Not possessing prophetic visions, it will be difficult to predict what forms Anarchism will take in the 21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity—individual and collective—(including and especially among strangers) will always constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the context of anarchism, or rather anarchisms.

I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but rather intersecting yet not hierarchically descending, within which twenty-first-century anarchists will strive to identify the best forms of action. There is clearly a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other contributions will provide us with general and specific features and contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not exclude or downplay the more common, more everyday, and perhaps more local spheres of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rooting in the territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will also “over-determine” local or traditional conflicts, changing their forms and modalities and imparting, in my view, significant twists.

The first is climate change, which alters the planet’s living conditions, jeopardising the survival of its ecosystems, with the risk of demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent exploitation of resources (fertile land, water), etc. The nomadism typical (and even original) of the human species cannot be stopped by state or “natural” borders, such will be the pressure of migration in search of better living conditions. If the pace of exploitation of humanity’s resources (land and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world’s population is of working age, and a quarter of them live in rural areas, where 80% of global poverty exists. This is without considering the informal, obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. In these conditions, which it would be unworthy to call “emergency”—so endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality on a global scale—the approach to problems can only hinge on bottom-up self-organisation, to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from this practice of solidarity and self-organisation that an anarchist ethos is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem-solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganisation of social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars following Elon Musk & Co.

The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to global hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the close of the last millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against which to pursue policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. It’s not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, history has never seen smooth and peaceful successions of global hegemony—quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarisation of societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of hard-won “rights,” even without losing the pretence of (pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, speech, expression, the ability to shape one’s life as one sees fit, and the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalised or translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary majorities. The path will make the difference.

By militarisation, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war industries, etc.). We must address the internalisation of a warmongering and bellicose culture, which arms consciences from a very young age, pressuring them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at us at every step. Cultural models in which violence is exalted because it is simulated—game over, and we begin again—life as a video game in which you kill and are killed, but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that transform war in its forms, anaesthetising its wounds and physical traumas and transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least for those who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows.

We must not underestimate or minimise the hybrid militarisation that insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our physical and virtual experiences, which are transformed into numerical data easily processed by algorithms, resulting in a unique mass profiling —and this may not sound contradictory—that is useful for predicting and even guiding our future behaviour.

Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionising the way of life in our societies, not only in the areas of living labour, which can be replaced by robots and various machines, nor only in the ways in which “political” opinions are channelled during elections. The split between the corporeal, “real” sphere and the “virtual” dimension, whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to on the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In an era of extreme individualism, advocated and encouraged by the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has shattered to be “resurrected” in the relationship between the self and the screen of my digital device; Physical sociality has in some ways evaporated in favour of a virtual “sociality,” managed by proprietary platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue is enacted with just as many other selves, each connected via their own screen. The fiction of having a following of followers, of having tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between different people. And when these virtual expulsions resurface in the space-time of corporeal existence, being unaccustomed of relating to different others turns into gratuitous, senseless, unexpected violence, except as a “defensive” form of a psychology devoid of real sociality, precisely because it is imbued with “social” surrogates.

Neoliberal individualism, further translocated into the digital universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones using the devices, but perhaps it’s precisely the opposite. Outside of any community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What community could give rise to the communism of goods and services? What critical and diverse subject could emerge in the increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine?

The new ways in which we feel we are subjects of ourselves, aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for “social(i)” connections from which we can reconstitute a strong destituent community capable of imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized around the pivot of the absence of power.

Written by Salvo Vaccaro for Umanità Nova (Italy)

Machine Translation in English- edited by Blade Runner. 

Summary of a presentation at the Carrara Conference (11-12 October 2025) on occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Italian Anarchist Federation.

SOURCE: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/12/17/21st-century-anarchism/

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Wtitten By Emilia Salvanou (Hellenic Open University)

1. Introduction

In 2023–2024 mass protests erupted across Europe and North America not in the name of humanitarian neutrality, but in direct opposition to what thousands of demonstrators called a genocidal war waged by the Israeli state against Palestinians in Gaza.¹ The brutality of the images—hospitals bombed, families buried alive, bodies retrieved from rubble, and a relentlessly rising death toll—shattered long-standing taboos around how the Israeli–Palestinian conflict could be named, narrated, and historicized. At the same time, the charge of antisemitism re-emerged as a powerful instrument for disciplining this emergent discourse.² In the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, accusations of antisemitism have been increasingly deployed to delegitimize and suppress opposition to Israeli state violence. While antisemitism is a real and ongoing threat that demands attention, the current moment reveals a strategic instrumentalization of the term that transforms it from a category of historical and ethical urgency into a tool of silencing and disarticulation. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe lies a deeper struggle: not just over competing narratives, but over the very politics of grief—over whose deaths are grievable, whose pain is legible, and whose history can be invoked in the present.³

Rather than seeking a diagnostic of antisemitism per se, I interrogate memory as a political form—both as a regime that disciplines public speech and as a site of contestation through which the ethics of grief may be reimagined. The essay asks what forms of memory and political responsibility are foreclosed when the accusation of antisemitism is deployed to silence critique of Israel’s war in Gaza. How did we arrive at a point where Jewish identity is conflated with state violence, and mourning Palestinian lives is cast as suspect—or even as hate speech? Can we imagine a reconfiguration of historical memory that does not pit the trauma of one people against the suffering of another?⁴

In the current situation we find ourselves not in front of an absence of memory, but rather in front of the formation of a certain kind of memory—what I propose to call a memory-shell: a hard, sealed structure that preserves traces of past suffering while rendering them politically intransigent and epistemically non-negotiable. Drawing on recent historical debates, memory studies, and social movement theory, this essay proposes to treat memory not as a container of facts, but as a shell—a political form that both preserves and protects, hardens and hollows, shaping what can be said, felt, and remembered in public space. Through this lens, I suggest that European discourse around antisemitism is not simply about historical truth or falsehood, but about managing moral authority in a time of colonial reckoning.

2. From “Never Again” to “Again and Again”: The Rhetorical Capture of Holocaust Memory

While Holocaust memory has served as a pillar of European post-war ethics, it has also, from the beginning, been marked by exclusions—chiefly, the exclusion of Europe’s own colonial crimes. Scholars such as Michael Rothberg and Enzo Traverso have argued that the promise “Never Again” has always been unstable. The transformation of Holocaust memory into a kind of civil religion of the West has often come at the expense of other histories of violence—particularly those that Europe itself perpetrated through colonial conquest, racial domination, and imperial war.⁵ As Peter Novick has argued, the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the United States was not a continuous act of mourning, but a historically contingent process shaped by Cold War politics, American exceptionalism, and shifting geostrategic interests.⁶ In this sense, Holocaust memory became not only a site of moral instruction but also a symbolic resource—one increasingly detached from the material history of Jewish suffering and repurposed to frame Western identity as morally redemptive.⁷ The result has been what Levy and Sznaider call “cosmopolitan memory,” a moral lingua franca that can universalize particular trauma while eliding others.⁸ Building on such insights, Gil Z. Hochberg’s scholarship further illuminates how memory operates not only as a repository of past suffering but also as an active site of political contestation and embodied resistance in contexts of settler colonialism. Hochberg’s analysis foregrounds the lived experience of trauma and the ways in which Palestinian memory challenges dominant narratives that seek to contain or delegitimize their claims to justice.⁹

This tension is not new, but in recent years it has deepened. As the realities of Palestinian displacement, occupation, and death have become more visible—especially through digital media and transnational activism—new generations shaped by intersectional politics and postcolonial critique have begun to challenge the monopoly of Holocaust memory as the sole or supreme site of moral authority. Within this shifting field, Holocaust memory has in many official and public discourses been recast not as a warning against the dangers of state violence per se, but as a symbolic shield for a particular state—Israel—even when that state engages in what many describe as apartheid or colonial war.¹⁰

This rhetorical shift has deep implications. As Enzo Traverso has shown, the exceptionalization of the Holocaust risks producing a form of moral insulation: a past that is so singular it cannot illuminate present forms of domination.¹¹ This “de-historicized memory,” he argues, cuts the Holocaust off from other histories of political violence and thereby weakens its critical power. Similarly, Israeli philosopher Yehuda Elkana warned as early as 1988 that the obsessive institutionalization of Holocaust memory in Israel—and by extension in the West—risked turning a collective trauma into a permanent lens of victimhood, rendering others’ suffering invisible and undermining the process of building a peaceful future.¹²

The point is not to diminish the significance of the Holocaust or to relativize its horror. On the contrary: to preserve its ethical force, we must resist its rhetorical capture. When “Never Again” is invoked to shield acts of ethnic cleansing, occupation, or military terror from critique, it becomes a reversal of its own moral intention. As Rothberg argues in Multidirectional Memory, the memory of different traumas does not inherently compete; they become rivals only within political structures that impose a zero-sum logic. In the case of Gaza, this logic has become brutally evident: expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are framed as denials of Jewish suffering, while Jewish grief is selectively mobilized to legitimize violence against a stateless people.

This logic is not without precedent. Already in 1955, Aimé Césaire warned that European humanism had turned inward against itself. In Discourse on Colonialism, he argued that the crimes of fascism were not an aberration but the return of colonial violence to the metropole—what had been rehearsed abroad now enacted at home.¹³ Today, the colonial scaffolding of Holocaust memory in European discourse risks producing a similar effect: a historical rupture instrumentalized to disavow present forms of racialized domination, even as the language of anti-fascism is invoked to justify them.

In addition to the voices analyzed above, it is crucial to acknowledge Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, who have long emphasized the ethical imperative to remember trauma in ways that challenge dominant narratives and foster a politics of responsibility. Said’s reflections on exile and the role of the intellectual exemplify a memory that is at once disruptive and dialogical. In Representations of the Intellectual and elsewhere, he insists that the task of the intellectual is not to consolidate consensus but to “speak truth to power”—to inhabit a position of principled disobedience, even (or especially) when it entails marginality or estrangement. For Said, exile is not only a physical condition but an epistemological stance: to remember, from exile, is to contest the authorized versions of history and to reinsert the silenced, the excluded, and the ungrievable into the historical record. Memory here becomes a political force: it interrupts, unsettles, and demands reparation. It is not a duty to the past alone but a responsibility toward the future.¹⁴

Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and prose evoke the pain of loss and the disarticulation of homeland—but not as a static lament. Rather, his work affirms the necessity of bearing witness across boundaries of nation, confession, or language. In his hands, memory is both elegiac and insurgent: it recovers fragments of a shattered world not to restore them intact, but to expose the violence of their destruction and to imagine new forms of collective life. His verse performs the impossible simultaneity of love and rage, intimacy and defiance, absence and presence. As such, it marks a refusal to let historical trauma be domesticated by abstract humanism or geopolitical cynicism. Instead, it situates Palestinian grief within a broader, decolonial poetics of survival and historical reckoning. Darwish’s poetry resists the teleological loop of trauma that locks the subject into binary positions of either perpetrator or victim. As Ella Shohat observes, Darwish “provincializes” the Holocaust not by denying its magnitude, but by returning it to a historical and political terrain—a terrain marked by colonial displacements, Mediterranean crossings, and shared griefs. In this way, he breaks the singularity of Holocaust memory as the limit-case of suffering and repositions it within a relational field of loss.¹⁵

In State of Siege, written during the Israeli siege of Ramallah in 2002, Darwish writes:

“We do what prisoners do, // what the unemployed do: // we cultivate hope.”

Here, hope is not redemptive; it is neither messianic nor compensatory. It is a minor practice, a labor of dailiness that works against the suspended temporality of siege and trauma. As Ariella Azoulay and Gil Hochberg have argued, this kind of aesthetic labor—particularly in Palestinian poetics—reclaims futurity not as promise, but as unfinished inheritance: a way of inhabiting memory without enclosing it.¹⁶

Together, Said and Darwish articulate a form of memory that is unhomed yet generative, one that confronts power without mirroring its exclusions. Their interventions push us to imagine a politics of grief and recognition that is capacious enough to hold multiple histories of violence, without flattening their specificities or reinscribing new hierarchies of suffering.¹⁷ Against the backdrop of a Western memory regime that often instrumentalizes the Holocaust as a civil religion while obscuring the colonial and imperial violences in which Europe remains complicit, their work insists on the right to narrate and the imperative to remember otherwise. 

Alongside these perspectives, diasporic Jewish activist groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, and the former Not In Our Name offer a critical intervention into the politics of Holocaust memory. Refusing the instrumentalization of Jewish suffering to justify the oppression of others, they reclaim a Jewish ethical tradition rooted in justice, solidarity, and anti-colonial resistance.¹⁸ Their actions and writings challenge both the ethno-nationalist appropriation of the Shoah and the silencing of Palestinian grief, asserting instead a memory that is relational and emancipatory. By organizing protests, issuing public statements, and engaging in civil disobedience—often at great personal and communal cost—these groups articulate a diasporic Jewishness not defined by state power or military force but by historical conscience and political refusal. In their hands, Holocaust memory becomes not a license for exceptionalism but a moral and historical imperative to stand against apartheid, occupation, and genocide in all their forms. Recent interventions—such as the mass protest at the U.S. Capitol on October 18, 2023,¹⁹ and the disruption of Grand Central Terminal in New York on October 27, 2023,²⁰ demonstrate how these activists seek to reclaim Jewish memory as a tool of decolonial solidarity. This refusal to be confined within the dominant “memory-shell” enables a different temporality and ethics: one in which Jewish and Palestinian histories of dispossession need not be mutually exclusive, but can become the basis for shared mourning and collective responsibility. Their activism thus disrupts hegemonic memory regimes and gestures toward a horizon of justice where grief is unbounded by ethnic, national, or religious divisions. The interventions examined above—Palestinian, diasporic Jewish, and decolonial—challenge this closure and reopen the possibility of a memory otherwise: one that is committed to justice, multiplicity, and shared vulnerability.²¹

3. Memory-Shells and the Floating Signifier: A Theoretical Framing

In this sense, the appropriation of Holocaust memory as a hegemonic moral grammar—mobilized to justify ongoing colonial violence while silencing other histories of grief—illustrates how memory regimes operate through exclusion as much as through commemoration. Rather than serving as a space of ethical confrontation, Holocaust memory increasingly functions as a memory shell. In what follows, I propose the concept of the memory-shell as a heuristic device to understand the transformation of memory from a site of historical and affective disturbance into a hardened vessel of moral authority. The memory shell should be understood as a political form that preserves the outer layer of historical trauma while hollowing out its disruptive, universalist potential. The notion refers to a dynamic formation in which memory does not function as a straightforward recollection of the past but as a flexible container for resemanticization. It is neither true nor false; rather, it is contingent — open to reactivation, ideological reframing, and symbolic contestation depending on the political conjuncture and the struggle for moral authority. As such, memory is not merely selective; it is actively negotiated and often antagonistic. A memory-shell preserves the symbolic imprint of past trauma while increasingly detaching it from the contexts that made it politically and ethically disruptive. In this sense, memory-shells resemble sealed containers: they protect, encapsulate, and abstract memory from lived histories and struggles, thus regulating what can be said, grieved, or imagined in public discourse.

The concept draws on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of the floating signifier, a signifier emptied of fixed meaning that becomes hegemonically rearticulated within different political contexts.²² In other words, a term that condenses historical trauma into a point of moral certainty, while allowing it to be rearticulated across divergent political projects. Like the floating signifier, the memory-shell is not bound to one content but gains force precisely through its ambiguity and moral overdetermination. We may approach shell-memory as a nodal point emptied of fixed referent but capable of being invested with divergent political meanings. It can stand for “never again,” for trauma, for justice, or for exceptionalism—depending on who invokes it, and when. Like “democracy” or “freedom,” memory — and particularly Holocaust memory — can be appropriated across ideological divides, charged with contradictory emotions, and mobilized for competing claims to victimhood. In this sense, the memory of the Holocaust has become a site of articulation, simultaneously enabling resistance to injustice and functioning as a tool for discrediting criticism of Israeli state violence. This is not a symptom of forgetting. On the contrary – memories that turn into memory shells are usually those that are so securely embedded in historical culture and identity, that is impossible to bypass. Therefore, resignification and even contestation is rather a symptom of political appropriation: memory as a vessel for hegemonic realignment. Memory shells are, in this sense, not merely a mode of historical recall but a technique of governance, echoing Michel Foucault’s insight that regimes of truth function through what is rendered sayable, thinkable, and grievable.²³ Memory here becomes a terrain of political struggle: a contested medium through which hierarchies are encoded, disrupted, or suppressed. 

Yet the memory-shell does not merely float; it shields. It becomes an ethical armor that protects hegemonic narratives while repelling interpretations that might link past and present forms of violence. Shell-memory thus reveals memory as a terrain of contestation rather than a stable referent. This is particularly evident in the case of Holocaust memory in the post-1945 West, which has undergone a transformation from traumatic rupture to moral consensus. The memory of Auschwitz, once disruptive and historically embedded, now circulates as a normative grammar of recognition and punishment, deployed to name and shame certain actors while exonerating others. Such deployments, while not new, have intensified in the wake of global protest against the genocide in Gaza. In the case of Gaza, the struggle for remembrance is not simply historiographical or humanitarian; it is a battle over who can legitimately invoke trauma, define victimhood, and occupy the moral register of History. The very act of linking Gaza to Auschwitz becomes unspeakable—not because of historical inaccuracy, but because the memory shell has become performative, disciplinary, and sacrosanct. What is at stake, then, is not the truth-value of memory, but its instrumental function: to govern grief, regulate dissent, and secure geopolitical alliances.

As Donatella della Porta argues, memory is never politically neutral. In moments of political contestation, memories of past violence can become central to the framing strategies of both protest movements and hegemonic actors. Memory does not merely recall the past; it reconfigures the present by legitimizing certain claims and delegitimizing others. In her work on social movements and contentious politics, she highlights how symbolic references to historical traumas—whether of war, fascism, or genocide—are mobilized to shape collective identities and to justify political action or repression.²⁴ The memory shell, then, is not only a metaphor for historical closure, but also a political instrument—a site where affect, legitimacy, and power intersect. 

In the current conjuncture, the sacralization of Holocaust memory often serves not to expand the democratic horizon of solidarity, but to shield specific state actors from critique, transforming memory into a disciplinary tool that regulates the limits of political imagination. Affectively, memory shells operate as technologies of emotional capture. They command reverence and impose silence; they channel sorrow into specific, allowable directions. This memory shell enshrines the Holocaust. But it does so by detaching it from the plural and contested terrains of historical remembrance and by repositioning it within a moral grammar that demands loyalty, not inquiry. Here, memory becomes a surface rather than a depth—a performative invocation rather than a space for reflexive engagement. As such, the memory of the Holocaust is reified: placed behind a transparent barrier through which it can be seen, reverently cited, but not recontextualized. In this context, “antisemitism” is increasingly unmoored from the specific genealogies of hate, exclusion, and extermination that gave rise to it, and becomes instead a floating moral charge: one that can be affixed to anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinian activists, human rights NGOs, and even ceasefire protesters.

The functionalization of antisemitism as a mode of accusation has a long genealogy, but it has intensified in the wake of 7 October 2023. In the months that followed, institutions across Europe and North America adopted punitive measures against individuals and groups opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Humanitarian workers were suspended or investigated for public expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. University presidents in the United States were summoned to Congressional hearings and forced to resign under the pressure of donor campaigns and orchestrated outrage. Protesters in cities from Berlin to Paris to London faced bans, arrests, or police violence, justified by the claim that any public dissent against the war amounted to an incitement to hatred or a threat to Jewish safety.²⁵ In such cases, the invocation of antisemitism operates not as a means of protecting Jewish communities, but as a mechanism of anticipatory repression—a form of delegitimization of actors, practices, and narratives before they can generate political traction.²⁶ Memory, in this schema, becomes the moral substrate for a new regime of securitized speech. One must not only avoid antisemitism; one must not appear to contest the state’s definition of what antisemitism is. 

4. Definitions and the Politics of Memory

This process is most evident in the strategic adoption and dissemination of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism, which blurs the line between anti-Jewish hatred and criticism of the Israeli state.²⁷ By contrast, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, authored by a group of Jewish scholars and public intellectuals, insists on the distinction between antisemitism as a form of racialized hatred and legitimate critique of Zionism or Israeli policies.²⁸ Yet in the institutional field, it is the IHRA definition that has prevailed—endorsed by governments, universities, and cultural organizations across the West, often as a condition for funding or partnership. Here, the memory-shell operates as a shield and a filter: it shields a particular narrative of Jewish victimhood from scrutiny and filters out alternative forms of remembrance—especially those that foreground Palestinian dispossession as part of the same historical arc. The memory-shell does not deny the Holocaust; it monopolizes its meaning. It demands that Holocaust memory serve as the ground for identification with Israeli state violence and casts any deviation from this moral script as a betrayal of Jewish suffering itself. As Sara Ahmed has argued, emotions are not private states but forms of contact and orientation: they stick to certain bodies and histories more than others. The memory shell ensures that grief over Jewish loss remains politically permissible, even compulsory, while grief over Palestinian death becomes suspect, antisemitic, or uncivil. This is not a failure of memory, but a political use of memory as moral governance. 

This logic of exclusive mourning produces a condition I describe as a memory impasse: a blockage in the field of public memory, where the imperative to remember is transformed into a prohibition on historical analogies. One cannot remember the Nakba alongside the Shoah. One cannot recall Gaza’s destruction in the same breath as Auschwitz. One cannot draw the analogies between antisemitism of the past and islamophobia of the present. The charge of antisemitism thus becomes not only a political weapon, but also an epistemic veto: it forbids certain associations, disqualifies certain comparisons, and discredits alternative genealogies of violence and resistance.²⁹ What is at stake here is not only the distortion of a term, but the foreclosure of a political horizon. The memory shell is not simply an inert object; it is a technology of governance. It shapes what can be said, who can speak, and which memories are allowed to co-exist in public discourse. It organizes affect, affiliation, and recognition. It institutes a hierarchy of grief—where some lives are legible as victims and others are not.³⁰ Thus, the memory-shell functions not merely as rhetorical armor, but as a form of mnemonic power—shaping not only discourse but the affective contours of grief itself.³¹

5. Toward a Decolonized Memory

The current regime of Holocaust memory, while deeply entrenched in Western political and cultural institutions, remains profoundly unstable. As with all hegemonic formations, it is continually contested from within and without, by diverse actors including Jewish and Palestinian intellectuals, activists, artists, and survivors. These contestations do not advocate for the rejection of Holocaust memory itself, but rather call for its decolonization—a reconfiguration that acknowledges Jewish historical suffering while simultaneously opening space for solidarities that refuse to erase or marginalize other histories of violence and dispossession. In the sense Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o articulated, decolonization entails not simply political realignment but a radical transformation of the epistemic and representational order—a refusal to let dominant narratives foreclose the complexity of human suffering.³²

Decolonizing memory means disrupting the monolithic narratives that function as what I have termed the “memory-shell”—a protective and restrictive framework that preserves a singular understanding of trauma, while foreclosing alternative or conflicting memories. This memory-shell often operates to shield a particular political agenda, conflating Jewish victimhood with uncritical support for the Israeli state, and thus excluding Palestinian experiences of displacement and ongoing violence from the collective mnemonic landscape.

In this context, we must imagine forms of memory that are porous, dissonant, and dialogical—memories that resist closure and instead keep the past open as a contested site of ethical struggle and political connection. Such memories defy attempts at monopolization or instrumentalization and refuse to allow trauma to become the exclusive property of any state or political entity.³³ A radical, decolonial ethics of memory must not only open to the possibility of plural and conflictual histories; it must refuse the confiscation of mourning, the closure of the past, and the foreclosure of the present. This gesture resonates with Ariella Azoulay’s call to treat the archive not as a repository of state-sanctioned facts, but as a site of violence, exclusion, and imperial governance. In her account, the logic of imperialism does not only destroy lives and lands—it destroys the very conditions of co-seeing and co-witnessing. Against this regime, Azoulay proposes a radical civil contract of photography and memory, one that decenters the sovereign gaze and instead reclaims the right to narrate, to mourn, and to remember without prior authorization. In this sense, a decolonial ethics of memory requires not only a critique of mnemonic violence but an insurgent stance toward the monopolization of memory, archival closure, and historical legitimization. This vision draws on decolonial thought, which insists on the necessity of unsettling hegemonic narratives and restoring multiplicity and relationality in historical consciousness.³⁴

To decolonize memory is not to deny or diminish the Holocaust’s significance but to reclaim its ethical force—its capacity to unsettle settled narratives, to challenge complicity, and to demand ongoing responsibility and justice. Memory might as well function as a rupture: a deliberate break in the circuits of power that govern public discourse, opening space for solidarity across difference and for political horizons beyond exclusion and erasure.³⁵ Such a reframing also aligns with Edward Said’s call for the intellectual to embrace a memory that resists closure and demands critical engagement beyond nationalist or sectarian frameworks.³⁶ Similarly, Mahmoud Darwish’s poetic work exemplifies the necessity of bearing witness to multiple, intersecting histories of loss and displacement. In this way, decolonized memory becomes a transformative practice: one that reconfigures affect, recognition, and belonging in ways that resist closure and demand accountability.

6. Mourning, Solidarity, and the Ethical Risk of Historical Comparison

In the face of institutional repression and widespread political censorship, recent mass mobilizations across Europe and beyond have articulated new forms of political mourning. Led by coalitions of Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Black and brown communities, and younger generations of activists, these movements reject the binary logic of competing victimhoods and insist instead on entangled solidarities: a right to remember without erasure, and to grieve without state sanction.³⁷ This emerging counter-memory does not signify an erosion of Holocaust remembrance but rather a radical refusal to prioritize past trauma over present atrocity. To affirm that Palestinian life matters, to name apartheid or to mourn children killed in their beds is not antisemitic. What becomes antisemitic, however, is the conflation of all Jews with the actions of a state, instrumentalizing Jewish identity to shield state violence from accountability. This moment demands a reimagined Jewish voice—one that breaks with ethno-nationalist paradigms and reclaims diasporic, anti-colonial, and ethical traditions within Judaism.³⁸ Jewish scholars, artists, and activists have been among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies, not despite their Jewishness but precisely because of it.³⁹ To silence these voices under the guise of combating antisemitism risks erasing the very dissent crucial for a pluralistic political discourse.⁴⁰

In this context, mourning transcends affective expression to become a radical political act: a refusal to permit the state to monopolize death or history, and a form of remembering against the grain, across time, and through rupture. Where the memory-shell erects barriers around the past, preserving moral certainties, mourning fractures this enclosure, demanding that memory remain porous, responsive, and accountable. Far from being antithetical to politics, mourning becomes its very condition, transforming memory from weapon to threshold of justice.⁴¹

Yet mourning also opens the terrain of political risk, particularly the risk of historical comparison. The invocation of genocidal analogies in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza has sparked heated debate, with some perceiving such comparisons as a transgression against the singularity of the Holocaust and a moral affront to Jewish suffering. Others assert that naming the systematic targeting of civilian populations as genocide is not only justifiable but ethically necessary.⁴² The legal challenges brought before international bodies like the International Court of Justice have foregrounded the Genocide Convention as a critical framework for adjudicating contemporary crises.⁴³

Beyond juridical proceedings, the question remains epistemological and political: Are historical analogies inherently dangerous, or can they function as tools of ethical reckoning? Must the past be policed to safeguard singular traumas from appropriation, or can comparison open pathways for solidarity and critical reflection? Against the hegemonic logic of exceptionalism, comparison need not imply a flattening or erasure of difference; rather, it can serve as an ethical disruption that destabilizes hierarchies of suffering and exposes structural continuities of violence.⁴⁴ Thus, comparison can be a pedagogical and political act—not to equate atrocities but to reveal dangerous resonances that demand attention. To prohibit comparison is effectively to foreclose history as a contested and dynamic field. It treats memory as fixed and sacralized rather than as a site of ongoing negotiation and political struggle. For societies to confront contemporary crises without replicating past exclusions, they must permit historical analogies to circulate—not as incontestable truths but as critical provocations to be debated, contextualized, and when necessary, contested.⁴⁵ Criminalizing such discourse risks stifling political agency and ethical reflection.

In sum, the politics of memory today extends beyond what is remembered to encompass who is allowed to remember, under which conditions, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. It has turned into a truth regime. The concept of the memory shell exposes the instability and contestation inherent in memory as a field of signification and power. Recognizing this contingency does not imply relativism but calls for a responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attuned to asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of suffering and injustice. At a historical moment when the genocide in Gaza is silenced beneath rhetoric of security and historical exceptionalism, insisting on a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory becomes not only an act of solidarity but one of historical justice.

This emergent politics of mourning and solidarity not only challenges dominant narratives of victimhood but also exposes the underlying structures of power that govern memory itself. The contemporary politics of memory thus encompasses not only the content of remembrance but also the power to define who may remember, under which terms, and within what geopolitical and moral frameworks. The recent genocidal violence in Gaza exposes the limits of Holocaust memory as a politically neutral foundation of Western moral order; instead, it necessitates a critical interrogation of memory as a contested and politicized instrument of power. 

Memory is inherently dynamic and pluralistic, a contested field where divergent narratives and claims to historical truth are negotiated, among others taking into account the political stakes of representation. The concept of “memory shell” captures this ambivalence: memory functions as a protective yet constraining form that preserves the outer shell of trauma while frequently neutralizing its disruptive ethical potential. Acknowledging this complexity is essential for advancing a more responsible, situated, and politically engaged memory—one attentive to structural asymmetries of violence and receptive to emerging forms of injustice. 

Historical comparisons, particularly analogies invoking genocide, remain among the most divisive and fraught dimensions of this politics. While many see such comparisons as a threat to the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a moral affront to Jewish suffering,⁴⁶ others argue that naming contemporary atrocities—such as the systematic violence against Palestinians—as genocide is both justified and ethically imperative.⁴⁷ These debates extend beyond public discourse into legal arenas, with international tribunals and courts grappling with the application of the Genocide Convention.⁴⁸ Yet the core question is epistemological and political: are comparisons inherently reductive and dangerous, or can they function as critical tools for ethical disruption and pedagogical engagement?⁴⁹

The prohibition of comparison risks freezing history into a sacralized and immutable domain, disconnected from present struggles. Conversely, ethical comparison can destabilize hierarchies of suffering, reveal the structural continuities of violence, and foster solidarities across social and political divides. As Enzo Traverso and Dirk Moses, among others, compellingly argue, the Holocaust’s significance lies not in its unique exceptionality but in its illumination of modernity’s violent rationalities.⁵⁰ In this frame, comparison serves not to equate atrocities but to provoke reflection, political responsibility, and a critical reconsideration of power.

This theoretical framework resonates with the emergence of counter-memories articulated by diverse coalitions who reject binary victimhood and the monopolization of suffering. Their political mourning demands the right to remember without erasure and to grieve without state sanction, challenging the instrumentalization of identity to shield violence. Mourning thus becomes a radical political act that ruptures the “memory shell,” opening memory to ethical porosity, responsiveness, and justice. In a moment when the genocide in Gaza is obscured by discourses of security and exceptionalism, advocating for a heterogeneous, critical, and emancipatory memory constitutes both an act of solidarity and a demand for historical justice.

Author Bio:

Emilia Salvanou is a historian working at the intersection of social and cultural history, with particular attention to migration, refugee movements, and historical culture. She currently teaches public history at the Hellenic Open University. Her research explores how cultural memory, historiography, and public debates about the past shape historical consciousness in the present. Email: emilia.salvanou@gmail.com

Published on July 17, 2025. 

SOURCE: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2025/07/15/haunted-pasts-and-the-politics-of-grief-memory-shells-and-the-struggle-for-ethical-grief-after-gaza/

Footnotes:

1. The term ‘genocidal’ is used here not as a legal determination but as a political charge articulated by numerous civil society organizations, scholars, and activists in reference to the scale, intent, and continuity of the assault on Gaza. See UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ (2024) https://www.un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-55/. ︎
2. For analyses of discursive constraints around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Western media and academia, see Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out. An everyday occupation (New York and London: W.W. Norton  2008); Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press 2012). ︎
3. On the entanglement of memory, mourning, and political legitimacy, see Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press 2004); and Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009). ︎
4. Antonis Liakos, “Βγάλτε τους νεκρούς από τη ζυγαριά” [Take the dead off the scale], Chronos 8, 2013 https://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/ls-gl-p-g.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
5. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Enzo Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity (London: Pluto Press, 2016). ︎
6. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). ︎
7. Ibid., esp. pp. 13–14, 195–205. ︎
8. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider,The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), esp. ch. 2. ︎
9. Gil. Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). ︎
10. Butler, Parting Ways, esp. chs. 1 and 4. See also the analysis of performative memory in Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004).  ︎
11. Traverso,The End of Jewish Modernity, pp.186–190. ︎
12. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Haaretz, March 1988; republished in Haaretz Magazine, 2004. For contextual discussion, see Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir,The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). ︎
13. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 35-49. ︎
14. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Also, Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). ︎
15. Ella Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims,” Middle East Report 178 (September/October 1992). ︎
16. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, pp 140-180; Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. (London: Verso, 2019). ︎
17. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness. Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). Also, Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ︎
18. See Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Our Principles” https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/our-vision/ and IfNotNow’s platform https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/principles (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
19. JVP led a sit-in at the U.S. Capitol calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/jewish-activists-arrested-at-us-congress-sit-in-calling-for-gaza-ceasefire (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
20. Thousands of Jews and allies gathered inside Grand Central Station, staging one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in NYC since 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/world/middleeast/grand-central-protest-nyc-israel-hamas-gaza.html (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
21. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
22. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 105–110.  ︎
23. Michel Foucault,The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). ︎
24. Donatella della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995).  ︎
25. See reports on the post-October 2023 crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists across the US and Europe, e.g., Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/israel-and-palestine (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
26. Donatella Della Porta, “Moral Panic and Repression: the contentious politics of anti-Semitism in Germany”,PArtecipazione e COnflitto * The Open Journal of Sociopolitical Studies PACO, Issue 17(2) 2024: 276-349.  ︎
27. The IHRA working definition of antisemitism was adopted in 2016 and has been widely institutionalized; see IHRA official website, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com (last accessed 6.6.2025). ︎
28. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021), available at https://jerusalemdeclaration.org, is an alternative framework developed by leading scholars to safeguard free speech and clarify legitimate criticism (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
29. Butler, Frames of War; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh University Press 2004). David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Wiley-Blackwell 2002); Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London and New York: Verso, 2000). ︎
30. On the concept of hierarchy of grief, see James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero (University of Hawaii Press 2001), and Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (2002). ︎
31. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale: Yale University Press 1993). ︎
32. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (James Currey Ltd / Heinemann, 1986). ︎
33. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press 2017). ︎
34. Azoulay, Potential History; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity (Duke University Press 2011). ︎
35. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961). ︎
36. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994). ︎
37. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso 2004). ︎
38. Ella Shohat,Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), especially the introduction and Chapter 2.  ︎
39. Ella Shohat, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Butler, Parting Ways. ︎
40. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005).  ︎
41. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.  ︎
42. Israel W. Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide.” In Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, edited by George J. Andreopoulos, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 64–94. ︎
43. International Court of Justice, Case Concerning Application of the Genocide Convention (South Africa v. Israel), 2025 (pending). https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192 (last accessed 6.6.2025).  ︎
44. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York and London: New Press 2003). ︎
45. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press 2003); Antonis Liakos, Πώς το παρελθόν γίνεται ιστορία [How the Past turns into History (Athens: Polis 2007). ︎
46. See for example, Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now. Schocken Books, 2019. ︎
47. M. LeVine & E. Cheyfitz, “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited”, Journal of Genocide Research, (2025), 1–23. ︎
48. International Court of Justice, Case on Palestine (South Africa v. Israel), 2024. ︎
49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present ( Harvard University Press 1999). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge 1994). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). ︎
50. Traverso,The Origins of Nazi Violence. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology”. The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books 2012), pp. 272-289. ︎

The post Haunted Pasts and the Politics of Grief: Memory-Shells and the Struggle for Ethical Grief after Gaza appeared first on Void Network.

Written by Felipe Corrêa and Rafael Viana da Silva

We are going to take up the contributions of Bakunin and Malatesta to establish a dialogue between them and the Platform, trace the similarities and differences between the proposals of anarchists who advocate an organizational dualism and those of the Bolsheviks, and we will see the proximity of Malatesta with the Synthesis, as well as the historical impact of the Platform, which will make it possible to elucidate the positions that have been disseminated about this debate.

Anarchism is a political-doctrinal ideology that emerged in the nineteenth century, with a hegemony of mass oriented strategies, especially syndicalism (revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism). Among the fundamental positions of “mass anarchism” are the defense of organization, of reforms as a possible path to revolution (provided they are properly conquered through class struggle) and of violence when associated with previously organized popular movements. Such positions are distinguished from other minority positions characterized by their anti-organizationism, their opposition to the struggle for reforms and their defense of violence as a trigger for popular mobilization (“propaganda by the deed”).

Those who have taken part in mass anarchism and defend organizational dualism—concomitant organization on two levels, one political/anarchist and the other mass/social—are not the majority, but among them there are relevant authors with significant positions and, above all, a solid historical experience, supported by the theoretical and practical construction of anarchist organizations.[2]

Contributions from Bakunin

Despite the fact that, after important attempts to compile them, Bakunin’s complete works have finally been published in French[3], his writings on the so-called “Fraternity” of 1864 and “Alliance” of 1868 —to use the terminology proposed by Max Nettlau— are very little known.

Bakunin’s mass strategy has been thoroughly discussed in relevant texts such as Bakunin: Founder of Revolutionary Syndicalism, by Gaston Leval,[4] and several others by René Berthier.[5] Not so much his theory of political organization—which he addresses extensively in different documents—which is his attempt to base the political-organizational proposals he had in terms of principles, program, strategy and organization.

There seems to be some shame around these writings, especially among French anarchists. It is as if they belonged to an authoritarian heritage, perhaps of Blanquist and Jacobin inspiration, which remains in the author and should not be brought to light.[6]

We believe that Bakunin’s positions on anarchist political organization, from 1868 onwards, are fully reconciled with his mass strategy, which he proposed to the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), and should be recognized as a relevant part of his anarchism. Today, such positions seem to carry weight as a pillar for fruitful reflections on the most suitable organizational model for anarchist intervention.

Bakunin argued that the Alliance should have a dual objective: on the one hand, to stimulate the growth of and strengthen the IWA; on the other, to bring together all those who had political-ideological affinities with anarchism—or, as it was generically called in that period, revolutionary socialism or collectivism— around principles, a program and a common strategy.[7] In sum, create and strengthen both political organization and a mass movement, which has been called organizational dualism:

They [Alliance militants] will form the inspiring and vivifying soul of that immense body that we call the International Workers’ Association […]; then they will deal with issues that are impossible to discuss publicly; they will form the necessary bridge between the propaganda of socialist theories and revolutionary practice.[8]

For Bakunin, it was not necessary for the Alliance to have a large number of militants: “The number of these individuals should not, therefore, be immense.” The Alliance had to constitute a political organization, public and secret, with an active minority and collective responsibility among the members, to bring together “the most safe, the most committed, the smartest and the most energetic, in a word the most intimate,” with groups in various countries and the ability to decisively influence the working masses.[9] The organization had to be based on internal regulations and a strategic program to establish, respectively, its organic functioning and its political-ideological and programmatic-strategic bases, forging a common axis for anarchist action.

Only “he who [has] frankly accepted the entire program with all its theoretical and practical consequences and who, along with intelligence, energy, honesty and discretion, [has] also a revolutionary passion” could be a member of the organization. Internally, there should be no hierarchy among the members of the Bakuninist political organization and decisions had to be made from the bottom up, generally by majority (varying from consensus to simple majority depending on the relevance of the issue), and all had to abide by decisions taken collectively. This meant applying federalism—advocated as a form of social organization that must decentralize power and create “a revolutionary organization from the bottom up and from the periphery to the center”—in the internal bodies of the anarchist organization.[10]

The Alliance should not exercise a relationship of domination and / or hierarchy over the IWA, rather it should complement it; and vice versa. Together, these two organizational bodies had to complement and enhance the revolutionary project of the workers, without the submission of either party.

The Alliance is the necessary complement to the International ... But the International and the Alliance, tending towards the same end goal, pursue different goals at the same time. One’s mission is to bring together the working masses, the millions of workers, with their different professions and countries, across the borders of all States, in a single huge and compact body; the other, the Alliance, has the mission of giving the masses a truly revolutionary leadership. The programs of one and the other, without being in any way opposite, are different by the very degree of their respective development. That of the International, if taken seriously, contains in germ, but only in germ, the whole program of the Alliance. The program of the Alliance is the ultimate expression of the [program] of the International. [11]

The union of these two organizations—one political, of minorities (cadres), another social, of majorities (masses)—and their horizontal and permanent organization enhance the strength of workers and increase the opportunities of the anarchist transformation process. Within the mass movement, the political organization makes anarchists more effective in disputes over positions. This formation, organized and in favor of its program, is opposed to forces that are oriented in the opposite direction and that may seek: to raise to the status of principle any of the different political-ideological and/or religious positions; to minimize its eminently class-based character; to strengthen reformist positions (viewing reform as an end) and the loss of combativeness of the movement; to establish internal hierarchies and/or relations of domination; to direct the force of workers toward elections and/or toward strategies of change that imply the takeover of the State; to submit the movement to parties, states or other organizations that eliminate, in the process, the protagonism of the oppressed classes and their institutions.

Contributions from Malatesta

Various ideas from Malatesta resemble those described previously, especially the set of organizational proposals on the “anarchist party,” the name by which he referred to the specific anarchist organization. “Parties” of this type took shape historically and had considerable involvement, as were the cases of the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party, of 1891, the Anarchist Party of Ancona, of 1913, and the Italian Anarchist Union, of 1919–1920.[12]

Malatesta conceptualized the anarchist party as “the ensemble of those who are out to help make anarchy a reality and who therefore need to set themselves a target to achieve and a path to follow.” For him, “staying isolated, with each individual acting or seeking to act on his own without entering into agreement with others, without making preparations, without marshalling the flabby strength of singletons into a mighty coalition, is tantamount to condemning oneself to impotence, to squandering one’s own energies on trivial, ineffective acts and, very quickly, losing belief in one’s purpose and lapsing into utter inaction.”[13].

In order for anarchists to be effective in their action, they had to establish a common strategy and program and overcome the form of affinity groups that have no contact with social struggles. The goal of the party was stated as follows: “We want to act on it [the mass] and propel it along the path that we believe to be best, but as our objective is to liberate and not dominate, we want to accustom it to free initiative and freedom of action”[14]. Obviously that path was that of the social revolution.

The Malatestian party is founded on revolutionary discipline and in the principle of unity. “Without understanding, without coordination of each other’s efforts for common and simultaneous action, victory is not materially possible.” But “discipline must not be slavish discipline, blind devotion to bosses, an obedience to the one who always speaks so as not to have to move.” This is about revolutionary discipline, which means “consistency with accepted norms and fidelity to assumed commitments, […] feeling obliged to share the work and the risks with comrades in struggle”[15]. The principle of unity establishes that it is not enough to have a platform of association that calls itself anarchist. Although anarchists may seem united, Malatesta affirms that he does not believe “in the soundness of organizations built upon concessions and subterfuge and where there is no real agreement and sympathy between the members.” He continues, “Better dis-united than mis-united”[16].

Propaganda and education were fundamental activities to be carried out by the anarchists. We “carry on our propaganda to raise the moral level of the masses and induce them to win their emancipation by their own efforts.” Of course, propaganda should be organized and planned: “Isolated, sporadic propaganda which is often a way of easing a troubled conscience or is simply an outlet for someone who has a passion for argument, serves little or no purpose.” For Malatesta, “seeds sown haphazardly” had great difficulty germinating and taking root. Rather, what is needed “is continuity of effort, patience, coordination, and adaptability to different surroundings and circumstances.” Anarchists should occupy themselves with education, “education for freedom,” “making people who are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their real power and capabilities”[17]. However, he believed that propaganda and education alone were not enough. “We would be deluding ourselves in thinking that propaganda is enough to raise them [the people] to that level of intellectual development which is needed to put our ideas into effect.”[18] In relation to education, Malatesta criticizes the “educationists […] who assert that through propaganda and instruction, the defense of free thought and positive science, with the establishment of popular universities and modern schools, it is possible to destroy in the masses religious prejudice, moral subjection to state rule and belief in sacrosanct property rights”[19].

In reality, for him these initiatives were very limited: “Educationists should see how powerless their generous efforts are.” The consciousness of the masses could not be sensibly elevated and the environment transformed “as long as the economic and political conditions [of the moment] [lasted]”[20].

Malatesta proposed organizational base building work, to be carried out daily by anarchists:

In normal times [it is necessary] to carry out the long and patient work of preparation and popular organization and not to fall into the illusion of short-term revolution, achievable only by the initiative of a few, without the effective participation of the masses. Since this preparation is carried out in an adverse environment, do not neglect propaganda, agitation or organization of the masses, among other things.[21]

The activities of organized anarchists would therefore be “the propagation of our ideas; unceasing struggle, violent or non-violent depending on the circumstances, against government and against the boss class to conquer as much freedom and well-being as we can for the benefit of everybody”[22].

Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform: “Anarcho-Bolshevism”?

First of all, it must be said that when Bakunin developed his praxis—and his theory and practice of political organization—which would directly influence Malatesta, Lenin had just been born and Bolshevism would still take many years to emerge. Therefore, to accuse Bakuninist organizational dualism of being “Leninist” is an anachronism.[23]

At the same time, it also seems problematic to assume that by defending organizational dualism Bakunin, Malatesta and Lenin should be considered part of the same current or political-ideological tradition, resembling each other to some extent. As is known, this dualism was understood and practiced in a very distinct way in the anarchist tradition and in the Leninist tradition, including its Trotskyist and other variations. Any canonical text of Marxism-Leninism on the question—for example, Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?[24]—shows this clearly. Apart from parallel work on two different levels, one of the cadre party and the other of the mass movement, there are no major similarities.

To be concise, there are two fundamental differences that can be marked between the organizational praxis of Bakunin and Malatesta and that of Lenin: the internal structure of the organization and the relationship between organization and mass movements.

In the first instance, in the anarchist political organization there is internal democracy and decisions are made from the bottom up. It is the grassroots organizations and the militants themselves who discuss and resolve all the organization’s issues. There is no hierarchy between the members so there is no leadership-base division. Leninist political organization, on the contrary, is based on “democratic centralism,” which envisioned a hierarchical organizational model, with a leadership-base division, so that although the base is consulted for decision-making, who in fact deliberates is the leadership, including against the positions of the base. In other words, there is no internal democracy and decisions are made from top to bottom.

Unity of action, defended by a sector of anarchism, is often confused with democratic centralism. What makes the difference between the two positions is not the obligation regarding the decisions made, common in both cases, but who makes the decisions and the way they are made. In anarchist organizations everyone effectively participates and deliberates on all issues (sometimes through majority mechanisms); in Leninist organizations, on the other hand, even though the rank and file are consulted, the leadership is the one who decides and hierarchically imposes decisions.

Secondly, the anarchist political organization functions in a complementary way to mass movements and does not attempt to impose a relationship of hierarchy and/or domination. Its function is to strengthen the leadership of these movements, since in the anarchist project the masses must be responsible for revolutionary social transformation. The organization is part of the masses and brings together an ideologically related sector that seeks to strengthen its position in political disputes. The Leninist organization differs in that it believes that popular movements are only able to fight in the short term, in the struggles for demands. Leninists believe that it is the party that must provide movements with transformative capacity and that the party itself must lead in the process of revolutionary social transformation. The party is conceived as a separate sector of the masses that exerts a relation of hierarchy and domination over them, withdrawing their class independence and protagonism.

That is why we are not in agreement with the assertion that the positions of Bakunin and Malatesta—according to our point of view, as we will argue later, rescued in several respects by the Platform and by various anarchist political organizations—constitute some kind of “anarcho-Bolshevism” or carry Leninist traits. Both Bakunin and Malatesta—and later Makhno, Archinov, Ida Mett and others—had the anarchist political organization as one of their important topics for reflection and established its framework within anarchist principles. The link between anarchist organizational dualism and Leninism, which has been established with some frequency in the past and continues to establish itself in the present, has no historiographical foundation, not even theoretical-logical. It seems to relate more to the self-serving motives of those who make these claims than to a historical phenomenon.

Anyone who takes on this topic with a minimum of seriousness and intellectual honesty will verify the erroneousness of the alleged relationship of Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform with Bolshevism. In the case of the Platform, its main aspects are based on the long anarchist political tradition and its authors lived through the experience of a concrete social revolution, dulled by the authoritarian politics of the Bolsheviks, which makes the characterization of its authors as anarcho-Bolsheviks more absurd.[25]
The Platform and the debate between anarchists

The Platform and the debate between anarchists

The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists, written in 1926 by a group of Russians and Ukrainians exiled in France, constitutes a frame of reference in the discussion on anarchist organization. In our view, the debate on this document has been relatively truncated and, for certain reasons, misunderstood by a significant part of those interested in the subject.

The result of a process of self-criticism by anarchists in the wake of developments of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, the Platform was published as a program proposal for anarchists. Divided into three major sections —general, constructive and organizational—the Platform upholds, among other things: the critique of capitalist society, the State and representative democracy and the centrality of class struggle; the need for leadership of the masses for the revolution, through class and federalist intervention; criticism of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a period of transition; the defense of syndicalism as a relevant means for anarchist action; the establishment of a post-revolutionary society in which production and land have been socialized; the creation of organs for the defense of the revolution; the formation of an anarchist political organization programmatically based on theoretical and tactical unity, on responsibility and federalism.[26]

Two reasons mark the misunderstanding of the Platform, especially if the recently discussed contributions of Bakunin and Malatesta are taken into account.

Regarding Bakunin, ignorance of his texts on the Alliance has prevented appreciating the similarities between his conception of political organization and that of the Platform. With respect to Malatesta, it must be said that the partial dissemination and excessive focus on part of his mail exchange with Makhno about the Platform—specifically the first letter sent by the Italian—has impeded a clearer understanding of his positions.

There is a third reason, in addition, which has to do with sectors that have set the standard for debate in the world, establishing a version that many researchers and militants hold: A significant part of the discussion about the Platform has been monopolized by an interpretation that is dominant in European anarchism in general, particularly French, and which is mostly critical of the Platform.

Next we present elements for the discussion on these three relevant questions, in order to contribute to solidifying our position.
Bakunin and the fundamentals of the Platform

We agree with researchers such as Frank Mintz when they argue that the Platform, rather than introduce a new organizational debate among anarchists, takes up fundamental elements of the Bakuninist strategy.[27] In this sense, Van der Walt correctly states that “Makhno and Archinov explicitly related the Platform to the Bakunin heritage.” Quoting Colin Darch on the makhnovitchina, he states:

Bakunin’s “aspirations concerning organizations, as well as his activity in the First International give us every right” to view him as an “active partisan” of the idea that anarchism “must gather its forces in one organization, constantly agitating, as demanded by reality and the strategy of class struggle.”[28]

Fundamental elements found in the Platform are certainly tributaries of Bakunin, among them the social critique of capitalist and statist domination and the centrality of class struggle, the need for the simultaneous intervention of anarchists at both levels, anarchist organization and mass movements (organizational dualism), the need for a violent social revolution, and in general libertarian socialism as a proposal for a future society.

In a more detailed analysis, as much as we can find differences, there are similarities in the main lines. The federalist functioning of the anarchist organization, without hierarchy or domination among the members, and its complementary relationship with mass movements, are also characteristic elements that allow Bakunin to be related to the Platform. This is not the time to do so, but it would not be very difficult to establish with substance and detail this whole series of parallels.

According to this analysis and what we have mentioned above, far from innovating, the Platform simply proposed a “return”—adapted to a concrete historical context—to the Bakuninist organizational strategy of the post-1867 period. We should recall that this model took shape, in theoretical and practical terms, in other circumstances, in the most diverse times and locations, the Platform being only one of them. For this reason, we understand that the qualifier platformist —beyond having the merit of differentiating, among anarchists, a particular organizational strategy—can be easily substituted by others that refer to other authors and experiences, some of which occurred during the first great wave of anarchism in the world.

Malatesta, the Platform and Synthesis

Analyzing the controversy around the Platform,[29] in which the debate between Makhno and Malatesta stands out, the proximity between Malatesta and the Platform is not as obvious as it is with Bakunin. According to what we have indicated, if we take into account the more than six decades of Malatesta’s anarchist militancy, we can understand that at certain times his positions are closer to those of the Platform and in others to the Anarchist Synthesis.[30]

Texts such as those published in 1897 in L’Agitazione, especially “Organization I” and “Organization II”[31], and compilations such as Anarchist Ideology,[32] allow us to identify positions quite similar to that of the Platform. However, texts such as “Communism and Individualism”[33] and “Individualism and Communism in Anarchism”[34], as well as Malatesta’s interventions at the Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907,[35] show positions much closer to Synthesis.

In his texts closest to Synthesis, Malatesta criticizes the fact that “anarchists of various tendencies, despite wanting basically the same thing, find themselves in their daily lives and in their propaganda in fierce opposition to each other.” Based on this criticism, Malatesta defends the need to “reach some understanding” and that “when agreement is not possible [it is necessary] to know how to tolerate each other. Work together when there is consensus and when there is not, allow others to do what they consider best, without interference”[36]. This should be the case, since “individualist and communist anarchism is one and the same thing — or almost,” “there are no fundamental differences”[37].

At the Amsterdam congress, trying to mediate between the positions of syndicalist anarchists and others with individualist influences, Malatesta affirms that “cooperation is indispensable, today more than ever. Without doubt, the association must allow individual members complete autonomy and the federation must respect this same autonomy for its groups.” If on the one hand, he says, it is understood that it is “wrong to present the ‘organizationists’, the federalists, as authoritarians, [on the other hand] it is equally wrong to imagine that the ‘anti-organizationists’, the individualists, have to be deliberately condemned to isolation.” In short, Malatesta believed that the dispute between individualists and organizationists was a “simple dispute of words”[38].

These and other positions allow authors to correctly claim that Malatesta “flirted with the synthesist position on some occasions”[39]. But it is necessary to acknowledge that there are also times when he defends quite different positions.

The debate between Makhno and Malatesta: necessary clarification

With regard to the debate between Makhno and Malatesta on the Platform,[40] Malatesta’s positions are also modified throughout the debate, hampered by issues of text comprehension and mutual comprehension. There are some aspects relative to context that should be pointed out: the fact that Malatesta was on house arrest and quite removed from anarchist discussions; the problem of translation of the Platform, done by Volin, one of its greatest opponents, who “adjusted” it to his point of view through a series of terminological choices;[41] ​​a certain difference of evaluation of anarchism at that moment, which the Russians considered much more critically than Malatesta and, consequently, they saw more need for a significant change in their organizational patterns. Their critical position is related to the historical experience of Russian-Ukrainian anarchism, since their progress and defeats contributed to reinforcing their conviction on the importance of the specific anarchist organization and of its fundamental axes.[42] We will discuss some questions on this debate that we consider necessary to address in more depth.

First of all, it makes sense to clear any doubts about our position: for us, Malatesta as well as Makhno and other Russians who wrote the Platform are anarchists, considering a historical and global approach to anarchism. Both positions can be more or less historically identified in various anarchist authors and episodes. Mainly in his first letter, Malatesta exaggerates and commits misunderstandings when criticizing the Platform. There is no justification for a statement like the one in which he says that the Platform is “typically authoritarian” and does not constitute a document of anarchism, but rather “a Government, a Church,” which Makhno simply refused to comment on due to its degree of absurdity. Malatesta also hints that the Platform admits that “to organize means to submit to leaders and belong to an authoritarian, centralizing body that suffocates any attempt at free initiative.”[43] For us, there is no doubt that the Platform is anarchist, it does not bear any relation with governments, churches or any other type of authoritarianism, fits without difficulty into the historical tradition of anarchism and does not assume, as its detractors said from the beginning, a Bolshevik detour.

Second, there are unquestionable similarities between the positions of Makhno and Malatesta. They both agree, for example, in the need for anarchists to organize themselves in a revolutionary political organization (a “General Union” for the first, an “Anarchist Party” for the second). They are also in agreement —despite terminological divergences[44]— on their conception of organization as a promoter of their ideas and practices among the masses (that’s why they use terms like “influence,” “orientation,” “suggestion,” even “direction”) and as guiding the direction of struggles and workers’ movements towards social revolution and socialism or communism libertarian. Malatesta says:

I believe that we, anarchists, convinced of the validity of our programme, must strive to acquire overwhelming influence in order to draw the movement towards the realization of our ideals. But such influence must be won by doing more and better than others, and will only be useful if won in that way.[45]

In this same sense, Makhno asserts that “anarchism is a revolutionary social doctrine that must inspire the exploited and oppressed”[46] in the struggles for social transformation, and as the Platform proposes, it must make “revolutionary anarchist positions” penetrate into the movements of “workers and peasants,” to become a “pioneer” and “theoretical guide” of popular organizations in the city and countryside.[47] The Supplement to the Platform affirms that the tools to influence the masses should be “propaganda, force of argument, and spoken and written persuasion”[48].

Third, it should be noted that two of Malatesta’s criticisms of the Platform are completely misplaced: the idea that the Russians were proposing a hierarchical organization and that the Executive Committee (despite its name, which indicates that it executes and not that it deliberates) should control the decisions of the organization.

It was not for nothing that Makhno was surprised by Malatesta’s first text and told him: “My impression is that… you have misunderstood the project for the ‘Platform’.”[49] Let us agree that it is true to some extent.

The Platform is clear about the functions of the Executive Committee:

The execution of decisions taken by the Union with which it is entrusted; the theoretical and organisational orientation of the activity of isolated organisations consistent with the theoretical positions and the general tactical line of the Union; the monitoring of the general state of the movement; the maintenance of working and organisational links between all the organisations in the Union; and with other organisations.[50]

It is, according to our point of view, a type of secretariat that guides the decisions made by the base of the organization.

The proposed organizational form is federalist, built by the base, from the bottom up, so that it reconciles “the independence and initiative of individuals and the organisation with service to the common cause.” However, so that “shared decisions”—that is, socialized among the whole membership and established collectively—can be carried out, federalism demands that members “undertake fixed organisation duties, and demands execution of communal decisions”[51].

There is nothing in the Platform or in documents related to it that allows for linking it with an organizational model based on hierarchy and domination (internal or with respect to the masses) or that allows for conceiving the Executive Committee as a type of central committee that would decide the direction of the General Union.

The debate between Makhno and Malatesta: real divergences

At this point we will identify issues that, taking into account the entire debate, constitute real disagreements between the two militants. The question that undoubtedly occupied most of the debate was the question of collective responsibility. At first, for Malatesta the idea that there was mutual responsibility between militant and organization (“the entire Union will be responsible for the political and revolutionary activity of each member; in the same way, each member will be responsible for the political and revolutionary activity of the Union as a whole”[52]) constituted an “absolute denial of all individual independence, all freedom, all freedom of initiative and action”[53]. In this text, for Malatesta responsibility means autonomy and independence of individuals and groups: “Full autonomy, full independence and, therefore, full responsibility of individuals and groups”[54].

In his first reply, Makhno claims that Malatesta always accepted the individual responsibility of anarchist militants: “You yourself, dear Malatesta, recognize the individual responsibility of the anarchist revolutionary.”[55] His rejection of collective responsibility would be, according to Makhno, “without basis” and would be “dangerous for the social revolution”[56]. Makhno further relates collective responsibility to the question of anarchist ideological influence on the masses:

The collective spirit of its militants and their collective responsibility will allow modern anarchism to eliminate from its circles the idea, historically false, that anarchism cannot be a guide—either ideologically or in practice—for the mass of workers in a revolutionary period and therefore could not have overall responsibility.[57]

Archinov, for his part, supporting Makhno’s positions and criticizing Malatesta, reinforces the sense of collective responsibility in the following way:

The practical activity of a member of the organization is found in full harmony with general activity and, inversely, the activity of the whole organization cannot be in contradiction with the conscience and activity of anyone of its members, provided that you have accepted the program on which the organization is based.[58]

The idea is that an anarchist organization cannot be founded if not on this principle, in the sense that the member “could not carry out his political and revolutionary work if not in the political spirit of the Union […] his activity could not be contrary to that which was developed by all its members”[59].

In the following response, Malatesta is still standing his ground, going so far as to relate collective responsibility with governments, the military that kill rebel soldiers or the armies that decimate populations in invasions—another completely out of place comparison, from our point of view—noting:

I accept and support the view that anyone who associates and cooperates with others for a common purpose must feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members and do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause; and respect the agreements that have been made, except when wishing sincerely to leave the association when emerging differences of opinion or changed circumstances or conflict over preferred methods make cooperation impossible or inappropriate. Just as I maintain that those who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association.[60]

Malatesta complements his criticism by saying that “perhaps, speaking of collective responsibility, you mean precisely that accord and solidarity that must exist among the members of an association” and emphasizing that, if this were the case, “agreement would soon be reached”[61].

In the following response, Makhno once again affirms that “anarchist action on a wide scale will only achieve its goals if it possesses a well-defined organizational base, inspired and guided by the principle of the collective responsibility of its militants”[62].

Some time later, Malatesta would go on to affirm that responsibility is essentially individual: “Moral responsibility (and in our case we can talk of nothing but moral responsibility) is individual by its very nature.” Adding: “If a number of men agree to do something and one of them allows the initiative to fail through not carrying out what he had promised, everyone will say that it was his fault and that therefore it is he who is responsible, not those who did what they were supposed to right up to the last.”[63]

In sum, it can be said that there are points of agreement and others of divergence in this controversy between Malatesta and the editors of Dielo Trudá. Malatesta does not relent when it comes to the idea that responsibility is essentially individual, although he understands the need for coordinated actions and agreement and respect for these actions and pacts on the part of the members of an anarchist organization. For Makhno and Archinov, responsibility is individual and collective at the same time, it necessarily binds the militant and the organization, making them responsible to each other, and it has to do with the guiding role of anarchism in the revolutionary process. As Malatesta himself notes, the notion of collective responsibility and the position of full independence and autonomy that he himself defends are incompatible.[64]

Another divergence has to do with the greater or lesser need for unification (homogeneity) of anarchists. While the Russians advocate that the anarchist organization must bring together the majority, if not the entire organized and revolutionary sector of anarchists—emphasizing “the great need for an organization that [brings together] most of the participants in the anarchist movement”[65]—, Malatesta affirms: “Let us therefore abandon the idea of ​​bringing together all [the anarchists] in a single organization.” For the Russians fragmentation was the central problem, something that doesn’t seem to be that essential for Malatesta.

There are also very important differences in terms of organization—that is, to the organic functioning of the anarchist grouping—which includes the level of commitment and autonomy of the members and groups that belong to the organization in relation to collective decisions and the decision-making method of deliberation. For Makhno and the Russians, action with a clear strategy and program was fundamental, which, in addition to anarchist principles, established a common and unitary path for the organization as a whole: “such a role [of anarchists in a revolution] can only be played successfully when our Party is ideologically homogeneous and unified from the point of view of tactics”[66]. He further states that “our Party must […] make clear its political unity and organizational character”[67], in a position similar to what Archinov called “homogeneous theoretical and practical program”[68], a form of collective deliberation with binding decision for all its members.

For Malatesta, members and groups of the organization had to have the most complete autonomy and decisions should not be mandatory, but only recommendations that may or may not be followed: “full autonomy, full independence and, therefore, full responsibility of individuals and groups,” so that the decisions of the organization’s congresses “are not mandatory rules but suggestions, recommendations, proposals.” Malatesta even goes so far as to elevate this position—according to our point of view related to organizational strategy—to a principle of anarchism, when he emphasizes the “principles of autonomy and free initiative which the anarchists profess,” certainly a doubtful conclusion from a historical point of view.[69]

Archinov asks: “What would be the value of a congress that only issued ‘opinions’ and did not take charge of making them come true? None. In a vast movement [like anarchism], a solely moral and non-organizational responsibility loses all its value”[70]. Indirectly, the previously discussed issue of collective responsibility comes up again.

When it comes to matters related to the program of anarchist organization, Malatesta relates them more to anarchist principles than to a well-defined strategy. Unlike what he does in the texts of 1897, he goes so far as to affirm that the anarchist party is “the group of those who are on the same side, who have the same general aspirations, who in one way or another fight for the same end against common adversaries and enemies”[71]. Which is to say that the party would be formed by the “partisans” of anarchism, almost automatically, by the simple fact of existing.

Makhno and the Russians advocate that for the formation of a coherent strategy and program for the anarchist organization, in case of divergence in positions, majority voting would be adopted and the result of the deliberations would be binding for the entire organization, which consequently must apply them. This applies provided members decide to remain in the organization, since the right to a split is given.

Malatesta criticizes decision-making by majority and proposes that differences are voluntarily readjusted, by means of some type of consensus-dissent, and says that the good sense of militancy should lead it to contribute positively to the dynamics of organizational activities: “an adaptation [that] must be reciprocal, voluntary and derive from the awareness of the need to not paralyze social life by mere stubbornness.”[72] For him, this means working with a broad program, around anarchist principles, that allows each member and group of the organization to carry out any action that in practice they judge will contribute to that program.

Malatesta, closer to the Synthesis or the Platform?

As the complete works of Malatesta are not yet published, not even in Italian, we will have to wait until that happens to be able to deepen the discussion on the positions of Malatesta and be able to decide which were in the majority, which were in the minority, to what extent the positions adopted are related to certain periods of his life, etc. For the moment, we can conclude that, according to what has been said, his positions are varied and allow different interpretations: particularly in reference to the Platform-Synthesis debate, we have already demonstrated that it is possible to link his positions without great difficulty to one or the other camp depending on the texts and extracts taken into consideration.
Debate: historical impact of the Platform and the dominance of the Synthesis interpretation

The distrust of a large part of anarchists in relation to the elements that culminated in the formalization of the Platform began in 1923, shortly after the publication of Archinov’s book, History of the Makhnovist movement.[73] Distrust spread rapidly in anarchist networks.

Marc Mrachny, a former member of the Nabat organization who spent a few days with the Makhnovists, in June 1923 published a series of criticisms of them in the newspaper Via Obrera, an organ of the Russian anarcho-syndicalists published in Berlin. Mrachny said that the role of Makhno had been overrated by some anarchists to the detriment of the working class and that the makhnovitchina had constituted a kind of “military anarchism.” In the same issue of the magazine, he himself wrote a review of Archinov’s book, which had caused some discomfort due to his criticism of certain “intellectual” sectors of the anarchist movement.[74] The last chapter of Archinov’s book, entitled “The makhnovitchina and anarchism,” develops some questions that will later be deepened by members of Dielo Trudá and laid out in the Platform. Perhaps it can be said that this contribution is at the origin of what years later would become the Platform.[75]

In March 1924 the anarchist Judoley pejoratively compared the Russian anarchists for the first time with left-wing socialists, who act through a hierarchical political organization. In another critical article, written by Eugène Dolinin (Moravsky), Ukraine’s free soviets are considered a form of state, which “should be fine for ‘the most honest Bolshevik Marxists, but not for anarchists.” To Archinov’s criticism that a considerable part of the anarchists did not participate in the uprising in Ukraine, Moravsky replied that “anarchism cannot rely on bayonets but on the spiritual product of humanity.”[76] As we can see, criticisms of the makhnovitchina, a phenomenon that arose out of the Ukrainian popular struggle and of the anarchists of that region, are generally the result of a misinterpretation and reflect an ignorance not only of the historical episode in question, but even of anarchism itself. These critics were wrong when they tried to disassociate the Makhnovists from the anarchist tradition, by virtue of the use of revolutionary violence, since that has been used by practically all anarchists who have been involved in revolutionary episodes in history. This has to do with violence that has been at the same time a tool of resistance against attacks from its multiple enemies and to promote the anarchist revolutionary program. To these and other criticisms of the Makhnovist movement Archinov and Makhno responded in long articles. They were responsible for causing unpleasant polemics within international anarchism, especially European anarchism.

Criticisms of anarchist intellectual sectors were not exclusive to Archinov. Anatol Gorelik—a Russian anarchist who went into exile in Argentina in 1922 and contributed from Buenos Aires to Dielo Trudá—published in June of the same year, Anarchists in the Russian Revolution. Beyond an overview of events in Russia, Gorelik criticized the anarchist intellectuals who had isolated themselves from the workers’ movement.[77]

With the publication of the Platform in 1926 it was possible to deepen the debate that had been taking place in relation to the Russian and Ukrainian revolutionary process and the written contributions of its members, and above all its defenders were able to concretize their own organizational project in better conditions.

A deep debate about anarchist organization, possibly the largest in history, took place until the early thirties of the twentieth century. Not only did Makhno and Malatesta participate, so did Archinov, Volin, Luigi Fabbri, Camilo Berneri, Sébastien Faure, Maria Isidin, Gregori Maximoff, among others. While the members of Dielo Trudá explained and deepened the lines of the Platform, other anarchists tended to criticize it. As in the Makhno-Malatesta debate, some of these criticisms denoted real differences and others were due to misunderstandings or outright gross nonsense.[78]

Among the absurdities were the positions of Volin and other synthesists, who in 1927 claimed that the Platform constituted a “revisionism in the direction of Bolshevism, which the authors hide”[79]. Despite being unfounded, several anarchists and scholars of anarchism followed them and adopted this position.

In their attempt to concretize the organizational project, in 1927 the anarchists of Dielo Trudá launched a call for the constitution of an international federation following the bases of the Platform. With the aim of organizing an international conference that same year, on February 5, 1927, they held a preliminary meeting in Paris in which militants from Bulgaria, China, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and Russia participated. From that meeting came a provisional commission made up of the Chinese anarchist Chen, the Ukrainian Makhno and the Polish Ranko, and various circulars were sent to various anarchist groups.

From the international conference, which also took place in Paris on April 20, 1927, some agreements emerged: the recognition of the class struggle as the most important aspect of the anarchist idea, anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement and syndicalism as the main method of struggle; the recognition of the need for a general organization of anarchists based on tactical and ideological unity and collective responsibility; and the need for a program for social revolution.

The conference suffered a major setback: the police assaulted and arrested everyone present, and only thanks to a campaign by French anarchists, Makhno was not deported. Also, many groups, even the conference participants, did not try to or failed to carry out the resolutions that had been adopted.[80]

Still, the conference yielded some practical results. In France, platformists were responsible for the transformation of the Anarchist Communist Union into the Anarchist Communist Revolutionary Union in 1927 and managed to make their positions the majority in the organization, which lasted three years. They also created the Libertarian Communist Federation, which existed between 1934 and 1936.[81] Of shorter existence was the Italian Anarchist Communist Union, also created by platformists. Apart from these, the most relevant experience of the period took place in Bulgaria, when the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB), founded in 1919, adopted the Platform after it was published and used it ever since to guide their political practice. The Bulgarian platformist experience can be considered one of the great episodes of anarchism between the 1920s and 1940s; in fact, it contributed to a considerable mass movement with rural and urban syndicalism, cooperatives, guerrillas and great youth mobilization.[82] The Platform of the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria, published in 1945, reflects the direct influence of the Platform and addresses “crucial questions in terms of tactics and organization and reflects the form of organization in political party,” orienting a movement that “had significant clarity to defend against the Bolsheviks” but it was decimated by Stalinism and by fascism.[83]

This debate resurfaced strongly among anarchists after World War II, most significantly in France and Italy. The Platform influenced both the French Libertarian Communist Federation Fédération Communiste Libertaire and the Italian Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action Gruppi Anarchici d’Azione Proletaria, groups of the 1950s that coordinated in a libertarian communist international of platform inspiration.[84]

Regarding the consequences of the organizational debate, the case of the French-Francophone Anarchist Federation Fédération Anarchiste was the most emblematic. Founded in 1945, the FAF took as its organizational foundation the Synthesis of Sébastien Faure and had different tendencies within it: individualists, humanists, trade unionists, libertarian communists, among others.[85] Starting in 1950, a trend led by George Fontenis and influenced by the Platform began to function without the knowledge of others and founded the Organization Thought Battle Organisation Pensée Bataille, a secret organization whose objective was to give the FAF a revolutionary leadership, driving away those opposed to the class struggle and social anarchism.[86]

In the three years after its founding, the OPB grew in influence and in 1953, at the Paris congress, now without many of its members, under the influence of the platformists the FAF became the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL) and adopted as a programmatic document the Libertarian Communist Manifesto of Fontenis, also inspired by the Platform.[87] Its existence was relatively short and between 1956 and 1957 the FCL ceased its activities, mainly because of the Algerian war of independence in 1954—in which its militants got involved—repression, the rise of the French Communist Party and its own mistakes.[88]

This process caused immense trauma, especially due to the exclusion of members of the FAF, including its founders, and because of the way in which the OPB was constituted and made use of its ideas. By the end of 1953, the FAF was reconstituted by rekindling synthetist positions and the dispute with the FCL dragged on to its end.[89] In addition to the incorporation of theoretical elements of Marxism, such as dialectical materialism,[90] an already controversial issue, the FCL was involved in very complicated episodes. The first took place in 1955, with the decision to present candidates for the 1956 electoral campaign, an effort that was subsequently the object of self-criticism by its own members and that at the time earned criticism from both synthesists and important platformist sectors, like those who later formed the Anarchist Groups of Revolutionary Action Grupos Anarquistas de Acción Revolucionaria and the newspaper Rojo y Negro. The second was proximity with André Marty, candidate in the 1956 elections together with Fontenis and others from the FCL. Marty was a former member of the French Communist Party who during the Spanish Revolution had been responsible for the International Brigades and had ordered the slaughter of dozens of anarchists.[91]

In Italy, the formation of Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action (GAAP) was carried out by a platformist sector of the Italian Anarchist Federation. Expelled in 1950, this sector—who criticized the reformism and idealism of its organization of origin and advocated the creation of an anarchist party inspired by the Platform—acted as GAAP until 1956, the year in which it merged with Marxist groups to form Communist Action, a far-left sector of the Italian Communist Party that subsequently contributed to the creation of the Movement of the Communist Left.[92]

Be that as it may, both French and Italian platformism have had further developments and influenced organizations up to the present, the vast majority of which are inscribed in the anarchist camp.

It is not difficult to demonstrate the consequences of the analyzes of French and Italian platformists of that period and of the generalization of its postulates in all sectors of anarchism inspired by organizational dualism in general and in the Platform in particular. Despite the virtues of the projects in question—there is no doubt about the theoretical and practical relevance of some of the contributions of the French and Italian platformists of the 1950s—it seems clear that a significant part of them, especially the FCL and the GAAP, brought serious problems. The mode of formation and action of the OPB, the position in favor of elections and the proximity to an authoritarian communist of the stature of Marty of the FCL and the fusion of the GAAP with the Marxists are examples that, although they responded to a specific context, broke with the anarchist principles and strategy enunciated in the Platform.

Without a doubt, they armed the adversaries of the Platform with powerful arguments. As we have seen, the controversy surrounding the Platform was already complicated in its time and since its publication it was accused of Bolshevik deviation by its detractors. The French and Italian cases reinforced these criticisms.

By refraining from making a less ideological analysis of the Platform, comparing its fundamental elements with anarchist classics and ignoring the case of Bulgarian platformism,[93] the Synthesists ended up generalizing these examples—especially the so-called “Fontenis case” [L’affaire Fontenis] in France—and turned them into paradigmatic examples of the modus operandi of platformism.

This is how the argument was constituted that very often equates Bakuninist[94] and platformist organizational dualism to a kind of Marxist and/or Bolshevik deviation from anarchism, to a kind of anarcho-Bolshevism. The dominant interpretation of the Platform exercised by the French synthesists and the dissemination that its argumentation reached—orally and in writing—explain that such positions will be uncritically consolidated by the world between researchers and militants.

Concluding

Although organizational dualism has not been defended by the majority organizationist anarchists, it has representatives of unquestionable importance and magnitude among anarchists: Bakunin, Malatesta and the editors of Dielo Trudá, among them Makhno and Archinov.

Toward the end of the 1860s, Bakunin carried out a theoretical and practical praxis that includes the Alliance and International Workingmen’s Association and contributes decisively to the debate on anarchist political organization. In our view, his positions constitute the fundamentals of the Dielo Trudá Platform. Malatesta also held positions close to the Platform, although, as we have seen, this does not occur in all his writings on the subject: it is not only about differences with respect to some issues of the Platform, but also that at distinct moments he comes close to the Synthesis position.

Taking into account the role of Bakunin and Malatesta in anarchism and that of figures like Makhno and Archinov, it is not very fair to equate their positions with some kind of Leninist or Bolshevik deviation and an alleged anarcho-Bolshevism. Logically, to claim that the Platform contains authoritarian positions implies ascribing responsibility for this to Bakunin. And yet it seems quite evident that both are anarchists and that their positions about the anarchist political organization are fully reconcilable with their other positions.

From the analysis of the debate between Malatesta on the one hand and Makhno and Archinov on the other, we can conclude the following: there is no doubt that the positions in question are anarchist and that they share the opinion on the need to organize anarchists on two levels—as workers in popular mass movements and as anarchists in revolutionary political organizations— and on the duty of anarchists to influence workers in general as much as possible. At the same time, we consider Malatesta’s criticisms misplaced, which claimed that the Platform is proposing a hierarchical model of organization and that the executive committee proposed by them would have the function of controlling decisions of the organization.

Be that as it may, we can at least identify three real differences between Malatesta and Makhno and Archinov on the following issues: individual and collective responsibility; fragmentation and the need for union of anarchists; level of autonomy and independence of individuals and groups in the anarchist organization. If for Malatesta responsibility is essentially individual, for Makhno and Archinov it is both individual and collective, so that it binds the militant and the organization at the same time. If for Malatesta the fragmentation of anarchists is not a problem of the first order, for Makhno and Archinov it urgently needs to be overcome in order to allow the union of as many anarchists as possible, provided they are in accordance with the organization’s program and strategy. If for Malatesta individuals should have the widest autonomy and independence in groups and these groups in the federations, to Makhno and Archinov unity of action is fundamental, even if it requires a majority vote.

Finally, we must add that for us there is a nexus between certain positions of Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform that have made it possible to develop a powerful theory of anarchist political organization and that these have served as inspiration for important political experiences. In the specific case of the Platform, it inspired a considerable set of anarchist political practices but, as we have seen, the French and Italian experiences of the 1950s, despite their virtues, offered elements for the argument of “Bolshevik deviation” that had been sustained since the Platform was published. Considering the ideologicalized analysis of the debate and the cases in question, in addition to the dominance of the French interpretation, we can get an idea of ​​why the Platform has been considered as a Bolshevik element of anarchism or even something foreign to the anarchist tradition. We have tried to show that this has no foundation.

Although there are reports about the reception of Dielo Trudá by Russian anarchists who were in Rio Grande do Sul,[95] it seems that in Brazil the Platform was not discussed even at that time nor in subsequent decades. Although there were different anarchist positions throughout the twentieth century which bear similarities to those outlined in the Platform,[96] it was not until the end of the decade 1990 and early 2000 that the text had been read, translated and discussed by Brazilian militants.[97] Those who have led the debate are the militants involved in especifismo anarchism, influenced by the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation, who without knowing the Platform at the time of its formation, reached quite similar conceptions via Bakunin and Malatesta.

Without a doubt, reflection on the Platform should not be taken as an inflexible guide for structuring a political organization. But to reject it on the false argument that it is an “authoritarian deviation” from anarchism or that its contributions should be confined to a specific context is to ignore all the political debates before and after this document, which link the organizational discussion to a long central thread. We understand that it is possible to advance the debate on anarchist political organization if we do it jointly with other contributions, both theoretical and practical, among others those of Bakunin and Malatesta. To continue working on deepening this debate seems to us an urgent need.

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Notes

[1] Felipe Corrêa and Rafael Viana da Silva, “Introduction à l’édition francophone.”

[2] This claim is also supported by the studies mentioned above (Corrêa, Van der Walt, De Laforcade, Viana da Silva). On organizational dualism in theory and practice see the previous chapter “Organizational Issues within Anarchism.”

[3] Mikhail Bakunin, Bakounine: Oeuvres Complètes [CD-ROM]. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History (IISH), 2000.

[4] Gaston Leval, Bakunin: fundador do sindicalismo revolucionário.

[5] See for example: René Berthier, “Bakounine: une théorie de l’organisation” and “Postface.”

[6] In recent decades, the silencing by French anarchists of Bakunin’s work is remarkable, especially with regard to the question of anarchist political organization. Virtually none of the numerous programs of the Alliance were included in the published books of this anarchist. Perhaps this question can be explained by following the hypothesis that René Berthier put forward in a talk in 2014 in Brazil. For him, for a long time the French linked Bakunin to Marxism under the umbrella of a so-called “libertarian Marxism,” defended by Daniel Guérin. Thus it can be explained, according to him, that a magazine like Itinéraire, which dedicated its issues to the “great anarchists” of history, does not have any issue on Bakunin. It is Berthier himself who, to a certain extent, along with other researchers and activists, has taken up the discussion about Bakunin’s work.

[7] Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to Morago (May 21st, 1872).” On the Alliance, see Felipe Corrêa, Liberdade ou Morte: teoria e prática de Mikhail Bakunin, chapters 10 and 13.

[8] Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to Cerretti (March 13–27, 1872).”

[9] Mikhail Bakunin, “Statuts secrets de l’Alliance: Programme et objet de l’organisation révolutionnaire des Frères internationaux,” “Letter to Cerretti (March 13–27, 1872)”and “Letter to Morago (May 21st, 1872).”

[10] Mikhail Bakunin, “Statuts secrets de l’Alliance: Programme et objet de l’organisation révolutionnaire des Frères internationaux” y “Statuts secrets de l’Alliance: Programme de la Société de la Révolution Internationale.”

[11] Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to Morago (May 21st, 1872).”

[12] It should be noted that during his long anarchist career, which spans more than sixty years, Malatesta defended different positions on anarchist political organization. If in some cases it is close to Bakunin’s conceptions and, as we will argue, to those of the Platform, in other cases his positions are more related to the Synthesis. It should also be noted that the term “party,” used by Malatesta in this period, must be placed in its historical context. It is a term that anarchists will gradually abandon, especially after the Russian Revolution, when it becomes more directly linked to Bolshevism and other initiatives to conquer the state, either through revolution or electorally.

[13] Errico Malatesta, “A organização II.”

[14] Errico Malatesta, “A organização II” and “Enfim. O que é a ‘ditadura do proletariado’,” p. 87.

[15] Errico Malatesta, “Ação e disciplina,” p. 24.

[16] Errico Malatesta, “A organização II,” p. 62.

[17] Errico Malatesta, “La propaganda anarquista,” pp. 170–172.

[18] Errico Malatesta, “Programa anarquista,” p. 14.

[19] Errico Malatesta, Ideología anarquista, p. 193.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid., p. 31.

[22] Errico Malatesta, “Programa anarquista,” p. 26.

[23] Although the Leninist party form is described in 1902 in Lenin’s work, What is to be done?, the model will not be internationally divulged until after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

[24] Vladimir I. Lenin, O que fazer?

[25] Any serious researcher would be horrified to hear this characterization of the members of Dielo Trudá. In the 2014 talk mentioned, for example, researcher René Berthier (who is also a member of a synthesist organization) was clear and emphatic when he heard it from another synthesist stating: “That does not exist.”

[26] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[27] Frank Mintz, “Contexto de la Plataforma.”

[28] Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame […], p. 256.

[29] Many of the texts on the debate can be found on the Nestor Makhno Archive: http://www.nestormakhno.info. Among the anarchists who contributed to this broad debate are: Malatesta, Makhno and the The Platform’s own authors —Piotr Archinov, Ida Mett, Jean Walecki, Benjamin Goldberg (Ranko)—in addition to Gregori Maximoff, Volin, Senya Fleshin, Camilo Berneri, Luigi Fabbri, Sébastien Faure and Maria Isidin, among others. For a full compilation of the interventions in this debate, see Felipe Corrêa (ed.), “Dossiê A Plataforma Organizacional”: https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/plataforma-organizacional.

[30] There are two homonymous historical texts that, although they have have significant differences, theoretically ground the “anarchist synthesis”: Sébastien Faure, “A sintese anarquista,” and Volin, “A sintese anarquista.”

[31] Errico Malatesta, “A organização I” and “A organização II.”

[32] Errico Malatesta, Ideología anarquista.

[33] Errico Malatesta, “Communism and Individualism.”

[34] Errico Malatesta, “Individualism and Communism in Anarchism.”

[35] Maurizio Antonioli (ed.) The International Anarchist Congress: Amsterdam (1907).

[36] Errico Malatesta, “Individualism and Communism in Anarchism,” pp. 14–18.

[37] Ibid., pp. 19–21.

[38] Errico Malatesta, “Intervention, 6th session,” p. 96.

[39] Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame […], p. 250.

[40] The debate was reflected in the correspondence between the two: Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista” and “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno,” and Nestor Makhno, “Reposta a “Um projeto de organização anarquista” and “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.” Malatesta’s article “A propósito da responsabilidade coletiva” can also be useful.

[41] Alexandre Skirda, a Russian translator who, in addition to participating in the political debate, was in charge of the publication of the new translation of the Platform into French, says about the original translation: “Let us remember that Volin’s first translation was described as ‘vile and boring’ and its author accused of not being ‘careful to adapt the terminology and phrases to the spirit of the French movement’ (Le Libertaire, 106, 04/15/1927). We investigated what these accusations could refer to and found, indeed, several consciously distorted terms: napravlenie, which means both ‘direction’ and ‘orientation’, was consistently used in the former sense. The same occurs with the term rukovodstvo, which means ‘conduct’ and as a derived verb it has the sense of ‘guide, lead, direct, manage’ but it was also systematically translated as ‘direct’. The most flagrant case is that of zatrelchtchik, which appears in the last sentence of the Platform and means ‘instigator’ but Volin translated it as ‘vanguard’. This is how, through light brushstrokes, the deep meaning of a text can be modified.” Alexandre Skirda, Autonomie individuelle et force collective: les anarchistes et l’organisation de Proudhon à nos jours, pp. 245–246.

[42] We can mention the case of the Nabat Confederation, which brought together various anarchist organizations. Although the differences in analysis between historians and anarchists themselves on the organizational conception and anarchism of Nabat do not allow us to know for sure if it was closer to the conception of the Synthesis or the Platform, we can affirm that, along with the experience of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, it broadly contributed to the Platform. Piotr Archinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement.

[43] Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista.”

[44] The discussion between Malatesta and Makhno got very complicated due to terminological problems, to which the issues previously noted on translation contributed.

[45] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[46] Nestor Makhno, “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.”

[47] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[48] Dielo Trudá, “Suplemento a la Plataforma Organizativa (Preguntas y respuestas).”

[49] Nestor Makhno, “Resposta a ‘Um projeto de organização anarquista’.”

[50] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista.”

[54] Ibid.

[55] Nestor Makhno, “Resposta a ‘Um projeto de organização anarquista’.”

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Piotr Archinov, “O velho e o novo no anarquismo.”

[59] Ibid.

[60] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[61] Ibid.

[62] Nestor Makhno, “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.”

[63] Errico Malatesta, “A propósito da responsabilidade coletiva.”

[64] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[65] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

[66] Nestor Makhno, “Uma segunda carta a Malatesta.”

[67] Ibid.

[68] Piotr Archinov, “O velho e o novo no anarquismo.”

[69] Errico Malatesta, “Resposta de Malatesta a Nestor Makhno.”

[70] Piotr Archinov, “O velho e o novo no anarquismo.”

[71] Errico Malatesta, “Um projeto de organização anarquista.”

[72] Ibid.

[73] Piotr Archinov, Historia del movimiento makhnovista.

[74] Alexandre Skirda, “Polémicas en torno del libro de Archinov: Historia del movimiento makhnovista,” p. 232.

[75] Piotr Archinov, “A makhnovitchina e o anarquismo.”

[76] Alexandre Skirda, “Polémicas en torno del libro de Archinov: Historia del movimiento makhnovista,” pp. 233–234.

[77] This and other writings from the author in Frank Mintz (ed.) Anatol Gorelik: el anarquismo en la Revolución Rusa.

[78] As mentioned above, the whole debate can be found in Felipe Corrêa (ed.), “Dossiê A Plataforma Organizacional.”

[79] Volin et al., “Reply to the Platform (Synthesist).”

[80] Nick Heat, “Introdução histórica.”

[81] David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement (1917–1945), pp. 174–176.

[82] Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame […], p. 258.

[83] Michael Schmidt, Anarquismo búlgaro em armas: a linha de massas anarco-comunista, p. 40. The Bulgarian Platform appears in the appendix of this book.

[84] Nick Heat, “Introdução histórica”; José A.G. Danton, “Para pensar el anarquismo desde nuestra realidad: sobre el Manifiesto comunista libertario,” p. 19.

[85] Maurice Joyeux, “L’affaire Fontenis.”

[86] Alexandre Skirda, Autonomie individuelle et force collective: les anarchistes et l’organisation de Proudhon à nos jours, pp. 203–213.

[87] George Fontenis, Manifeste du communisme libertaire.

[88] José A.G. Danton, “Para pensar el anarquismo desde nuestra realidad […],” pp. 19–20.

[89] Maurice Joyeux, “L’affaire Fontenis.”

[90] Alexandre Skirda, Autonomie individuelle et force collective […], p. 343.

[91] “Organisation, pensée, bataille,” in Noir et Rouge. Cahiers d’Études Anarchistes Revolutionnaires: Anthologie 1956–1970; Cédric Guérin, Pensée et action des anarchistes en France: 1956–1970; Maurice Joyeux, “L’affaire Fontenis,” p. 81.

[92] José A.G. Danton, “Para pensar el anarquismo desde nuestra realidad […],” p. 20; Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (FdCA), Anarchist communists: a question of class, p. 107.

[93] Bulgarian platformism is quite a different example from the French and Italian cases of the 1950s and became known in France through Balkansky’s publications. See for example this book published even by a group of the French-Francophone Anarchist Federation (FAF): Georges Balkansky, Histoire du mouvement libertaire en Bulgarie.

[94] Let us recall, as we have already pointed out, that the French attributed a certain authoritarian character to an important part of Bakunin’s work.

[95] Edgar Rodrigues, Renato Ramos y Alexandre Samis, Against all tyranny! Essays of anarchism in Brazil, p. 19.

[96] For an analysis of the experiences of the forties and sixties of twentieth century São Paulo and Río de Janeiro, see Rafael Viana da Silva, Elementos inflamáveis: organizações e militância anarquista no Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo (1945–1964).

[97] Dielo Trudá, “Plataforma Organizacional dos Comunistas Libertários.”

__________

Source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/felipe-correa-and-rafael-viana-da-silva-bakunin-malatesta-and-the-platform-debate-the-question

The post Bakunin, Malatesta and the Platform Debate- The question of anarchist political organization appeared first on Void Network.

By political philosophy, I mean a way of thinking about politics, institutions and decision-making. How people arbitrate their business with one another, theories of government – or self-government – or the abolition of all hierarchy. I liked to boil down anarchism into a few pithy phrases like, “anarchism is about no one having power over anyone else.”

I was not wrong. Anarchism is indeed about all of these things. It is indeed a political philosophy. It is indeed about how people take decisions together and manage their affairs collectively. But I thought this was its philosophy in toto, that there was nothing more to it. It was a way of thinking that was separate from our interior realities. It is an external philosophy, above all about how we behave towards one another.

These ideas take you far in analysing the current political and economic situation and working out how to reform it and replace it. In place of a top-down system of government, we need a system where decisions are made by the mass, including everyone with a stake. In place of an economic system controlled by the few with massive wealth, we need one where shares are equal, both in terms of wealth but also in terms of agency; where everyone gets a say over the economic affairs that affect them, whether in the workplace or society at large. The individual and society are at the heart of this idea. Individuals must be free to act as they please, but always taking into account the needs of others – a fair and equal negotiation (this isn’t the most purely libertarian form of anarchism, of course, more socialist libertarianism).

But who is that individual and how do they think? Anarchists are sceptical of formal religion, seeing it as another form of social control where agency is denied the individual in favour of a rigid orthodoxy enforced hierarchically – most often by men. The claim that god exists is seen as a veil, used to conceal many human wrongs and injustices, excused as a universal salve and explanation. Anarchism rejects religion: no gods, no masters.

Thus, I had been sceptical of those who sometimes called themselves spiritual anarchists. What is spiritualism but another kind of religion that confuses and misleads us from our earthly realities? I saw what can loosely be called spiritualism as narcissistic and selfish, with its focus on the individual soul and its needs and expression. Some of those I saw talking of spiritualism retreated from the battleground of society into drugs and other forms of refuge, both physical and mental. The battle is in our cities and streets, here and now, I argued crossly.

But those same ‘spiritualists’ claimed to me that there could not be revolution of the whole of society without revolutionising the way that individuals think within it. You couldn’t expect that society would adopt practices of equality, respect and inclusion unless we ourselves were transformed from the rationalism and analytic thinking that sees everything as structure or transaction. The interior needed to be reformed too. You couldn’t have revolution in one without revolution in the other.

I have come to think that they might be right. At the heart of all anarchism is how we treat other people. Anarchism demands that this treatment is always respectful and egalitarian: no one can coerce another, whether by overt means or subtle. My kind of anarchism demands that we treat others as they wish, not as we wish (which is, by the way, an explicit rejection of the so-called ‘golden rule’, under which we treat others as we would wish to be treated. Instead we must attend to what they say they want, not what we think they want). We must give up all notions of domination, of influence and getting others to do what we want. We must give up all power.

I once worked in government. I was agog with power, convinced that I worked among an elite few who understood the needs of society – in my case, in foreign policy and diplomacy – better than society understood itself. This fed my ego and structured my life around career and status. It has been a hard road to abandon these pillars of my sense of worth and self. If I don’t have power, what am I? If I cannot tell others what to do, what value do my ideas and wishes have? If it’s just me, what am I?

I have found that I need to believe in something. I’m not sure what I would call it. But I suspect my spiritualist friends would call it just that: spiritual need. It’s a belief that there are values and meanings outside ourselves but which animate and inspire our interior realities. Religions might name this thing god, expressed through litany. But my litany is anarchism, and I’m not willing to call that guiding spirit god. It is more earthly, it is more human.

I identify it by observing the core of anarchist practice: the interaction with others. How we treat other people. In anarchism, that interaction must be guided by consideration and caring, the putting of the needs of others on an equal footing to our own. At least: in its most extreme iteration, it is the erasure of self. Lao Tzu talks about this in the Tao te Ching. It is having power by giving up all power. He reached this conclusion thousands of years ago. It is a harmony between how we see and treat others and how we treat ourselves.

There is a word for this practice: it is Love.

Without this ‘spiritual’ core, anarchism struggles to make sense. If it is judged in the terms of current capitalist culture, it is not necessarily a more efficient or productive practice: it does not necessarily produce more goods or make more money.

What it accomplishes is in fact of infinite worth: the beauty of humans living with one another in love and respect and equality. These are abstract, ineffable things that cannot be measured in euros, pounds or dollars. Indeed, this stuff is beyond all terms themselves – and this is why it’s hard to put it into words too. It is on a plane above all that. And if you want to call this a ‘spiritual’ plane, I am happy with that. What goes on in the spirit or the soul matters, for it matters to the exterior reality too. What we believe in ourselves is intrinsic to how we engage with the world. One doesn’t work without the other.

____________

Carne Ross is a former British diplomat, author of The Leaderless Revolution: How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century, and the subject of the film Accidental Anarchist

http://www.accidentalanarchist.net/

The post Anarchy is Love! – Carne Ross appeared first on Void Network.

Geopolitics for anarchists?

Geopolitics tends to be a field of analysis for experts and journalists interested in the competing fortunes of nation-states, their alliances and institutions. They bring to it a level of strategizing similar to sports commentators at Sunday football: they understand the repertoire of plays, they can suss out strengths and weaknesses, but they will never deconstruct the history of the game, ask about the relationship between the bench and the field, the coach and the owner, the spectators and the players (that is, beyond a democratic spectacle: do they get along? are the fans happy with their team?). They will not dissect the architecture of the stadium or the commercial break, and they certainly will not wonder, is there another kind of game we could be playing? They need the game to go on forever. If the game stops, they disappear.

Some anarchists might think, if we want to abolish all nation-states, why engage with their irrelevant strategy games? Why understand them on their own terms?

It is absolutely true that anarchists will never show up as a player on the Risk board of geopolitics. We have entirely been drawn off that map. And that is as it should be. If we are anarchists, we are approaching strategy and power from a completely different place, and with completely different desires and methods.

But currently, it is the geopolitical system of states and capitalism that is most active in producing the future we are forced to inhabit. Knowing what range of futures are likely helps us understand the system we are up against and it helps us prepare.

If you think the zombie apocalypse—or really any apocalypse movie—presents a realistic scenario for what systemic collapse looks like, then you will be engaged in the wrong kind of preparation.

Over the last two decades, I’ve seen numerous anarchists make serious predictions about where we were headed, and what dangers we faced. This is a bold thing to do, and a good thing, because it allows us to test our theories. All the predictions I remember have turned out to be wrong.

• Trump did not launch a coup: in fact, John Bolton was speaking from experience when he said a coup requires a great deal more organization.
• Fascists are not close to taking over: they are primarily a danger for people at the street level and in the way they push the center rightward in terms of acceptable policy for a democratic government to enact.
• Promoting antifascism in the midst of a growing antiracist movement was a mistake, a step backwards. As it did in its previous iterations, antifascism decentered questions of whiteness and colonialism and allowed the Left to gain ground in what had previously been anti-state movements: it left us flatfooted when real fascism faltered but the democratic State plowed forward.
• Democracy is facing a crisis, but it still poses the biggest danger to us: spreading this awareness more generally might have saved some of our most powerful movements—in Chile and in Greece—from falling into fatal strategic dead ends. It would also have improved the initial framing of the Occupy and 15M movements, allowing them to develop in far more radical directions.
• “Late capitalism” or “the final stage of capitalism” were declared after WWI and it’s still chugging along. Discarding Marxism would allow us to more clearly see capitalism’s vital strategic, state-driven element: states and their institutions proactively open up new territories to ensure capitalist expansion.
• Being on the look-out for these new frontiers would have given us a head start in identifying the mainstream climate movement and green energy as the biggest threats to life on this planet. Now, we have to play catch up.

It worries me immensely that, as far as I have seen, people who made false predictions didn’t own up to their mistakes. Doing so would have been brave, honest, and it would have strengthened us immensely, giving us more chances to sharpen our theoretical tools, to hone our strategic intuition.

And I think that ego, that headlong retreat from our mistakes, has been a major factor shunting radicals around the world into even bigger mistakes, obvious mistakes. Frustrated, would-be revolutionaries are turning to single-issue activism, municipal democracy, or the latest Stalinist cults with robustly defined organizations, a carefully curated prole machismo, but no actual engagement or relevance to social conflict.

Which way the world system?

To summarize, a world system is a system that understands itself as global and that mediates political conflict and the flow of resources and information in accordance with a certain logic. Each successive world system has a leading state, but that leader does not have the power to control everything that happens in the world system: rather, they are the architect who at a critical moment achieves the power and legitimacy, the hegemony, to design a new world system that all the relevant players agree to take part in.

After World War II, the US took over from the UK and became the architect of the next world system, centered around a putatively universal order of states governed by the UN, headquartered in New York, and a capitalist regime of free trade and investment overseen by the Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF.

The US and its closest allies are no longer the main motors of economic growth, and the share of new investments they capture is diminishing. Politically, the NATO bloc had been expanding its web of alliances into territory that had long belonged in the Russian sphere of influence. Russia is pushing back in Ukraine, but divisions within NATO and the EU have recently immobilized those alliances, so that while Russia continues to receive armaments and financial support from its allies, critical funding for Ukraine has stalled.

Elsewhere, Russia has suffered humiliating defeats, as in its inability to support Armenia against the expansionism of Azerbaijan, which is backed by Turkey. When Turkey joined NATO during the Cold War, this was a major victory for the military alliance as it constituted a partial encirclement of Russia. But now, Turkey is acting on a strategic level like a non-aligned country, even as it continues to wield the ability to block consensus within NATO.

In the Cold War, the non-aligned countries consisted of states that were far weaker economically and militarily than the US and Russia, but that could incrementally improve their position by keeping their doors open to both blocs, essentially seeing who would give them a better deal.

So Turkey is effectively pursuing its own interests, against both the US/EU and against Russia, as well as other mid-weight rivals to its south and east, for example in the way it has weaponized Sunni fundamentalist groups related to the Islamic State against both Iran and the Kurds.

Futures

When a world system is faltering, the general options are:

a) the system successfully renovates and reinvents itself, with the old leader launching a reformed architecture

b) a new leader secures the power and legitimacy to win adherence to a new architecture, beginning a new world system

c) people increase their ability to fight back against the State and we win a global revolution, destroying the world system and preventing a new one from taking its place

d) the current world system remains in place, corroding and descending increasingly into civil war until eventually option a, b, or c occurs.

A New American Century

I’m making this reference to the Project for a New American Century, the group of neoconservative intellectuals who backed Bush II and believed they had the strategic plan for revitalizing the US as the undisputed world leader, ironically. The reason is that no player has done more than the US to undermine US hegemony.

The foreign and economic policy championed by Bush II and carried on in some ways by Trump and in other ways by Biden, has probably destroyed any chance the US has of restoring the global architecture that it put in place on the heels of its triumph over the Nazis.

The fact that no one in the US or British political elite seem aware of this fact only reconfirms it. And though the level of self-defeating ignorance is astounding, it should not be surprising, as capitalists usually only understand capitalism at a superficial level, and statists usually only understand the State at a superficial level, similar to sports commentators going over the latest plays.

When the US was at its most powerful, in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, immediately after winning the Cold War, the hubris of the neoconservative movement in the political class, and the unbridled avarice of the neoliberal technocracy amongst the financial institutions, directly destroyed the basis for US hegemony.

The IMF, G7, and the whole circus of humanitarian NGOs and international investors were blatant in the ways they benefited from corruption, authoritarian regimes, and internecine civil wars in recently decolonized countries; how by “development” they meant absolute dependence on a single export commodity, so that every poor country was not only completely vulnerable to political pressure from the US and Europe, they might also be plunged into starvation based on the vagaries of the currency market; and how, after the ‘70s, what they were most interested in was making cutthroat profit on the basis of sheer financial speculation rather than any productive growth that, from a capitalist standpoint, could be seen as sustainable. In other words, the entire Lawrence Summers crowd didn’t hide the fact that they were absolute vampires who didn’t even believe their own dogma, and the entire Rumsfeld and Bolton crowd couldn’t hide how ignorant they were about the world, about politics, and about the countries they believed they could dominate.

US power was not masked any better on the political stage.

The US and UK could have accepted occasional disappointments, not always getting their favored outcomes in international conflicts. This theater of “playing fair” could have generated widespread faith in and reliance on the United Nations framework. And this would have buttressed US power in the long run, since the UN was authored by the US and it headquarters global politics in New York City. But instead, they misunderstood the hegemonic and relational nature of power, and thought that having an unprecedented amount of power meant that they could act unilaterally without undermining the basis of that power.

This would be like if Apple had gotten everyone in the world to use Apple computers, but then didn’t let people produce any media on an Apple computer that was critical of Apple. What does it matter if you trash talk X, if the only forum to do it on is X?

By unilaterally invading Iraq twice and killing millions of people, by flagrantly overthrowing social democratic (but capitalist!) regimes that didn’t favor a handpicked list of Western investors, by protecting Israel from any slightest slap on the wrist to the point where nearly the entirety of Israeli society now feels entitled to commit genocide—not out of view, the way the US sometimes does, but in front of the cameras, and they’re the ones holding the camera, smiling and cracking jokes—the US and UK have destroyed the legitimacy and functionality of their own political instrument. The US (and under its protection, Israel) flagrantly ignores UN resolutions whenever it wants. It acts like a “rogue state” within the interstate system that it designed, and designed to its advantage. And this cowboy attitude has always characterized US foreign policy (except, arguably, under FDR), but it accelerated under Reagan and especially Bush II.

Trump aped the arrogance of it with several unilateral moves, increasing blank check support to Israel, for example, and retreating from the very question of strategy with a non-interventionist tendency that left key US allies in the lurch. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has tried to press a reset button on strategic thinking, but they’re acting like it’s 1996.

Israel was once an important military laboratory for the US and a nuclear option in the world’s key oil producing hub, at a time when a pan-Arab alliance posed the threat of controlling both the oil and the Suez canal. Now, Israel is largely a liability; Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran are all aggressively trying to redraw power lines in West Asia and none of them rely exclusively on the US as a patron; Yemen is effectively threatening shipping through the Suez canal; and most West Asian oil is exported to India and East Asian economies, primarily China.

As Israel carries on with its blatant genocide against Palestinians, the UN is even proving inept at delivering humanitarian aid and barely even registers as a potential mediator. The only actors able to target Israel with any real consequences are Hizbollah, the Houthis, and Revolutionary Guard-linked militias. The chief actor in the mediation process is Qatar. In other words, all the actors who are gaining in legitimacy and power are allies of Iran, which is the only one of the three regional powers that the US has no leverage or alliance with.

Meanwhile, the US is damaging its relationship with European governments. Trump in particular showed the EU and NATO that they could not assume the US would always be reliable, and this is a direct result of the dysfunction of democracy as the world system falls apart. Democratic mechanisms still provide an important release mechanism that can pacify and incorporate resistance movements before they become revolutionary. But in the US, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, and the UK, rightwing populist electoral victories have shown that actually, democracy is dangerous to power because it is not total bullshit. Up until now, electoral promises were all rubbish because no new political administration endangered the underlying economic policies of neoliberalism. The technocrats didn’t have to worry: their machine would keep humming along.

Even progressive electoral victories in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere let the capitalists know: nothing to worry about here. And the democratic states have proved capable of dismantling actually fascist movements like Golden Dawn in Greece before they proved too much of a threat. But the rightwing white populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Johnson not only eroded the functionality of democratic governance, they also threatened the stability of the technocratic status quo, scaring the hell out of investors who had been living in a Candyland made just for them, and they burst the assumed durability of key political formations like the European Union or the US-European alliance.

Europe—long a valuable container for cultural and political legitimacy, given the white supremacy at the heart of the world system—has for the first time in nearly a century had to consider its separate interests, and this is already showing up in a markedly different approach towards China. In the US, the political elite already consider China an adversary worthy of a new Cold War, whereas in Europe, China is considered a partially reliable strategic partner. If something does not change quickly, the US will be relegated to the same status.

And without reliable US support, the EU will have to bring itself up to war readiness, able to dissuade Russia from further invasions. In order to find a balance that Russia won’t risk upsetting, that may mean abandoning Ukraine to a permanent partition.

From the perspective of US power, none of this looks good. To have any chance of renovating the world system it authored, the US would need to make grand gestures in order to expiate their rotten brand:

• supporting Palestinian statehood and breaking Israeli public support for its current ruling class by wrecking the Israeli economy
• normalizing relations with China and Iran but ensuring favorable investment and trade deals with putative democracies like India, Taiwan, and South Korea
• making a convincing, substantial pitch for rebranded international investment that distinguishes itself from the mercenary monetary policy of the IMF by assuring more autonomy for “sustainable development” directed by the local ruling classes of formerly colonized countries, etc.
• unveiling a convincing plan for a global transition to green energy that accelerates the current wave of profitable investment, extraction, and production, while also including a “global justice” element that gives meaningful resources to poor countries to participate in the transition and improve their economic standing

And internally:

• co-opting abolition for the second time (the first time being in 1865) by decriminalizing drugs, eliminating prison for all nonviolent offenders, and expanding the use of unarmed neighborhood patrol cops
• instituting universal healthcare.

The likelihood of this happening, however, seems minuscule, given how little awareness the current ruling class has of all the ways they are sabotaging their own power. They even seem to think that projecting force is the way for them to stay in control. But no one is contesting that the US has the strongest military in the world. They don’t need to. All rivals need to show is that the US military is not effective at creating the outcomes desired by its ruling class. That was demonstrated in Afghanistan. The question was brought to a costly standstill in Iraq. And now the US is stomping up and down the Red Sea and the Mediterranean firing missiles into Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, puffing out its chest and demonstrating that if you hit me with a straw I’ll hit you with a hammer but what they’re actually showing is their ineffectiveness, their willingness to destabilize the region out of pure hubris, and their permanent contempt for any other country’s sovereignty, even that of their allies. This seriously damages faith in the US as a potential world leader because one of the key changes from the British world system to the American world system was decolonization, and in the wake of World War II the US positioned itself as a champion of freedom from dictatorship and freedom from aggression.

US force is irrelevant. For two years, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill, the second strongest military in the world, destroying million dollar Russian tanks with thousand dollar drones. The Houthis are now using drones to threaten shipping in one of the most important commercial waterways in the global economy. The effectiveness of multibillion dollar US missile defense systems is moderate. Meanwhile, US missile strikes from bases, ships, and planes all across the region are worse than ineffective, because they are strengthening rivals and forcing nonaligned countries to realign themselves at a more cautious distance from both the US and Israel.

Instead of projecting force, the US needs to be projecting intelligence, creating solutions to the many crises pummeling the world system. The current US ruling class does not see the actual problems, and is not proposing any real solutions. The chance of a change of guard that pushes the US and European elite in a more intelligent direction is extremely low, based on a glance at the electoral map.

From the Trumps, throwing gasoline on the fire at home and abroad, to the Bidens, trying the same old techniques and hoping for different results, the political mainstream is at war with itself. Politicians, technocrats, and investors would receive the kind of proposals actually needed to save the current world system like some bizarre mix of treason, progressive nonsense, and socialistic revolution.

A BRICS road

At this juncture it seems unlikely that the US could rescue its project of global dominance, but until an effective new world leader steps forward with a convincing new architecture, that means the current system will drag on, descending increasingly into conflict, civil war, and even a neofascist regimes in a few regions, until a decisive change occurs in one direction or another.

In the essay, “Anarchy in World Systems,” the argument is made that that next global architect would probably be China, or potentially India.

Before exploring those possibilities, let’s take a look at a feature of this theoretical framework we’re using, the world system. The most relevant theorist is Giovanni Arrighi, who was combining a largely materialist analysis of global economic flows with a largely anarchist analysis of power and social design under the modern state. He doesn’t credit the anarchists of course, but he’s an academic, so that’s to be expected.

In the first edition of the book published in 1994, Arrighi does that bold thing: he makes a prediction. And he gets it completely wrong, saying that Japan will be the architect and leader of the next world system. In a later edition of the book, however, he does the decent thing and acknowledges that he was wrong and that it would likely be China. He doesn’t, however, offer a convincing analysis of what flaw in the theory led him to make that mistake.

“Anarchy in World Systems” argues that his mistake comes from Arrighi favoring the materialist side of his own theoretical tool over the anarchist side. Capital accumulation is not the driving force of the world system. It is a necessary fuel, but capital accumulation does not happen without the architecture and the strategic planning of states. We can realize how obvious this should be if we let ourselves see, in hindsight, how ridiculous the prediction was that Japan would be the number one global power. This prediction was based on statistics for Japan’s economic growth, leaving out the non-quantifiable factor: strategic planning and power contests by states.

Japan could not possibly be the next global architect because it had never won a war against the old leader, the US, so it had no bubble of autonomy within which to begin creating a new design. Once Japan challenged the US—at a purely economic level—in the ‘80s, US planners simply turned off the faucet. After the Korean War, though, China did have that military victory, and with it a bubble of regional autonomy.

So could China be the architect of the next global system, and what would that look like?

For starters, China does not appear to have the military strength that earlier world system architects enjoyed. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the British had the most powerful fleet, giving them a global military reach, and at the end of World War II the US had the most effective military, the largest carrier fleet, nuclear bombs, long range bombers, and military bases with runways large enough for these bombers, all across the world.

Today, China has advanced technology but only recently achieved a blue water fleet, and only recently went intercontinental, setting up military bases in eastern Africa. However, this distinction may not be as important as it was in the past.

There is no state that the Chinese government needs to overthrow or conquer in order to take its place as a global architect (Taiwan comes close to holding this status, although for reasons far more relevant to Chinese ruling class ideology than to China’s stature on the world stage; Taiwan, in fact, could become China’s Israel). In the current system, open warfare has shown diminishing returns. No major powers have gone head-to-head since 1945, and all the greatest interventions of the two world powers (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) cost them more than they gained.

The only military capacity China would likely need to take on the role of global leader is the capacity for deterrence and for stabilization operations. Deterrence simply means that they pose enough of a military threat that no other state would directly attack China or the smaller countries that China considers to be in its primary zone of influence, more on this in a moment. Stabilization operations would require China to project force internationally to protect the flow of commerce and protect major investments. Its bases in Eastern Africa are well positioned to help it police the Red Sea and Suez Canal route through which a great deal of commerce flows between Europe and Asia.

Taking this analysis further, though, would be making the mistaken assumption that one state alone needs to be the sole military and economic powerhouse to launch a new world system. From the Westphalia system to the United Nations, all previous world systems relied on a strong degree of cooperation (between nation-states), and if not consensus, then at least consent.

We can see this more clearly when we look at BRICS, which is the most likely vehicle currently prefiguring a new world system. BRICS, together with the New Development Bank and other linked institutions, provide a counterweight to the G7 and the IMF. They are organized by the powerhouses of the so-called developing world: Brazil, Russia, India, and China starting in 2009, with South Africa added a year later. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates joined at the beginning of this year.

Clearly, BRICS is achieving important growth, with the original five constituting 45% of the world’s population and 33% of the world’s GDP (or 27% if not adjusted for purchasing power parity). Compare that to NATO (which is a military alliance and not an economic alliance like BRICS), with 31 members who account for 55% of global military spending, 12% of the world population, and over a third of the world’s GDP.

Meanwhile, the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, has total capital of $100 billion, with $34 billion in authorized lending annually. This is much less than the $932 billion that make up the IMF’s total resources, but is still nothing to sneeze at.

Both the UN and IMF were founded inside the US (with the first UN General Assembly convening in the UK, the closest US ally). The main US rival, the USSR, was included in the UN, since the purpose was to be a universal body for all modern states, but the US consistently used the UN to constrain its rivals, or immobilized the UN when it couldn’t get its way. And the USSR was not initially included in the IMF and similar financial institutions, though over time they were invited and integrated. In other words, the US system purported to be universal, just in ways that subtly benefited the US and its allies.

BRICS, on the other hand, is pursuing a different strategy. The alliance gives itself the possibility of being counterhegemonic by not pretending to be universal. It is very explicitly a counterweight to the dominant economic institutions and alliances (the G7 and IMF). And yet, it offers more meaningful collaboration. Especially at its founding in 2009, China was the economic powerhouse of the alliance. China has ongoing political and economic rivalries, as well as border disputes, with both Russia and India. Yet both of those countries were invited to form the ground floor, and the founding summit was held not in China but in Russia (though, not without significance, in Yekaterinburg, which is in Asia).

There is nothing revolutionary about the Chinese-authored system. It is absolutely a continuation of the global system of capitalism that has ruled the world with a tighter and tighter grip since the 1500s.

It does demonstrate some different organizing principles, though. We can identify the following principles in the US-led system.

national decolonization: the US distinguished itself from Great Britain, the biggest colonizer in world history, by championing the cause of decolonization… within a certain framework. Every nation-state should have a government along Western lines, but colonized populations were not allowed to self-define. The borders were usually defined by the former colonizers, and independence would only be granted once the former colonizers and the US decided that a new (local) ruling class was ready. Thus, most oppressive power dynamics from the colonial era carried over after decolonization.

neoliberalism: the IMF and WTO pushed world economies away from protectionism and towards a liberalization of monetary policy, so that in theory, capitalists anywhere in the world could invest anywhere else in the world. The concept of a “free market” was pure mythology, though, as large investments in poorer countries tended to have monopolistic characteristics, and powerful countries could wreck the currencies of less powerful countries. Furthermore, investments in formerly colonized countries tended to achieve profit in a purely speculative, financial way, and/or by reinforcing single export/extractivist/plantation economies.

democracy and human rights: the US pushed for universal democracy and guaranteed human rights. However, these proved the most imperfect of all the organizing principles. Investors often found it more expedient to work with dictatorships, especially when their goal was quick profit or the construction of highly destructive megaprojects. And the US, British, French, Dutch, and Belgian political elite were too jealous of their hold on power to countenance free elections if it meant a government gained power that was less docile or didn’t give favoritism to the right investors. As such, these NATO states in particular engaged in coups and supported dictatorships across the world, respectively in “America’s backyard” or in former colonies across Africa and Asia. As for human rights, it has proven to be a largely meaningless concept in hierarchical societies that produce vast inequality.

I would love to see a better analysis, but I believe the organizing principles being promoted by China can be summarized as the following.

state sovereignty: though China engages in a great deal of ethnic cleansing and should be qualified as a settler state in at least half its claimed territory, and Xi himself could accurately be described as a very nationalist socialist, China does not place emphasis on the nation-state, per se, as an organizing principle globally. The far more important principle is state sovereignty: within its borders, a state has the legitimacy to do whatever it wants. It can impose ethnic homogeneity to constitute itself as a nation, it can do away with ideas of nation entirely. It isn’t anyone else’s business. Presumably, disagreement around existing borders between sovereign states should be settled through bilateral diplomacy. Also presumably, as their military power grows, the Chinese ruling class will support coups and regime change in weaker countries throughout Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Africa, but they will need to find an effective way of governing or justifying these exceptional actions.

infrastructural investment: China will continue to support the global discourse of free trade, walking the usual balance between giving strategic support to important domestic companies and ensuring the possibility for governments to attract investment from anywhere in the world, the right of investors to invest anywhere in the world. But unlike a focus on pure profit, as under the US system, there may be a real shift towards promoting sustained economic growth, initially achieved through major infrastructural “improvement” in post-colonial countries. In other words, China—and India, and Brazil—will likely seek to achieve an expansion in real production, not just domestically, but around the world.

quality of life: given their technocratic background, the Chinese ruling class is likely to favor an emphasis on quality of life over one on human rights. Quality of life, according to the capitalist religion, is something that can be measured quantitatively, unlike human rights. And promoting (this view of) quality of life dovetails with increased investment in advancing infrastructure, whereas the figure of human rights encourages violations of other states’ sovereignty. Human rights is a holdover from the paternalism of colonial, Christian countries who need to make sure colonized people have learned how to recite the proper dogmas before they can be trusted with independence. Quality of life, however, can be a point of common ground between diplomats working for a political order based on absolute state sovereignty, and technocrats and investors working to achieve economic growth through infrastructural investment. Promising a higher quality of life can also be an effective strategy for pacifying potentially threatening popular movements.

Both the paradigm and the resources that BRICS has to offer are proving attractive. Just this year, Iran was one of multiple new countries to join BRICS, flaunting US attempts to isolate Tehran.

What would the tipping point look like, heralding the beginning of a new world system?

BRICS wouldn’t necessarily be the vehicle for the new world system, especially since it was designed as an economic and political counterweight within the current world system. But similar to the relation between the League of Nations and the United Nations, it gives a good indication of what the new system would look like.

It could easily kick off as an alliance or treaty after a global recession and the spread of one or two regional wars. The treaty or alliance would include language around a respect for borders and the internal sovereignty of states, and a commitment to mediation instead of warfare. It could be cast as a win-win (rather than the negative sum game of open war) if it were the expansion of an already existing, successful alliance between economic powerhouses. This alliance would open an invitation to all other countries, requiring a recommitment to free trade while announcing major investments as an incentive. Rather than the predatory lending of the IMF, this investment would be putatively designed to modernize infrastructure around the world and increase quality of life.

Original signatories to this alliance would probably have to include China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, maybe Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and—critically—the European Union, or at least Germany and France. As noted, the EU has already begun distancing itself from the US and keeping the doors open for good relations with China.

An important change that might tilt the scales could be the US defaulting on its debt in a future recession, or any continuation of unhinged US military aggression around the world, without a matching commitment to its historical allies.

The new alliance would begin among a self-selecting group of countries, but it would open itself up globally and quickly eclipse the UN and IMF in legitimacy, functionality, and resources.

What early tensions would such a world system face? Not that the Paris Agreement or UN are having any effect on mitigating planetary disaster, but the BRICS emphasis on using “sovereign resources” (fossil fuels) to fund development and pay for an energy transition directly block any real alternatives for the planet. This means accelerated and catastrophic climate change would be the backdrop of the new world system. Weather changes are proving most catastrophic for middle latitude countries, but these are the very countries that have to pull the weight of inaugurating a new world system.

Chinese and Indian investment in Africa would likely retain an overtly colonial character (moreso, for example, than Brazilian investment in Latin America), preventing the new system from benefiting from a change in branding or an increased legitimacy.

Power struggles among the most powerful members of the alliance could prove destabilizing, especially as India (a rightwing democracy) overtakes China in economic growth. As the resistance movement in Hong Kong demonstrated, China, as an autocracy, has fewer options for incorporating rebellion. If they could not repress a subversive movement with police force, CCP leadership might split and the system would crack.

Also, dictatorial power arrangements rarely survive strong leaders. Granted, Xi is not a dictator in the way that Hitler and Franco were. There is a very strong party apparatus behind him and he has consolidated his power in the Party over the last decade.

India will not fall apart after Modi. but Russia could easily fall apart after Putin. With China, it’s hard to say, because earlier administrations of the CCP lacked Xi’s political acumen, his ability to make aggressive calculations that hone in on how the Chinese state could increase its power without accepting any of the options on the table (e.g. neither Maoism nor a new Open Door Policy).

In other words, Xi and his advisers can think in a new paradigm, a quality necessary for being able to design a new world system. But part of Xi’s system of governance has required an intolerance for any disobedience or dissent, which will make an effective succession much more difficult when Xi is gone. The critical question is, does robust debate happen in secret at the upper and intermediate levels of the CCP, with a projection of consensus and unity in public? Or does Xi’s governing method breed a culture of acquiescent bureaucrats who cannot challenge a bad idea? If the latter, China might be able to help launch a new world system while Xi is in charge, but they might not remain the dominant member of the system’s central alliance.

Talking about a revolution

Honestly, the only reason I gave a bump to the probability of a successful global revolution is because global power systems are facing more friction and becoming unable to project stability. Not because we’re getting stronger.

And the main reasons we are not getting stronger under our own steam is because we have lost memory and imagination.

We rarely know how to achieve any continuity from one generation to the next within the alienation and scarcity of capitalism, so we commit the same mistakes again and again. And under the colonial spirituality of rationalism we have forgotten that the real world cannot exist without imaginary worlds. We let capitalism do all our imagining for us until our imaginations become atrophied, so we can no longer turn to revolution as a meaningful concept because barely anyone knows how to imagine a revolution anymore.

Once we get through the early moments of revolution in which we can carry ourselves solely on passion, spontaneous intelligence, and our own tactical innovation, we have not imagined what steps to take next. So, we do not take them. We either become passive, or exhausted, or we try repeating the exact same dance moves that brought us to that place. Or we try an opposite set of dance moves (which usually bring us to a much worse place).

This is unfortunate because we have the most latitude to build a revolution in a moment like this, when one world system is falling apart, and before it rejuvenates itself or before the next system has the chance to fully animate the replacement.

To not squander our chances, though, we need to remember a great many things:

• Democracy is our enemy. Supporting democracy only turns us into innovative designers for the rejuvenation of the American project.
• The Right and the Left are the two hands of the State, equally dangerous. The real line of conflict runs between above and below. However, Right and Left are not the same. The followers of the Left are mostly sincere. We need to be present to them to help spread meaningful forms of revolt, and we need to show them the true nature of their leaders. As for the Right, we must always attack its lies and paranoias. The key is to leave the door open for followers of the Right to betray authority, but never accommodating their anxieties. We need to build power based on expansive solidarity to show them what that could look like, but they need to take the step of abandoning identities based on oppression.
• Marxism betrayed the strongest revolutionary movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It does not deserve any more chances. Vanguards, authoritarian parties, and reforms betrayed the strongest social movements of the last 100 years. They do not deserve any more chances.
• Abolition already happened, but because it was partial, it only changed the institutions of oppression without ending oppression itself. Meaningful abolition needs to identify the shared root of exploitation and white supremacy (many of today’s abolitionists are already preparing the groundwork for a second major defeat-in-victory).
• Decolonization already happened. But because it was political, it only spread the colony, training the colonized to act like their colonizers. To destroy colonialism, its beginning points and the vehicles for its adaptation need to be destroyed.
• A revolution needs to enact solidarity between all people, but people need to be honest about where they are coming from. People who bear a middle class culture need to unlearn it, as it manifests in a politics of comfort: building informal social power, flattening contradictions, and avoiding conflict. Currently, its crusade is to destroy practices of transformative justice—and the difficult experiences those practices come from—in favor of the kind of attitudes (simultaneously fragile and vicious) that flourish on social media.
• Revolution is a question of organization, but nearly everyone who poses it this way is already limiting themselves to a counterrevolutionary idea of organization.
• There is another way of organizing ourselves, of making plans, of taking strategic steps. And there always has been.

I’ve been trying to develop these arguments in my writing, and it is a major focus of my forthcoming projects. But if you have a specific question, want me to elaborate on something, drop a comment, and I’ll respond if I’m able.

https://petergelderloos.substack.com

Additionally, something I’m less able to contribute to: Black and Indigenous anarchisms need more space and more support. To be truly successful, any revolutionary approach needs to be multiple, it needs to be anticolonial, and it needs to understand the origins of oppression. The specific historical lineage of anarchism that was born in Europe is not sufficient, not for those of us trapped within whiteness and certainly not for everybody else.

For more on these directions, check out Klee Benally’s No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred

Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy

Zoe Samudzi and William C. Anderson, As Black As Resistance

and William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map

Finally, here is a thought-provoking article about solidarity with both the Kurds and the Palestinians—two peoples facing genocide—and a call for internationalism from below rather than an internationalism that privileges state actors.

Ozlem Goner, “Internationalism beyond the Geopolitics of States and Solidarity in ‘Complex’ Situations”

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https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/geopolitics-for-2024

Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I think we can simplify these questions in a way that may provide some perspective.

Which future would you rather face?

Having to spend between one and ten years in prison

OR

not going to prison, but living in a world in which:

• you and most people you know will, by the age of 50, probably get cancer, heart disease, diabetes, an auto-immune disorder, or a painful chronic illness that no one understands (with all the suffering and likelihood of death that accompany those conditions)
• you, your immediate family, and your closest friends will have a roughly 10% – 50% chance of experiencing a high death toll extreme weather event or acute famine, and possibly dying in it
• if you have family and loved ones from outside Europe/Australia and North America, they will probably face a 50-99% chance of having to face lethal weather events and famines multiple times, killing many of them
• any natural area that you have ever loved will be forever altered by mass extinction, mining, drought, or other causes
• you would have to sit by and watch as the political institutions, financial institutions, and corporations most responsible for all this suffering gain ever more power over your life and your surroundings, never being abolished, never being held accountable in any meaningful way.

Now let’s assume that the bad things described above—relating to death, disease, extreme weather, mass extinctions—are going to happen no matter what. In fact, yes: let’s assume that. We’re not speaking hypothetically right now. This is a realistic assumption. All the scientific models that have been validated and refined over the last decades predict that we are on a collision course for that level of suffering and death, or worse. In the parts of the world that are on the cutting edge of the apocalypse, those conditions already pertain.

So now let’s come back to our hypothetical scenario. First, the scenario’s realistic foundation:

Every year for the foreseeable future brings with it the grim certainty of skyrocketing death rates, disease, famine, mass extinction, loss of habitat, and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

Now, the choice. Would you rather:

• face all this harm and suffering, within the approximate probabilities named in the first bulleted section, but also
• take illegal actions against the structures and institutions responsible for all this suffering, and by doing so assume a less than 50% risk of one to ten years in prison
• know that with all the other people also taking forceful action, ecocide and genocide become less profitable, and those in power lose some or all their power, whereas the rest of us, as well as the generations to come, gain a partial or complete ability to organize our communities and tend to our ecosystems in a way that prioritizes healing

OR

take no action other than symbolic protest, avoid the risk of prison, but also do nothing to diminish the power of the world eaters. With nothing to hold them back, the apocalypse becomes even more brutal, and the future you face includes:

• hundreds of millions of humans dying every year from famine, lack of clean water, pollution, extreme weather events, and genocidal warfare resulting from these scarcities occurring within a competitive politico-economical framework
• you and everyone you know facing a significant decrease in life expectancy, as the entire human population decreases between 10%-80%
• the likelihood that you and the people you care about the most have to survive or are excruciatingly killed off by famine, cancer, diarrhea, tropical diseases, heart disease, untreated infection, wildfires, floods, or warfare
• having to obey the increasingly dictatorial authority of the political and economic institutions that are directly responsible for all this suffering, or even worse dictatorships that arise as society falls apart but people just watch it all passively

In the above scenarios, which offer simplified but accurate versions of the hidden choices we all face every day, what does the risk of prison have to do with the apocalypse and how extreme it gets?

Actually, everything. To understand why, there’s some official history that needs to be refuted.

When we learn the standard history of civilization, revolutions are never mentioned until the Age of Reason and the supposedly reasonable revolutions of slave owners, colonizers, military officers, and businessmen in France and North America. Prior to that, we may hear of quite a few earlier civilizations that mysteriously collapsed. Or, we may get spoon fed a tale of continuity from Mesopotamia through Egypt to Rome and the Holy Roman Empire and Spain and then modernity, with everything beyond the shadow of the State (or in the latter version, beyond the shadow of so-called Western states) completely ignored.

In the years I was doing the research for my book, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, I could not find a single example of a statist society that collapsed, that just fell apart from some logistical inefficiency, spiraling warfare, or local ecocide perpetrated by the ruling class. I did come across multiple “mysterious” collapses that were quite clearly caused or at least helped along by lower class revolutions, and after these revolutions people’s quality of life usually improved. As for the other collapses that do remain mysterious, in every case I came across evidence—inconclusive but nonetheless strong—that popular uprisings combined with massive abandonment (back in the day when there was a frontier beyond which State power did not reach) helped tip the balance of power. Yet the vast majority of academic sources I plowed through—historians, archaeologists, paleoecologists, and anthropologists from fifty different decades, twenty different countries, and a dozen different schools of thought—refused to even mention the concept of revolution or to portray the lower classes as a group capable of agency or even thought.

So: revolution. It’s been with us as a possibility as long as the State has. Accordingly, in our present scenario, I am talking about us rising up against the power structures responsible for ecocide and genocide, and taking effective action against the institutions and infrastructures that cause us the most harm.

The question of the law, obviously, is a joke. The law is a weapon in the hands of the ruling class. They only follow it or deploy it when it suits their interests. And if we take effective action against them, they will try to punish us regardless of whether our actions are technically illegal.

So I’m not strictly talking about taking illegal action: I’m talking about saving ourselves from immense harm, which most people would consider an ethically valid basis for action.

For now, let’s leave aside the ethical question of, how many people complicit in mass murder is it okay to kill, provided they are still engaged in mass murder and we’re not punishing them for harms that are no longer ongoing. (I might pick that question up in a future newsletter.)

At the moment let’s just imagine the destruction of things that have no feelings and no existence outside of their status as tools for extraction, domination, and despoliation: pipelines, mines, highways, airports, prisons, mansions, drilling installations, facilities related to the police and military, cash crop and monocrop operations, golf courses, grass lawns, cell phone towers, useless-shit factories, chemical and automobile and weapons manufacturers… the list goes on and on.

We know from past experiences that sabotage campaigns are exponentially more likely than protest to lead to the cancellation of new oppressive infrastructures being built. Sabotage campaigns together with protests are even more effective, especially if those protests focus on blockades and the total rejection of those in power rather than the overtures to dialogue. Regardless, protests, blockades, and sabotage all put us at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

About that risk though. I tossed out the figure of a 50% chance of going to prison. That was intentional, because I think if we are going to take big risks for a revolution, it is much healthier and more sustainable if we face up to those risks and assume the worst will come to pass. If we can imagine ourselves dealing with the consequences and surviving, prison and the police will already have lost most of their power over us. But realistically, the actual risk is closer to, and probably below, 1%, if we follow some basic security practices. Significantly, the actions that may feel the safest if we are inculcated in all the delusions of a liberal democracy, are actually the riskiest.

This has certainly been true for me. In my life, I have been arrested four times. Those four arrests earned me (in order)

• six months locked up in county jails, maximum security prison, and minimum security prison, where I faced various forms of violence from guards and snitches;
• a weekend in a temporary detention facility in conditions that technically qualified as toxic;
• a week in jail, a deportation process lasting two years in which I had to remain in the country and check in at court every two weeks but was not legally allowed to work, and the whole time I was under the threat of a permanent ban, which would mean never being allowed to return and see loved ones;
• and a quick night in jail, respectively.

The first three arrests—the ones with the worst consequences—were for some of the most peaceful actions I have ever participated in. The first was civil disobedience, the second was a legal protest (in fact it was the mass arrest that was illegal, and if I’d had the patience to follow up with some noncommunicative lawyers I would have gotten a huge payout a few years later, in part for the illegal arrest and in part for the toxic site where the holding pens had been set up). And the third was also a legal protest, though it took two years on provisional release and a court case to prove it (there was, um… some disagreement about what constituted “public disorder” and what constituted an “explosive” in the eyes of the law, and it took a good lawyer and favorable witnesses to win that dispute).

The fourth one actually was an illegal protest in which a number of neo-Nazis and cops got assaulted and even injured, and some property got smashed. My friend and I weren’t assuming any additional risks aside from going with the flow, but going with the flow is its own risk, and we didn’t hightail it out of there fast enough when the signs made it clear that that was the move. However, police couldn’t pin anything on any of the people who got cornered and mass arrested. It was too difficult for them to gather specific evidence, because of the chaos factor, because people weren’t civil, because of all the movement and pandemonium plus a modest amount of destruction. Of course, police don’t needevidence to lock people up in prison, but in a democracy they do need to calculate how much they can stray into the legal terrain of the state of exception. In this case, it would have been harder for the pigs to sell since there wasn’t enough disruption for the media to create a major political scandal or mobilize fragile bourgeois sensibilities enough to justify locking up anyone who had anything to do with the protest. So they let us all go.

Now let’s talk about all the things that aren’t showing up here, all the risks that never resulted in arrests. Or, more appropriately, let’s talk around them. There is an unavoidable inequality between civil disobedience, on the one hand, and on the other the continuum of sabotage, collective self-defense, counterattack, and insurrectionary action. The State will go to far greater lengths to repress or eliminate those they suspect of carrying out forceful actions, and also those who vocalize their support for such actions and the revolutionary culture they belong to.

What’s more, the State proactively organizes society to preempt the capacities we need in order to struggle wisely, like the ability to tell stories and create collective memory. We are shaped as isolated individuals dependent on the dominant institutions for any sense of history. More often than not, they just spoon feed us entertainment to fill the hole where our sense of history should be. And as we know, repression skews sharply in favor of nonviolence: it is far riskier to tell the stories of sabotage, of insurrection, of combat. I won’t be sharing any such stories in this newsletter. Immediately, I can hear in my own head the cynical insinuation that I’m probably just some hypocrite who only writes about this stuff. Which is okay. We need to learn to deal with far worse forms of baiting and harassment.

The most important thing is on the one hand not to respond from a place of ego, not to worry about curating a reputation for being a daring revolutionary, and on the other hand to pay close attention to anyone who mocks or belittles others in a way that would encourage a culture of people having to show off or insinuate their illegalist credentials. And always remember the maxim: you don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work. (Don’t spread rumors about people you suspect of being infiltrators or snitches: the cops themselves benefit from rumorology and often spread false accusations against others; instead, share constructive criticism of harmful forms of communication and conflict/avoidance.)

Stepping back from our individual egos and sinking into our collective body, what any one of us can attest to is that there have been tens of thousands of banks and cop shops smashed or burned, pigs and fascists beaten up, government buildings attacked, pipelines and mines sabotaged, construction and clearcutting equipment destroyed, research facilities torched, labs liberated, secrets leaked, useful or valuable goods stolen, and frauds committed, and those who have done prison sentences can best be counted in the hundreds,1 with many of those being people who got framed but didn’t actually do anything.

In other words, we are often the safest when we play it dangerous, as long as we are careful, as long as we use precautions or make smart interventions during chaotic moments, as long as we discourage a culture of bravado, self-isolation, rumor-spreading, or snitching.

And to zoom out for a moment, no one on this planet is safe until we can nourish an ethos of collective self-defense against the institutions that are threatening and harming us, smashing their gears so they cannot function anymore. What use is it to speak of survival if we have no practice of fighting back against those who are killing us? There is room for all of us, but we need to figure out what we can contribute and what it is we still need to learn in order to be a vital part of the webs of solidarity and mutual aid.

Thanks for reading Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A revolution is not comprised of tactics alone. If we let ourselves get turned around by impatience, desperation, avoidance of criticism, loss of historical memory, if we divorce our strategies from our goals, our visions, and our ethics, we quickly become our own worst enemies. Nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to proliferate certain tactics, to imagine what a better place we would be in if people realized it’s well worth the risk to attack the infrastructures that are spewing out death, poisoning our futures and our present. What a better place we would be in if people responded to our learned helplessness, to this hegemonic hopelessness, with a thought, a certainty: how many miles there are of unprotected power grids and pipelines! How many bulldozers, construction sites, and offices of evil institutions have no more protection at night than a camera that will log nothing more than a time and a masked figure, unidentifiable! How many of us there are, and how hard we are to surveil when we leave our snitches at home, when we don’t take our phones and other tracking devices out of the house with us!

How powerful, when we realize that we are powerful. How frightful, when we remember that we can be vengeful. How grounded, when we learn to integrate our need to fight and to heal. How inspiring, when we understand that all the walls and cages and cameras and militarized police forces of this whole prison society are there to protect the powerful… from us.

Sooner or later, the odds will flip, and our probabilities for health and survival will begin a slow ascent, and the odds on the plutocrats and police will face a sudden plummet. That moment? Collectively, we decide when it arrives.

1

The approximation—tens of thousands of actions, hundreds of imprisoned—is based on, roughly, the last ten years in the half dozen countries I’m most familiar with.

_____

SOURCE: https://petergelderloos.substack.com/p/ethics-risk-apocalypse

The post Ethics, Risk, Apocalypse- Peter Gelderloos appeared first on Void Network.

Preface 

Below are two excerpts from Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited, a compilation of essays and reflections composed during the initial months of the 2019 Chilean uprising, which recently appeared in English. 

In October 2019, Transantiago, the Metropolitan Transit system in Chile’s capital, raised the train fare by thirty pesos. In response, high school students planned what they called a Evasión Masiva, a week of coordinated protests across the city where participants and commuters alike jumped metro turnstiles and refused to pay the fare. On Friday, October 18, a “mass evasion”  shut down Santiago’s metropolitan transit system during rush hour. Crowds began gathering across the city, and by nightfall, barricades guarded by singing revelers burned at every major intersection. Banks and government buildings were set ablaze, while supermarkets, WalMarts, and one sixth of all corporate owned pharmacies were looted. The country’s President at the time, Sebastián Piñera, held a press conference in which he declared a “state of emergency” in the city. Twenty-four hours later, tanks and Humvees patrolled Santiago, military curfews were enforced, and civil liberties were suspended for the first time since the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

This inaugural wave of unrest was quickly countered by a series of political maneuvers that sought to channel the energy in the streets into institutional changes. By November 2019, the ruling conservative party and its opposition agreed to initiating a process that would lead to the drafting of a new constitution. 

Two years have since passed. The constitutional convention has begun to draft a new constitution, and Gabriel Boric, a leader from the 2011 university student movement turned congressional representative, now serves as Chile’s president. In the eyes of many who cleave to the normative framework of political conflict, this trajectory appears as a sorely needed process of social change. However, as Karmy’s meditations on the experiences and rhythms of October 2019 reveal, the most powerful elements of the revolt are often those least capable of being translated into institutional transformations.  

For Karmy, the date “October 18th” marks not simply a night of insurrection, but a fissure that split Chilean history open, like a short circuit that bridged the anger against the Pinochet Dictatorship, the 1990’s transition to democracy, and the present forms of technocratic governance. After decades of violent social control, forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial murder, the political reconciliation that announced the shift from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy was made possible by a series of agreements and accords between Pinochet’s administration, its political supporters, and its centrist and leftist opponents. This meant that throughout the 1990s, Pinochet remained a “senator for life” and the head of the Chilean military, while his 1981 constitution enshrining the Chicago boy’s neoliberal principles remained in place.

Although social democrats and progressives like to present the rampant inequalities and political restrictions that plague contemporary Chile as institutional hangovers from the dictatorship, the Chilean left has its own part to play in this history. As Karmy shows, their inability to break away from “the transitional episteme” has committed them to a pragmatic framework of political conflict, which prioritizes the restoration of a shared legitimacy and the practical matter of governability over all expressions of “popular,” i.e., everyday people’s concern for justice, dignity, and self-respect. If the revolt taught us anything, it’s that the real conflict is not between the camps of left and the right, but between an elitist framework for resolving questions of governance, and a Chilean people who no longer wish to be governed as a population whatsoever.

Whether or not the energy from October 2019 will succeed in breaking out of this transitional episteme remains to be seen. What limitations would need to be overcome, in order for this to happen? In Chile’s capital, it was the state of exception and the military in the streets that allowed the game of mass evasion to be transformed into a general revolt. Yet constitutional states of exception have been declared many times in Chile’s periphery in recent years, without the corresponding eruption of mass revolt. Mapuche communities in Southern Chile have been occupied by the Chilean military since September 2021, in response to an escalation in direct actions against the local elite complicit with extractive industries and ecological destruction earlier that year. In the desert regions along Chile’s northern border, the military has also been called on to police the crisis of mass undocumented immigration spurred by Venezuelans fleeing the economic crisis. This suggests, first, that our understanding of popular revolt must expand beyond the spectacle of urban riots and street demonstrations, to consider what revolt looks like in other territories. At the same time, the concept of “popular” revolt has often been hamstrung by its association with an idea of “the people” as the agent and actor of struggle, whether this be the Nation or various abstract “communities.” As Karmy shows, the protagonists of the Chilean revolt, at the moment they take to the streets, cannot be neatly subsumed under any such categories. In this way, his work not only allows us to see the limitations of the 2019-2021 wave of global uprisings, but also helps us identify potential connections with others struggles internationally that continue to confront similar obstacles. 

—Emilio Janequeo, Santiago de Chile, April 2022

October 18 [1]

Whatever happened to this date? Is it just a chronological date? Perhaps, a dislocated number that, while locating itself on a calendar, desperately flees from it. Its potency does not match its figure, its life with its letter. It explodes without referring to any leader, nor to any political party or partisan vanguard. Everything is much more precarious, but at the same time, more resistant, it can flee between the interstices of the city and permanently “evade” the “who” created by police dynamics. “Evade” designated the subtraction of the sensible life of bodies — what we will call “surface” — with respect to the governmental machinery of neoliberal reason.

As if a crack opened in the middle of the road, as if a historical continuum had stopped. The atmosphere normalized the presence of multiple sounds: sirens breaking the city buzz, helicopters machine-gunning the airspace, shots from various weapons filtering through diverse populations, never before images being monitored by images already frozen, songs — Víctor Jara ^[2] or Jorge González ^[3] — penetrating from other times to face a voracious repression; pots and pans biting into the night coming from dark windows and protesters defying the curfew with shouts and hand-to-hand combat against police or military uniforms.

Nights and days were not the same, but they were the same. A single day, hour or minute that condensed days and nights, days and nights as if there was no more difference between them. Other faces ravaged the mornings, other voices dictated the rhythm; the poor, the blind, those who had said “enough” to a life that promised nothing but debts, to an existence that had renounced all historicity, to an agony whose grief paralyzed bodies. The streets were invested with graffiti with which the crowd embraced the moment of their celebration. It all meant that the downward gaze in front of the boss could not carry on. The randomness of the clash was violent: the boss found the servant in the ferocity of a revolt, without the domestication he presupposed, without the ignorance he attributed to him, without the fear that he had instilled in him.

“No fear” is infinitely replicated on the walls of Chile. With no fear, but with rage: a whole generation that had been hardened by the silence of dictatorship imploded in the emergence of rage brought by their children. But anger not as a psychologically manageable emotion, but as a politically ungovernable affect. The entire transitional episteme was made for docile bodies. It was always a matter of modesty, of control, of learning not to demand beyond “what is possible” within a historical and political limit that became ontological. If not, the military could return or the businessmen could flee: fear provided the affective tonality to the transitional episteme. Sociologists, economists and politicians consolidated an upper echelons’ agreement around the prevalence of neoliberal reason. Everyone had to give in because everyone had to accept the established limit that was forged in the formula “as far as possible”. 

Those who raged during the dictatorship could faint in the desolation of democracy, those who fought during the dictatorship had to tame their spirits in the new transitional machinery. But injustice remained unredeemed. And it is that fissure that always challenged the transitional episteme that is actualized in the politicization of anger that ends up leading the Chilean government machine to bankruptcy.

Rage has been the ardor of an injustice that went beyond the psychological sphere captured by neoliberal confiscation and, like a blast crossing two eras at once, it left historicity in the hands of children: “He who doesn’t know about children, knows nothing of riots.” A revolt leads a people to experience its in-fancy, precisely, the inactuality with oneself, the strange thunder of its untimeliness. Usual spaces and times are shattered into a thousand pieces. And the revolt reminded us that the most decisive tremor, the adjustment with our historicity, is nothing more than a future that is inherited.

It is not a question of “future” as a horizon that owns a precise direction, but of a future in the sense of a disposition to the possibility of becoming others, in which a potency never rested on some trauma that could foreshadow it in some way, but always remained irreducible to the tricks of the law. It is a power that is nothing more than future and that only its clandestine transfer of the impersonality of a common can make it possible for bodies to know what it is that they are actually capable of. Because this potency is defined by its transmissibility and it becomes nothing more than an affirmation of life that escapes any suture provided by power. The future is inherited precisely because the bodies were able to “evade” the fear inoculated by the oligarchy during their years of dictatorship and in the convoluted transition.

The gaze of the former servant — like that passive “Indian” before the colonist — does not bow his head in front of power, but rather defies it and suffers the direct destruction of its eyes. The servant burns everything, launching himself in his martyrological potency for yesterday’s dead, for those who were defeated in the past. Rage burns everything on history’s pyre, without the authorization by the masters who once crushed the native, the worker, the student. In-fancy dislocating the civilized continuity between life and language to lead us to the cleft of popular imagination: the only barricade that connects bodies with surfaces, the new with the old, life with its forms.

The entire university apparatus, with its knowledge of order, believes that the revolt is a “social phenomenon.” A reduction to causalism by current sociology, when truly the revolt is a medium of common sensibility in which the spirits of the past embrace the incandescence of our present. Thousands of Chileans knew this when they sang “The right to live in peace” (El derecho de vivir en paz) by Victor Jara or “The dance of those left behind” (El baile de los que sobran). Uncle Ho, who fought against North American imperialism, became a surplus, a remnant, much like the municipalized students of the 1980s, ungovernable who transmitted potency from one moment to another, who inherited the future to those who could hear the intensity of their voice. That is why October 18 is not a date, but rather an artifact of spiritualism by which the defeated were able to “evade” the historical cruelty of the victors.

Revolt^[4]

One of the first days of protests I found myself at 11am in Plaza Italia. I was going to the demonstration called for 2pm, but decided to arrive earlier to get a feel for the atmosphere. After all, politics is always an atmospheric affair. I began walking from Plaza Italia towards the Andes, that is, towards the Salvador Metro station and the landscape was made up of the rubble after the battle. On Sunday, there was a large demonstration, and protests continued during the night, in the midst of the declaration of a curfew. There was the sour smell of tear gas along the road, burning the skin; burned plastic occasionally penetrated the urban ruin. Some shops were burnt, others were intact: The Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center (GAM) was intact, the Kentucky Fried Chicken branch was burnt; the theater of the University of Chile was intact, the branch of the Bank of Chile was completely burnt.

Popular violence is not a “Hobbesian violence”[5] but a violence interrupting capitalist symbolism. These are not vandals who simply destroy everything they touch, but molecular movements that, most of the time, direct their fury against the signs of power. But this does not mean, that once the revolt is in full swing, several criminal gangs will not penetrate the popular din to progressively restore exchange value from within, inoculating economy into what the revolt had made aneconomical. Precisely: every revolt runs at a loss. The aneconomy of the revolt interrupts “the normal flow” of the country’s capital, the institutions stop working, temporality is strongly suspended. The upsetting of reality, a necessary elixir of revolt, is a sign that a people has broken out as a revolt. 

Because no revolt carries with it the sign of purity. It is dirty, full of mixtures that flourish in the suspension of historical time it has opened. Every revolt fights against its own centrifugal forces, because its power is measured in the ability to remove sovereign violence that, however, tries to capture it permanently. For this reason, a revolt must bring into play an untimely relationship with the present. It never fits with itself because it wildly differs from itself. We cannot demand purity and hygiene from a revolt, because all dynamics oriented towards cleansing or purification symbolize the triumph of sacrificial or sovereign violence that the revolt is destituting. It is sacrifice that purifies, sacrifice that cleanses the world to slaughter the goats that crystallize the new evil on earth.

Sacrifice is precisely the weapon of all reactionary politics, waiting like a shadow within the state formula: “no people has ever doubted that there was an expiatory virtue in the effusion of blood,” wrote Joseph De Maistre in his Treatise on sacrifices.[6] Precisely because the violence of the revolt deposes the sacrificial dynamic, because in it the martyrological power is at stake, that is, the one that seals without blood the revocation of all sovereignty: “A political execution”, asserts Paul W. Kahn, “read as an act of martyrdom, proclaims the weakness, not the strength of the state.”[7] This is because martyrdom threatens to “expose the state and its claim to authority as nothing.” [8] Popular violence is martyrological in this sense: its potency destitutes [9] sovereign violence, exposing its weakness and dissolving its claim to authority as nothingness.

It does not destroy, but destitutes; it does not establish, but revokes. It breaks the subject supposed to know that has erected the discourse, making it fall like a mask, and it can do nothing but exercise sacrificial violence so as to restore order. All calls from the government and the occasional political actor to dialogue are based on the sacrificial fiction, in which all the agents in conflict get solved in the same general equivalent: police lives are as much of a victim of violence as those of citizens who have fallen under the military bullet or police hunt. The government’s discourse is sacrificial precisely when it condemns violence “wherever it comes from.” This sets it up to exercise the greatest violence of all — sovereign violence precisely — which is such because it can crush all the other types of violence that it considers simply sectorial.

But in addition, the sacrificial paradigm raised by the state discourse restores, in turn, capital, to the extent that it restores the equivalent codification that enables state violence to be reconciled in the same unit with the torn revolt of a citizenry out in the open. The martyr breaks sacrifice to the same extent that it exposes its nothingness. Could we say that the notion of sovereignty once proposed by philosopher Georges Bataille is that of a true and properly martyrological sovereignty inasmuch as it implodes the moment it is exercised? [10] And if this is so, would not the Schmittian conception of sovereignty be one that has not assumed the radical nature of its concept, that has never lived up to what it proclaims? [11]

In any case, the term “martyrdom” has had a bad name because, from my point of view, it has always been conceived under the sacrificial aura or, what is the same, it has always been represented from the point of view of the victors who appropriated its concept to capitalize on it in terms of the restitution of order. Using the well-known Benjaminian distinction between pure and mythical violence, I would like to differentiate martyrdom from sacrifice and maintain that the first refers to a popular violence of a redemptive and destituent nature that establishes or preserves nothing and, the latter is oligarchic violence oriented towards the establishment and preservation of order.

In this light, a revolt is martyrological and not sacrificial, and brings with it the courage of living labor in which the affirmation of a potency is played out, rather than the consolidation of power. Beyond the purification of liberal discourse that condemns all violence, wherever it comes from, thereby trying to exempt itself from sacrificial dynamics while reproducing them, it is necessary to vindicate the violence opened up by the revolt that, however, suspends the sacrificial violence that, time and again, does nothing more than exert its mythical death power. It is not a matter of aestheticizing it, but to assume the materiality with which it denounces the injustice of the current state of affairs, exposing sovereign power to the nakedness of its nothingness.

A revolt is never welcome. Crowds don’t know whether to laugh or cry in front of it. They don’t know if it happens for better or worse, precisely because it does not obey any telos or any guarantee to the extent that it exposes the fragility of our bodies before history’s elements. But a revolt never comes in a uniform shape or mode, but is always different, multiple and intense. It is also unpredictable. All efforts to identify its causes always come to a limit. Knowledge goes bankrupt. And suddenly, everyone remembers the thousand reports that kept on showing the misery of our conditions. But at such a moment, we wonder: if the conditions were already there, why did the fuse light at this moment? Why not before or after? Between the conditions and their outbreak, something key always takes place: a murder, an act of radical injustice against certain bodies, committed by the exercise of State violence.

In the Arab Spring, the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in front of the police station was the imaginal operator that triggered the revolt. In Chile on October 18, thousands of high school students who had evaded the Metro turnstiles were brutally repressed by the police force. Five days after the proclamation of the State of Constitutional Exception, accompanied a nightly curfew apparatus, national and international Human Rights organizations were counting the death toll by State agents as the fierce way in which sacrificial violence was being deployed in the streets of a flooded city.

The revolt breaks out in various ways, an organization can take over — such as the one articulated today by Unidad Social. Like the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, which articulated a minimum organization during the 1987 Palestinian intifada, Unidad Social could also become an “agency” (a “support” according to Judith Butler) [12] born out of the revolt itself to keep its work alive and not to confiscate it in a dead and completely bankrupt representational apparatus. Because, in the midst of the bankruptcy of a state model violently implemented in 1973, we are witnessing a beginning. 

We do not know what will happen or how events will unfold. But in the face of the devastation wrought by the dictatorship and later by the transition, directing its efforts to separate bodies from their potency, lives from their images, in a neutralization process, the revolt restored their intensity. Faced with the neoliberal body confiscated by the company form — turned “to prey”, said Guadalupe Santa Cruz — the revolt restored a body potency. The fascination experienced by the participants in a political process such as this is entirely linked to the surprise that awaits the conscience — that poor counselor — of what a body can do, what bodies can do. Because the revolt throws us into this: a hand-to-hand combat.

We never imagined what our bodies could do, we were never aware of it. How could we be, if consciousness — that representational apparatus — does nothing more than instill fear in us and push us to calculate our every movement? The revolt is aneconomic precisely because it does not calculate and always runs at a loss. We have already lost comrades in struggle, eyes, academic calendars, international events (APEC-COP 25) and we will continue to lose. Everything has been suspended, then, as Furio Jesi saw: unlike a revolution, a revolt implies the “suspension of historical time.” [13] A suspension that brings with it a radical loss, an unconditional expenditure that is impossible to foresee, but also the opening of a beginning in which we can re-imagine another historical era. It is precisely that beginning that we must embrace today with all the forces of history. Without it, we will not only be left without a future or a past, but above all we will be stripped of the heat of a present.

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s The Future is Inherited is now available in English from les presses du réel

Images: Tomas Munita

Notes

1. First published in El Desconcierto on November 27, 2019. 

2. Victor Jara (1932-1973) was a Chilean theater director, actor, playwright and folklore researcher, but generally known as a singer-songwriter, who actively participated in the Popular Unity’s presidential campaign. He was arrested after the coup in 1973 and was sent to the “Estadio Chile” (currently called “Víctor Jara Stadium”) where he was tortured and killed by the military. One of his most relevant songs was “The right to live in peace”, which Jara wrote inspired by Ho Chi Min and the Vietnam War. This song was massively sung during the recent protests along the country. —Editorial note.

3. Jorge González was the leader of Los Prisioneros, one of the main musical bands in recent Chilean history. Formed during the 1980s, they became a critical voice to the political and social order established by the dictatorship. One of their key songs was “The dance of those left behind”, which was massively sung during the protests in Plaza Dignidad. —Editorial note.

4. Originally published in Ficción de la Razón on October 29, 2019, as part of the special dossier “Estado generales de emergencia” coordinated by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and Mauricio Amar.

5. José Joaquín Brunner. Democracia, violencia y perspectivas futuras. Online here.

6. Joseph De Maistre. Tratado sobre los sacrificios. México, Sexto Piso, 2009, 24-25.     

7. Walter Benjamin, “On the Critique of Violence.”  

8. Paul W. Kahn. El liberalismo en su lugar. Santiago, Universidad Diego Portales, 2018, 112. 

9. The English edition incorrectly renders “destitutes/destituent” throughout as “dismisses.” —Note added by Ill Will.↰

10. Georges Bataille. Lo que entiendo por soberanía. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1996. 

11. Carl Schmitt. Teología política. Cuatro ensayos sobre el concepto de soberanía. Buenos Aires, Struhart y Cia., 2005. 

12. Judith Butler. Cuerpos aliados y lucha política. Hacia una teoría performativa de la asamblea. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2017.

13. Furio Jesi. Spartakus. The Symbology of Revolt, Translated by Alberto Toscano, Seagull Books, Ch. 2. Online here. 

_______

SOURCE: IllWill

The post Fragments of a Chile in Revolt- Rodrigo Karmy Bolton appeared first on Void Network.

Therefore, it is not enough to see the case of Ukraine only through the actions of a Russian authoritarian leader, nor through the prism of a violation of international law. This is for three reasons:

First, because we cannot ignore the presence of NATO, which after the fall of the USSR and in the context of the emerging “neoliberal consensus” became both a military vehicle of consolidation and a police institution against centrifugal forces. Thus, on the basis of the role of the US in this new phase of “globalisation”, NATO became essentially a mechanism for consolidating the US-led empire of capital. To put it in paradigmatic (and largely rhetorical) terms, what exactly did a supposed “defense alliance” do by bombing Yugoslavia without the approval of the Security Council, carrying out one of the largest military operations on European soil? How can it be denied that Yugoslavia was devastated by NATO for the interests of the US and its “New world order” doctrine? Did that event constitute war – at least some form of war – or a “special military operation”? Even if it is not just a powerful military instrument of the Americans, NATO cannot be conceived outside the imperialist policy of the USA. It is worth noting, in this context, that the inter-state relations between Russia and the US over the last 30 years have been largely structured by the initial assurances of the NATO alliance that they did not intend to expand the alliance eastwards and the gradual breaking of these promises. That these assurances, as Spinoza reminds us, have no substantive force outside of actual power relations and their historical unfolding points to the heart of the matter (something we will return to).

Second, war between states in its modern form tends to involve the clash, and therefore the intensification of two or more nationalisms. This is because nationalism is the ideology of the contemporary nation-state and therefore one of the inevitable languages of justification for a state of war. As a determinate historical form, the modern state relied on war for its birth and the organization of society on the scale it proposed: the boundaries of the state as a legal order of sovereignty to coincide with the geographical boundaries of the nation. It is truly an outrageous idea that continues to leave humanity blood-drenched, to produce cultural difference, and to systematically lead to tragedies and ethnic cleansing. Linking soil with blood: a genius German conception! Even the republican conception of the nation that draws on the American and French revolutions, and which admittedly provided the language for an entire revolutionary tradition, inevitably tends, after the consolidation of the state form, to become a language of legitimation of domination, exclusion, violence and expansion.

In the case of the Greek state, nationalism led to the tragedy of Smyrna with the help of the great fantasy – yet one with entirely material consequences – that we called the “Great Idea”. Nationalism is also responsible for the tragedy that Cypriot society has been experiencing for so many decades on both sides of the island. Rhetoric about living space was indeed used by Hitler and is now being used by Putin. But the difference is that the former was a Nazi and as such burned anyone who was not  ‘of aryan race’ in the crematoria, while the latter is the authoritarian leader of a country that sacrificed 20 million people to stop the Nazis. The difference is staggering. And it is a difference of content as much as of form: for all the autocracy, corruption and constant human rights violations that define the dysfunction of official institutions and the huge democratic deficit in the country, Russia is not a fascist state. This, of course, does not justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because whatever the context, it is an invasion. But we must be strict in the analogies and comparisons we make because they determine our perspective and therefore our political stance.

It is also worth pointing out that the identification of Russia with the USSR is untenable, at least in the ideological field. On the other hand, on the geopolitical and economic front, things are clearly more complex, since the USSR (from one point onwards) became to a considerable extent the continuation of the Russian state; thus the Russian Federation, together with its satellites, inherits the treaties left by the USSR. Putin’s rise to power is also the expression of this “continuity of the state”, against the aggressive (and destructive for the plebeian masses) disintegration that preceded it. Besides, apart from some fascists like Georgiades, who else considers “the communists” dangerous and still dreams of exile (really, “dangerous” for whom?). Despite the special symbolic weight of communism in the construction of various identities and perceptions, all countries, in one way or another, move to the rhythm of the capitalist organisation of the economy and society. So does Russia. Within this global system, nationalisms continue to develop and the great powers continue to compete with each other in national terms, without reference to the political-ideological differences of the past. The competition today, similar to some extent to the imperialist competition before the First World War, is about power within the globalised capitalist system. But political-economic competition is always conducted through a multitude of ideological-cultural mediations, de facto historically determined.

Thus, it is difficult to abandon the idea that the cultural representation of Russia in the ‘West’ passes through the imaginative conception (and constitution) of difference. At the state level, the hostility towards Russia clearly has as an objective basis, Russia’s independent hegemonic geopolitical and economic role and ambition (the political expression of which is precisely ‘Putinism’). Also, in the social imaginary (as mediated, of course, by spectacular media representations) the emerging suspicion and hostility towards Russia is due to Putin’s current attempt to regain the country’s old imperial power. On both (related) levels, however, the hostility is fueled by the stereotypical construction of Russia as a threatening authoritarian power coming from the barabaric East. It is within this cultural construction of otherness that the reflexive and endemic anti-communism that some Western military officers and diplomats have long since internalized, finds its functional place.

In this intense interface between the political and economic aspirations of the hegemonic centres and their ideological investments, obsessions and prejudices, international law can only be respected on a case-by-case basis and according to the interests at stake – sometimes invoked and sometimes ignored. Liberals and social democrats of all stripes and tendencies will retort that there is a whole material system of rules, deliberations, agreements, decisions, institutions and bodies which produces what we call ‘international law’, and which has a regulative role; even when it is ignored by some states, its actuality allows us to criticise this attitude while at the same time giving to Right an institutional and therefore practical status (i.e. clearly defining what ‘ought to be done’ and ‘how’ it can be done).

This is certainly not the place for an extended discussion of international law, which de facto presupposes a broader analysis of law in general. Its violation, however, as a fact systematically carried out by the powerful, makes the interpretation of reality on the basis of international law alone a symptom of a normative formalism that does not help explain a complex situation and the dynamics it contains. Founded on the liberal legalist logic that systematized it, international law is utterly incapable of both regulating the actual relations of states and providing a theoretical basis for understanding them. The same can be said differently: vis-à-vis ‘powerful players’, international law is a weak tool and therefore, especially in times of crisis, it is not sufficient either to dictate and organise the practical activity of the powerful, or to take it as the main unit of analysis in understanding complex historical processes, that shape inter-state rivalries and international balances. Unless we want to become the unhappy consciousness of this world, along with liberals and a significant part of the Left. 

The third reason why we need to be careful in our perspective is related to the collective self-identifications and the character of Ukrainian nationalism. It helps us to understand the complexity of Ukrainians’ perception of the Russian invasion, i.e. ultimately how they perceive the ethnic ‘self’ and the ethnic ‘other’ in this particular case. This clearly makes the way in which the invasion of Ukraine is presented by Western officials and the ‘Western’ media very problematic, i.e. as an attack by a foreign power on a fully distinct ethnic society. The empirical data that anyone who knows anything about Ukrainian society can cite suggests something quite different.

Between Russia and Ukraine there is a strong cultural affinity, with deep historical roots, reaching back to the very constitution of Tsarist Russia as the hegemonic political form of the Slavic ethnic group. Even today a large percentage of families in both Ukraine and Russia are mixed, and kinships spread beyond their borders. To this significant part of the population, this particular war seems rather like a civil war. Especially in the east, where there has been secession, a large percentage of Ukrainians have no particular problem with the political attachment to ‘Mother Russia’, which is why Russian forces initially met little resistance by advancing into the country.

On the other hand, colonial control and inequality has been a key index in this complex historical relation. Naturally, the Ukrainian nation-state de facto established its identity in against Russian domination, of which the USSR period was considered a part. This “anti-Russian” national narrative intensified after the events of 2014 in the country, when the balance was disturbed by the violent political shift towards the West and therefore NATO. In this context of geopolitical and economic restructuring, Ukrainian nationalism is becoming radicalized and seems to be gaining traction in the social sphere. Even so, until recently it is doubtful whether, outside the extreme nationalist circles, of which the neo-Nazis of the so-called ‘Right Sector’ (Pravyy Sektor) with their black and red flags or the even broader and more diverse ‘Azov Battalion’, which is part of the Ukrainian national army, most Ukrainians wanted to fight against Russia (which is also true in reverse). This is precisely what Russian expansionism is now decisively reversing, further fomenting Ukrainian nationalism.

In ‘Western’ media and in the mainstream discourse in general there is a deafening silence about the internal political balances and collective identity in Ukraine. In fact, the attack on Ukraine strikes at the pan-Slavic narrative – a central feature of ethnoromanticism there – replacing it with nationalist hatred. Is this not contradictory to the fact that Russia appears to be the main political exponent of this ethno-romantisism? But also, the hybrid character of the collective, national identity in Ukraine, or the fact that it is presented as ambivalent in terms of the distinction between ‘Russian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ nation and the related sense of collective belonging, is a catalyst for the attack. If, in terms of ethno-cultural relations and collective identities, similarity and affinity rather than ethnic difference prevail, without one group necessarily identifying or assimilating the other, the attack from Russia’s perspective ceases to be seen as an invasion. If, even more than in other countries of the former Soviet Union, Ukrainians are, in a sense, in an identity transition, since the process of Ukrainian nation-state building is unstable and ongoing, the attack on Ukraine may have had as an intrinsic purpose to radically interfere in the process. And the instability of the Ukrainian political system and the dysfunction of its democratic institutions actually contributes to this attempted rapprochement with Russia (for a country whose president is a former actor who played the president in a Ukrainian T.V series [!]). Therefore, in the face of the project of stabilising Ukrainian institutions and democracy within the EU. -which seems to have been the main claim of the 2014 protests and which necessarily took the form of anti-Russianism, thus opening up space even for nationalism drawn from the collaborators of the Nazi invasion- Russian imperialism, faced with the very real danger of Ukrainian attachment to NATO (i.e. the expansion of the latter), responded with an operation to strengthen the link with Russia. Of course, since the Russian surprise didn’t last long and the war drags on, it’s hard to see how a regime change could bring anything but instability.

Here it rather seems that we have two sides – Russia and the ‘West’ – that fear and perceive each other as a threat in terms shaped on the one hand by the history of conflicting expansionist nationalisms-imperialisms and on the other hand by the reality shaped by the capitalist economy in its modern globalised version. We will therefore support neither of them! A further reason for not supporting either one is evident from the fact that within the framework of once – but no longer – fringe theories like those of the 4th political theory, we are faced with the possibility of the creation of a deeply authoritarian informal coalition of disparate countries (from North Korea to Iran and China) on an ascending trajectory of conflict with the whole of a distinct civilization now defined in their eyes as “the West”.

Neutrality, by highlighting the community of those from below, with class characteristics and our dynamic peace-promoting practices is, in our opinion, the appropriate attitude in this case and therefore has nothing to do with an abstract refusal of war. This is all the more true since the consequences of such a war will affect us all. In this light, the revival of the international anti-war movement, which has been extinct for over 15 years (better proof of its total absence during the Syrian civil war) could perhaps have some positive influence on developments. However, judging by the content of public discourse, the low dynamics of collective action today and, above all, the proxy nature of the conflict between NATO and Russia, this possibility should not be considered particularly likely. Nevertheless, the anti-war demand for global nuclear disarmament is proving to be extremely necessary today.

Under the weight of developments in Ukraine there is no doubt that this is a moment of paramount historical importance. We are witnessing a direct violent challenge to the balance of power of the hegemonic centres, which is very interestingly linked to the economic challenge being waged by China. Something that has been discussed for a long time may be happening, but the outcome is really uncertain, especially since the ‘first move’ was made by the Russian military state. At a time when many people, while realising the role of planetary domination in the ongoing social and environmental decline, no longer have the courage to speak out, the conflict in Ukraine paints an extremely contradictory picture that has emerged particularly strong in the pandemic and is of immense value both for the left libertarian forces of our time and for radical forces in general. On the one hand we seem to not know how to survive without some kind of state organization, on the other hand the state leads us to social, health, economic and environmental destruction. How do we pragmatically manage such a complex reality?

The dystopia of a nuclear holocaust or a large-scale ecological (hence social) collapse may still seem distant (?), but we cannot ignore the fact that the forces that gave birth to these prospects as a technical possibility and political-military possibility are precisely the dominant forces today: capital, technocracy and all kinds of military-industrial complexes, nationalism and the modern state.

We conclude with some observations which will shed more light on the rationale that leads us to consider the neutrality stance in this war as the only appropriate option from the point of view of social emancipation. Like any authoritarian leader who wages war, Putin, by attacking Ukraine, is undermining, or at any rate endangering, his own power. However, its end will hopefully come with an internal uprising of the Russian people, especially the most oppressed social groups. Ukraine may of course be the occasion for this, but the battle for its downfall cannot be fought on Ukrainian soil. Among other things, because in this case national war and multilateral conflict signify not only the death of soldiers and civilians who have never supported Russia’s authoritarian regime, but also the nuclear threat. This, of course, implies that the phenomenon of Putin’s authoritarian rule cannot be reduced to the realm of individual psychology and personality, as the liberal position, that presents anti-democrats as ‘madmen’, deliberately and with artificial levity tries to sustain. The problem is not that Putin is “insane”. The problem is that the very juxtaposition of democracy and authoritarianism is now losing the formal validity it once had (which historically has always been more complex, of course).

Democratic political systems and their institutions all over the world, regardless of their specifically national versions, are subjected with undiminished intensity to the web of relations and practices that we call ‘capitalism’. So while states continue to be active forces, the contemporary globalised and interconnected world of transnational relations and antagonisms is regulated by the active presence of capital and the imperatives of accumulation and value valorization that define it. So along with a contradiction – transnational competition tends to undermine the capitalist totality that allows it to exist – there is also a truth that the adherents of liberal discourse cannot bear to hear, as it is a truth that calls for political displacement and personal engagement but also for the questioning of multiple cultural constants and perceptions. The configuration of democratic institutions and their articulation with the legal order and the economy allows for the simultaneous and perpetual reproduction, that is, the permanent co-existence, of representation, authoritarianism and inequality in many social fields and in decision-making. It is also a dynamic relationship that today is increasingly unable to take the formal form of democracy. Modern liberal democracies are technocratic oligarchies separated simply by the presence of a social liberalism (which is also challenged by the neo-right reaction).

The pacified societies of the ‘developed’ world in Europe and America are more likely to abandon Ukraine to the expansionist ambitions of a rising Russia than to fight for it. It is not only the experience of two world wars that is, fortunately, frightening. Material affluence, the ideology of producing and consuming infinite objects, the complete commodification of the world and the trivialization of multiple aspects of life by advertising – all of it, that is, which describe the hegemonic conception of ‘growth’ – guarantee (apart from ecological destruction) that war is removed from the range of culturally available options, not only for the sterile upper classes of ‘Western’ societies, but also for the lower classes and subordinate social groups.

And while we could not rule out the resurgence of European and US nationalisms in the face of a common antagonist, we can hardly imagine European citizens sacrificing themselves on the battlefields fighting against the Russians. Especially when everyone knows that the new ‘cold war’ we have already entered is exclusively a game of the powerful for the control of resources and wealth.

But unfortunately, it is even more difficult, to imagine the oppressed fighting an internationalist, anti-nationalist and anti-colonial battle for the equality of people in all corners of this world. This is despite the fact that from the pandemic and the impending ecological collapse to the devastating war in Ukraine, the great issue at stake is the power of the modern state and of capital, the complete inability to control and be controlled.

The question then becomes more crucial than ever and is this: at the dawn of a new ‘cold war’ and in the era of ecological crisis, will the left libertarian forces of our time be able to present a culturally convincing vision to make people believe again in a different way of organizing collective life that includes as its central point the symbiosis of all beings? Or will they forever distance themselves from people by adhering to simplistic rhetorical schemes that are of little interest to anyone? The questions, though theoretically profound, are primarily practical.

Active neutrality in the war raging in Ukraine is our position, the continuation of the global social war against all those who destroy life and freedom is our promise.

Solidarity with the antifascist anarchists in Ukraine and Russia.

DEATH TO TYRANTS –

LONG LIVE ANARCHY- FIGHT FOR GLOBAL FREEDOM

VOID NETWORK – http://voidnetwork.gr

The post The State, Nationalism and the War in Ukraine appeared first on Void Network.

I want to begin with a shout-out to what happened here last night, and to the working class of the city of Seattle, to the rebels of the city of Seattle: I really liked what I saw, that’s why I’m here, you know, to feel that vibe. I would also like to send my solidarity to comrades in Greece. It was they who allowed me to experience insurrection for the first time in 2008. The lessons I’ve learned and the experiences I had there have been so valuable this time around, even though we are in a much different social context. Moreover, a comrade was recently killed at the hands of the police there. To the fallen comrade, Vasillis Maggos, I want to say: rest in power.

My title demands a little bit of explanation. It is a reference to Chernyshevsky [1] , and to the novel he wrote from inside a Czarist prison. Lenin borrowed the title for his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done? [2] , which provides answers to what he calls “the burning questions of our movement”: what does it mean to constitute a vanguard party? how do we spread consciousness from this vanguard party to the working class? how do we move beyond strikes to a full-on revolutionary political struggle?, etc. Later, in 2001, a text entitled “How It Is to Be Done” appeared in the journal of the French collective Tiqqun. [3] Rather than stating what our goals or objectives should be, Tiqqun sought to shift our focus to the means and the techniques of struggle. Instead of thinking about ends, they thought about the means that we should employ.

My aim here is far less ambitious. As for the grammatical construction, “might should”, from the southern dialect—I tried to Blackify the title a little bit. But it’s also serious, because these are in fact tentative theses and proposals: I’m perfectly okay with being completely wrong about every single thing I put forward today, just so long as it creates a further deeper discussion on strategy. What I really want to do is open up this discussion, and I want to leave it, for people to engage with it as they want to, and to push it further. At the same time, I want the dialogue to be honest. There’s a kind of prevailing posture of cynicism, nihilism, and democratic moralism that holds back insurrection. And I think now is the time: we are experiencing an uprising on a scale that many of us have never lived through. Even if we compare present events to Greece, this thing has gone much further. There are far more martyrs in this struggle than there ever were in the Greek uprising. The time has arrived for strategic thought and reflection.

It’s of course weird to find myself saying this in America, the most counter-revolutionary place on the globe. But we must reorient ourselves, and take these questions seriously. The stakes have been raised to the next level, they’re extremely high now. It’s time for us to think seriously about them.

1. A militant nationwide uprising did in fact occur. The progressive wing of the counter-insurgency seeks the denial and disarticulation of this event.

The obvious is not always so obvious.

We all saw it. We all saw what happened after the murder of George Floyd. What occurred was an extremely violent and destructive rebellion. It was a phenomenon the likes of which we have not seen in America in 40 or 50 years. Very few of us have experienced anything of this magnitude: a precinct was immediately torched in Minneapolis, after which entire cities went up in flames—New York, Atlanta, Oakland, Seattle. Comparisons were quickly made with the riots after Martin Luther King’s assassination. However, I think that we’ve gone further in this case, that 2020 went harder than 1968, and we’re not even done yet.

Despite all of this, the reformers have had the audacity to claim that all of this never actually happened. They are trying to make the burning cop cars disappear, to extinguish from memory the police stations on fire, as if it didn’t happen. Again and again, I hear the same script: someone comes on the news, a political activist gives a talk, and we hear them say something like, “the protests were peaceful and non-violent, they stayed within the bounds of law and order.” No: cops being shot at in St. Louis is not within the bounds of law and order. They’re doing their best to make the event disappear. One has to to wonder what planet they are on that a torched police station appears within the bounds of civility.

This delusion is something that we need to think about. Ultimately, it’s more than a delusion. It unites veritably all the progressive liberals who chatter on about what’s been going on over the past summer. From the Biden democrats to virtually all of the mainstream media not affiliated with Fox News, to the Black Lives Matter people, the agenda pushed by all these groups is the claim that the insurrection did not take place. I even read a recent study by some sort of consulting firm that sought to prove through quantitative means that there was a very civil nature to the protests. [4]

The fact is, whatever data or graphs they draw up, nothing will erase the fact that police cars were on fire in dozens of American cities. So why do liberals feel the need to jump through such incredible hoops in order to erase this insurrection or this uprising? Why is it that the most violent wings of law and order—e.g., Attorney General William Barr—are today the only audible voices willing to acknowledge that the uprising occurred? We need to think this through.

What is at issue is more than just a momentary lapse of sanity: it is a strategy of denial, a counter-insurgent strategy of reform par excellence.

Unconsciously, liberals do recognize that an insurrection occurred. They can’t ignore the shattered glass that occurred in the streets of Seattle yesterday. But what they want is to downplay the significance of these events that mean so much to us, and that we are continually trying to push forward. They want to reassert and reaffirm them, but in a different direction. Ultimately, what they want is to block the possibilities that the revolt has opened up, to dissuade us from going further in this uprising. As with all democratic liberal reformists, what they’re trying to do is exploit the outburst in order to make it so that things change, but only just a little—which is to say, not at all.

There’s a moral component to this as well, a deep ethical problem. This wing of the counter insurgency is just one more way that those in line with the system have found to manage and to exploit Black death. It must be recalled (and I will return to this below) that there are scores of young Black children who lost their lives in the uprising, and that activists, ‘woke’ journalists, progressive politicians of all stripes, and even so-called BLM activists are profiting off their death. This is a continuous narrative in American society, and it will not stop now unless we do something about it.

By denying the event, they seek to obscure the revolutionary truth that was ushered in through the streets. They want to extinguish the present that we brought about. They want to sap our energy while they propose superficial palliative adjustments to preserve the system. The history of America is the history of attempts to reform race relations. If they haven’t gotten it right by now, they never will.

Whatever they do, whatever slight changes they make, there will always remain an insatiable drive to brutalize and kill Black people. Anyone who profits off this change is complicit in that murder. If you block the revolutionary trajectory of the rebellion, you have blood on your hands. Anyone who remains complicit with the system is the enemy, tout court.

By contrast, the Right has adopted the opposite approach to the event. Besides us revolutionaries, they are the only voices today that acknowledge that the rebellion occurred. There’s an illuminating honesty to what William Barr says. Think of it this way: before he can forcefully smash and eventually suppress an insurrection, he must first acknowledge that one did, in fact, occur. In this way, there’s an honesty to Trump’s words. Trump and his entire Fox News crowd, all those who are calling for law and order, have no choice but to acknowledge the existence of the uprising, precisely because they want to crush it. Just today, Trump declared on the news that he intends to send federal stormtroopers not only to Portland but to New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. [5] To justify such a choice, he must acknowledge that the uprising did in fact happen. These are the two sides into which our opponents may be divided, the Janus face of the State we confront today.

What is more, the rebellion shows the liberals what it means to defund the police halfway, instead of abolishing and outright destroying them. If anyone thinks it suffices to undertake a series of small measures and quick fixes, or that they can re[form] and preserve the police as a force while simply shrinking it—well, the result is what is happening right now in Portland. Let that be an example to liberals. On the other hand, those who recognize that a change really did occur, and who now seek to stomp it out are typically more aligned with fascist trajectories and politics, since they are typically the same people who feel the need to dream up and defend a sort of immutable, eternal, and transcendental idea of law, order, and white supremacy. Whatever deviates from the ideal, this fascist side of order will seek to annihilate. For this reason, it is compelled to refuse those same reforms that the liberals attempt to push through. For instance, this is why Trump is so upset about changing the names of military bases. The issue itself doesn’t actually matter, but the sort of power he represents cannot stand such changes, and seeks instead to crush and flatten the event itself in its tracks.

There’s only one way to deal with this fascist wing of the state: they operate with violence, and we return with violence that’s more powerful. However, as concerns the other, more reformist side that aims to deny the event in order to incorporate it into their own objectives, we need to be a little bit sharper in how we handle them. We need to be deceptive, like Machiavelli’s fox. Honesty isn’t their mode of operating. They have always sought to deny what lies right before our eyes. Deception and subversion is how we are going to have to play them: we need to deceive them twice over.

When it comes to these two sides of state, I do not wish to claim that either one is any more nefarious than the other, but simply that these are the two sides that we have to contend with, and ultimately to defeat.

2. While spearheaded by a Black avant-garde, this largely multi-ethnic rebellion managed to spontaneously overcome codified racial divisions. The containment of the revolt aims at reinstating these rigid lines of separation and policing their boundaries.

To begin with, it must be said that former African slaves and their ancestors have been the avant-garde of everything in this country. There’s no culture in America, in this American wasteland, without us. There’s no classical music; there’s jazz, and that was invented by us. And besides that, America has nothing to offer the world and it never has.

However, I used the term avant-garde in a more specific sense. There were no leaders. We were not leaders of the revolt. We were the avant-garde who spearheaded it, we set it off, we initiated it. What ensued was a wildly multi-ethnic uprising, and the reformists will do everything in their power to make it so that this truth is erased. If you were out on the streets, you know you saw people of all different kinds. Different bodies, different shapes, different genders, manifested themselves in the streets together.

There’s a lot of talk about how to end racism, especially within corporate and academic circles. We saw how to end racism in the streets the first weeks after George Floyd was murdered.

It was only after the uprising began to slow down and exhaust itself that the gravediggers and vampires of the revolution began to reinstate racial lines and impose a new order on the uprising. The most subtle version of this comes from the activists themselves. Our worst enemies are always closest to us. You’ve all been in these marches, these ridiculous marches, where it’s, “white people to the front, black people to the center”—this is just another way of reimposing these lines in a more sophisticated way. What we should be aiming for is what we saw in the first days, when these very boundaries began to dissolve.

The most devastating example of how the racial lines and boundaries are reimposed comes from the example of Rayshard Brooks’ long-time partner, Natalie White, who offers the most blatant example of this racial policing seen so far. White was called out by so-called “woke” Twitter activists for her involvement in the protests in Atlanta over her dead partner. Eventually, they implicated her in the burning of the Wendy’s where Rayshard was killed. It is up to us to never reinforce these sort of bourgeois constructs of guilt or innocence. Whether she had a hand in the destruction or not, I don’t judge her either way. That is not up to us, we stand in solidarity no matter what. But I do hold accountable, I do place blame on the wanna be do-gooders, these “woke” Twitter activists who implicated her in what occurred. I lay the blame solely on those activists, and Rayshard Brooks lays the blame on them from the grave.

Order neatly defines collections of people — these are the prerogatives of prison guards, of the police. We should remember the example of John Brown, who was often criticized by his so-called allies and friends for relating to Black people in a way that they deemed unacceptable. If you saw the way John Brown related to Black people in his time, you might think he was being criticized for relating to Black people as human beings. Every time we cross over those racial boundaries and meet each other as human beings, this is when we will be criticized, especially by the most advanced parts of the counter-insurgency. John Brown was heavily criticized for his advocacy of militant tactics, and Frederick Douglass was among his most vocal critics of his advocacy for insurrection. Douglass would come around later, but history would prove Brown right: the only way to abolish slavery is through violent insurrection. History has now redeemed him to some extent. But what I want us to think about is this: if John Brown was alive today, what would he be like? How would he behave? John Brown would be in jail alongside Natalie White for crossing over those boundaries.

3. By avoiding the morbid libidinal core of white supremacy, identity politics, intersectionality, and social privilege discourse comprise the most sophisticated sector of this police apparatus.

We’ve all come in contact with it at some point, particularly if we have been involved in politics for some time. We all know that identity politics, this talk about “white privilege” and what people call “intersectionality”—all it does is reinforce the racial lines that we’re trying to overcome. If it ever had any use or goal, the uprising has superseded it at this point. Let me work through these ideas one by one.

Privilege: I think we all know, or we can all admit, or we should admit, that privilege has become a purely psychological concept. There’s a long history to the notion of white privilege. It dates back to W.E.B. Du Bois, to Theodore Allen, to Noel Ignatiev, to Harry Haywood. For each of these authors, what was in question was a theoretical construct whose aim was to incite white workers to strike alongside Black workers. Somehow in the twists and turns that are American politics, the notion became psychological, a way to make white people feel good about their guilt. If you look at, for instance, Peggy McIntosh’s definitive text on white privilege, she talks about the privilege of being able to chew with your mouth closed. I don’t give a fuck about chewing with my mouth closed. [6]

As for intersectionality: I did a talk at Red May so I won’t go into this too deeply here, but as John Clegg and I tried to show, the presuppositions that intersectionality holds are becoming empirically false. [7] What the data is beginning to show is that, for instance, there are more Black women prison guards than there are those going into prison. This doesn’t discredit the struggle and plight of Black women, but as a construct, intersectionality is showing its limits. In fact, there are more white women being incarcerated today than Black women, oddly enough. As for Black men, we all know they just sit in jail and stay in jail.

Whatever intersectionality once wanted to do is no longer feasible or viable as a guide for us. In my talk with Red May, I suggest that we get back to the roots of Black feminism. We need categories that understand the Black feminist struggle beyond the oppression that the system inflicts upon them. I cited Toni Cade Bambara’s book called The Black Woman (1970), in her excellent preface, she refuses to define what a “Black woman” is. She does not say that a Black woman is the intersection of two oppressions; she does not say that Black women are in the margins of two different systems of hierarchy. What she argues, rather, is that Black women are an open possibility to be further understood through their revolutionary activity. In place of intersectionality as a discourse of systemic oppression, what we need to do is to bring back the idea of Black feminism as a discourse of struggle.

Finally, by opening up this definition of what Black women are and who they are, what Toni Cade Bambara was saying that Black women cannot be tied down by any static identity imposed upon them. Of course they are something more. And if we look at the history of Black folks in this country, we’re always something more than what has been hoisted upon us.

Identity politics, intersectionality, and social privilege discourse: all are modalities of the police.

What’s more, and above all, is that each of these discourses ignore the morbid and terrifying libidinal politics that undergirds race in this country. It took someone as courageous as James Baldwin to say this, and everyone is still afraid to repeat it. If you read his phenomenal short story, “Going to Meet the Man,” [8] you can see the dynamics of racism in this country acutely. To briefly summarize the story: it starts in the bedroom of a white heterosexual couple. The white man is struggling with impotence. How does he get over his impotence? He remembers back to a time as a child where he was brought to a lynching. At that lynching the corpse was not only mutilated, it was sexually mutilated, and he was given the genitalia. Once he remembers being handed the genitalia, he is able to become erect.

This is deep stuff. No one likes talking about it. But this is the core of racism that we need to reach. What’s more, I think no one wants to touch this part of the race problem because we are all implicated in it. It is obvious that white liberals get off on videos of Black murder. It is even more obvious that there are Black liberals who are more than happy to sell these videos of Black death for their own careerist goals. So long as we fail to take into account these libidinal drives within racism, we will not be able to explain how and why Ahmaud Arbery was killed. It had nothing to do with the police. It had to do with what is driving American society as such.

4. The insurgency cannot be confined within any well-circumscribed sociological category. By necessarily exceeding all classification, it is an excluded remnant detaching itself from all that binds together the American wasteland. Consequently, this combatant formation can only be defined in terms of its movement and its development, as that which emerged during the first weeks of the revolt and which will dissolve itself upon the full completion of the revolutionary project.

As I said earlier, every conceivable kind of person participated in the revolt. This can be confirmed by anyone who participated in the revolt itself. There is no category that can sum up all of who was there. The best we can say is that what we saw was the inclusively-excluded, or the part of America that has no part in it, and that wants nothing to do with this place. Such a formation can only be grasped by how it is moving, outside and against the current state of things, that can only be traced by way of its trajectory: against the state and capital, against American society. What is now up to us is to deepen and strengthen this spontaneous organization, so that we come up with something together that is even more terrible, even more powerful, than what we saw last night. Something that splits American society in half.

5. The so-called the Black leadership, therefore, cannot and does not exist. It is a chimera to be found exclusively in the white liberal imagination.

You hear it everywhere. I’ve heard it from every city, every friend who texted me. If I called a friend and said, “Hey, what happened in NOLA?”, or “What happened in Chicago?” If there were riots, if people got busy, there was no mention of a Black leadership. If things stopped, if things were stultified, all we heard about was a Black leadership.

The thing is, I have never in my life actually seen a Black leader. Why? Because they don’t exist. If there are Black leaders, they’re dead like Martin and Malcolm. If you’re worth your salt, you will be killed. If there are Black leaders, they are in jail with Mumia and with Sundiata. If there are Black leaders, they are on the run with Assata.

There is only one category of people who speak of Black leaders, and we know them as white liberals. The Black leadership is nothing other than a figment and hallucination that exists solely in the imagination of the white liberal’s mind. The odd thing about it is that somehow white liberals have more contact with Black leaders than I have ever come across in my entire life. It is as if a channel extends from the Black leadership directly into their head.

There have been reasons proposed as to why the classical formation of Black leadership no longer exists. One argument, which can be derived from many of the new sociological studies (there was a big report about this in the New York Times as well), asserts that to develop a firm hegemonic leadership of the sort we saw in the past typically requires a substantial middle class. But if you look at the data from the past 40 years, the Black middle class has been under constant threat. Hopefully it stays like that, honestly. But it is very hard to define what exactly the Black middle class is. If you do say there is this well-defined group, and if you’re able to circumscribe this well-defined group, they typically exist within the white community. Just to speak a little bit more personally from my experience in New York, I am hard pressed to think of ever meeting a Black middle-class person growing up, or of ever even hearing their rhetoric and their nonsense. But it’s not really a thing anymore.

Why does the white liberal need to hallucinate and invent a Black leadership for him or herself? Ultimately, it is because whitey loves property. Property enjoys a special prestige in American life, it has a special kind of sanctity. We always get these calls for the Black leadership from white liberals whenever the windows start to crack. There is a very important reason that property has this particular kind of sanctity in America, as many historians are starting to confirm and argue. [9] For most of its history, the most important property in America was human property, shackled and chained. We need to weaponize this argument, and say that whenever property is protected, it is protected for white supremacist ends. If property is truly the pursuit of happiness, in that trifecta of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the existence of that happiness and property is premised upon the negation of Black life and the negation of Black liberty. So the protection of property is something that we need to attack explicitly.

6. The current crisis derives from a contradiction that proceeds from the two Janus-faced sides of post-Cold War American governance: an inconsistency between the demands of the sovereign imperial State and globalized biopolitical security. As a result, the metropolitan center has begun to experience the sort of chaos and the instability that it has classically sewn within the colonial periphery.

This dynamic captures the situation that we are living in today, and which we have been experiencing acutely over the past few months.

On the one side, we have state sovereignty, the classical notion of the state. Following Schmitt, but most importantly following Agamben, the paradoxical foundation of the state proves to be important to the way it operates. In order to define the state, the state must employ extra-legal and extra-juridical measures in order to found itself. Every time the state founds itself, it must go outside the law that it seeks to create. What has occurred classically, and we have a lot of historical examples of this in America, is that whenever there’s a crisis, the state imposes some sort of state of exception in order to create the order that it needs to reassert itself.

As we saw, for example, in the American Civil War, in the two Red Scares, and most recently in the War on Terror, the executive branch of the government has continually mobilized itself beyond its formal legal parameters and confines.

We see this today especially with Trump. Trump is using and abusing his executive powers, but it is better to say that he is using them in the way that they were set out to be used. What was originally the province of the legislative branch has now been taken over by Trump himself.

This component of the U.S. asserting itself has also shown itself in its foreign wars. We need to keep in mind, and I will come back to this, that—and for some reason this fact has been downplayed in the past 20 or 30 years—America is the one imperial power in the globe, and it serves itself aggressively around the world. After the collapse of the [Soviet Union] and the Cold War, we have seen the United States become the police officer, or the storm trooper, of the entire Earth. This is one side of governance.

It is important to contrast this with another form of governance, which is typically called biopolitical discipline, or biopolitical security. The latter differs from the enforcement of the law carried out by the classic state. Rather, it names the management of lives. If the state kills, biopolitics is concerned with the protection of those lives—for its own ends, of course.

The most recent regime of biopolitical control is what is known as “security”. What “security” does is it allows an event to happen, so as to then manage that event. These events are varied. They can be something like pandemics, like the COVID-19 pandemic we’re going through today; these could be famines, or disasters like Katrina; and they could also be insurrections like the one we are hopefully fomenting right now. What the state does in these instances is to make a statistical calculation and try to find acceptable terms within which it can allow events such as pandemics to occur, while keeping them within neatly circumscribed boundaries.

In addition to the paradox of the state that we see in the state of exception, there is also a strange biopolitical paradox of preparedness that we are experiencing right now. The paradox typically goes like this: after a disasters—say, a pandemic or a famine—there is a drive within the security apparatus to begin preparing for the next disaster to come. After SARS in the 2000s, there was a big push to be prepared for the next coming pandemic. This over-preparedness then is put on the back burner when it comes to light that the next disease is not going to appear when we expect it to appear. The famed medical anthropologist Andrew Lakoff drew attention to this paradox, which we have seen again recently. There has been preparedness for pandemics, but the preparedness was then put on the back burner, so that when the COVID-19 pandemic came we were still not ready for it. We are dealing at once with two different types of paradox here: one that must venture outside of itself in order to found itself, and the other a cycle of preparedness that consistently generates unpreparedness.

There is the legal side and the statistical side of the state, the nation state in its classic form and this more global operation of security. I would like to argue that these two directives are colliding with each other and forming some sort of crisis.

Legal means to an ends have been in a constant state of crisis: Trump just can’t do anything right. Whatever he does seems to backfire, and it does not seem to always be the worst thing. Trump and his own deluded mind has become an agent of anarchy. [10] Now of course he doesn’t think he is–it is up to us, when this chaos reigns, to utilize this for our own ends. What I’m saying is that we need to inhabit this chaos that the state is inflicting upon itself.

Unlike liberals and reformists, we are not here to reaffirm and reassert law and order. We are not here to transform America into one big safe space. We are here to make the chaos and the disorder more terrible than it has ever been.

We must do what revolutionaries have always done: we must make the contradiction intolerable.

7. As the rebel-slaves did with the periodic outbreaks of yellow fever in Haiti, there is a hidden partisan knowledge to be uncovered surrounding the novel coronavirus pandemic that also can be exploited and weaponized against established power.

In the Imaginary Party’s best book, entitled To Our Friends [11] , the authors mention a pamphlet issued by the CDC in 2012 on the subject of disaster preparedness. [12] It is a part American Tiqqunists tend not to mention. In order to make disaster preparedness pertinent and hip to the youngsters, the CDC invokes the example of preparing for a zombie apocalypse. Their basic argument was that if people can prepare for a zombie apocalypse, they will be able to prepare for a natural disaster such as a flood, a storm, a pandemic, or even an insurrection.

The Invisible Committee argue in their book that this fear of zombies has a long and racialized history, linked in no uncertain terms to the fear of the Black proletariat. And the other side of this fear that doesn’t want to be mentioned, that refuses to be mentioned or is repressed, resides in the paranoia of the white middle class over its own worthlessness.

If we look back over the history of zombies, the figure of the zombie appeared within the voodoo utilized during the Haitian Revolution. There was a person by the name of Jean Zombi who ended up taking the name because he participated in the massacre of slave owners. What I think is particularly instructive for our purposes today is that the Haitian insurgents were perfectly aware that they could use the yellow fever pandemic against their former masters and against the army, whether this be Napoleon’s army, or the party of order more generally. The insurgents waited until the yellow fever outbreak took hold. They knew that their former slave masters’ army would be devoured by the pandemic, and they also knew that they had built up an immunity to that pandemic. So they waited until the army had been decimated by yellow fever, and then they launched their guerilla attacks.

What I am arguing for here is something very similar. We all know that Black people and brown people were disproportionately affected by the COVID pandemic. This is a medical problem. But it is much more than a mere medical-scientific problem, it is a political problem. We must reject the sort of sanitized liberal politics of safety that is afraid of the pandemic, that is largely a sanitary discourse around masks, distancing, etc. I know this is a political issue now. But, on the flip side, I’m not defending right-wing conspiracy theorist ideas that the pandemic does not exist, or that it is just a flu, etc.. What I’m proposing here is that we develop a kind of partisan knowledge—our own knowledge about the pandemic—to exploit the pandemic for our own good, and to use the knowledge of the pandemic as a weapon against our enemies.

8. The insurrection will involve precise coordination from within the constellation of riots: the paradoxical organization of disorder beyond any measure of control. Accordingly, the problem of insurrection has equal parts social and technical dimensions.

What I am advocating is a paradoxical ordering of disorder, an Organized Konfusion (for those who remember the rap group). To do this, we must read up on tactics: we must look into what exactly was smashed; what exactly was looted; and how and why the occupations were effective or ineffective. We need to think strategically about the chaos that we inflict in the streets.

What is more, we also need to anticipate new forms of tactics, struggles and strategies that will emerge, so as to intensify these struggles and tactics. We can anticipate that occupations and rent strikes are going to occur in the near future due to the looming threat of eviction that is occurring in all of our heavily gentrified cities. But I think we need to go beyond these defensive struggles and to be more creative and to initiate tactics that go on the offensive. In fact, what I am advocating here is employing the whole arsenal of proletarian strategies and tactics–from riots, to strikes, to blockades.

But we need to be creative in our tactics and strategies. As we have seen in the recent Twitter hacks, these are just as important. What’s important is that we be creative in how we deploy these strategies and tactics.

What is the modern equivalent of the telephone exchange in Barcelona that was so savagely fought over during the May Days in 1937? What is the modern equivalent of the St. Petersburg rail line that the insurgent workers fought so hard over in revolutionary Russia? We have a unique problem, in that we live in a huge country. We need to figure out creative ways to break this distance and utilize it for our own ends, i.e., as pure means.

9. Materialize the ever-present specter of a second, more balkanized, civil war by fragmenting the fragments of a crumbling empire.

At least since Trump was elected and took office, the archetype of civil war has been looming over this country. There are historical reasons for this. Since American Civil War was for some the most traumatic experience this country has ever collectively undergone, and for others the most liberating, it stands as a figure that is continually recalled within the collective imaginary. But, I think there are also structural reasons. The fundamental operation of the state works by warding off the ubiquitous threat of civil war. The State as such can be thought of as that which blocks and inhibits civil war. What is unique about this country is our singular emancipatory tradition, which is itself bound up with our understanding of civil war.

I would otherwise here cite Kenneth Rexroth’s excellent autobiography, where he explains that the radical abolitionists who took part in the Civil War gave birth to children who became the first era of the American socialist, anarchist, and communist labor movement. [13] But I think the best example comes from Du Bois’s classic book, Black Reconstruction. [14] It was the proletarian general strike of the ex-slaves that truly put the final nail in the coffin of slavery. It is precisely this lineage of an emancipatory, liberatory, but nonetheless violent, civil war that needs to be updated for its second coming. Another important precedent is Harry Haywood’s “Black-Belt” thesis. As a member of the central committee of the Communist Party USA, Haywood argued that revolution in the United States of America would involve an independent Black state in the South. I think this is no longer feasible, but I think what he was grasping at, and was trying to deal with, was the problem of revolution in a country that is simply massive.

The revolution here presents a problem of sheer scale for us. This is, I think, why Haywood argued for the breaking apart of America. We have no historical precedent for a revolution in such a large, industrialized, and modern state, so we have a unique problem to grapple with.

I do not know exactly what this looks like. What is certain is that this country is already beginning to break and fracture, and it is up to us to break and fracture it further, into so many pieces that it can never be put back together again.

Revolution, here more than anywhere else, will involve the messy task of division. Here too, we have a unique problem, for we must avoid the rather aggressive, ugly, and dangerous nationalism that occurred in other cases of civil war that we have seen over the past forty years. I am not advocating another series of Yugoslav wars, nor am I advocating what has occurred in Syria. Nonetheless, we must harness civil war as an emancipatory liberatory power. The fundamental goal is to break apart America into a constellation of federated communes.

10. The fulfillment of the revolutionary project is ultimately an inescapable ethical obligation that each of us have to the dead and the exploited.

At the risk of sounding naive, I sincerely believe that the riots that we have all witnessed, and hopefully participated in, this summer have opened the window to insurrection and even a full-blown revolution. It is possible that I may be miscalculating the potentialities that have emerged. Still, it is entirely impossible for anyone to have participated in the current uprising without having the fundamental core of their being unalterably changed. As for myself, and I know for many of you, we feel the revolution deeply within our souls, and it changes our very outlook, the approach to how we live our lives. All the pervasive cynicism, all the rational self-interest, all the nihilism, all that is constitutive of the typical American citizen is slowly being worn away by the insurrection and the uprising.

What this shows us is that the revolution is truly beyond us, truly beyond each and every one of us here. It surpasses all the boundaries thrown up by American individualism. It forces us to finally look beyond ourselves and recognize that America has wreaked havoc as an imperial power around the globe for a century.

And the fight is not only for the living, but also for the dead. We owe the revolution to the millions of slaves who never knew a second of freedom. What the long list of martyrs who have fallen during this uprising deserve from us is nothing other than the completion of the revolution.

Pasolini wrote an essay about a trip to America. What really took him was one of the phrases that no one says anymore but was a big part of the Civil Rights movement: “we need to throw our entire bodies into the struggle.” [15]

The dead of the struggle scream out for vengeance, and we must avenge their deaths. As Benjamin famously put it, “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious”. [16] Tonight is the night to begin to settle accounts once and for all, to end their victorious reign upon the globe, and to allow the dead to finally rest.

• 1 https://archive.org/details/cu31924096961036
• 2 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/
• 3 https://voidnetwork.gr/2012/07/18/how-is-it-to-be-done-by-tiqqun/
• 4 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/10/george-floyd-black-lives-matter-police-protests-widespread-peaceful/5325737002/ & https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/knowledge/society/Protests-in-the-wake-of-George-Floyd-killing-touch-all-50-states
• 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_deployment_of_federal_forces_in_the_United_States
• 6 https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf
• 7 https://youtu.be/MHMeYtYHiKM
• 8 https://www.cristorey.net/uploaded/Academics/2019-2020/Summer_Reading/James_Baldwin_Going_To_Meet_the_Man.pdf
• 9 https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-capitalism & https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/slavery/EAF172288A7718B082A074603D149A48
• 10 See, Marten Bjork, “Phase two – the reproduction of this life.” https://www.tillfallighet.org/tillfallighetsskrivande/phase-two-the-reproduction-of-this-life
• 11 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends
• 12 https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/zombie/index.htm
• 13 http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/index.htm
• 14 http://www.webdubois.org/wdb-BlackReconst.html
• 15 Pasolini, In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology.
• 16 https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

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Humans are an extraordinary result of evolution. It is a great power to be the most highly evolved creature in our conceivable knowledge and, in that, each one of us has a great responsibility. Problem solving is something that all humans do intuitively every day. It matters not what class, race, age, educational level; every single person can and does solve problems every day. The size, form and manifestations of those problems vary greatly but there is one major problem that transcends the rest and affects every single one of us. That problem is capitalism. This form of free-trade economics based on infinite growth models has proven to be unsustainable. A modern-day solution to the problems posed on the Earth and faced by all animals, human and otherwise, due to human activities can be found in the United Nation’s (2015) 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. There has also existed since as early as the 19th century a political philosophy that can provide a social, political, and economic framework to accompany the well-defined scientific solutions to our environmental issues. Anarchism, as a political philosophy, realizes that society is entirely able to govern itself (Miller, 2003, 3) and was originally introduced as a critique to industrial capitalism (Proudhon, 1893, 48). It is not within the realm of this essay to defend anarchism against the negative portrayal it has received*. Instead, Proudhon’s political anarchism will be used to accompany the UN’s Sustainable Development as a social, political, and economic framework for a sustainable planet.

Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls for “peace, justice, and strong institutions”. Evidently, these virtues are something the global community seemingly lacks. Conventional anarchism focuses on individual and societal cooperation and cohesion and “urges man to think, to investigate, to analyze every proposition” (Goldman, 1921, 22-23). Instilling Proudhon’s anarchic political philosophy, ideologies, and practices will make achieving this goal more realistic because it has been developed through inductive reasoning (Proudhon, 1893). As seen on the “Scale of Knowledge” from Dr. Floris van den Berg, the same highly certain method of acquiring knowledge is also used in the natural sciences, such as physics and chemistry (van den Berg, 2012). In this sense, anarchism is something of the science of politics. As our species developed free-will over basic survival instincts, people were the first animals to live outside of natural law. This affords us countless innovations that provide the comfort and safety to question existence. Before science, it was widely believed that we were descendants of divine beings and, given only the condition that we follow a set of rules established by these gods, the Earth and everything on it was infinite and made for us. This anthropocentric perspective instilled with heteronomous ethics is still widely engrained in global society. However, the recognition of anthropogenic environmental impact can be dated back as far as Plato’s Critias dialogues where he unconcernedly notes soil erosion and deforestation due to agricultural advancements (Attfield, 2018, 3). The fatal flaw of humanity is the continuance of anthropocentricism. If one can only view humans as the apex of life for whom the Earth was created, as opposed to one step in evolutionary time, it is not possible to live sustainably. This alongside prescribed heteronomous ethics systematically removes the virtues of self-awareness, self-responsibility, and autonomy necessary to understand that the ecosystem is finite and that perhaps we are not the be-all, end-all of biological evolution.

Anarchism attempts to bring these virtues to the forefront of humanity by calling for the elimination of overruling heteronomous virtues found in the institutions of religion, property, and government (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1892). Following the Green Revolution in the 1950s, which involved using newly developed artificial fertilizers and heavy irrigation techniques to maximize food production, the development of environmental science and concern for the effects of increased large-scale agriculture and industrialization rapidly became more prevalent. With the release of The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, the non-scientific community was able to read an alluring and beautifully written prose that clearly outlined the spread of pollutants from one side of the world to the other (Attfield, 2018, 3). In 1972, The Limits to Growth was published. Written by an international team of multidisciplinary academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it evaluated those factors which limit growth of our species could be narrowed into five basics: population growth, nonrenewable resource capacity, industrial and agricultural production rates, and pollution output (Meadows et al, 1972, 11). Clearly, these five indicators hold true today. The Limits to Growth also set out to provide an accessible handbook for how people can “achieve a state of global equilibrium” by limiting ourselves and our production of material goods; thus, we can “live indefinitely” (Meadows et al, 1972). These texts were some of the first initiatives by environmentalists to provide complex information in a concise, accessible manner for the general public. In this sense, the various researchers concerned for the environment aimed to expand the anthropocentrism that dominated to a more “ecocentric” (Attfield, 2018, 12) worldview. While it is a much more distorted and silenced voice, anarchism (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1893) recognized this ecocentric worldview by maintaining the philosophy that Gods and the State are socially constructed authoritative figures that can only exist through the peoples’ submission to the rules outlined by these archetypal figures.

Meanwhile, just around the time The Limits to Growth was published, a new ideology of capitalism had been introduced and rapidly appropriated by governments and industries worldwide. It promoted most notably three assumptions: (1) “commercial value could be maximized by handing management of companies and public policy to exceptionally smart, and highly motivated people”, (2) “commercial value, so maximized, would be a good proxy for social value without government interference”, and (3) “the redistributions of income resulting from this maximization, whether within countries or between them, were not a proper concern for economists” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). These quotations are from Capitalism: what has gone wrong, what needs to be changed, and how it can be fixed, a 2021 article in the Oxford Review of Economic Policies which poses these questions to a selection of leading capitalist economists. Their summation of these assumptions is immediately followed by the statement: “Unfortunately, no part of this new ideology proved to be correct” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). As well, the article states that these 3 main drivers of the newest manifestation of capitalism “resulted in social and political polarizations which have become unsustainable” (Collier et al, 2021, 638). It is clear there is now consensus on all sides that the current dominating economic methodology and resulting society is unsustainable and the result of misinformed, misdirected guidance (Attfield, 2018; Collier et al, 2021; Goldman, 1910; Miller, 2010; Proudhon, 1893; van den Berg, 2012). In this revelation, it gives hope that there are grounds for systemic change.

A common term used to critique globalization and free-market capitalism is ‘neocolonialism’. It describes the phenomenon wherein nations that were previously ravaged due to colonialism are now targeted for extremely valuable resources such as precious metals and oil. In statements such as, “The major untapped pool of cheap young workers for the next few decades is Africa and the region is ripe for conventional capitalism”, also extracted from page 643 of the 2021 Oxford Economic Policy Review article, it is clear we must be vigilant in deciding on a global system that will not lead us back but forward. Global free-market capitalism is seen as a “neo” or new form of colonialization. Another view of this can be found in the article in defense of capitalism in the distinction between “winners” and “large groups of uncompensated losers” under the capitalist system (Collier et al, 2021). Aptly so, the result was and is “disaffection and political activism with unpredictable repercussions” (Collier et al, 2021). No deliberation is provided in the article. The only understanding of political activism in this statement is with the vague, negative association of “unpredictable repercussions”. This presents a fallacy of what can come from positive political activism in response to unsatisfactory laws and regulations. One direct example of positive political activism by anarchists is dumpster-diving. Ann Meneley (2018) presents specifically the point of view of Danish dumpster-divers that, “It is perceived as functional, as wasting is seen as stupid”, though this is a view taken by most modern anarchists. Meneley also recognizes the group “Food Not Bombs” which is an international anarchist collective that feeds the impoverished and homeless populations with meals cooked entirely from ‘dumpstered’ food. Dumpster diving is an act of direct rebellion that only exists when a nation lives outside of its means. Educating the Stupid is a concept developed by Dr. van den Berg (2012) which discusses, in part, that the combined ecological footprint of the global population must stay within the Planet’s carrying capacity for our species. The same concept is reverberated through The Limits of Growth report. The seemingly incendiary title of this ethical concept sets to reiterate an ethical standard that has resounded in the speech of many great minds such as Albert Einstein who is famously quoted to have said: “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”. In the age of knowledge and technology, it is no longer acceptable to feign ignorance of the various consequences of lives based on production, consumption, and infinite growth in a finite ecosystem. At this point, there is only stupidity in those of us who know and do not act.

Aside from the environmental and societal devastation caused by global trade and industry practices, the driving force of capitalism, consumerism, is inherently unsustainable. Though once viewed as a sign of wealth and well-being when a country’s citizens were able to be effective spenders, nowadays, consumerism is being discussed more frequently as a health detriment (Meneley, 2018). On one hand, citizens in impoverished regions, ie. the “losers”, live lives of “involuntary simplicity” (Meneley, 2018). Meanwhile, mental illnesses exhibited in behaviors such as hoarding and physical illnesses such as morbid obesity are rampant in wealthier nations, or the nations of “winners”. Consequently, initiatives encouraging minimalism, or “voluntary simplicity”, immerge in response to these ailments of overconsumption (Meneley, 2018). Capitalism focuses on unbridled maximization of profit through consumer spending, thus requires branding and advertising techniques to promote greater consumption. These tactics often include creating a sense of self for the consumer and encouraging “self-branding”, as the consumer should view themselves as a commodity (Meneley, 2018). Anarchism brings value to individual freedom of expression and calls for the elimination of property (Goldman, 1910; Proudhon, 1893). As expressed so eloquently by Emma Goldman, a distinguished anarchist and feminist pioneer, value is manifested by someone “to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist, — the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force” (Goldman, 1921, 24). In other words, anarchism encourages the individual to find what work they can do that does not ultimately feel like work but feels like the fulfillment of one’s personal values. This recognition of ‘self’ in a career path allows for a level of self-responsibility and social obligation often not afforded by a consumer driven society.

So, while globalized trade ravages the underdeveloped nations, consumerism plagues the rest, and the greatest damage is incurred by the ecosystem and non-human animals. Just as no one would deny the atrocities of imperialism, colonialization, fascism, or any other form of absolute authoritative rule, the vast disparities between the winners and losers under capitalism are well-known. Additionally, the complete devastation of the planet’s biodiversity, natural resources, and the ecosystem is not news. The current world economic system and alleged lack of political interference have failed. The solution needs to be a complete reformation of these elements.

In the conclusion of the Oxford Economic Policy Review, the capitalist economists sum up three underlying issues that are commonly reported on about how “the pathologies of economics have misdirected policies”. They are in short: (1) “…inadequate depiction of the individual in conventional economics as a person preoccupied with consumption and leisure. In contrast, evolutionary biology suggests we are strongly motivated by purposes beyond consumption and leisure with a capacity to be morally load-bearing”, (2) “…widespread support for greater devolution to local decision-taking, and an emphasis on the importance of cooperation in communities. Far from being selfishly individualistic, humans have a strong capacity to cooperate in communities”, and (3) “…the human brain has evolved to be well-suited to decisions under uncertainty, and decisions devolved to teams within which people naturally cooperate enable rapid learning through experimentation and copying”, (Collier at al, 2021, 647). Conventional anarchism has always encompassed these exact ideologies, as it is a century-old political reformative plan developed due to disaffection with the capitalist economic system in an industrializing, globalizing world (Proudhon, 1893). In this, Proudhon’s anarchic political philosophy is the only available, long-standing social-political framework to achieve a sustainable planet.

Lina Miller

*See the following text for additional information on this topic:

Egoumenides, M. (2014). Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation. Bloomsbury Academic.

Pritchard, A. (2010). What can the absence of anarchism tell us about the history and purpose of International Relations? Review of International Studies, 37, 1647–1669. doi:10.1017/S0260210510001075

References:

• Attfield, D. (2018). Environmental Ethics. A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  Collier, P. et al. (2021). Capitalism: what has gone wrong, what needs to change, and how it can be fixed. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 37 (4), 637–649 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grab035
• Proudhon, J.P. (1893). Property is Theft. In D. Guérin & P. Sharkey (Eds.), No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (pp. 48-54). AK Press.
• Goldman, E. (1910). Anarchism: What it really stands for. In H. Havel (Eds.), Anarchism and other essays (pp. 21-29). Mother Earth Publishing Association.
• Meadows, D.H. et al. (1972). The Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Potomac Associates. https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/
• Meneley, A. (2018.) Consumerism. Annual Review of Anthropology 47, 117-132, https://doi-org.proxy.library.uu.nl/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041518
• Miller, D. (2003). Political Philosophy: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• United Nations. (2015). THE 17 GOALS: Sustainable Development. In Sdgs.Un.Org. Retrieved January 4, 2022, from https://sdgs.un.org/goals
• Van den Berg, F. & Meindertsma, J. (2012). Ethics: Philosophy for a Better World. [Poster for PSE2 course]. Geosciences Department. Utrecht University.
• Van den Berg, F. & Meindertsma, J. (2012). Philosophy of Science. [Poster for PSE2 course]. Geosciences Department. Utrecht University.

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