Rethinking Anarchy: Direct Action, Autonomy, Self-Management

RETHINKING ANARCHY

direct action, autonomy, self-management

carlos taibo

translated by the autonomies collective

Prologue

It is strikingly evident that we are witnessing a remarkable renewal of libertarian ideas and practices. The corresponding movements, which have often been taken for dead, demonstrate a surprising capacity for survival that is ultimately sustained by an undeniable fact: we stand before a current of thought and action whose constant presence can be verified since time immemorial. The interest in anarchism is growing at a moment when the word crisis resounds everywhere, along with a growing awareness of the terminal corrosion of capitalism and the general collapse that may accompany it. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that the discourse of capital—there is no alternative other than our own, they tell us—is crumbling. There are ever more people who take notice of this and ask in vain for some explanation about the presumed suitability of that which, given the evidence, no longer has any.

The perception of what constitutes anarchism’s virtues and flaws has changed continuously, often notably, over the course of time—in particular over the last quarter-century with the collapse of social democracy and Leninism. Many appear to have been mistaken, especially those who saw in anarchism a project completely incapable of addressing the problems of complex societies. The arguments today appear farcical; arguments that continue to be repeated, which suggest that anarchism is a worldview of the past, only imaginable—whatever these terms may mean—in the minds of simple people who inhabit backward countries. And it is surprising that there are people who fail to appreciate greater problems with growth, industrialization, centralization, mass consumption, competition, and military discipline. Anarchism does indeed imply restoring many of the characteristic elements of particular communities of the past, but it also involves an effort at a complex understanding of the miseries of the present, venturing in favor of self-management, decommodification, and an awareness of limits.

None of the above should be taken to mean that libertarian thought offers answers to all our concerns, much less that an aggiornamento is unnecessary—something that at times seems to be indispensable. We are obliged to rethink, or to qualify, many of the concepts that we have inherited from the nineteenth-century classics. We urgently need to adapt anarchist thought to new realities, even more so when the problems it identified a century or a century and a half ago—authoritarianism, oppression, exploitation—have in no way abated. In some sense, we find ourselves before two interrelated paradoxes. The first one reminds us that, while anarchism encounters unquestionably serious difficulties in positioning itself within the societies in which unfortunately it has been our lot to live, there seems to be a growing necessity to confront the calamities of these very societies. The second one underscores the evident weakness of those organizations that claim an anarchist identity, in contrast to a remarkable and more general influence of the libertarian project.

Therefore it appears ever more pressing to break with the isolation inherent in many identitarian forms of anarchism and to consequently do so from the nondogmatic perspective of those who are necessarily doubtful and who know that they do not hold—and I will say this again—the answers to everything. We must face the tension between the inescapable radicalness of the ideas we advocate and the knowledge that these ideas ought to reach out to many human beings and have practical consequences. Unsatisfied with what we are, convinced of our necessity, and conscious of the glories and the miseries of the past, it often becomes clear that we talk a lot, but we do not act in a desirable manner.

What I refer to above is the mental scenario wherein this book unfolds, which incidentally is a breviary due to its being a compendium of reduced dimensions and not through an imagined pretense that includes some sort of liturgical wisdom. Several years ago, I submitted to print an anthology of libertarian thought that aimed mainly at rescuing texts by the classics, who as far as I’m concerned, shed light on many of the challenges we must now face.¹ That is certainly not the aim of this modest volume the reader has in her hands. In no way do I pretend to address in these pages the various debates surrounding such pluralist and complex thought as the anarchist idea. I am content to offer some material open to discussion—never a hermetic and unquestionable text—directed first and foremost to those individuals who possess some kind of militant experience, or a knowledge of it, within social movements or unions, material whose objective is essentially to reflect on what we have done so far, the stigmas we have been cursed with—individualists, hostile to all sort of organization, chiliastics, infantile prepoliticals, et cetera—and what we are supposed to do. So, in case it is not sufficiently evident to the reader, I would like to clarify that this book is in no way an introduction to anarchism that may assess, for instance, the differences between mutualists, collectivists, and communists. It is neither a post-anarchist nor a post-structuralist text, much less a postmodern one, however much it feigns perspectives influenced by a weary zeal upon certainties and established truths as well as an express design to consider at all times the multiple forms of exploitation and alignment that torment us.

This may be the appropriate moment, then, to warn about a terminological choice that permeates most of this work. Although the adjectives anarchist and libertarian will be taken as synonyms throughout and in such a way that they may be employed without any distinction whatsoever, more often than not—as I will explain later on—I will reserve the latter to portray positions and movements that are not necessarily anarchist but that nonetheless agree with basic tenets, like those linked to direct democracy, assemblies, or self-management. When I make use of such meaning, the usage of the adjective anarchist will remain circumscribed to the description of positions and movements that assume a clear doctrinal identification with anarchism, understood in its most restricted sense.

During the task of writing of this work, I have consulted some of the material I have been publishing over the last few years, which has been heavily edited for the current volume; namely, the chapter A vueltas con el Estado del bienestar: espacios de autonomía y desmercantilización, from the collective effort ¡Espabilemos! Argumentos desde el 15-M (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2012); the epigraph Un capitalismo en corrosión terminal, from my book España, un gran país: Transición, milagro y quiebra (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2012); the text Ciudadanismo y movimientos sociales, which appeared in the May 2013 bulletin of the Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo; and the articles La CNT cumple cien años, Los modelos latinoamericanos: una reflexión libertaria, and Por qué hay que construir espacios autónomos, which I have published on my website, www.carlostaibo.com, in October 2010 and in April and May 2013, respectively.

—Carlos Taibo

1 Libertari@s. Antología de anarquistas y afines para uso de las generaciones jóvenes (Barcelona: Del Lince, 2010).

I. ABOUT ANARCHISM

What Anarchism Is

Given that anarchism has a manifestly antidogmatic outlook, it is hardly surprising that determining what anarchism proper is ends up being a singularly complex task. There exist two distinct perceptions relative to it, if you will. The first asserts that anarchism refers to a state of mind that, sustained by a way of seeing the world, manifests itself through behavior that sinks its roots into time immemorial, whereas the second relates to a specific doctrine with clearly defined outlines that saw the light of day at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

In regard to the first of these perceptions, we should not forget that by the end of the eighteenth century the adjective anarchist had been commonly employed to describe earlier peoples and initiatives. This usage of the term been evident in references to Chinese peasants, members of religious movements in Medieval Europe, or specific forms of piracy, to name a few among many examples.² The label has also framed accounts of the condition of primitive societies, such as the Nuer peoples studied by Evans-Pritchard, the Piaroa considered by Overing, or the many peoples invoked in the writings of Sahlins and Clastres. Acknowledging this condition seems to have an important consequence in regard to determining what should be of interest to an eventual history of anarchism. The latter should not only address the relatively recent evolution of certain ideas but should also approach the condition and the deployment of many human initiatives recorded in the distant past, for—according to this perspective—in the general body of anarchism, practices hold greater relevance than theoretical reflections.

It is also true that there exist important links between the two perceptions of anarchism that I have so poorly glossed. For instance, in the eyes of some historians, anarchism was little more than a passing and extemporaneous manifestation of so-called primitive rebels. From this perspective, the past invoked by the first of our perceptions would then burden the content of the doctrine located at the heart of the second to such a degree that the result could be nothing more than a useless jumble. This does not seem to be the best moment to address such nonsense. I will simply argue that, seen from a distance, if the primitive rebels appear preferable to their modern inheritors, it should be emphasized that the historical practice of anarchism is open to anything and includes frequent manifestations in complex societies. I would also question the primitive condition of people who, like Noam Chomsky or Bertrand Russell, have identified themselves—with or without reason—with anarchism, or recall that, according to my understanding, the answers offered by anarchism to many of our current problems are much more sound than those forged by its ideological competitors. Thus, despite anarchism being, indeed, a state of mind, the latter is accompanied by a body of ideas and shared experiences, though often with vague and even contradictory features. In this body of ideas and experiences we often find a lucid and reflective discourse that thereby compels us to be wary of a very common image of anarchism as an amorphous thing burdened by its emotional and irrational condition, impulsive and novelesque, romantic and prone to dejection. Yet, just as I have suggested when speaking of primitive rebels, what is wrong with emotion, especially when it is permeated by rational elements?

In the end, it would seem fitting to understand anarchism as the product of a sort of mixture of those two glossed perceptions, held together by the idea that there is ultimately a memory that conveys values and experiences in such a way that neither, despite temporal lapses and appearances, ceases to exist. The configuration of anarchism as a practice/doctrine calls on a whole tradition—one that took shape in the last two centuries around phalansteries, communes, soviets, factory councils, collectivizations, or French Mays—that, though more often than not possessing modest historical resonance, scarce concretizations, and a precarious consolidation in time, carries with it examples that shine amid a magma of misfortunes. This tradition would certainly have significance when attempting to explain certain current phenomena. It is worth bringing up in this regard a fairly widespread view that considers a movement like the fifteenth of May (15-M) as a response, among us, and in one of its forms, that is fed simultaneously from three decentralizing traditions—the local, the nationalist and the anarchist—that have deep roots in the political culture of the country where it originated.³

The propensity to live in the past, which is not uncommon in many of the expressions of libertarian culture, may have been at the origin of the idea that anarchism itself is an ideology of the past. Therefore it is necessary to stress that the majority of anarchists do not celebrate any nostalgic attachment to the past. While, on the one hand, they simply base