, but her view of him apparently soured after she
learned from Samuels' wife that the editor had provided Bourdin with the 'chemical'
bomb he carried and encouraged him to detonate the device in Greenwich Park. The
bomb itselfwas too small to do much material damage; no one believed then (or
believes now) that the Greenwich Observatory was Bourdin's target. In an undated
letter to Wheeler, Bevington mentions that 'Samuels came to my house and described
bomb making', so she could easily associate Samuels with the Greenwich detonation.
But then Louisa did not care much for Samuels' wife either, noting in an April
1 893 letter to Wheeler that she is 'a somewhat ill-tempered and unusually small
minded wife, who is dead against the cause to which he [Samuels] has dedicated his
life'. In any event, Samuels eventually resigned from the editorship of The Commonweal,
a job which in Bevington's words to Wheeler 'devolved upon me:
Despite being mangled by the bomb he carried, Bourdin lived another thirty
minutes and was conscious and vocal, but he revealed nothing about himself or his
John A. Quintus
mission. The whole affair became ' The Greenwich Mystery', and the source ofJoseph
Conrad's
The Secret Agent ( 1 907), which argues that Bourdin
(who was Samuels'
brother-in-law) was 'set up' by a double agent - i.e., Samuels, who then becomes a
traitor to the anarchist cause.6 Conrad does not use Bourdin's or Samuels' names and
was not even in the U.K. when the event occurred (he learned about it from Ford
Madox Ford, who was a first cousin of the Rossetti sisters) , but his suggestion that
the movement had been infiltrated by spies and traitors was something Bevington
believed at the time. To be sure, Conrad's novel underscores the self-destructiveness
of the anarchist movement as literally represented by Bourdin's death. The
Greenwich Park explosion led the London police ro raid the Autonomie Club, the
anarchists' club, as it were, where Bevington often lectured. They found nothing ro
incriminate anyone, but the raid carried the message that the authorities intended to
be aggressive in their efforts ro prevent what we today would call 'terrorist' attacks in
the capital city.
Thus it is possible that the Bevington-Wheeler correspondence of 1 894 was
destroyed in order ro remove damaging information, but Bevington's remark about
Samuels' description of bomb making is nonetheless in one of the surviving letters.
Bevington addresses the issue of anarchism and violence in her correspondence with
Wheeler as well as in several published articles. Her approach to the subject is multifac
eted and complex. She deplores the ' bomb-scare' in an
8 June 1 895 letter to Wheeler
because it allows the popular press to attack all anarchists as potential killers. She claims
the Central News Agency in London bribed a comrade with 20 to plant a bomb in a
London theater. 'These frights [are] designed to keep all your minds away from what it
[authority] fears:
The Idea: She also faults the 'inquiSitional torture against anarchists in
Spain' following the Barcelona attack. Further, Bevington employs a strong offense as her
defense, arguing especially in 'Dynamitism'
( 1 895), and 'Anarchism and Violence' ( 1 1
(24 June 1 893), An Anarchist's Maniflsto

1 896 posthumous) that the evils
November
of capitalism have killed countless more people than all the anarchists' bombs put
together. She says that slum housing, unregulated mining, badly maintained vessels,
inadequate sanitation (among other causes) are the real killers of humanity.
Bevington is careful in her letters to Wheeler not to dwell on the subject of
violence, most likely because Wheeler voiced concern in her letters over the use of
extreme measures to achieve a goal. Bevington observes in a 20 February
1893 letter that
'although anarchists are revolutionaries, some are opposed to the taking oflives or the
taking of anything ' Yet while she never unequivocally endorses the use of violence,
Bevington nevertheless can understand why some men resort to explosives in order to
try to remove a system that is so entrenched, so solid that only an eruption can serve to
shake its foundations. Thus Bevington does not approve of violence, yet she does not
explicitly condemn it either. Mainly she says that it gets in the way of appreciating the
real aims of anarchy.

65 1
On Christianity and religion

Although anarchism was her essential creed, Bevington writes occasionally about
religion in her letters to Wheeler and mentions Jesus several times. She also names
prominent Christian Anarchists with approval: Leo Tolstoy, John C. Kenworthy (an
English biographer of Tolstoy), and Edward Carpenter; but she always distinguishes the
individual, Jesus, from the church and clergy that disseminate Jesus' message. She also
writes in a 30 April 1893 letter that 'Anarchism is, in the very highest and truest sense, a
religion; its influence on the lives that accept it is religious throughout; that is, binding
the life and all its actions and the soul to a cause that is more than one's personal own:
'Christ (so called)' she writes in the June 1 895 letter 'was absolutely right, every time. No
wonder (the Romish) State and (the Jewish) Church conspired to execute him'.
Bevington had intended to write a 'booklet' entitled 'Jesus and his Creed: but that was
one of the many projects ill health precluded. She does quote with approval a speaker at
one of the many anarchist lectures she attended as saying: 'Christ's doctrine and ours are
much the same; Anarchists are about to fulfill the predictions ofJesus'. Perhaps
Wheeler's Irish Catholic background served to elicit some of Bevington's favourable
comments on Jesus.
But the church, as an instrument of repression, is a different matter for Bevington.
In an 1 895 letter she writes that 'the priests, clergy & so on have to live under the system
with the politician, the capitalist, the prostitute, the soldier, the royalty, the lawyer, and
every other parasite'. Further, 'There is no constitutional remedy for the world's woes.
That is the truth which the politicians and clerics are feeling today. Their position is a
sad one. They are doomed not to be honest.' In the same letter Bevington uses an expres
sion which she repeats (less personally and passionately) in An Anarchist's Manifesto: 'Oh
Ethel, Satan can not ever ever "cast out Satan": This sentiment is repeated in Bevington's
essays, namely, that neither the government nor the church can reform itself: hence the
necessity of completely discarding both.
On revolutionary hope and utopia

'It is bitter work' Bevington writes in a 10 February 1 895 letter 'waiting for the awak
ening to spread deep and far enough for the Big Move, yet perfect hope sweetens the
bitterness'. In one of her last letters to Wheeler, Bevington mentions health and other
problems yet still exudes: 'But the days are bright, & friends are plenty; and work is
claimed; and the great splendid certainty (so short a distance ahead) seems to make it
more or less immaterial whether one will live to see its century or not'. Indeed,
throughout the correspondence Bevington is optimistic about the ultimate victory of
anarchism, noting 'We are many thousand strong in every corner of the civilized world,
and all in communication with one another ... To "hear" us means death to government
John A. Quintus
1 86
and death to Mammon in whose interests alone government exists'. She even claims 'the
barracks in France & Germany are perfect hotbeds of anarchy'.
Bevington writes in the June
1 895 letter that 'the Idea moves - riding the crest of a
great tidal wave By God, she moves ! Take note: the over-ripe and putrescendy decaying
condition of the preceding barbaric age which, by means of the barbarian idea
Government has a fixity on the necks, hearts
& souls of a ceaselessly progressing
humanity of that crude institution of savagery, "property": Still, Bevington maintains

that mankind is evolving just as nature evolves, and will eventually achieve the enviable
state of absolute individual freedom. 'We
know the cause will be won'.
Just what is to replace property, government, laws, currency (and so on) is not made
clear in Bevington's utopian writings, even if the aim of the movement is well defined:
'Under anarchy alone will there ever be peace, order,
& harmony in every department of
human life'. Her goals include 'the letting go of effete appendages - the fostering of
nascent life-ward novelties & expansions of human nature: Further, 'the day will come
when we shall know ourselves for what we are - neither good nor bad, but the actual
children of our planet'.
Bevington admits in her
25 July 1895
(and last) letter to Wheeler that 'Critics think
we're too optimistic about human nature'. Nevertheless, she is firm in her belief that
human beings can and will change, especially if they are allowed to do so.
In the April
1 893 letter Bevington describes the future for her movement:

Voluntary cooperation is the keynote of anarchist society ... That is anarchy. The
right thing, the fit thing, the happy thing, the free thing everywhere The basal
idea of Anarchism itself [ is] Freedom. Room for nature. No limit on anybody's
individual life the gladly conceded liberty of individuality accorded to each by
all, and to all by each.
This emphasis on personal liberty and self-realisation is reminiscent of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and his concept of self reliance, and Bevington mentions Emerson in some of
the letters with unequivocal approval. 'The whole of out idea', she writes, 'is in
Emerson'. Bevington also mentions William Morris in the letters, noting in a
February
1 893 letter that 'he
20
[Morris] too is an anarchist, but for some reason best
known to himself does not make use of the term'. In another letter she reviews a
lecture by Morris and observes that he 'said a great many good things but all the same
his intellect is far from being as clear or is as capacious, or his insight as deep as our
Kropotkin's'. But she agrees with Morris's condemnation of Victorian life when he
'described existing society as a miserable
laissez-foire muddle,
upheld by coercion and
smothered by corruption''?
Yet Morris's advocacy of socialism is rejected by Bevington in her letters to Wheeler.
She does not agree with a social or group construct to replace the current evils of govem-
Louisa Sarah Bevingtons Letters to Ethel Rolt Wheeler

ment and capitalism. The Socialist League, the Social Democrats, the 'state socialists or
collectivists or Fabians' are taking the wrong approach, she argues, and their direction
will result in 'Law here there and everywhere but Freedom nowhere'. Bevington prefers
the 'Individualist's camp' represented by Herbert Spencer and others who believe that
only through individual awareness, personal evolution and self reliance can the dictates
of society be eliminated. Socialism as an ordered, state-run enterprise is as anathema ro
Bevington as capitalism. Of course, Morris had quit the Socialist League in 1 890, chiefly
because it had been co-opted by anarchists; nevertheless, Bevington does not endorse the
SL, even ifit had become a sounding board for some of her anarchist comrades.
On Anarchy
The definition of anarchy from the Greek roots is 'without order/rule/authority: and it
is this definition that Bevington shapes and broadens in her letters to Rolt Wheeler as
well as in her essays. She wants people to know what the causes of poverty and suffering
really are, and she wants people to appreciate the benefits of living without institutions
that circumsctibe human behaviour in order to achieve power and wealth. Bevington
wants to disassociate the word 'anarchy' from the popular perception that the term
implies chaos and mayhem, and through her many efforts remove the negative connota
tion of the word while emphasising its positive import.
Whatever one thinks of Bevington's beliefs and assertions, one cannot help admiring
her determination and passion. Nor can one fault her criticism of the failures of capi
talism, particularly as applied to late-Victorian Britain, the historical context in which
she worked.
Matters would change substantially after the close of World War I, but the outcome
(new labour laws, new unions, women's suffrage, the wholesale dismantling of royal rule
in many countries) would still not have satisfied Bevington's vision of a classless society
composed of realised individuals whose lives are free from all forms of oppression and
whose universe embraces the complete liberation of body and soul.
John Allen Q.uintus was born in Washington, DC in 1 943. He is an Honors graduate of

UNC-Chapel Hill, holds masters degrees from Harvard University and the University
of Virginia, and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware. Mr. Quintus entered the
Foreign Service in 1 980 afrer having taught at George Mason University, Louisiana State
University, and the University of Delaware. He has published several articles on British
and American literature, US Naval history, American history, and education. He has
taught at the University of Delaware after retiring from the State Department in 2005.
Email: jquintus@udel.edu
John A. Quintus
1 88
ENDNOTES
1 . The CoUected Essays ofLouisa Sarah Bevington was edited by Jackie Dees Dominque
and published by Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints at Ann Arbor in 2010. Dominque's
Introduction to the collection is a helpful guide to Bevington's views on church and
state. Dominque has also eliminated the typos and other irregularities that often
appear in the original publications. Other recent books that include Bevington's
poetry as well as some commentary about her are Nineteenth-Century 1#Jmen Poets,
edited by Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow (Clarendon Press, 1 996); The
Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry, edited by Linda K. Hughes (Cambridge,
20 10); and F. Elizabeth Gray's Christian and I!yric Tradition in Victorian 1#Jmens
Poetry (Routledge, 20 1 0).
2. A biographical account of Bevington's life is found in the Spring, 2006 issue of
Organize! Available on the Lib.com site http://libcom.orglhistory/bevington-Iouisa
sarah- 1 845-1 895.
3. Bevington's work is accessible at the Victorian Women Writers Project: Common Sense
Country http://webapp 1.d1ib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view ?docld=VAB7040; An
Anarchist Manifesto http://webappl.d1ib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view ?docld=VAB701 3 ;
Liberty Lyrics http://webapp l.d1ib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view ?docld=VAB7095.
4. Bevington exchanged letters with Robert Browning in 1 882. Browning wrote to offer
praise for Bevington's 1 882 book of poetry, and his letter, according to Jackie Dees
Dominque, is one of the few to escape Alexander's fire.
5. For more detailed information on H.B. Samuels' career, see www.libcom.org.
6. Dominque discusses the Greenwich bomb accident and Samuels' role in it, as well as
the disclosures that Samuels' wife apparently made to Bevington. But the account of
what actually happened is still somewhat murky. Bevington makes no specific mention
of the bombing in her letters to Wheeler.
7. Curiously, Bevington cites a speech that Morris gave on 1 9 February in Kelmscott
House to the Hammersmith Socialist Society, which he founded after abandoning the
Socialist League. In fact, Morris had eschewed anarchy as well as the SL by the time of
the speech Bevington describes. But he had not stopped criticising British materialism.
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism1

McKay, Iain
pg. 89
Anarchist Studies 20.1 2012
ISSN 0967 3393
www.lwbooks.co.uk/journalslanarchiststudiesl
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism

and Marxism1
lain McKay
This article is a response to Ralph Darlington's essay 'Syndicalism and the influence tif
Anarchism in France, Italy and Spain' (AS 1 7(2), 2009) and was originally planned as
part ofa debate. Unfortunately, Ralph Darlington was unable to participate.
ABSTRACT
In the AS special issue on syndicalism, Ralph Darlington seeks to downplay anarchist

influence on syndicalism while also suggesting mat Marxism was one of its core ideolog
ical elements. He ignores both the more obvious influence ofBakunin on me syndicalist
tradition and that Marx and Engels explicitly rejected the syndicalist ideas expounded by
libertarians in the First International. The supposed conceptions syndicalism is claimed
to have inherited from Marxism can all be found in the revolutionary anarchist tradi
tion. Rather than syndicalist ideas being inherited from Marxism, they arose from a large
anarchist movement in the 1 860s and subsequently influenced a wing of Marxism
decades later.
Keywords: anarchism, syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolution, unionism, Marxism,
8akunin, Marx
me anarchists ... do not seek to constitute, and invite the working men not to
constitute, political parties in the parliaments. Accordingly, since the foundation
of the International Working Men's Association in 1 864-66, mey have endeav
oured to promote their ideas directly amongst the labour organisations and to
induce those unions to a direct sttuggle against capital, without placing their
faith in parliamentary legislation.
Peter Kropotkin, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1 9 1 ()2
lain McKay
1 90
INTRODUCTION
Ralph Darlington's article in AS 17
(2)
tries to defend a provocative assertion in a
journal dedicated to studying anarchism, namely that 'the traditional assumption ... that
syndicalism was simply an outgrowth of anarchism would be an over-simplification'
(p.30).3 He does so by presenting two main lines of argument. Firstly, that 'Marxism also
influenced' syndicalism 'significantly to varying degrees: going so far as to list it as one of
its 'three core ideological elements' (p.46) alongside anarchism and revolutionary
unionism. Secondly, that in 'many other countries where syndicalist movements also
flourished (for example, Britain, Ireland or America), anarchist influence was only of
marginal consequence' (p.30).
Both claims, I would argue, are deeply flawed. The first is simply an assertion, with
no supporting evidence, and ignores not only the more obvious influence ofBakunin's
revolutionary anarchism but also Marx and Engels' explicit rejection of key syndicalist
ideas raised by libertarians in the International Working Men's Association (IWMA). It
also stands at odds with a well-established scholarly literature that, while admitting the
affinities between some forms of Marxism and syndicalism, nonetheless draws a direct
and traceable linkage between anarchism and syndicalism.4 The second confuses the
spread of syndicalist ideas and their acceptance by Marxists with a pre-existing ideolog
ical influence. As such, it crucially ignores the element of time. That a few Marxists
found syndicalism more appealing than Social Democratic orthodoxy during the period
of the Second International, some twenty years after the IWMA's collapse, does not
support the retroactive claim that syndicalism was indebted to Marx and Engels.
ANARCHISM AND SYNDICALISM

The first assertion is that 'syndicalism was always an alliance between at least three core
ideological elements: one of which was Marxism which 'influenced it Significantly to
varying degrees'. More precisely, 'a number of syndicalist movement leaders inherited
some central components of the Marxist tradition' (with the useful qualifier of 'in
however a diffuse form') (pp.46-7).
This influence was twofold. First was 'the Marxist conception of the necessity and
desirability of class struggle (of which strikes were the primary expression) as a means of
collective resistance to capitalism that could develop the confidence, organisation and
class consciousness of workers'. Second was 'a conception of socialism arising from the
need for workers to take power themselves rather than relying on the enlightened actions
of parliamentary and trade union leaders who would reform capitalism on
behalfof
workers' (p.47).
As far as the first supposed contribution goes, it is essential to note that 'the necessity
and desirability of class struggle' had been discovered in working class circles long before
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism

Marx invented Marxism.5 Moreover, it is hardly uniquely Marxist as can be seen from
Bakunin's repeated references to both. It follows, therefore, that that characteristic of
syndicalism by no means supports Darlington's inference and so there is no need to
invoke Marxism.
While concentrating on Bakunin and his ideas I must stress that I am not suggesting
that he invented syndicalism. Rather I am using him as a convenient source for ideas already
germinating within the libertarian wing of the IWMA, ideas he championed and deepened.
As such, Bakunin is used as a handy spokesperson for a wider anarchist movement which
shared similar ideas on theory and practice. Moreover while syndicalist ideas have developed
independently both before and after Bakunin, the ideas he expressed after 1 865 and the
movement he was part of both had a direct influence in the rise of syndicalism as a named
revolutionary theory and movement when it developed in the 1 890s. This focus on
Bakunin also seems appropriate as the syndicalists 'viewed themselves as the descendants of
the federalist wing of the First International, personifled above else by Mikhail Bakunin:6
For Bakunin, like the rest of the revolutionary anarchist tradition, class conflict was
inherent in capitalism for there was, 'between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, an
irreconcilable antagonism which results inevitably from their respective stations in life:
He stressed that 'war between the proletariat and the bourgeOiSie is unavoidable' and for
the worker to 'become strong' he 'must unite' with other workers and form 'the union of
all local and national workers' associations into a world-wide association, the great
International Working-Mens Association: Only 'through practice and collective experi
ence' and 'the progressive expansion and development of the economic struggle' will the
worker come 'to recognise his true enemies: the privileged classes, including the clergy,
the bourgeoisie, and the nobility; and the State, which exists only to safeguard all the
privileges of those classes: There was 'but a single path, that of emancipation through
practical action' which 'has only one meaning. It means workers' solidarity in their
struggl against the bosses. It means trades-unions, organisation, and thefideration of
resistancefonds:7 Thus 'unions create that conscious power without which no victory is
possible' while strikes 'create, organise, and form a workers' army, an army which is
bound to break down the power of the bourgeOisie and the State, and lay the ground for
a new world:s Bertrand Russell stated the obvious when he commented: 'Anarchists, like
Socialists, usually believe in the doctrine of class war'.9
As for the second supposed contribution, the need for workers 'to take power' them
selves rather than relying on leaders, this was precisely Bakunin's critique of Marx. For
Bakunin, 'the new social order' would be attained 'through the social (and therefore anti
political) organisation and power of the working masses of the cities and villages'.lO This
meant that anarchists do
not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent
assemblies, provisional governments or so-called revolutionary dictatorships;
lain McKay
because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the
hands of the masses, and that when it is concentrated in those of a few ruling
individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction.! 1
Rather, the revolution 'everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control
must always belong to the people organised into a free federation of agricultural and
industrial associations ... organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary
delegation:12 This was because 'every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by
Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privi
leged minority of conceited intellectuals who imagine that they know what the people
need and want better than do the people themselves'. 1 3
In short, as well as 'anti-state, anti-political action, and anti-militarist ideas' and 'the
notions of federalism, decentralisation, direct action and sabotage' (p.46), syndicalism
took from the revolutionary anarchism associated with Bakunin, the 'necessity' of class
struggle and a 'conception of socialism' based on workers' power organised (to use one of
Bakunin's favourite terms) 'from the bottom up:
So to claim that class struggle and workers' power were the contributions of
Marxism to syndicalism means ignoring a far more obvious source for these ideas Bakunin and other revolutionary anarchists in the IWMA. Given this, it seems odd to
invoke Marxism to explain aspects of syndicalism particularly since, as I will show, Marx
and Engels explicitly rejected syndicalist ideas when they were raised by those libertar
ians in favour of forming political parties and utilising elections.
The redundancy of invoking Marxism to explain syndicalism can also be seen from
what Darlington calls syndicalism's 'utter primacy of the working class as the sole agency
of revolution that could liberate the whole of society' (p.47). Bakunin also argued that
the 'initiative in the new movement will belong to the people ... in Western Europe, to
the city and factory workers - in Russia, Poland, and most of the Slavic countries, to the
peasants'. 'Organise the city proletariat in the name of revolutionary Socialism: he
stressed repeatedly, and 'unite it into one preparatory organisation together with the
peasantry'.14 However, 'in order that the peasants rise up, it is absolutely necessary that
the initiative in this revolutionary movement be taken up by the city workers ... who
combine in themselves the instincts, ideas, and conscious will of the Social Revolution'. 1 5
Then there is the issue of trade unionism. Here Darlington does indulge i n a
tautology by asserting that 'arguably we can define' syndicalism as 'revolutionary trade
unionism' (p.3 1 ) and then proclaiming that one of its 'three core ideological elements'
are 'the ideas of revolutionary trade unionism' {pp.46; 47).16 Yet revolutionary unionism
was a core aspect of Bakunin's ideas: 'the natural organisation of the masses ... is organi
sation based on the various ways that their various types of work define their day-to-day
life; it is organisation by trade association'. Once 'every occupation . . . is represented
within the International, its organisation, the organisation of the masses of the people
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism
93 1
will be complete: Then, 'when the revolution ... breaks out, the International will be a
real force and know what it has to do', namely 'take the revolution into its own hands'
and replace 'this departing political world of States and bourgeoisie'P
As such, it is incredible to suggest that when the CNT was founded in 1 9 1 1 it
'combined syndicalist principles of revolutionary unionism with the more traditional
Spanish anarchist principles' (p.36). This ignores the well-established recognition that
the Spanish anarchists had traditionally organised revolutionary unions. The Spanish
section of the IWMA 'was from the beginning based upon unions' and organised 'by
local councils in each town, and national unions for each branch of production'. One
leading Spanish anarchist noted in 1 9 1 0 that only the term 'syndicalism' was new.18 1n
Zaragoza, for example, anarchist union organising began in 1 87 1 and when the CNT
formed 40 years later that city was the 'largest centre of anarchist trade-union influence
in Spain, outside Barcelona'. 19 As such, syndicalism's 'theoretical and practical links to the
nineteenth century are readily apparent:20
As historian J. Romero Maura correctly summarised, for the 'Bakuninists' in the
IWMA the 'anarchist revolution, when it came, would be essentially brought about by
the working class. Revolutionaries needed to gather great strength and must beware of
underestimating the strength of reaction' and so anarchists 'logically decided that revolu
tionaries had better organise along the lines oflabour organisations:21
In short, Darlington is incorrect to suggest that 'the core of syndicalist philosophy
was not explicitly anarchist in character' (p.44). Comparing it with the ideas of Bakunin
we discover identical theories and practices:
Toilers count no longer on anyone but yourselves. Do not demoralise and paralyse
your growing strength by being duped into alliances with bourgeois Radicalism ...
Abstain from all participation in bourgeois Radicalism and organise outside of it
the forces of the proletariat. The bases of this organisation ... are the workshops
and the federation of workshops ... instruments of struggle against the bour
geoisie, and their federation, not only national, but international when the hour
of revolution sounds, you will proclaim the liquidation of the State and ofbour
geois society, anarchy, that is to say the true, frank people's revolution.22
A similar vision was expounded in 1 872 when the anarchists within the IWMA
gathered at St Imier. Rejecting political action, they argued that 'the proletarians of every
land should establish solidarity of revolutionary action outside of all bourgeois poli
ticking'. They advocated the 'Organisation of Labour Resistance' as it created 'a
community of interests, trains [the proletariat] in collective living and prepares it for the
supreme struggle'. The strike was regarded 'as a precious weapon in the struggle' and 'a
product of the antagonism between labour and capital: These 'ordinary economic strug
gles' prepare 'the proletariat for the great and Snal revolutionary conquest' which will
lain McKay
1 94
destroy 'all class difference'. The future society would be created by the 'proletariat itself.
its trades bodies and the autonomous communes'.23
As Bertrand Russell summarised: 'Hardly any of these ideas [associated with syndi
calism] are new: almost all are derived from the Bakunist [sic!] section of the old
International'.24 In this he was echoing Malatesta,2S Kropotkin,26 and Goldman,27 (a
position Rudolf Rocker repeated decades later).28 Many academics have made the same
connection.29
Significantly, at the 1 907 International Anarchist Congress both Malatesta and
French Syndicalist Pierre Monatte linked revolutionary syndicalism with (to quote
Monatte) the 'ideas of autonomy and federation' expounded by those who 'took sides
with Bakunin' and 'rose up against the abuse of power by the general council' in the First
International.3
If syndicalism is defined as the belief that 'unions should go beyond merely

attempting to improve workers' terms and conditions of employment within the frame
work of capitalist society, to become the instrument through which workers could
overthrow capitalism and establish a new society' (p.48) then it is clear that Bakunin
advocated such a theory.3l Sadly, Darlington does not discuss how syndicalism differs
from the revolutionary unionism expounded by libertarians in the IWMA and after.32
However, to claim that 'syndicalist principles of revolutionary unionism combined with
anarchist notions'
(p.38) would suggest unawareness that revolutionary unionism had
been advocated decades before 'syndicalism' was used to describe these ideas.33
Darlington's second argument in support of Marxist influence on syndicalism is that
many syndicalist movements developed in countries without a large anarchist presence.
This, however, ignores that these movements developed in response to, and were influ
enced by, syndicalist movements elsewhere where there was significant anarchist
influence (such as France). Given the role of unions in revolutionary anarchist theory
and practice from the 1 860s onwards, the rise of these initial syndicalist movements
would testify to that very influence.
The Italian syndicalists, for example, 'drew considerable inspiration from their
French brethren:34 while 'the founders' of the IWW 'did draw on the experience of the
French syndicalists'}S In Britain, syndicalists 'drew much from the overseas syndicalist
experience' (particularly of the CGT and the IWW).36 Over time, syndicalist ideas did
spread to labour movements in countries without large anarchist movements but that
hardly diminishes the significance of the links between syndicalism and anarchism. As
George Sorel observed,37 these self-proclaimed Marxists utilised the theories and practice
of existing syndicalist organisations in countries which did have Significant libertarian
influence.38
So while not all syndicalists considered themselves anarchists, syndicalism itself orig
inally came from revolutionary anarchism which had advocated revolutionary unionism
from the start. This was reflected both theoretically and practically, with anarchists
Another View: Symlicalism, Anarchism andMArxism
95 1
producing revolutionary union movements in Spain, Mexico,39 America,40 and elsewhere
before the 1 890s. Ironically, Darlington himself shows this to be the case when he states
that 'anarcho-syndicalism became a potent force after the Russian anarchist Bakunin had
arrived' in Italy 'in the late 1 860s' (p.3S). His admission is difficult to reconcile with the
assertion that Marxism was one of syndicalism's 'three core ideological elements:41
MARX AND ENGELS AGAINST SYNDICALISM

In addition to the obvious similarities in Bakunin's politics and syndicalism, there is the
awkward fact for Darlington that while he proclaims Marxism as one of syndicalism's
'core ideological elements' Marx and Engels explicitly rejected such ideas. Marx attacked
Bakunin for thinking that the 'working classes must not occupy itself with politics. They
must only organise themselves by trades-unions:42 Engels dismissed the general strike as
'the lever employed by which the social revolution is started' in the 'Bakuninist
programme' while suggesting they admitted 'this required a well-formed organisation of
the working class:43 (That is, Bakunin aimed to 'organise, and when all the workers ... are
won over ... abolish the state and replace it with the organisation of the Intemational:)44
Likewise, they routinely mocked the notion, popular in the libertarian wing of the
organisation, that the International should both prefigure and become the future struc
ture of a socialist society. For Bakunin, the 'organisation of the trade sections and their
representation by the Chambers of Labour ... bear in themselves the living seeds of the
new society which is to replace the old world. They are creating not only the ideas, but
also the facts of the future itself:45 For Engels, the Bakuninists told the proletariat 'to
organise not in accordance with the requirements of the struggle . . . but according to the
vague notions of a future society entertained by some dreamers: 46 As Bakunin explained,
the 'future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free
association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, men in the communes,
regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal'.47 For
Engels me 'democratic republic' was 'the specific form for the dictatorship of the prole
tariat:48 (Although the Paris Commune showed that 'the victorious proletariat must first
refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it
for its own purposes: )49
If'the essence of syndicalism was revolutionary action by unions aimed at estab
lishing a society based upon unions' (p.3 1 ) men this is found in Bakunin, not in Marx
and Engels. Indeed, they highlighted these aspects ofBakunin's ideas - me centrality of
union organisation and struggle (including the general strike) - and expressed their
opposition to them. Moreover, as well as rejecting key syndicalist ideas, Marx and Engels
also advocated what many revolutionary socialists, as Darlington admits, came to
consider as the 'dead-end of electoral and parliamentary politics' (p.46). The subsequent
development of social democracy confirmed Bakunin's fears on using elections rather
lain McKay
1 96
than Marx's hopes. 50 So when Darlington correctly suggests that when 'many syndicalists
dismissed' political action, 'rejecting' electoral politics, he fails to note that they adopted
the same 'narrow defin ition of political action' (p.47) as had Bakunin in the First
International.51 It was precisely this 'nartow definition of political action' which Marx
and Engels inflicted upon the IWMA against the libertarians.
It is true, as Darlington suggests, that many Marxists became syndicalists as 'a
reaction' against social democracy.52 Sadly, he fails to raise the question of why social
democracy became reformist, instead stating that these were 'reformist socialist parties'
(p.47) so ignoring that, at the time, there were not - they considered themselves as revo
lutionary parties explicitly following the ideas of Marx and Engels on 'political action'.
True, a substantial revisionist tendency existed within these parties and, moreover, their
rhetoric was not reflected in their practice, but it should not be forgotten that they
prided themselves in being revolutionary.
So if social democracy put the 'emphasis on parliamentarism at the expense of the
direct action of the workers' (p.47) it is fair to say that the focus that Marx and Engels
placed on 'political action' helped this ptocess immensely. 53
It is hard not to conclude that if syndicalism is marked, as Darlington suggests, by a
'rejection ofpolitical parties, elections and parliament in favour of direct action by the
unions' and a 'conception of a future society' based on 'the economic administration of
industry exercised directly by the workers themselves' (p.29) then not only were Marx
and Engels not syndicalists, they were explicitly
opposed to it.
Given this, to claim that
Marxism is one of syndicalism's 'core ideological elements' seems rather strange.
ASSESSING SUCCESS
Darlington argues 'revolutionary syndicalism was short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful
in achieving its overall aims - particularly when compared to the architects of the
Russian revolution' (p.49).
That raises the obvious question of what counts as success. If we look at the 'overall
aims' of 'the architects of the Russian revolution' then this revolution was 'ultimately
unsuccessful' - unless you assume that the 'overall aims' were to create within one year a
one-party dictatorship presiding over a state capitalist economy or that this counts as a
'successful' socialist transformation. So while it may be correct to say that the Bolshevik
Party successfully seized and held onto power this was utterly unsuccessful in creating
socialism - which was the whole point.

Darlington is partially correct to suggest that 'it was the seizure of state power by
Russian workers under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party ... which was to ptove a
decisive ideological and political challenge to the revolutionary syndicalist movement'
(p.49). Partially, because squeezed between fascism and Bolshevism (and then Stalinism)
syndicalism did become marginalised as the negative influence and abundant resources
Another VIeW: SynJicaIism, Anarchism anJ Marxism
97 1
of the Comintem (particularly, but not exclusively, under Stalin) and the illusions gener
ated by the Bolshevik Myth sidetracked revolutionary movements across the world. The
dream of socialism realised allowed far too many to blind themselves to the realities of
Soviet Russia under Lenin and then Stalin.54 This cannot be ignored when evaluating
why syndicalism did not flourish after the First World War as it had beforehand.55
I would suggest that Darlington's summary of the Russian revolution shows that the
Bolshevik Myth still has its adherents. As anarchist and syndicalist critics of Bolshevism
explained, a key problem was precisely that it had been the Bolshevik Party which seized
power, not the Russian workers,56 with predictable (and predicted, by Bakunin) conse
quences.57 While many in the revolutionary movement did expose the failings of
Bolshevism, not enough believed them.58 Luckily, today these are too well known in
radical circles for this to be repeated.
Ultimately, the Bolshevik revolution has associated socialist ideas with their exact
opposite. It is a legacy which the socialist and labour movements have still not recovered
from. This, by any objective measure, must be considered far more 'unsuccessful' than
the syndicalist movement.
CONCLUSION
Instead of seeking elements of syndicalism in Marxism, I would suggest that 'the tradi
tional assumption' that syndicalism was 'simply an outgrowth of anarchism' is no
'over-simplification: All of Darlington's supposed contributions of Marxism to syndi
calism can be found in Bakunin's ideas. Moreover, other key elements of syndicalism
identified by Darlington can also be found in Bakunin and, ironically, were denounced
by Marx and Engels.
Rather than see unions and direct action as the key as Bakunin did, Marx and
Engels advocated the creation of socialist political parties and use of {bourgeois} elec
tions. So strongly did they feel about this they shattered the IWMA by making those
mandatory policies for it. If syndicalism is marked, as Darlington says, by a 'rejection of
political parties, elections and parliament in favour of direct action by the unions' and a
'conception of a future society' based on 'the economic administration of industry exer
cised directly by the workers themselves' then it seems strange to seek a 'core'
ideological influence on it in the ideas of people who explicitly rejected this. Kropotkin,
therefore, was right to point to 'the closest rappon between the left-wing of the
International and present-day syndicalism, the close rapport between anarchism and
syndicalism and the ideological contrast between Marxism and the principles of Social
Democracy and syndicalism:S9
Instead of trying to squeeze Marxism into syndicalism, it would be better to ask
why so many 'Marxists' rejected the legacy of Marx and embraced positions {revolu
tionary unionism, primacy of economic struggle, the general strike, unions as the
lain McKay
1 98
structure of a socialist society, etc.) which were expounded by Bakunin and attacked by
the founders of their ideology. Looking at what the syndicalists themselves said, the
ideas ofBakunin and what Marx and Engels advocated, it quickly becomes apparently
that Marxism was not one of the 'core ideological elements' of syndicalism. In reality,
syndicalism was simply, as so many syndicalists and others stressed, a new name for the
ideas raised in the IWMA and for which Bakunin was a leading advocate.
I have shown that there are very good reasons why '[m]any historians have empha
sised the extent to which revolutionary syndicalism was indebted to anarchist
philosophy in general and to Bakunin in particular' (p.29). We need only compare
Bakunin's politics and revolutionary syndicalism. Marxism, in conclusion, need not be
invoked to explain revolutionary syndicalism.
lain McKay is currently a member of the Black Flag editorial collective, Britain's
leading anarchist magazine. He has produced An Anarchist FAQ and Mutual Aid: An
Introduction and Evaluation (both published by AK Press). He also writes for Black
Flag, Freedom and Anarcho-Syndicalist Review as well as on websites (primarily
Anarchist Writers). He has recently edited and written the introduction to Property is
Theft!, the first comprehensive anthology of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's writings
(published by AK Press).
Email: iain.mckay@yahoo.co.uk
ENDNOTES
1. I would like to thank Lucien van der Walt for his useful comments on previous
versions of this article.
2. Kropotkin in Baldwin (ed.), Anarchism, p.287.
3. 'Syndicalism and the Influence of Anarchism in France, Italy and Spain: pp.29-54,
Anarchist Studies, 17 (2).
4. This extensive literature is ably summarised by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der
Walt in Black Flame. See Chapter 5 ('Anarchists, Syndicalists, the IWW and Labour')
in particular.
5. Indeed, when Bakunin and other libertarians advocated a syndicalist strategy in the
1 860s within the IWMA they independently discovered a strategy pursued by British
workers in the 1 830s. 'When Marx was still in his teens' British trade unionists had
'developed, stage by stage, a theory of syndicalism: This vision was lost 'in the terrible
defeats of 1834 and 1835' (E.P. Thompson, The Making ojthe English Working Class,
p.912, p.9 13).
6. Wayne Thorpe, 'The Workers Themselves: pp.xiii-xiv.
7. Bakunin, in Cutler (ed.), The Basic Bakunin, pp.97-8, p. 103.
ATWther View: Syndicalism, Anarchism andMarxism
99 1
8.
Bakunin in Maximoff (ed.),
9.
Russell, Roads to Freedom, p.38.
10.
1 1.
1 2.
1 3.
14.
1 5.
The Political Philosophy ofBakunin, p.379, pp.384-5.
The Political Philosophy ofBakunin, p.300.

Selected Writings, p.237, p. I72.
Bakunin, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p.237, p. I72.
Bakunin in Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anarchism, p.338.
Bakunin, The Political Philosophy ofBakunin, p.378.
The Political Philosophy ofBakunin, p.375. Alvin W. Gouldner usefully discusses the
Bakunin,
Bakunin in Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin:
'popular stereotype' associated with Bakunin's ideas on social class and revolution,
noting it is 'more distorted by its decisive omissions than in what it says' ('Marx's Last
Battle: Bakunin and the First International: pp.853-884,
Theory and Society, Vol.
1 1,
No. 6, p.869).
1 6.
Given that Darlington does not actually define what 'revolutionary unionism' is, it
makes it difficult to determine whether he thinks it does, or does not, differ from
syndicalism.
The Basic Bakunin, pp. 139;
1 1 0.
17.
Bakunin,
1 8.
1868-1903, p.82.
libertarian communism and the state, pp. I 3-4.
George R. Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain,
1868-1898, p.208.
'The Spanish case', pp.60-83, Anarchism Today, D. Apter and J. Joll (eds), p.66.
Bakunin quoted by K.J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, pp. I 20- I .
Graham, Roben (ed.), Anarchism: A Documentary History ofLibertarian Ideas,
1 9.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Ternma Kaplan, Anarchists ofAndalusia:
Graham A. Kelsey, Anarchosyndicalism,
volume 1, pp.99- IOO.

24.
Moreover, this was 'often recognised by Syndicalists themselves' (Russell, p.52). David
Berry also notes that 'anarchist syndicalists were keen to establish a lineage with
Bakunin ... the anarchist syndicalism of the turn of the century was a revival of a
tactic' associated with 'the Bakuninist International' (A History ofthe French
Anarchist Movement, 1917-1 945, p. I7). The syndicalists, notes Wayne Thorpe, 'iden
tified the First International with its federalist wing ... [r]epresented ... initially by the
Proudhonists and later and more influentially by the Bakuninists' (p.2).
25.
'I have never stopped ... pushing comrades to the path that syndicalists, forgetting a
glorious past, call new, but the fust anarchists had already established and followed
within the international' (Maurizio Antonioli (ed.),
The InternationalAnarchist
Congress Amsterdam (1 907), p. I 22). Space preludes a discussion of what I consider
Darlington's misreading of Malatesta's critique of syndicalism.

26.
'Revolutionary Anarchist Communist propaganda within the Labour Unions:

Kropotkin explained, 'had always been a favourite mode of action in the Federalist or
'Bakuninist' section of the International Working Men's Association. In Spain and in
Italy it had been especially successful. Now it was resorted to, with evident success, in
lain McKay
27.
28.
29.
30.
3l.
France and Freedom eagerly advocated this sort of propaganda' (Kropotkin, Act For
Yourselves, pp. 1 l9-20). He repeatedly stressed that 'the current opinions of the French
syndicalists are organically linked with the early ideas of the left wing of the
International' (quoted by Max Nettlau, A Short History ofAnarchism p.279) I must
note that Kropotkin's position was not suggested in response to the rise of syndi
calism. In 188 1, for example, he was arguing that the French libertarians follow the
example of their Spanish comrades who had remained faithful to 'the Anarchist tradi
tions of the International' and 'bring this energy to workers' organisations'. His 'advice
to the French workers' was 'to take up again ... the tradition of the International'
(quoted by Gaston Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, p.3 1 ).
In the IWMA 'Bakunin and the Latin workers' forged ahead 'along industrial and
Syndicalist lines' and 'Syndicalism is, in essence, the economic expression of
Anarchism' (Goldman, Red Emma Speaks, p.89, p.91 ). Her comrade Max Baginski
argued that it was Bakunin's 'militant spirit that breathes now in the best expressions
of the Syndicalist and I.w:w. movements' and these expressed 'a strong worldwide
revival of the ideas for which Bakunin laboured throughout his life' (Peter Glassgold
(ed.), Anarchy! An Anthology ofEmma Goldman's Mother Earth, p.71 ).
'Modern Anarcho-Syndicalism is a direct continuation of those social aspirations
which took shape in the bosom of the First International and which were best under
srood and most strongly held by the libertarian wing of the great workers' alliance'
(Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, p.54).
For example: Syndicalism 'can be traced to Bakunin's revolutionary collectivism'
(Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology, p.209); 'Bakunin, perhaps even more than Proudhon,
was a prophet of revolutionary syndicalism' (Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits, pp. 14- 1 5);
The 'basic syndicalist ideas ofBakunin' meant he 'argued that trade union organisation
and activity in the International were important in the building of working-class power
in the struggle against capital ... He also declared that trade union based organisation of
the International would not only guide the revolution but also provide the basis for the
organisation of the society of the future: For Kropotkin syndicalism 'represented a
revival of the great movement of the Anti-authoritarian International' (Caroline Cahm,
Kropotkin and the Rise ofRevolutionary Anarchism, p.219, p.21 5, p.268); 'many anar
chists, including Bakunin, had long recognised the revolutionary potential of
syndicalism' (Nunzio Pemicone, Italian Anarchism: 1864-1892, p. 1 17).
Maurizio Antonioli (ed.), The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907),
p. I IO. Monatte also pointed to 'idea of the proletariat organised into "resistance soci
eties", being the agent of the social revolution that lay at the heart of the great
International Working Men's Association:
Kropotkin also argued that unions were both 'natural organs for the direct struggle
with capitalism and for the composition of the future order' (quoted by Paul Avrich,
The Russian Anarchists, p.8 1).
Another VIeW: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism

1 01 I
32.
Particularly, as Kropotkin notes, ' [w]ithin these federations [of the IMWA] devel
33.
This even applies of the red-and-black flag usually associated with anarcho-syndi
oped ... what may be described as modern
anarchism' (Anarchism, p.294).
calism but which was nrst used by anarchists in the IWMA in the 1 870s (Pemicone,
p.93, pp. 124-7). For example, by the end of the 1 870s 'the historic red-and-black flag
of anarchism' had 'became the official symbol of the Mexican labour movement'
(John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican
'Working Class, 1860-1931, p.48).
'WOrkers Themselves: p.36.

Black November, p.94. Salerno has a useful chapter
34.
Thorpe,
35.
Salvatore Salerno, Red November,
discussing the influence of the CGT on the IWW.

36.
Bob Holton, British Syndicalism:
1910-1914, p.50. Anarchist historian John Quail
notes that British anarchists while relatively few in number 'did provide the means by
whereby the ideas of the French revolutionary Syndicalists could reach a wider
audience'
37.
(The Slow Burning Fuse, p.236).
Unlike many commentators who proclaim Sorel as the father of syndicalism, he

himself stated that historians 'will one day see in this entry of the anarchists into the
syndicats one of the greatest events that has been produced in our time' (Reflections on
Violence, p.35).
38.
This raises the interesting question of, regardless of their self-proclaimed Marxism,
how far these individuals can be considered as Marxists given that both Marx and
Engels explicitly rejected the syndicalist ideas raised by the libertarian wing of the
IWMA. Schmidt and van der Walt suggest that such Marxists are better considered
anarchists due to their embrace of positions advocated by Bakunin and rejected by
Marx and Engels. Space precludes discussion of this issue beyond stating that
'Marxist' becomes so elastic to be meaningless if it embraces those who politics are
close, if not identical, to Bakunin's.
39.
By the late 1 870s the anarchists had become 'strongest force in Mexican labour' and
the Congreso Nacional de Obreros Mexcano was 'affiliated with the Jura-based anar
chist international' (Hart, p.59, p.27).
40. The anarchist dominated International Working People's Association (IWPA) 'antici
pated by some twenty years the doctrine of anarcho-syndicalism: The IWPA's legacy
influenced the IWW, whose 'principles of industrial unionism resulted from the
conscious efforts of anarchists ... who continued to affirm ... the principles which the
Chicago anarchists gave their lives defending' (Salvatore Salerno, Red November,
Black November, p.5 1 , p.79). As Paul Avrich reports, the Chicago anarchists' ideas
allow them to 'penetrate deeply into the labour movement and attract a large working
class following: He also agrees they 'anticipated by some twenty years' anarcho-syndi
calism although he adds that these ideas had 'originated' in the 1860s and 1 870s
when 'the followers of Ptoudhon and Bakunin in the First International were
proposing the formation of workers' councils designed both as a weapon of class
lain McKay
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
SO.
51.
52.
struggle against capitalists and as the structural basis of the future libertarian society'
(Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, p.73).
To this must be added the opinion ofleading Marxists at the time. Karl Kautsky
considered syndicalism as 'the most recent variety of anarchism' and noted 'its anar
chist ancestry' ( The Road to Power, p.4 l, p.67) while Lenin, referring to Germany in
the l 880s and 1 890s, wrote of 'the growth of anarcho-syndicalism, or anarchism, as it
was then called' (Collected ffilrks, vol. 1 6, p.35 1 ).
Marx, Collected ffilrks, vol. 43, p.490.
Engels, Collected ffilrks, vol. 23, pp.S84-S. Space precludes a discussion of what
Engels wrote about the 'Bakuninist' general strike and what the 'Bakuninists' them
selves actually advocated.
Engels, Collected ffilrks, vol. 44, p.30S.
Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchism, p.2SS. Compare this to the syndicalist CGT's 1906
Charter of Amiens which declared 'the trade union today is an organisation of resist
ance' but 'in the future [it will] be the organisation of production and distribution,
the basis of social reorganisation' (quoted by Thorpe, 'The ffilrkers Themselves'
p.20 1).
Engels, Collected ffilrks, vol. 23, p.66.
Bakunin, Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p.206.
Engels, Collected ffilrks, vol. 27, p.227. Engels re-iterated this elsewhere: 'With
respect to the proletariat the republic differs from the monarchy only in that it is the
readyfor-use form for the future rule of the proletariat' (Marx and Engels, The
Socialist Revolution, p.296).
Engels, Collected ffilrks, vol. 47, p.74. I explore the issue of the Paris Commune and
its relationship with anarchism and Marxism in The Paris Commune, Marxism and
Anarchism' (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. SO).
Bakunin argued that when 'common workers' are sent 'to Legislative Assemblies' the
result is that the 'worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeOis environment, into an
atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming
Statesmen, they will become bourgeois ... For men do not make their situations; on
the contrary, men are made by them' (Bakunin, The Basic Bakunin, p.l08).
'The International does not reject politics of a general kind; it will be compelled to
intervene in politics so long as it is forced to struggle against the bourgeoisie. It
rejects only bourgeois politics' (Bakunin, The Political Philosophy ojBakunin, p.3 13).
The first case of this would be in the American socialist movement in the 1 880s with
many embracing of anarchism and forming the IWPA in reaction to experiences of
using 'political action: Compare Bakunin's ideas to Lucy Parsons: 'we hold that the
granges, trade-unions, Knights of Labour assemblies, etc., are the embryonic groups
of the ideal anarchistic society' (Albert R. Parsons (ed.), Anarchism: Its Philosophy
and Scientific Basis, p. 1 IO).
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism andMarxism

53.
Marx, universal suffrage was 'the equivalent of political power for the working
class' and its 'inevitable result' would be 'the political supremacy ofthe working class'
(Marx, Collected J%rks, voL 1 1 , pp.335-6). In countries 'like America, England ... the
workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means' (Marx, voL 23, p.255). Engels
For
expanded on this, arguing that in Britain, 'democracy means the dominion of the
working class' and so workers should 'use the power already in their hands, the actual
majority they possess ... to send to Parliament men of their own order: The worker
'struggles for political power, for direct representation of his class in the legislature'
for in 'every struggle of class against class, the nen end fought for is political power;
the ruling class defends its political supremacy, that is to say its safe majority in the
Legislature; the inferior class fights for, first a share, then the whole of that power'
(vol. 24, p.405, p.386). In America, the workers must form a political party with 'the
conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal' (vol. 26, p.435).
54.
Ex-syndicalists like William Gallacher and William Foster remained Stalinists to the
end, happily denying its dictatorial nature while denouncing those who recognised
that something had gone seriously wrong.
55.
Or, for that matter, why Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist parties remained so small and
insignificant in spite of the obvious failings of Stalinist Russia.
56.
Lenin was quite clear on this arguing in 1 9 1 7 that the 'Bolsheviks must assume
power: The Bolsheviks 'can and
must take state power into their own hands: He
raised the question of 'will the Bolsheviks dare take over full state power alond' and
answered it:
'I have already had occasion ... to answer this question in the affirmative:
Moreover, 'a political party ... would have no right to exist, would be unworthy of the
(Collected
J%rks, vol. 26, p.I9, p.90). The problems of equating Bolshevik power with working
name of party ... if it refused to take power when opportunity offers'
class power soon became apparent when the party lost popular support.
57.
Space precludes any discussion of the interplay of subjective (e.g., Bolshevik ideology)
and objective factors (e.g., civil war, economic collapse, etc.) here. Suffice to say,
supporters of Leninism minimise the former and maximise the latter and so, 1 would
argue, present a distorted picture of what caused the degeneration of the Russian
Revolution.
58.
For example: Emma Goldman's My Disillusionment in Russia, Alexander Berkman's
The Bolshevik Myth and Peter Arshinov's The History ofthe Makhnovist Movement.
The eye-witness reports by syndicalist militants like Angel Pestana, Augustin Souchy
and Armando Borghi to their unions also ensured that many libertarian unionists
rejected Leninism.
59.
Quoted by Netdau, pp.279-80.
lain McKay
1 1 04
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2009. The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (J 907),
Translation and English edition by Nestor McNab, Alberta: Black Cat Press.
Apter, D. andJoll, J (eds), 1 97 1 . Anarchism
Today, London: Macmillan.

The Russian Anarchists, New York: WW. Norton & Company.
Avrich, Paul. 1 984. The Haymarket Tragedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Avrich, Paul, 1 988. Anarchist Portraits, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Arshinov, Peter 1 987. The History ofthe Makhnovist Movement, London: Freedom Press.
Bakunin, Michael, 1953. The Political Philosophy ofBakunin, G.P. Maximov (ed.), New
Avrich, Paul, 1978.
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Bakunin, Michael, 1973. Michael Bakunin: Selected
Writings, Arthur Lehning (ed.),
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Bakunin, Michael, 1 980. Bakunin
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Bakunin, Michael, 1 994.
The Basic Bakunin, Robert M. Cutler (trans. and ed.), Buffalo,
N.Y: Prometheus Books.
The Bolshevik Myth, London: Pluto Press.

Kropotkin and the Rise ofRevolutionary Anarchism 1872-1886,
Berkman, Alexander, 1989.

Cahm, Caroline, 1 989.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Esenwein, George Richard, 1 989. Anarchist Ideology and the
Working Class Movement in
Spain, 1868-1898, Berkeley: University of California Press.

200 1. Anarchy! An Anthology ofEmma Goldman's Mother Earth,
Glassgold, Peter (ed.),
Washington D.C: Counterpoint.

Goldman, Emma, 1 998. Red Emma Speaks: An Emma
Goldman Reader, 3rd Edition, Alix
Kates Shulman (ed.), New York: Humanity Books.

Goldman, Emma, 1 970.
My Disillusionment in Russia, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell
Company.
Graham, Robert (ed.),
200S, Anarchism: A Documentary History o/Libertarian Ideas
Volume 1 : From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1 939), Montreal/New

York/London: Black Rose Books.
Hart, John M., 1987. Anarchism and the Mexican
University of Texas Press.
Holton, Bob, 1 976. British Syndicalism:
Working Class, 1860-1931, Austin :
1900-1 914: Myths and Realities, London : Pluto
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Kaplan, Temma, 1965. Anarchists ofAndalusia:
1868-1903,
Princeton, N.J: Princeton
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Kautsky, Karl, 1 996.
The road to power: political reflections on growing into the revolution,
Atlantic Highlands : Humanities Press.

Kelsey, Graham A., 1 99 1 . Anarchosyndicalism,
libertarian communism and the state: the
Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism ami Marxism

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CNT in Zaragoza and Aragon 1 930-1937. Dordrecht. London: International
Institute of Social History.
Kenafick. K.J.. 1 948. Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx. Melbourne. Privately Published.
Kropotkin. Peter. 2002. Anarchism: A
Collection ofRevolutionary Writings, Roger N.
Baldwin (ed.). New York: Dover Press.

Kropotkin. Peter. 1988. Actfor
Yourselves: articlesfrom Freedom 1886-1907. N. Walter and
H. Becker (eds). London: Freedom Press.
Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press.

Marx. Karl and Engels. Frederick. 1 978. The socialist revolution. F. Teplov and V. Davydov
Leval. Gaston. 1975.
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Netclau. Max. 1 996. A Short History ofAnarchism. London: Freedom Press.
Parsons. Albert R (ed.). 2003. Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis. Honolulu:
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University Press ofthe Pacific.

Pernicone. Nunzio. 1993. Italian Anarchism:
1864-1892. Princeton: Princeton University
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Quail. John. 1978.
The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History ofthe British Anarchists,
London: Granada Publishing Ltd.

Rocker. Rudolf. 2004. Anarcho-Syndicalism:
Theory and Practice, Edinburgh/Oakland:
AK Press.
Salerno. Salvatore. 1 989. Red November,
Black November: Culture and Community in the

Industrial Workers ofthe World, Albany: State University Press of New York.
Schmidt, Michael and Walt, Lucien van der. 2009. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class
Politics ofAnarchism and Syndicalism. Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press,.
Sorel. Georges. 1 999. Reflections on Violence. Jeremy Jennings ( ed.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
The Making ofthe English Working Class. London: Penguin Books.

'The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and
International Labour, 1 913-1923. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Thompson. E.P 1 99 1 .
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Thorpe. Wayne. 1989.
Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940. The Praxis of Nation...
Bantman, Constance
pg. 106
Anarchist Studies 20. 1
20 12
ISSN 0967 3393
www.lwbooks.co.ukljournals/anarchiststudies/
REVIEWS
Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds.), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the
Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870- 1940. The Praxis of National Liberation,
Internationalism, and Social Revolution
Leiden: Brill 20 1 0, Ixxiv
434pp., 1 0 illustrations. Preface by Benedict Anderson.
ISBN 978 90 04 1 8849 5

Let's be clear about one thing - this book is an academic masterpiece. Not only does it
synthesise thirty years of research into the history of anarchism and syndicalism, high
lighting in particular both the gains and the limits of the 'transnational turn'; it does so
through the prism of two fascinating lines of investigation. First, it shifts the predomi
nantly Western, North Atlantic focus of much of the existing historiography and looks at
'the colonial and postcolonial world', that is to say mainly Africa (Egypt, South Africa),
Central and Latin America (the South Caribbean axis, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Brazil),
Asia (Korea, China, Japan) and Eastern Europe (Ukraine), with the notable inclusion of
Ireland too. This in turn opens on to a revised chronology and a number of new themes.
Chief among these is the complex dynamics between anarchist/syndicalist politics,
race and the national question - the overarching theme of the volume, starting to 611 a
major gap in existing historiography, as Hirsch and van der Walt's excellent introduction
points out. This is indeed puzzling, given the well-known anarchist emphasis on doctrinal
anti-imperialism and anti-racialism as well as the coincidence between the springtime of
anarchism and syndicalism and, on the other hand, the period of the nrst globalisation,
the heyday of empire building and eventually independence struggles. Benedict
Anderson's preface thus emphasises the dilemmas which anarchists and syndicalists, given
their insistence on universalism and anti-statism, contended with in many countries where
nationalism gained great strength among their recruits: 'For all its genuine internation
alism, anarchism had to deal with a force which it did not wholly comprehend, and had
some good reasons to suspect' (p.xxiv). And yet, seemingly paradoxical alliances were
formed between anarchism and nationalism in a number of countries: Egyptian anarchists
occasionally found themselves making common ground with nationalists, while Korean
anarchists also supported the idea of forming a national government. The national
question could also be a guise for socioeconomic claims for greater equality (Korea,
China, Ukraine, Ireland): apparent oppositions between national and transnational
Constance Bantman
politics, between the national and the economic struggle, were in fact overcome. In Cuba,
on the other hand, not all anarchists supported the independence struggle, fearing a bour
geois revolution which would substitute one repressive government for another;
independence could be construed as a lure, a distraction from proletarian war. In
Argentina, anarchist and syndicalist unions were also stigmatised as 'foreign' and 'anti
national: The anarchist and syndicalist stance on race divisions within the nation and the
labour movement - the articulation ofclass and colour protest - has similarly been largely
overlooked so far. And yet, in many cases anarchists and syndicalists placed ethnic and
gender equality at the centre of their project. Van der Walt shows that the South-African
ISL had a strong commitment to race issues, contrary to the claims of Marxist historians.
In Brazil, ethnic, religious and ultimately ideological divisions were rife, but a broad anar
chist and syndicalist platform was found in the 1 9 1 0s. In Peru, anarchism and
anarcho-syndicalism served as a unifying counter-cultural oppositional culture, against
the power and cohesion of the countty's ruling elite.
This is transnational history at its best, for a number of reasons. First, behind its
somewhat arid title, the volume explores individual and collective destinies, the stories of
militants and their struggles, their movements - combined with the mapping out of
occasionally intricate networks (in the cases of 'Tropical libertarians' and Korean anar
chists) or ideologically complex and ethnically multilayered societies (Brazil). The essays
are extensively researched and extremely well-written. There is a strong emphasis on the
'polymorphist' character of anarchism (p.400), the 'question of place: as Arif Dirlik
refers to it in the Chinese context, which goes some way to explain the fascination anar
chism exerts on historians and also its elusive nature: each chapter highlights the
localisation of anarchism and syndicalism - or, in the words of Biondi and Toledo about
Brazil (p.
364):
'Those who turned to anarchism in different parts of the world were
part of a common international project, but in each country workers used the language
and method of anarchism to provide answers to concrete local problems and concerns:
Kirk Shaffer articulates this to the problematic of militant networks, examining 'how
anarchists of different nationalities but linked by language, geography and politics devel
oped movements in these specific locales and then functioned as part of regional
networks that sometimes overlapped' (p.276). These networks were of course connected
with Western ones: Tom Mann, the SDF, de Leonism were influential in South Africa, as
were Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin across Asia, along with the Chinese 'Paris' anar
chists. Similarly, Steven Hirsch notes Argentine and French influences in Peru, while
Italians and Britain's w.e. Owen played an important part in Spanish-language
networks in Latin/Central America. This shows how much anarchists and syndicalists
indeed operated on a truly global scale.
In the end, many of the stories told here are narratives of semi-failure (often in the face
of Communism); in many countries the second half of the 1 920s saw a dwindling of anar
chist and syndicalist activism, although lasting influences are recorded in Ireland, Peru or
Reviews
South Afii.ca. However, the flnal note is resolutely open and optimistic; the traditional view
of anarchism and syndicalism as marginal and historically circumscribed trends is replaced
with a statement of their importance as a global, 'interconnected [ . . ] resistance movement'
with much contemporary resonance. The volume is a great piece of historical revisionism. It
counters the influential Communist school oflabour and left history and rehabilitates anar
chism and syndicalism against the 'falsified' historiography of anarchism by Marxist
historians. Then, the very nature of anarchist and syndicalism transnationalism is put under
the microscope; the book makes a clear case for the revision of the received geography and
chronology of the movement, moving away from Euro- and Western-centrism in favour of a
truly global and interconnected perspective. Misconceptions of centre/periphery dynamics
are replaced by much subtler analyses emphasising the circulation of workers, militants, and
ideas, rather than clear-cut dominance. At a time when transnational anarchist studies are
fast becoming a new academic orthodoxy, van der Walt, Hirsch and all their contributors
thus provide much-needed reassessments, in immaculate style.
.
Constance Bantman
University ofSurrey
Sean Birchall, Beating the Fascists: the Untold Story ofAnti-Fascist Action
London: Freedom Press, 201 0, 41 0pp. ISBN 978-1 904491 1 25
This is an important book on an important and still divisive episode in the oft-neglected
history of anti-fascism in Britain. Anti-Fascist Action was formed in 1 985 against the
backdrop of an increaSingly aggressive campaign by the far right. The British National
Party had initiated a strategy that they dubbed 'march and grow', which saw them taking
to the streets and attempting to organise within working-class communities.
AFA was an amalgam of anarchists and left-wing activists who were not only dissatis
fied with the traditional and constitutional tactics adopted by anti-fascists, but who also
emphasised the need to counter the far right on both the ideological and physical level.
Probably the most prominent single group within AFA was Red Action, which had itself
come into being when it split from the larger, Trotskyist, Socialist Workers Party over the
vexed issue of how best to confront the far right. The fact that Birchall provides us with the
most detailed and nuanced account of this split to date, as well as the tensions which lay
behind it, adds to the value of the book. AFA correctly identified the fact that the left in
Britain, in both its constitutional and revolutionary forms, had failed to put down roots in
working-class areas, leaving a dangerous vacuum which fascists were seeking to exploit.
AFA applied its particular brand of anti-fascism to the BNP to such an extent that
Keith Hodgson
the strategy of 'march and grow' had to be abandoned because marches became too
impracrical and basically too dangerous to contemplate. In fact, all BNP activity was so
vigorously opposed by AFA that a senior parry figure described the situation as 'a state of
war: After ten years of this, the BNP had had enough and in 1 995 announced at a
London meeting that 'the days of street warfare were over: and that there would be 'no
more marches, meetings, punch-ups'. The street strategy was ditched and the party was
turning to electoral ism and a faux respectability.
AFA is still a sufficiently contentious subject that the news that this book was in
preparation caused a flurry of concerned posting on British anarchist message boards.
Who was the author? What was his perspective ? Was this a belated attempt by those
dastardly reds to steal 'our' and AFA's history? And worse still, was this to be done under
the auspices of the venerable and respected anarchist publishing house, Freedom Press ?
In the end, these fears were unfounded and Birchall has treated his multifaceted subject
with as much impartiality as we are likely to get, providing us with a vibrant and fast
paced account of AFA and its activities from the footsoldier's point of view and without
shying away from detailing the inevitable stresses and strains that beset AFA internally.
The worst charge which can be levelled against him is an occasional lack of objectivity.
He rarely questions the analyses and tactics of AFA and Red Action, and credits AFA
with humbling not just the BNP, but every outfit on Britain's far right, from the aging
and basically conservative League of Empire Loyalists to Blood and Honour, the neo
Nazi music front. Perhaps objectivity will come in time, and perhaps there is scope for
another history of AFA to be written, but it will have to be very good to match this. One
discussion still to be had is how an AFA-style organisation would fare today, with
blanket CCTV, proactive policing and the anti-terror laws which states have armed
themselves with and which are already being used against activists who could in no way
be described as terrorists. In fairness, those issues were beyond Sean Birchall's remit in
this book and are best explored by the current generation of anti-fascists.
Keith Hodgson
Wigan and Leigh College
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary On

The Gospel
Exeter: Imprint Academic, 201 0, 336pp. ISBN 978 1 845401 931
To many potential readers 'Christian anarchism' may appear to be an oxymoron given

that anarchists are often uncomfortable with religion, while many Christians would be
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suspicious of anything labelled 'anarchist'. A fair-minded reading of this excellent book
will do much to dispel these reservations. While this book is ostensibly about what we
might term 'Christian anarchism' and will probably be required reading for all who
identify themselves as Christian anarchists or radical Christians, it is much more than
that. It works on three levels, drawing together nearly all the available modem literature
ptoduced by Christian anarchists and fellow travellers while offering a valuable thematic
political commentary on the teaching ofJesus of Nazareth (a neglected figure in political
science) and presenting a radical theological challenge to the Christian community.
It should be made clear from the outset that Christoyannopoulos does not see
Christian anarchism as a synthesis of the two systems of thought and neither does he
attempt to synthesise them. Rather, he is interested in exploring the suggestive reso
nances between the central gospel message and anarchist thought and practice and also
the work of a number of writers, notably Leo Tolstoy, who work within or around this
anarcho-religious tradition. Christian anarchists differ from their secular counterparts in
that while they reject human authority as represented by the State they submit to the
authority of God in order to bring about the Kingdom of God in the here and now.
Secular anarchists will probably be uncomfortable with this message given that they
would want to reject all forms of authority but God is here primarily seen as variously
the author of love, a teacher and guide rather than a monarchical figure. More impor
tantly, the engagement is with the teachings ofJesus and not with the dogmas of
institutionalised religion.
Christoyannopoulos begins with a nuanced defence of the idea and practice of
Christian anarchism before engaging with what is an exhaustive literature review of the
main writers associated with Christian anarchism, then shifts to the heart of the matter
by exploring the Christian anarchist critique of the state, materialism and the embracing
of social justice and non-violence. Central here is a political commentary on the Sermon
on the Mount which constitutes the distillation ofJesus' teaching to his followers. What
follows is a more general trawl through ancillary gospel teachings and an analysis of how
the gospel narrative leading up to Jesus' trial and execution reflects both his teaching and
example and how they fit together. Part one then concludes with an outline of how
progressive Christian compromise with the state and the growing infidelity of the
Church to the core teachings of Christianity came about and how this began to shape
radical Christian critiques of both Church and State. Understandably, the writings of
Tolstoy are foregrounded here. Part two focuses on the Christian anarchist response to
the State and examples of collective witness, giving a useful overview of the ways in
which theory informs practice. The conclusion highlights both the prophetic witness of
foundational Christianity and Christian anarchism and invites the reader to view
Christian anarchists as 'prophets at the margins'.
While this book constitutes the most exhaustive account of Christian anarchism
thus far it also presents Jesus of Nazareth as a major political thinker. This much should
Paul Chambers
be apparent from both the political nature of his trial and punishment and the radical
political thought that led him there. Unfortunately, the progressive neutralisation of
this radical political theology in favout of the salvic dogma of the institutionalised
Pauline Church has done much to obscute the real import ofJesus' life and teaching.
The theological implications for Christians today are challenging. All in all this is an
excellent and original book which deserves a reading by anyone interested in anarchism,
radical Christianity or the politics of non-violence. My one caveat is that this is recog
nisably a doctoral thesis and there has been no real attempt to translate this into
something more apptoachable for the non-academic. Sadly, this is likely to severely
limit its reach beyond academia and its core audience of Christian anarchists. A
promised more reader friendly and cheaper paperback edition has now apparently
sutfaced and it is to be hoped that this may be in a better position to cross over to a
wider audience.
Paul Chambers
University ofGlamorgan
Saul Newman (ed.), Max Stirner

Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 201 1 , 21 8pp. ISBN 978-0-230-28335-0
Among anarchists, few thinkers are so divisive as Max Stimer; derided and celebrated in
equal measures, his thought continues to haunt the corridors of radical thought. In Max
Stirner we flnd a welcome addition to a conversation that just won't seem to go away.
Editor Saul Newman introduces the anthology with his now-familiar portrait of a
post-structuralist thinker ahead of his time whose 'innovation lay in showing that belief
in secularism and rationality is no less fundamentalist or superstitious than belief in
God' (p.5). More important still is Stirner's revelation that the Aristotelian hangover of
'human essence' is a tyrant on a par with the most authoritarian political regimes.
After David Leopold's brief biographical essay (which provides information that
should already be familiar to anyone who has studied Stimer), Ruth Kinna provides us
with an examination ofStimer's legacy as manifested in his 'disciples' John Henry
Mackay and Dora Marsden; but not before summarising Saul Newman's highly influen
tial conception of Stimer as a sort of proto-agonistic 'hyper-liberal' and defender of
'difference' (p.44). 1t is no surprise, then, that Mackay - an open homosexual and
advocate of 'man-boy love' (p.46) - found in Stimer's a- (or was it anti- ?) social egoism
a defence of what was (and the latter surely remains) a socially condemned lifestyle.
Riccardo Baldissone inaugurates the book's second part with a peculiar 'historical'
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analysis of Stirner's work, read through the lens of later thinkers. His engagement with
Stirner's conception of ,truth' is particularly interesting, and one might be surprised to
see just how many later thinkers took Stirner seriously. However, the opacity of his essay
stands in contrast to the relative clarity of the others and may end up annoying certain
readers.
One of the most valuable contributions is a translation of the previously unavailable
(to the English-speaking world, that is) essay 'Die Philosophischen Reactionare', written
by 'G. Edward' (which may or may not have been yet another ofStirner's pen names)
and intended as a reply to Stirner's critics. Widukind De Ridder provides an excellent
introduction to an equally impressive translation, and responsibly makes a case against
Stirner's authorship of the 'G. Edward' letter as well as for it.
Part III begins with what is perhaps the best essay in the book, Paul Thomas's 'Max
Stirner and Karl Marx: An Overlooked Contretemps: It becomes increasingly clear as
one reads it that there is far more to be mined from Marx's largely dismissed, ad
hominem-fllied rejoinder to 'Saint Max's' Der Einzige than most have acknowledged.
Thomas is clearly sympathetic with Marx, but his engagement of the two thinkers with
one another results not in the destruction of either, but in the construction of an
argument that arguably transcends those of both.
De Ridder returns in chapter six with a case against two common readings of
Stirner: the first being the Hegelian reading, and the second the proto-existentialist
reading. Stirner's 'concepts' of 'egoism: 'ownness: and so on were not concepts at all,
argues De Ridder, but 'in a Foucauldian sense, tools to dismantle the subject-object
dichotomy and its social and political bearings in the wake of modernity' (p. 1 43). De
Ridder's Stirner is similar to that of Newman, but he is no rider of coat-tails; his case
against the popular 'existentialist' reading is novel and convincing, and his argument
against the purportedly Hegelian structures of Stirner's argument is well-researched and
thought-provoking.
The fourth and final part begins with Kathy E. Ferguson's defence of Stirner's inclu
sion in the anarchist 'canon'. Though she argues explicitly against Michael Schmidt and
Lucien van der Walt's dismissal of Stirner as a non-anarchist in their book Black Flame,
the battle over whether or not Stirner was in fact a 'proper' anarchist is by no means a
new one. Ironically, this battle owes its very existence to exclusionary groupthink (surely
not among anarchists!). Ferguson writes, ' [aJs with feminism and other radical political
projects, many people often feel a need to declare themselves in or out of the category'
(p. 1 70). She continues, '[bJut this impulse to join or quit the team is exactly the sort of
impulse that Stirner helps us to scrutinize for its implicit will to power over claims to
truth'. She rightly concludes that it is the scholastic need for a 'clear and coherent defini
tion of anarchism' that gives birth to these sorts of in-house disputes (p. 1 7 1 ). This does
not in and of itself invalidate the arguments of Schmidt, van der Walt and those sympa
thetic to their position, however. She continues, then, to make the case that such
Seth Crownover
113 1
theorists overlook Stimer's 'micro-politics' of insurrection, seeing only his insistence
against revolutionism (a common thread among 'real' anarchists) and concluding that
this (along with his 'not being a leftist' and 'not being an anarchist' - objecrions that she
also tackles) is sufficient for dismissing him.
Saul Newman concludes the anthology with the curiously-titled essay 'Stimer's
Ethics of Voluntary Inservitude' - curiously titled because 'Stimer' and 'Ethics' appear
right next to one another. In it, he reinforces Stimer's own argument that we are in a
sense responsible for our own powerlessness. But Newman's attribution of an 'ethics' to
Stirner is confounding. He portrays Stirner, who railed against all forms of domination
including morality, as a 'post-foundational' ethicist - 'post-foundational' in the sense that

ethics is 'something to be created by us, rather than abstracted into absolute moral codes
beyond our grasp' (p.204). But this view seems uncomfortably close to existentialism,
which is a tradition from which De Ridder has already succeeded in distancing Stirner.
Luckily, it is only this essay that radically - and without providing a sufficient defence
for so doing - deviates from the consensus understanding of Stirner (not that he would
have disapproved of this !).
All in all, this is an invaluable contribution to a field of study that keeps threatening
to manifest itself - 'Stimer studies', perhaps - and one wonders after reading it how it is
that this truly unique thinker has failed to capture the philosophical imagination to the
same degree that, say, Nietzsche or Marx has done.
Seth Crownover
University College Cork
Kathy Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 201 1 , 352pp. ISBN 978-0742523005
Despite the fact that Emma Goldman was a prolific writer and is today perhaps one of
the most well-known anarchists of her time, few authors have undertaken theoretical
engagements with her work; rather, many authors have been 'dismissive of [Goldman's]
theOrizing ... claiming that she was more of an activist than a theorist' and have empha
sized biographical information over her thought (p.4). This is one reason that Kathy
Ferguson's book is such a valuable contribution to Goldman scholarship. By '[encoun
tering] and [assessing ] Emma Goldman as a political thinker' Ferguson specifically
focuses on Goldman's anarchism, affirming the value of Goldman's work as theory while
simultaneously troubling the theory-practice distinction itself In troubling this
dichotomy - a distinction which, as Ferguson argues, Goldman's political thought
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invites us to look beyond - Ferguson's book conceptualizes both theory and practice in
refreshing and fruitful ways (p.6).
Though Ferguson emphasizes Goldman's relationship with anarchist thought and
practice, her book spans a very wide range of themes. It includes chapters on the
discourses positioning Goldman as 'dangerous' and her engagement with them,
Goldman's contributions to feminist thought and role in feminist struggles, and the
criticisms that authors have made regarding Goldman's apparent 'overlooking or
neglecting [of] race' in her analysis (p.21 1). The work engages with a wide variety of
theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze, to offer a
multi-faceted and nuanced reading of Goldman's life and work. WhUe Goldman's polit
ical thought is the focus of the text, it also offers rich deSCriptions of historical and
autobiographical detaUs, considering them in the wider context of anarchism in
Goldman's time. Emphasis is placed on Goldman's thought as 'event based, ectopic, and
untimely: as the work discusses, 'the kind of thinking Goldman offers, not only what
she had to say but the practices through which she made her thinking happen' (p.277).
Ferguson discusses the broader discourse networks in which Goldman operated, the
subcultures and spaces constituting (and constituted by) anarchism, and the relation
ships with others which shaped her 'coming-to-politics' (p.130). Ferguson also traces
Goldman's anarchist influences, both those with whom she was personally acquainted
and those whose written work contributed to her own thought. In doing so, she
demonstrates the ways in which Goldman 'integrated several strands of thinking to
produce her version of anarchism' while importantly problematizing the criticism that
Goldman merely synthesized others' thought and was not herself an innovative and
original thinker (p.l3I).
A notable and unique feature of Ferguson's book is that it extends well beyond its
own cover. In addition to the compelling maps and lists (on topics such as acts of prop
aganda against the deed, acts of violence against labour, and anarchist publications)
included therein, the book's companion website
(http://www.politicalscience.hawaii.edu/lists/emmaoldman.html) hosts a fascinating
archive of information on radical women working with or alongside Goldman.
These components of the work illuminate often-overlooked elements of radical
history in their wider contexts, and are certainly valuable resources whether read along
side the body of the ten itself or explored independently. Overall, Ferguson's Emma
Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets both illuminates Emma Goldman's contin
uing relevance today and opens up many avenues for future engagement with her work.
Laura Greenwood
Trent University Canada
The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren

Jun, Nathan
pg. 115
NathanJun
115 1
Crispin Sartwell (ed.), The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren

New York: Fordham University Press, 201 1 , 240pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-3370-0
There exists a serious - and, in my view, embarrassing - dearth of work on the native
American anarchist tradition within the contemporary anarchist studies milieu, much of
it fuelled, I suspect, by the worst kinds oflazy generalizations and uncritical Eurocentric
prejudices. For example, I have often heard comrades speak of Warren, Spooner,
Andrews, and Tucker as though they were a single, monocephalic being known as the
'American individualist: a being that was mostly irrelevant to the international anarchist
movement of its day and has since been co-opted by right-wing libertarian ideologues to
justify capitalism. So, too, have I wimessed them adamantly refusing to entertain the
possibility that the Transcendentalists or the Abolitionists were anarchists of a fashion,
even though Hippolyte Havel himself claimed John Brown as one in the November
1 928 issue of The Road to Freedom. It is into this morass of dogmatism that Crispin
Sartwell dares to plunge with his groundbreaking new book,
The Practical Anarchist:
Writings ofJosiah 1ttrren.

Those who are familiar with Sartwell's work know that he has long been a voice
crying in the wilderness on behalf of the forgotten tradition of Yankee anarchism. (At
the first North American Anarchist Studies Network conference in 2009, Ptofessor
Sartwell suggested that William Lloyd Garrison had anarchistic leanings and was practi
cally lynched.) With
The Practical Anarchist, Sartwell provides the scholarly world in
general and the anarchist studies milieu in particular with much-needed proof that none
of us really know what we are talking about. The writings ofJosiah Warren, many of
which the book makes available for the first time, conclusively demonstrate that an anti
statist and anti-capitalist - that is, anarchistic
form of thought existed in the United
States as early as the 1 830s.

In his Introduction, Sartwell helpfully summarizes Warren's ideas along four basic
themes. First, Warren was committed to 'Individualism, as an ontology and as a
science ; that is, as a statement of what there is and of the principle of finding out what
there is, by ever-Sner appreciation of the specificities of every event, thing, or person'
(pp. S-6). As Sartwell points out, although Warren's ontological and methodological
individualism makes him one of the most extreme of the American anarchists, it
simultaneously places him within a long and august tradition that includes Heraclitus,
the Cynics, the medieval nominalists, Thomas Reid and other Scottish common sense
philosophers of the eighteenth century, Emerson, Nietzsche and Heidegger (p.8).
Closely related to, but distinct from, Warren's ontological and methodological individ
ualism is his belief in 'the sovereignty of the individual; that is, each person is to have
absolute control over his own body and actions, at his own cost and responsibility'
(p. 1 2). As Sartwell notes, this conviction is a secularized outgrowth of the Protestant
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belief in the absolute sovereignty of God, which in turn necessitates the absolute
freedom of the individual.
Although Warren was an extreme individualist, he was nonetheless opposed to capi
talism, holding among other things that 'the profit motive devours people and the
economy [and] ... is an indulgence in greed, not a natural condition of human beings'
(p. l S). Instead, Warren believed in 'Cost as the limit of price; that is, the price of some
thing should be fixed by the cost of producing it, measured by the labor or pain
expended in producing it, rather than by what a given person is prepared to pay for it'
(p. 1 4). Consequently, he advocated 'the labor note as circulating medium; that is, the
only rational medium of exchange is a representation of a certain definite quantity of
labor of a certain type, which is equivalent to a certain quantity of a commodity' (p. 17).
In other words, Warren essentially supported a sort of mutualism that will be familiar to
readers of Proudhon. It is worth noting, however, that Proudhon did not publish What
is Property? until 1 840, whereas Warren had established the first 'Time Store' based on
mutualist principles in 1 827 in Cincinnati. The point of the Time Store was to compen
sate each individual with the equivalent of her actual production. 'This is Warren's
"socialism": Sartwell writes, 'his way of addressing the emerging polarization of class
along the lines of ownership in labor, which many American radicals of the era regarded
as a mode of ownership in persons or a development of slavery (i.e., 'wage-slavery')'
(pp. 1 8- l9).
Much more could be said about Warren's fascinating political and economical ideas,
but I strongly encourage readers ofAnarchist Studies to investigate them on their own. In
the meantime, I reiterate my praise for Crispin Sartwell for filling a conspicuous gap in
anarchist studies scholarship and providing this extremely important collection of
writings by an intrepid (if underappreciated) early anarchist thinker.
NathanJun
Midwestern State University
Theresa Papanikolas, Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticsm,
1914- 1924
Farnham: Ashgate, 201 0, 280pp. ISBN 978-0-7546-6626-4.
Paris Dada has long been considered not so much in its own terms, but as an appendage
to either the Ziirich Dada which presaged it or the Parisian Surrealism it developed into,
and as lacking as political art in respect to both. Papanikolas' book is novel not only in
fOCUSing on Paris Dada as a central moment in its own right, but in identifying anarAnarchist Studies 20.1
Gavin GrinJon
chism as its animating core. The role of radical social movements has often been down
played as a context in social art history, but this book joins a growing body of
scholarship that argues that social movements, and anarchism in particular, were central
to the new modes and values of artistic production in European Modernism, whose
concern - exemplified in Dada - with negation and antagonism often had a far more
solid ground than the mythological straw-man 'anarchism' of some vague chaotic irra
tionalism previously often ascribed to it.
The book is divided into two broad sections, the first chapters examining and intro
ducing anarcho-individualism in France, and the latter chapters examining Paris Dada
directly. While the introduction of Max Stirner's ideas is familiar ground, this is woven
into a fascinating but brief account of their reception and development in France in
journals such as C1.narchie, l'Un, La Melee and C1.ction d'art, as individualist anarchists
moved from illegalist direct action to cultural production, critically reflecting on strategy
and philosophy. This contextual introduction is followed by another, an account of
Zurich Dada, in Hugo Ball's philosophical debt to Bakunin, and Jean Arp's 'naturalist
anarchist' attempts to treat artistic production as propaganda by the deed. The only criti
cism is that the book arrives at Paris Dada itself a little late. It is only on page
105 that
Tristan Tzara arrives in Paris to meet Andre Breton. Perhaps this is an unavoidable
problem for a book attempting to reunite narratives and concepts long separated by critics
and historians between the disciplines of art and politics, although the text does assume
the reader's greater familiarity with the art-historical scholarship on Dada and Surrealism.
At this point, Papanikolas begins to weave these threads together, in Breton's reader
ship of all of the anarchist journals mentioned above, and the founding involvement of
Jacques Vache, the nonconformist hero of Paris Dada and Surrealism, in an anarchist
cultural circle in Nantes before his conscription. She convincingly argues that Dadaism's
famous negation begins to appear not as apolitical nihilism, but as underlined by the
anarcho-individualist revolution of the self The penultimate chapter focuses on the
Belgian poet Clement Pansaers, who was drawn into the milieu of Paris Dada in
1920
after a poem of his was published in a French anarcho-individualist review. He too had
developed anarchist sympathies alongside a disruptive aesthetic which drew increasingly
close to Dada. The Belgian journal
{7a Ira!
which he was involved in - increasingly
also joined this path, which brought anarcho-individualism into the realm of cultural
politics, while developing an anti-militarist and internationalist line as well as anti
authoritarian critiques of Communist revolution. The chapter concludes by returning to
Paris, where between Dada and anti-Dada factions, and Stirnerite and Nietzschean
egoism, the Paris Dada group fell into crisis on the relationship between individualist
destruction and individualist construction, and found itself on the receiving end of'indi
vidualist and anti-Dadaist' critiques from anarchist journals. Papanikolas does not stress
the point, but it seems anarchism also had something to do with the fall, as well as the
advent, of Paris Dada.
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The final chapter engages direcrly with the historiography of Surrealism, and argues
that biographers and historians have taken too much at face value Breton's own
disavowal of Dada and his claims that his Surrealist practices predated his encounter
with Tzara. Instead, she presents a narrative in which, amid a disillusionment with
anarcho-individualism Breton turns increasingly to experiments with the unconscious
and automatism as a constructive wellspring, first literary, then as an increasingly general
method. In conclusion, she tantalisingly points forward to the abstract expressionism of
Barnett Newman, to site Paris Dada as one episode in another art history of attempts to
develop specifically anarchist aesthetics. Though perhaps rather tOO dense and close for
the reader looking for an introduction or overview to anarchism's role in modem art, as a
gesture towards such a history, and an anarchist intervention into art-historical debates
around Modernism, this is a valuable and interesting contribution.
Gavin Grindon
Kingston University
Jared Davidson, Remains to be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill 's Ashes in New Zealand
Wellington: Rebel Press, 201 1 , 98pp. ISBN 978-0-473-1 8927-3
Remains to be Seen is the first book published about the New Zealand Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW). It is a reminder that the IWW was not just an American
union, and that a genuinely internationalist history of the IWW - which spread around
many Pacific Rim countries - is sorely needed. Davidson ably documents the failure of
the attempted New Zealand general strike in 1 9 1 3 and the pervasive state persecution
which meant that the New Zealand IWW was destroyed.
The book has a few shortcomings. Firstly, as the author's search for Joe Hill's ashes is
almost fruitless, perhaps it is questionable why the book was structured around this
investigation. Secondly, the book focuses on the New Zealand IWW itself - which
consisted of tiny and ephemeral propaganda clubs - and thus tends to neglect the
broader relationship between the IWW and the labour movement, in particular the
IWW's remarkable degree of influence within the socialist and trade union movements.
Indeed, the major union federation of the time, the Federation of Labour or 'Red Feds:
adopted the IWW's preamble in their constitution and pushed IWW tactics. Thirdly,
Remains to be Seen asserts that the state successfully repressed not only the IWW but
also 'militant labour', anarchists and other socialists during WWI, and that this suppres
sion had lasting consequences after the war. This gives further credence to the dominant
leftist interpretation that after the infantile syndicalist excesses of the pre-war period, the
Toby Boraman
119 1
Labour Party and Leninism became the only major socialist tendencies in New Zealand.
While this repression did have long-term consequences, militant labour and syndicalistic
praxis managed to re-emerge after about
1917. Frustrated by low wages, many workers
successfully began to use mass direct actionist tactics once more, even in defiance of
harsh war-time regulations. Several important unions became critical of parliamentary
action, and explicitly attempted to form several versions of ' One Big Union'. Two
examples include the rural-based New Zealand Workers' Union - an attempt to
'organise the unorganised: particularly because the
1913 'great strike' was crushed by
rural strike-breakers - and the Alliance of Labour, the major union federation of the
time, which united some of the more militant unions, such as the miners and water
siders/dockers. However, this semi-syndicalist current was never pure: it was ambiguous
towards the Labour Party and the state's arbitration system, and it was often dominated
by union bureaucrats despite their talk of rank-and-file contto!' For example, in
1 923 the
membership of the Alliance of Labour voted in favour of a general strike, but officials
ignored the vote.
Overall,
Remains to be Seen is a crisply written booklet, and contains much useful
original research. It is also beautifully designed by the author himself Yet by overlooking
the resurgence in militant unionism and syndicalistic praxis after
1917, it paints a
picture of blanket repression that is seemingly oblivious to how ideas and practices albeit in different forms - can often bounce back quickly in more favourable conditions.
Toby Boraman
Paul Fralich, Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action

Chicago: Haymarket Books, 201 1 , 340pp. ISBN 9781 608460748
First published in
1939 by her SPD and KAPD contemporary,
Paul Frolich, this is a
welcome republication of the original and most comprehensive study of one of the twen
tieth century's most resolute and convincing revolutionaries. The book makes for a
compelling survey of the revolutionary tumult across Europe at the beginning of the
previous century and of Luxemburg's role as dynamic figurehead and theorist of those
events.
Tracing her escape from the suffocation of Poland via exile and the bohemian intel
lectual milieu of Zurich, Frolich packs in an extraordinary amount of detail. He assesses
the considerable theoretical insights of his subject with an admirable scrupulousness and
the comradely eye of a contemporary. Reflecting on the early controversies of 'the
National question: Frolich notes:
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[ ... ]
Rosa Luxemburg overthrew the postulates of Marx's foreign policy. In doing
so, she proved herself a true pupil of Marx. This is what in fact distinguishes the
epigoni from the creative successors of great thinkers. The former piously take
over the mind work of their masters as rigid formulae, and defend them in spite
of transformed conditions; the latter grasp the real spirit of their great models by
retaining a freely critical attitude towards them, and as masters themselves, apply
their own master's methods to changed conditions (p.32).
The book provides primary-sourced insight into Luxemburg's pitiless verdict on the
German 'Social Patriots" mistaken belief, shared with Eduard Bernstein, in an electoral,
democratic, 'evolutionary' path to socialism. Frolich pays close attention to Luxemburg's
practice too, as well as the theoretical grounding for this in her most famous works.
Luxemburg's debunking of Lenin and of the Leninist party is also covered in detail,
though readers will no doubt be familiar with that controversy through
Organisational
Questionsfor Russian Social Democracy aka Leninism or Marxism.

Chapters
and
6 cover events in Russia and Russian Poland during 1905
and
Luxemburg's development of a theory of revolution, which taken to its logical conclu

sion would of necessity include armed insurrection. Luxemburg: '[ . . ] In every
.
revolution, it is the masses themselves who fmd the means of struggle best suited to
given conditions' (p. l04). Luxemburg's crucial theory of spontaneity is covered in depth
in Chapter 7, in which it is explained that her conflict with Lenin was rooted above all
in her contention that a revolutionary movement was not 'fabricated' by party officials,
'but broke out spontaneously under certain conditions' (p. I 40). Luxemburg was a
tireless critic of the Bolsheviks' throttling of the Russian Revolution, and Frolich
provides much first-hand material in the second half of the book in order to underline
this point.
Luxemburg also taught at the German SPD's party school, which ptovided educa
tion for workers, achieving some significant links with unions, and out of her teaching
were developed two important works: Introduction to Economics and
The Accumulation
qfCapital. The latter is also a crucial development of Luxemburg's theory of imperialism,
which expands as capital seeks new markets and countries to exploit; the arms race
between states was - and is - a continual reminder of the possibility of war. Luxemburg
had only relentless criticism of the advocates of evolutionary socialism who rallied
unequivocally behind the First Imperialist War and were quick to suppress dissent. The
book covers all the privations of imprisonment Luxemburg endured and her steely
refusal to let it break her spirit, writing The Accumulation qfCapita4 or what the Epigoni
have done with Marxist Theory. An Anti-critique whilst in prison. From the bitter experi
ences of the war, there followed the famous Junius pamphlet, a text which remains a
touchstone for anti-war critics.
Frolich's biography does an admirable service to Luxemburg. As he notes: 'The
Christian Garland
strongest elements in her character - compassion. a thirst for knowledge. an iron will. a
militant spirit - fused to a harmonious whole in her socialist ideas' (p. 1 9 1 ). The heroic
but abortive German Revolution of 1 9 1 8- 19. in which Luxemburg (along with
Liebknecht) was murdered by right-wing Freikorps paramilitaries. followed the machina
tions of Ebert, Noske and others in the right social democratic government, overseeing
repression of the workers' and soldiers' councils: 'The counter-revolution danced a jig
over their graves. believing that the social revolution had been struck down once and for
all' (p.30 1 ). But such vainglorious hopes remain illusory. for in the words of Luxemburg
herself, 'Tomorrow. the revolution will raise its head again. proclaiming to your horror
[ . .. ] "I was. I am. I always shall be.
..
Christian Garland
University of1arwick
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology,

edited by lain McKay
Edinburgh. Oakland. Baltimore: AK Press. 201 1 . 823pp. ISBN 978-1 849350242
All those who wish to see the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ( 1 809- 1 865) achieve
wider appreciation and recognition will welcome this new anthology. During the nine
teenth century. Proudhon's was the most important theoretical voice on the French
non-authoritarian Left. but for most of the twentieth century his theories were poorly
understood and frequently misrepresented. even caricatured. This misunderstanding
resulted largely from the spiteful distortion and critique he suffered at the hands of Karl
Marx. whose theoretical influence. especially following the Bolshevik Revolution. super
seded others on the Left. at least until the uprisings of 1 968. The unravelling of Soviet
power in Eastern Europe in the late- 1 980s and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet
Union in 1 9 9 1 accelerated the declining populariry of Marxism and its derivatives. As a
result. other Leftist views have come to receive more attention. One of the most impor
tant of these is, as it ought to be, that of Proudhon.
lain McKay. the editor of this collection. has done a wonderful job. bringing
together many of Proudhon's writings. Some selections are excerpts of older transla
What is Property? and System ofEconomic Contradictions, translated by Benjamin

General Idea ofthe Revolution in the Nineteenth
Century. translated by John Beverly Robinson in 1 923. Happily. these are joined by
tions:
Tucker in the nineteenth century; and
many additional pieces that have never appeared in English translation. The selections
date from 1 840 to 1 865; that is. from all periods of Proudhon's life except his earliest
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writings. This is the most comprehensive English-language collection ever published.
Moreover, McKay has written an incisive introduction that provides an excellent biog
raphical sketch and a useful analysis of Proudhon's theory and its continuing relevance.
Proudhon became famous in 1 840 with the publication of What is Property? In
this book, Proudhon provocatively proclaimed himself 'an anarchist' (p. 1 33) and
asserted that 'property is theft: He also proposed a reorganization of society that would
push aside those who produced nothing of value and inappropriately benefited from
interest and rents. He called for the elimination of the 'arbitrary' system of supply and
demand that, he claimed, unfairly disadvantaged workers, and he proposed the creation
of 'progressive associations' of workers that would serve as the foci of educational and
economic reform. These associations, he believed, would facilitate the elimination of
'les oisifi'
the members of the parasitic idle class - who had traditionally exercised
economic power, and they would also provide an alternative to government control of
economic and social forces that Proudhon argued would be equally unjust and debili
tating. In short, he wished to see economic and social decision-making transferred from
capitalists, financiers and politicians to workers.
In 1 846, Ptoudhon referred to this
same formula for socio-economic justice as 'mutualism' (see pp.254-55); in 1 848, he

called it 'positive anarchy' (p.280).
Especially welcome in this anthology are the translations of newspaper articles and
book selections from the period of the French Second Republic ( 1 848-52). Proudhon
was especially active during this period, even serving as a Deputy in the National
Assembly following the by-elections ofJune 1 848. For the next year, he was at the centre
of Parisian events. Even after he was arrested in June 1 849 for his criticisms of President
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, he continued his flood of words, writing numetous news
paper articles and four books. Proudhon's interventions during this tumultuous period
are especially revealing of his temperament and his ideological orientation. He was impa
tient with the politicians of the new Republic and their seemingly ceaseless rhetoric,
insisting that they ignored the need for economic reform 'from below', which he argued
was central. He was equally critical of traditional political economists who, he claimed,
were only protecting the interests of the propertied classes. His irritation is strangely
evocative of the ourrage articulated recently by demonstrators condemning the collusion
of political and financial elites during our own recent financial crises. On April 1 4, 1 848,
for example, he assessed the situation following the Febtuary 1 848 revolution in France
in an article in
Le Representant du Peuple in the following manner: ' [ T ]he people has a
perfect grasp on these two things: on the one hand, that politics is nothing ; on the other,
that political economy [ ... ], is merely the economics of the propertied, the application of
which to society inevitably and organically engenders misery' (p.300). Ptoudhon
lamented that the reformers 'always start out with their gaze fixed upon the past'
(p.308), and that the elections and political manreuverings produced discord rather than
providing the ftamework for needed social and economic reform.
K. Steven Vincent
1 23 1
Proudhon was shocked by the violence of the June Days, which he accurately char
acterized as a 'civil war'. Though he personally rejected armed insurrection and
preached peaceful conciliation, he sympathetically portrayed the insurrectionaries who
had been forced to endure so many social and psychological injustices, and argued that
ineffective politicians and the forces of reaction were responsible for this tragic 'explo
sion of desperation' (p.336). As he put it in one of his most famous articles, 'The
Malthusians' (published August 10, 1 848), for bourgeois politicians like Adolph
Thiers, it was 'better that four million should die than that privilege should be compro
mised ... They are courageous, they are stoical, these statesmen of the school of
Malthus, when it is a matter of sacrificing workers by the millions' (p.3SS ).
The primary function of this impressive collection is to make Proudhon's wtitings
accessible to those who do not read French, and to dismantle the superficial misconcep
tions that have surrounded Proudhon's theories. It does this marvellously. Because it
clarifies Proudhon's relationships with contemporaries and charts his reactions to the
important events of his era, historians and political theorists will find much of interest.
Because Proudhon's critical analyses seem startlingly appropriate for the disturbing
manreuverings of our contemporary financial and political elites, this anthology should
also attract attention beyond the boundaries of the academy.
K.
Steven Vincent
North Carolina State University
David Berry and Constance Bantman (eds.), New Perspectives on Anarchism,

Labour and Syndicalism: the Individual, the National and the Transnational
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 201 0, 228pp.
ISBN 978-1 -4438-2393-7
This fine collection draws together studies of anarchism and syndicalism, mainly
covering the 1 890s to the 1940s in Europe. These underline the important role of anar
chism in labour movement history, and, conversely, demonstrate anarchism's and
syndicalism's commitment to a libertarian, revolutionary class struggle politics. The indi
vidual chapters are remarkably interesting and solidly researched; the editors'
introduction is insightful; and the volume is cohesive, as important synergies make the
whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Berry and Bantman make a case for the importance of global - especially transna
tional - approaches to labour and left history. They argue for the utility of biography,
network analysis, comparative analysis and attention to political languages, in shifting
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from the 'methodological nationalism' (p.6) that has long shaped these fields. Bert
Altena's stimulating survey picks up these analytical issues. He argues against approaches
that treat syndicalism as something 'abnormal: a 'Pavlovian reaction' triggered by
external structural conditions such as the second industrial revolution, social democratic
failure etc. One problem is that mass syndicalism existed where many of these conditions
did not apply (e.g. Spain, 1 870s, France, 1 890s), and was conversely absent (e.g.
Belgium) or only a minority current (e.g. Germany) where they did apply. Second, struc
turalist arguments fail to examine syndicalism on its own terms, as a revolutionary
movement with its own political culture, driven by the ideas and aspirations of working
class people in particular communities and contexts.
The editors apologise for their 'Eurocentrism: but this is surely unnecessary. The
methodological problems ofEurocentrism reside not in a focus on Europe as such, but in
a conflation of world history with (West) European history, with other regions ignored
or caricatured. This is certainly not the approach of Berry and Bantman, who are keenly
aware that European anarchism/syndicalism was but part of a global movement. Levy's
fme discussion of anarchist 'global labour organiser' Errico Malatesta's role in anti
colonial risings in Bosnia and Egypt, and in activism and networks in North Africa, the
Middle East, the Caribbean and Latin America, makes this clear. Besides, this important
collection also breaks with the literature's traditional focus on the North Atlantic
seaboard and Spain, wherein the Spanish movement is presented as a mysterious, unique
case of mass anarchist influence.l
Most chapters are framed transnationally, and examine how movements operated
across state borders and within borderlands, as ideas and debates, activists and struggle
repertoires flowed across the European space.
At one level, this transnational constitution of the anarchist/syndicalist movement
centred upon what Bantman calls the 'informal internationalism' of cross-border
networks, periodicals and migrants. Bantman's fascinating chapter shows, for example,
that many key themes in the archetypal syndicalist CGT of France were 'ideological
imports'from Britain, where anarchism was itself deeply influenced by exiles like Pyotr
Kropotin and Malatesta. As Davide Turcato and Wayne Thorpe note in their rich contri
burions, London ('headquarters of continental anarchism') and Paris ('Mecca of
syndicalism') were key hubs in these European networks (pp.20, 1 1 2). Within these
spaces, Yann Beliard shows in his wonderful study of the worker Gustav Schmidt/Gus
Smith - a German immigrant active in British circles - that there were also elements of
intermingling, with anarchism and social democracy co-existing, overlapping, even fusing.
At another level, anarchist internationalism also includedformal cross-border organ
ising. Mter the anarchist majority wing of the First International (spanning three
continents) closed in 1 877, the movement entered the 'Second' International. Here
syndicalism (Altena notes) was very important, and here (Turcato shows) anarchists and
syndicalists campaigned to participate and shape the International, notably in the 1 896
Lucien van tier Welt

London congress. Their 'congressional battle' failed, and their influence in the
International waned for years - less because of Marxists than due to anarchist failings,
notably the debilitating influence of 'anti-organisationism: The 1 896 'bawe' however
laid a firm basis for the pro-syndicalist, 1 907 anarchist Amsterdam Congress: again,
however. Altena shows, 'anti-organisationists' prevented a real International emerging.
Meanwhile, Thorpe notes, syndicalism repeatedly re-emerged in the Second
International, including in its German, Italian and Swedish parties, and in the
International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres (ISNTUC), where the
French CGT was active. Facing ongoing frustrations, many anarchists and syndicalists
turned their efforts to building a new, specifically anarchist/syndicalist, international.
This led some to engage with the new Communist International - the subject of
Reiner Tosstorff's evocative piece. Anarchists/syndicalists were a massive force, leading
the Bolsheviks to make overtures; the Spanish CNT and Italian USI briefly affiliated.
However, Bolshevik authoritarianism reinforced the rejection of classical Marxism,
leading to the syndicalist International Workingmens' Association (!WA/ AIT) in 1 922.
Secondly, it is important to stress (regarding Eurocentrism) that the volume also
engages with Eastern Europe. Thorpe provides useful material on the diffusion of syndi
calism into Hungary, Poland and Russia. Rafal Chwedoruk provides an important
discussion of the Polish anarchist/ syndicalist movement, which eventually led the ZZZ
unions. This movement was shaped by the 'national question' generated by the country's
history of colonial subjugation and its brief independence ( 19 1 8-39). This impact on
ZZZ syndicalists is also noted by Dieter Nelles, whose compelling chapter examines
German and Polish militants (often linked to the syndicalist FAUD) in Upper Silesia.
Interestingly, Nelles notes, like the FAUD and the Spanish CNT, the ZZZ organised
armed militias - something contrary to Marxist claims that the Libertarian movement
refused to organise militarily for revolution.2
Contrary to the tired cliche that anarchism/syndicalism collapsed with Bolshevism,
the German movement peaked in the 1 920s, as Altena notes, while the Polish (and
Spanish) movements peaked in the 1 930s. By the end of the decade, however, partly due
to fascism and Bolshevism, significant legal syndicalist unions apparently only existed in
Chile, Bolivia, Sweden and Uruguay. Thus the 1 940s saw the Bulgarian, French,
German, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian and other movements focus on under
ground resistance}
Then followed the post-war rebirth. In France, the anarchist / syndicalist movement
soon rallied tens of thousands. As Guillaume Davranche's excellent chapter shows, some
worked in the new CGT-FO unions, others sought to regroup unions around the syndi
calist CNT; others worked within the (now Communist-led) CGT. The strategic choice
between forming new organisations or working within non-anarchist/syndicalist forma
tions - previously faced by local unions (Britain, Beliard), national centres (Poland,
Chwedoruk), or international bodies like the Second International (Turcato), the
Reviews
ISNTUC (Thorpe) and Comintern (Tosstorff) - again faced France. Eventually efforts
to form a powerful new syndicalist centre failed: this, Davranche suggests, was partly
because the CNT sank into 'a spiral of sectarian self-destruction' (p.177).
In conclusion, this is an excellent collection, and highly recommended. As a source
of bibliographical data alone, it is worthwhile-and it is far more than that. I have
ptovided but an indication of its richness.
Lucien van der 1alt

University ofthe Witwatersrand, South Africa
Notes
1. See Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, Black Flame: the revolutionary class
politics ofanarchism and syndicalism (San Francisco: AK Press, 2009), ch. I .
2. E.g. Paul Blackledge, 'Marxism and Anarchism: International Socialism, no. 125 (2010).
3. See Vadim Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century (Edmonton : Black
Cat Press, 2009).
BOOK NOTES
D. Nelles,
H.
Piotrowski,
U.
Linse & C. Garcia, Antifascistas alemanes en
Barcelona (1933- 1939). EI Grupo DAS: sus actividades contra la red nazi y en el
frente de Aragon
Barcelona: Editorial Sintra, 201 0, 430pp. ISBN 978-84-934745-3-9.
Given the existing historiography in either English or Spanish on the participation of

German anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish revolution, this book is a very welcome
addition. The book follows the activities of the exiled German anarcho-syndicalists in
Barcelona from 1936 under the umbrella of the DAS (Deutsche Anarchosyndikalisten),
ftom their participation in the militias on the Aragonese front, to their key role in anti
Nazi actions in Barcelona, through to the tensions with the republican state and with the
CNT (National Confederation of Labour).
The book is divided into ten chapters covering German emigration to Barcelona, the
role of the DAS in the anti-fascist militias, the role of the DAS in guaranteeing the new
revolutionary public order in the ciry, revolutionary expropriations of properry, particuAnarchist Studies 20.1
Rkhard Cieminson
127 1
larly of Nazi supporters in Barcelona, the relations between the DAS, the CNT and the
IWA (International Workers' Association) and the fate of the DAS from May 1 937
onwards, when the Marxist PO UM was illegalised and persecuted by the republican state.
The detail with which the story of the DAS is reconstructed is exemplary, with
extensive use of archive sources. Hence, we are told about the reception of the Germans
within the ranks of the CNT and the militias (not always positive), the tensions
between sectors in the IWA that endorsed or criticised the CNT's participation in the
reconstituted republican government, the question of the militarization of the militias,
the tole of the Spanish, Catalan and German communist parties in steering the war away
from revolutionary concerns, and the tole of women in the conflict. The success of the
DAS in rooting OUt Nazi supporters and dismantling the Nazi presence in Barcelona,
perhaps the greatest contribution of the DAS, is to be contrasted with the falling out of
favour with the CNT over questions of revolutionary tactics. More details could have
been provided on the actual formation of the DAS, its relation with the (by this time)
illegal FAUD in Germany and its status within the IWA.
Richard Cleminson
University ofLeeds
Werner Bonefeld (ed.), Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future

New York: Autonomedia, 2008. ISBN 978-1 -57027-1 84-7 (Pbk)
Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future is a collection of essays - most of which are
written from a broadly autonomist Marxist perspective - dividd into three parts
entitled, respectively, 'Primitive Accumulation: a Debate on History, Social Constitution
& Struggle'; 'Subversion in Everyday Life : Movements, Currents, and Class Struggle';
and 'The Question of the Multitude: Argentina, Mexico & the United States: Although
many of the individual essays gathered under these headings are interesting and thought
provoking in their own right, the editor does not bother to explain what 'primitive
accumulation: for example, has to do with 'class struggle: or what any of this has to do
with 'subversion: As a result, the volume as a whole comes across a bit like political-theo
retical potpourri without a consistent, unifying theme.
I want to reiterate, however, that the incoherent organization of the volume in no
way detracts from the general quality of the contributions, several of which are very well
done. As a historian of philosophy, I particularly enjoyed Massimo De Angelis' and Paul
Zarembka's competing interpretations of the role of primitive accumulation in capitalist
development. Stevphen Shukaitis' 'Dancing Amidst the Flames' is the standout essay of
Reviews
Part 2, articulating as it does a 'politics of minor composition'( i.e. 'a form of politics
which draws from existing social energies and ideas in circulation while using them to
other means: p. I 0 I ) using the IWW's Little Red Songbook and Martha and the Vandella's
'Dancing in the Streets' as prominent examples. Those who are familiar with Shukaitis'
work in general, and on the politics of the minor in particular, will greatly enjoy this
piece. Lastly, Patrick Cuninghame's 'Reinventing an/other anti-capitalism in Mexico:
from Part III, is strongly recommended for its extremely clear and in-depth analysis of
the Zapatistas' 'Other Campaign'.
If one happens to be interested in the somewhat disjOinted array of themes discussed
in this book, it will certainly not disappoint. All of the contributors are noted scholars
and activists and, not surprisingly, all of them bring something worthwhile to the table.
But if one is looking for a consistent or overarching 'point: I cannot say that Subverting
the Present delivers.
NathanJun
Midwestern State University

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Dave Berry, Department of Politics, International Relations and European Studies,

L. Susan Brown (Independent), political and social theory

Allan Antliff (University of Victoria), h isto ry of art

ISSN 0967 3393

201 2 subscriptions are (for two issues):

'Nothing is Permitted Anymore': Postanarchism, Gnosticism, and The End of

Building 'Another Politics': The Contemporary Anti-Authoritarian Current in the

Interpersonal Ethics in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed Daniel

Louisa Sarah Bevington's Letters t o Ethel Rolt Wheeler: A Catechism in

Another View: Syndicalism, Anarchism and Marxism lain McKay

Sean Birchall, Beating the Fascists: the Untold Story of Anti-Fascist

Reviewed by Keith Hodgson

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary

Reviewed by Paul Chambers

Saul Newman (ed.),

Max Stirner Reviewed by Seth Crownover

Kathy Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets

Reviewed by Laura Greenwood

Criticism, 1914-1924 Reviewed by Gavin Grindon

Jared Davidson, Remains to be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill's Ashes in New

Reviewed by Toby Boraman

Froli ch Rosa Luxemburg: Ideas in Action

Reviewed by Christian Garland

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology,

Reviewed by K. Steven Vincent

David Berry and Constance Bantman (eds.), New Perspectives on Anarchism,

Reviewed by Lucien van der Walt

About this issue's cover

About this issue's cover

Anarchist Studies 20.1

2012 ISSN 0967 3393

Anarchist Studies 20.1

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore': Postanarchism, Gnosticism, and The End of Production

Anarchist Studies 20.1 2012

ISSN 0967 3393

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore':

Keywords: Post anarchism, Gnosticism, cyberpunk, Lacan

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

and authorship in the digital age

presents contemporary anarchism with a sober ethical, and ultimately theological,

through the very postmodernists Chomsky

Anarchist Studies 20.1

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

The Cyphernomicon, although cyberspace

ETHICS AND THE POSTMODERN END OF PRODUCTION

Anarchist Studies 20.1

Brian James Schill

(logos). This is all relevant for desire-law-logos so far as

Anarchist Studies 20.1

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'

Anarchist Studies 20.1

Brian James Schill

The Ethics oJ'Psychoana/ysis, equates creative

production itself with desire-Iaw-logos.70 T hrough this rationale, Lacan, in a reiteration

by virtue ofthe law's existence - Lacan shows how

Anarchist Studies 20.1

'Nothing Is Permitted Anymore'