For my parents, Shifra and Ze’ev and in memory of Yosef Gordon (1920–2005)

Abstract

This thesis explores contemporary anarchism, in its re-emergence as a social movement and political theory over the past decade. The methodology used combines participatory research and philosophical argumentation.

The first part, “Explaining Anarchism”, argues that it should be addressed primarily as a political culture, with distinct forms of organisation, campaigning and direct action repertoires, and political discourse and ideology. Largely discontinuous with the historical workers’ and peasants’ anarchist movement, contemporary anarchism has come together in the intersection of radical direct-action movements in the North since the 1960s: feminism, ecology and resistance to nuclear energy and weapons, war and neoliberal globalisation. Anarchist ideological discourse is analysed with attention to key concepts such as “domination” and “prefigurative politics”, with attention to the avowedly open-ended, experimental nature of the anarchist project.

The second part, “Anarchist Anxieties”, is a set of theoretical interventions in four major topics of controversy in anarchism. Leadership in anarchist politics is addressed through sustained attention to the concept of power, proposing an agenda for equalising access to influence among activists, and an “ethic of solidarity” around the wielding of non-coercive power. Violence is approached through a recipient-based definition of the concept, exploring the limits of any attempt to justify violence and offering observations on violent empowerment, revenge and armed struggle. Technology is subject to a strong anarchist critique, which stresses its inherently social nature, leading to the exploration of Luddism, the disillusioned use of ICTs, and the promotion of lo-tech, sustainable human-nature interfaces as strategical directions for an anarchist politics of technology. Finally, questions of nationalism are approached through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, addressing anarchist dilemmas around statehood, and exploring approaches to “national conflicts” that link multiple forms of oppression and that employ a direct action approach to peacemaking.

Acknowledgements

My first and foremost debt is to my supervisor, Michael Freeden, without whose support and guidance this thesis would have never been possible. In his patient yet uncompromising way, Michael has provided a great deal of perspective, insight and criticism which were invaluable throughout my work.

David Miller and Elizabeth Frazer read drafts of four of the chapters in this dissertation and offered important suggestions. Katherine Morris, my college advisor, was also of great help and support during the difficult and anxious process of writing.

So many individual comrades and colleagues have contributed to this thesis without reading my written work that I could never mention some without doing injustice to others. If you, reader, have ever exchanged ideas with me in conversation, then something of the following pages is yours, as is my heartfelt thanks.

During research for this thesis I have enjoyed the hospitality of several infospaces and collective houses, whose living example of “anarchy in action” will always be remembered: Can Masdeu (Barcelona), Centre Autonome (Lausanne), Cecco Rivolta (Firenze), CIA (Amsterdam), Equinox (Manchester) Eurodusnie (Leiden), Forte Prenestino (Roma), Les Naus (Barcelona), Les Tanneries (Dijon), Le Tour (Geneve), Ragman’s Lane (Wye Valley) Salon Mazal (Tel Aviv) and Talamh (Lanarkshire).

Finally, my parents, Ze’ev and Shifra, my sisters, Noa and If’at, and my partner, Lucy Michaels, have been there for me throughout, to offer their unconditional support. It is to them that I am ultimately indebted.

Introduction

Stirling, Scotland — July 6 2005 — 4AM. From the temporary “Hori-Zone” eco-village, where anti-G8 activists have been camping for the past week, a mass exodus is in progress. In small groups, thousands of people trek through fields and hills, making their way to the M9 motorway. It is still dark when scores of men in black riot gear emerge out of police vans to surround the eco-village, but most of its inhabitants have already made it to the tarmac — now dragging branches and bricks onto the road or staging mass sitdowns. The intention: to block delegates, staff and workers from arriving at the prestigious Gleneagles hotel, the G8 summit venue. Meanwhile, emerging from within the camp, a remaining five hundred protesters begin pushing their way through one police line after another, on their way to the motorway. Some use a “battering ram” made of large inflated tyre-liners. Others convince lines of riot police to retreat by pelting stones at their large transparent plastic shields. As reinforcements rush to the scene, the celebratory defacement of corporate retail outlets quickly ends in favour of a rush to the motorway. Then news arrives that the railway approach to Gleneagles has been disabled — the tracks raised off the ground with a compressor, tyres set aflame as warning.

Meanwhile on the M9, police remove one group of protesters from the motorway, only to have another group blockade it a few hundred metres down. At that point, all access roads to Gleneagles from the north and southeast are simultaneously blockaded by six affinity groups, targeting the most obvious pressure-points for transport. There is no exit from Perth or Crieff, and American and Japanese delegates are forced to turn back at Kinkell Bridge and Yetts o’ Muckhart. Small groups of people, who have been lying low near their targets overnight, now lie on the tarmac linked through metal arm-tubes, or attached to an obstructing vehicle. Tactics developed through two decades of anti-roads protests and resistance to forest clearing are now creating long queues of vehicles around Scotland delaying the start of the meeting of the leaders of the seven most industrialised nations of the world and Russia.

A leaflet distributed earlier that week at the “Make Poverty History” march in Edinburgh, its text reproduced here, explains the blockaders’ motivations:

Make History: Shut Down the G8 The G8 have shown time and time again that they are unable to do anything but further the destruction of this world we all share. Can we really believe that the G8 will “Make Poverty History” when their only response is to continue their colonial pillage of Africa through corporate privatisation? Can we expect them to tackle climate change when whether or not it is a serious problem is up for debate, as their own leaked documents show? Marching is only the first step. More is needed as marches are often ignored: think back to the megamarches against the Iraq war. The G8 need to be given a message they can’t ignore. They can’t ignore us blocking the roads to their golf course, disrupting their meeting and saying with our bodies what we believe in — a better world. However, we don’t need to ask the G8 to create a better world. We can start right now, for example, with thousands of people converging together to demonstrate practical solutions to global problems in an eco-village off the road to Gleneagles — based on co-operation and respect for the planet. Starting today we can take responsibility for our actions and the world we will inherit tomorrow. We can all make history.

The G8 blockades represent only the most overt manifestation of a much wider phenomenon. The last decade, this thesis argues, has seen the full-blown resurrection of anarchism, as a recognisable social movement in its own right, with a scale, unity and diversity unseen since the 1930s. Contemporary anarchist politics represents an intriguing site of praxis and articulation. Anarchists are coming to define distinct cultural codes of political interaction and expression, in the broader polity but no less so in their own organising and human relations. The site in which these codes are reproduced, exchanged and undergo mutation and critical reflection is the locus of anarchism as a movement — a context in which many very active political subjects can say the word “we” and understand roughly the same thing — a collective identity constructed around an affirmed common path of thinking and doing. Anarchists are also possessed of a rapidly evolving conceptual ensemble for explaining their politics to themselves and to others, one which is nuanced and, in its own way, coherent — while leaving a great deal of room for disagreement and indiscipline. Nonetheless, contemporary anarchism has received very scant academic attention — a handful of papers, one or two anthologies, and several recent, unpublished doctoral dissertations. This establishes the space for a broad, exploratory study of contemporary anarchism — as a movement, culture, ideology and theory — elements which are inseparable.

This introduction begins by briefly spelling out some of the baseline understandings about contemporary anarchism suggested in the thesis, all of which will be elaborated and supported in the coming chapters. The discussion of methodological issues is then initiated, by presenting the relationship between the two research agendas informing the present study — an investigation of anarchism as a movement (with its political culture, history and ideology) and interventions in anarchist political theory. Third, I elaborate the methodological approach by making the case for an integration of engaged, participatory research methods with political theory. I finally review the concrete research stages undertaken, and discuss the issues of reliability, engagement and scholarly distance raised by activist scholarship.

Contemporary Anarchism: A first look

The contemporary anarchist movement is “new” in the key sense that it does not form a continuity with the workers’ and peasants’ anarchist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — which met its demise under European Bolshevism and Fascism and the American Red Scare. Rather, it represents the revival of anarchist politics over the past decade in the intersection of several other movements, including radical ecology, feminism, black and indigenous liberation, anti-nuclear movements and, most recently, resistance to neoliberal capitalism and the “global permanent war”. Because of its hybrid genealogy, anarchism in the age of globalisation is a very fluid and diverse movement, evolving in a rapidly-shifting landscape of social contention.

The architecture of today’s anarchist movement can be described as a decentralised network of communication, coordination and mutual support among autonomous nodes of social struggle. Lacking any one centre or permanent channels of interaction, this architecture has been likened to that of a “rhizome” — the stemless, bulbous root-mass of plants like potato or bamboo — a structure based on principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity and non-linearity (Cleaver 1998, Sheller 2000, Adams 2002a, Chesters 2003, Jeppesen 2004a. The metaphor is borrowed from the discussion of knowledge in Deleuze and Guattari 1987:7–13).

What animates these rhizomatic networks, and infuses them with content, is anarchism as a political culture, a shared orientation towards ways of “doing politics” that is manifest in common forms of organisation (anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical, consensus-based); in a common repertoire of political expression (direct action, constructing alternatives, community outreach, confrontation); in a common discourse (keywords, narratives, arguments and myths); and in more broadly “cultural” shared features (dress, music, diet).

Implicit in all the cultural codes propelling anarchist activity are the more abstract “political” statements of anarchism. These are also framed explicitly in representative artefacts of the movement’s political language, such as the “hallmarks” or “principles of unity” that activist groups employ, which form the basis for an ideological analysis of anarchism. These statements generally emphasise two themes. First, a rejection of “all forms of domination”, a phrase encapsulating the manifold social institutions and dynamics – most aspects of modern society, in fact – which anarchists seek to uncover, challenge, erode, perhaps overthrow. It is this generalisation of the target of revolutionary struggle from “state and capital” to “domination” that most distinctly draws contemporary anarchism apart from its earlier generations. Second, we find references to an ethos of “prefigurative politics” whereby liberatory aspirations are to be activated “inwardly” in the movement’s everyday praxis. Reflecting the do-it-yourself approach animating anarchists’ action repertoires, the ethos of prefigurative politics thus combines both dual power strategies (building grassroots alternatives that are to “hollow out” capitalism), and the stress on realising libertarian and egalitarian social relations within the fold of the movement itself.

What anarchist ideological expression overwhelmingly lacks, on the other hand, are detailed prognostic statements on a desired future society. This does not mean that anarchism is merely destructive, but that its constructive aspects are expected to be articulated in the present-tense experimentation of prefigurative politics – not as an apriori position. This lends anarchism a strongly open-ended dimension, whereby it eschews any notion of a “post-revolutionary resting point”. Instead, anarchists have come to transpose their notion of social revolution to the present-tense. Non-hierarchical, anarchic modes of interaction are no longer seen as features on which to model a future society, but rather as an ever-present potential of social interaction here and now – a “revolution in everyday life” (Vaneigem 2001/1967).

While the foregoing points represent the broad consensus at the back of anarchist organising, the movement has also been the site of a great deal of introspective debates, dilemmas and controversies. The most prominent and recalcitrant among these are discussions around “internal hierarchies” or “leadership” in the movement; debates on the definition, justification and effectiveness of violence; on anarchist positions around technology and modernity; and an emerging set of dilemmas around international solidarity and support for the “national liberation” struggles of peoples in the majority world. Whereas the investigation of anarchist political culture and its ideational components is an interpretative task of clarification, the debates and controversies just mentioned call for a more interventionist approach, located in the enterprise of developing anarchist political theory.

Two Agendas

The present thesis, then, is motivated by two linked research agendas:

The study of a particular political culture Interventions in a particular genre of political theory

These take turns in the front seat in each part of the thesis. Beyond the possibilities and challenges of each separate agenda, it is argued that that the two are not only complementary but inseparable. Let me first say something about each.

The first agenda is inquisitive and exploratory, and involves making sense of contemporary anarchism as a political phenomenon. Such an enterprise essentially sets out to provide an analysis of the anarchist movement in its various aspects, suggesting a theoretical working environment in which intelligent connections can be made among its many different manifestations. Key tasks in this respect are a) enriching our analysis of the movement’s network architecture, of the networks’ constituent nodes, and of the cultural logics that animate them; b) suggesting a reconstruction of the movement’s recent genealogy and sources of influence, as well as its relationship with the “historical” anarchist movement; and c) making sense of the way in which anarchists make sense of themselves: mapping the ideological world which anarchists create and reproduce, and the epistemologies that they generate in the course of political engagement. These topics are examined, in turn, in the first three chapters of the thesis.

The second agenda involves a more sustained concern with the topics of anarchist debate and controversy mentioned above. In addressing these, the first task is one of disentangling – differentiating between different aspects of a discussion, identifying patterns whereby speakers tend to argue at cross-purposes, pointing to confused uses of the same concept in different senses, and putting the finger on questions which are the most relevant and meaningfully-debatable ones. From this follows the second task, which is to suggest directions for the reconstruction of certain debates, formulate substantive arguments of my own, and ask whether and how the conclusions can be seen to filter back into anarchism’s cultural codes. The five chapters in the second part of the thesis are structured around these efforts, one theme at a time.

Presented in this way, there are two directions in which the relationship among these two agendas can be seen to proceed. One is to view the second agenda as a possible extension of the first one. The interest in anarchism remains driven by exploratory curiosity, but is allowed to spill over into the realm of conceptual argumentation. The anarchist movement, on this reading, is to be recognised as one of the many grassroots settings in which political thinking – indeed, political theorising – takes place. As a result, anarchist debates and controversies on a particular theme are approached with attention to the conceptual tensions and reconfigurations that they express, in order to unlock important processes of political thinking as they unfold in the hyper-modern public sphere. Having established an understanding of the cultural logics at work within the contemporary anarchist movement, we may further undertake an exercise in political debate from an anarchist perspective in order to follow how activists’ ideas are expressed, transmitted and reformulated through continuous process of discursive exchange.

More broadly, the political culture / political theory nexus suggested here can be seen as a sample of a more broadly proposed corrective to much of the accepted methodological corpus of academic political theory. Such a perspective suggests that political reasoning must take into account the real conditions of politics, in terms of defining its questions and debates, as well as in terms of integrating questions of practical implementation into its fold. While for mainstream political theory this would mean policy, legislation or constitutional change, the real world with which anarchist reasoning is concerned is that of extra-legal activity for social transformation.

Another possibility, however, sees the second, interventionist or prescriptive agenda, as an end in itself – and thus as perhaps primary to the first one, in terms of the researcher’s own interests and of its significance to providing an enriched approach to anarchist politics. On such an approach, the first agenda now takes on an auxiliary role, being viewed as a necessary preliminary to more argumentative thinking. From chapter 4 onwards, then, the reader is invited to provisionally adopt an anarchist frame of assumptions, and see what happens when we “run with it”, in application to a number of themes. To be sure, the possibility for any intervention in an explicitly anarchist theoretical debate depends on its grounding in a prior acceptance of some anarchist assumptions. While I present this framework in some elaboration, I do not argue for its validity as such. My purpose in this thesis is not to add anything new to “the case for anarchism”, which has already been presented exhaustively in two centuries of anarchist literature, and has received substantial treatment and reinforcement, from different angles, in academic political theory (Wolff 1971, Taylor 1976, Ritter 1980, Taylor 1982, Brown 1993, Carter 2000). My aim in this thesis is different. Instead of taking a universalist foundation to argue for anarchist conclusions, I intend to take the discussion to a more advanced level, beginning from some anarchist assumptions and opening up debates that only arise from within them. Thus, in the second part, the grounding of argumentation in a previous analysis of political culture allows the elaboration of contemporary themes in anarchist theory to reflect more genuinely the debates, mentalities and language of the anarchist movement, to be found in anarchists’ everyday actions and utterances.

The present thesis should thus further be distinguished from previous academic works on anarchism, such as those cited above. While I do not mean to question the validity or rigour of these enterprises as such, the issue I take with them all is that they proceed in complete detachment from the realities of the anarchist movement, resulting in theoretical interventions that have no direct resonance the actual debates in which anarchists engage in the course of their political activity. The explosive growth, and deepening of, discussion in anarchist circles recently, which has been touching on a multitude of issues and espousing original and sophisticated perspectives, has received little if any recognition from academic writers. Alan Ritter quite typically sees the “gist of anarchism” represented in the works of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin,

whose contributions to anarchist theory are universally [sic] regarded as most seminal. These writers, who succeeded each other within the discretely bounded period between the French and Russian Revolutions, worked out a coherent set of original arguments, which, while continuing to be influential, have not developed much since Kropotkin’s time. Hence, to comprehend anarchism as a political theory, the writings of more recent anarchists need not be considered. (Ritter 1980:5)

Such an approach would have been hard to justify even twenty five years ago, when anarcha-feminism and ecological approaches to anarchism were already well developed. Today it would be outrageous, in view of the sheer explosion of anarchist activity and its accompanying reflection, which are readily available for sourcing and discussion if one knows where to look. Still, even in some of the most recent writing, the assumptions and sources for discussion remain either those of nineteenth and early-twentieth century anarchists (Ward 2005), or stipulative claims which are entirely insensitive to what contemporary anarchists actually think and write (Sheehan 2003). As Jason McQuinn, editor of the most widely-read American anarchist journal argues, “the void in the development of anarchist theory since the rebirth of the milieu in the 1960s has yet to be filled by any adequate new formulation of theory and practice powerful enough to end the impasse and catch the imaginations of the majority of contemporary anarchists in a similar manner to Bakunin’s or Kropotkin’s formulations in the nineteenth century” (McQuinn 2004).

In engaging primarily with contemporary anarchist sources, both written and oral, I therefore attempt a discussion of anarchism that brings the topic up to date, reflecting the very real developments that have been taking place therein over the past years, and approaching perennial anarchist issues through a new perspective.

Between Philosophy and Participatory Research

The recognition of the importance of an activism-grounded approach for “doing” political theory extends beyond the specific interest in anarchism. Writing about environmental political theory, Avner De-Shalit has recently argued for essentially the same type of enterprise. In order to be not only interesting but also relevant, he argues, a political theory should “start with the activists and their dilemmas...It is therefore a theory that reflects the actual philosophical needs of the activist seeking to convince by appealing to practical issues”. Although s/he may take side with the broad agenda of environmental activists, “the philosopher should not take the value of the activists’ claims for granted; their intuitions, arguments, claims, and theories should also be scrutinized. However, the fact that they need to be critically examined does not affect the main point: that the activists’ intuitions, claims, and theories ought to be the starting point for a philosophy aimed at policy change”. Procedurally, this means that the theorist “studies the intuitions and theories that exist within the given society and analyses ‘popular’ theories with a view to refining them” (De-Shalit 2000:29–31). By bringing the (often conflicting) views of activists to a high level of articulation, the theorist can construct a discussion where the activists’ debates can be undertaken in a more precise and clear way, with attention to detail and a coherent thread of argument. The role of the theorist, on this score, is to partake in and facilitate the reflexive process of theorising among activists, functioning as a clarifier, organiser and articulator of ideas, an activity that takes place with and for activists. Her or his goal is to address, in theoretical form, the issues that activists face in their everyday organising, to assemble ideas so that they can be discussed carefully, to lay open hidden assumptions and contradictory statements, and in general to advance activists’ thinking by transposing it from the fragmented terrain of brief and informal debate to a dimension where a more structured and “high definition” discussion can be undertaken – to the written page.

While the gist of this approach is very close to the type of theorising activity that I am proposing here, one aspect of it is not sustainable for application to the present context. Clearly anarchist theory is not geared towards underpinning “policy change”, which inevitably means change through the state. Rather, the goal is to underpin various forms of grassroots action that take place outside and as-against the state. This observation does not invalidate De-Shalit’s basic approach, that is, the grounding of theory in the ideas of activists. What it does do, however, is to shift our understanding of what these needs may be. The anarchist theorist’s engagement with the “popular” argumentation of activists has the goal, not of helping anarchists articulate better arguments that they can use to influence the political process, but to improve their understanding of the issues that guide them in the project of transforming society without recourse to the state.

This aspect of De-Shalit’s meta-theory can be criticised along more general lines. In essence he seems to be taking on board, quite uncritically, what I would consider to be some very naïve assumptions about the way in which politics actually functions. The rationale that underlies his account is that the purpose of theory is to equip activists with arguments with which they then enter into a presumably open and free arena of public debate. Here, success in “convincing” other members of the public is, in turn, understood as automatically translating into policy changes. This can only be because this “public” is supposed to have a deciding influence over what the state does. Such an orientation seems to inhabit, along with much of contemporary political theory, some kind of dream-land in which there are no such things as systematic collusion and revolving doors between political and corporate elites, professional lobbyists and millionaire donors, manipulative news channels, and governments which lie to the public about anything from the dangers of GM crops to the existence of weapons of mass-destruction in oil-rich countries. If a political theory really wants to have an impact in the real political world, it should at least take on board some empirical consideration of what that world actually looks like, instead of assuming that the theorist is embedded in a well-functioning democratic polity. This assumption is not very widely shared among De Shalit’s own audience of environmental activists.

It could also be asked whether it is really the province of theory to convince the public of the appropriateness or viability of a political position, whether anarchism or De-Shalit’s democratic and socialist environmentalism. What convinces people much more effectively than theory is ideological communication: propaganda, slogans, cartoons and, perhaps more than anything, the living practice of activists which the latter use directly to inspire people by way of example (this is what anarchists call “propaganda by deed”). It may be seriously doubted whether anyone has ever been “won over” to a political position on the strength of a well-constructed argument or appealing theory. It is much more likely – and in fact confirmed by what can be observed among activists – that people come into their positions on the basis of a much more personal process, which takes place not only on an intellectual/theoretical level but also on the basis of emotion, conviction and belief – elements of ideology which need to be taken into account in constructing a “relevant” philosophy that can truly impact social agendas.

A final issue to be taken with De-Shalit’s account is more strictly methodological: his highly valuable approach to “doing” political theory does not come with the custommade toolkit that is obviously required for accessing the theories of activists. How is the theorist supposed to know what activists are saying? Where does s/he reach to in order to source the “popular” theories, arguments and debates which are supposed to form the basis for discussion? Although he continuously emphasises the need to do so, De-Shalit never actually spells out how. This lacuna has some serious consequences: in the remainder of his book, he mostly disregards the very activists whose theories are so dear to him, and remains largely in the terrain of professional academic sources. There are a great deal of quotations from environmental ethicists, political theorists and other academics, and a very occasional reference to “environmentalists” such as ex-Green figurehead Jonathon Porritt, German Green politician Rudolph Bahro and similar individuals who have either never been, or are no longer, genuine representatives of grassroots environmentalism. The real criterion for inclusion in the debate is not whether an activist’s argument is valuable, but whether it appears in a recognised publication.

The present thesis employs a strategy in which the philosopher / researcher more fully participates in the movement being studied and theorised with. It is argued that a participatory strategy provides the most adequate and enriching access to activists’ cultural codes of praxis, ideology, theories and debates.

This type of theorising has clear resonances with Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “organic intellectual”. According to Gramsci, each social group that comes into existence creates within itself one or more strata of intellectuals that gives it meaning, that helps it bind together and function. These intellectuals can be attached both to the ruling class – as managers, civil servants, clergy, teachers, technicians, lawyers etc. – but may also rise out of the oppositional sections of society. Gramsci maintains that not only should a significant number of “traditional” intellectuals come over to the revolutionary cause (Marx, Lenin and Gramsci himself were examples of this) but also that the working class movement should produce its own organic intellectuals. He goes on to point out that “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded” and that everyone, outside their particular activity, “carries on some form of intellectual activity...participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought” (Gramsci 1971/1926).

What is relevant here is not Gramsci’s reified notion of social classes, nor his integration of the organic intellectual into an authoritarian-Marxist framework – the “counter-hegemonic” project culminating in the seizure of state power. Rather, what can be stressed here is the embeddedness of the organic intellectual in a particular liberatory milieu towards which s/he remains responsive. Hence the process of generating anarchist theory itself has to be dialogical, in the sense that both the people whose ideas and practices are examined, and the people who are going to be formulating theory on their basis, have to be involved in the process of theorising. Only from this dialogical connectedness can the anarchist theorist draw the confidence to speak. On one statement, the voice of the intellectual should no longer come “from above, but from within” (Gullestad 1999; cf. Jeppesen 2004b).

We may now give this basic impetus further grounding, and concrete tools for application, by appealing to a set of methodological orientations that have been developed primarily for empirical social research but which can be applied, with some modification, to political theory as well. What I have in mind is the emerging tradition of Participatory Action Research or Co-operative Inquiry. These concepts are interchangeable umbrella terms, referring to research strategies where a horizontal approach to the generation of knowledge is adopted. The rigid separation between researcher and researched is dissolved in favour of an approach whereby good research cannot be done on people but must be done with them. PAR/CI strategies also emphasise the emancipatory potential of the collective generation of knowledge, which not only legitimates but valorises a socially-committed orientation in intellectual endeavours.

PAR/CI integrates diverse emancipatory and grassroots approaches to learning, including contributions of indigenous cultures, communities in the global South, radical pedagogues and philosophers, ecological practitioners and egalitarian, feminist and antiracist social movements (Freire 1970, Feyerabend 1970, Birnbaum 1971, Touraine et.al 1983a, 1983b, Rosaldo 1989). Reason and Bradbury (2001:1) provide a preliminary definition of PAR as “a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes”. PAR is thus an overtly “engaged” methodological orientation, grounded in an emancipatory ethos that fosters recognition of grassroots actors’ ability to create valuable knowledge and practice. In keeping with the emphasis of PAR on inquiry as empowerment, specific research methodologies take second place to the emergent processes of collaboration and dialogue which empower, motivate, increase self esteem, and develop solidarity.

One of the antecedents to PAR/CI in the field of sociology is the work of Alain Touraine and his fellow researchers, who studied French anti-nuclear mobilisations and the Solidarity movement in Poland (Touraine et.al, 1983a 1983b). Defining his method as “sociological intervention”, Touraine explains that the technique involves “opening up” a group in a social movement “so that it can experience, in conditions which one might describe as experimental, the practices of the social group or movement to which it sees itself as belonging”. The researcher “start[s] from the position that the behaviour being observed must be considered inseparable from the body of meanings which the actors attribute to that behaviour”. On the basis of the comments of invited external interlocutors (i.e., the researchers) in the group’s discussions, the activists “embark on a process of self-analysis which is impossible in ordinary circumstances because of the pressure of decisions to be taken and, indeed, the pressure of the organisation itself”. The group of activists, in this technique, comes to “analyse its own practices and those of the movement of which it is a part on the basis of the hypotheses introduced by the researches, which may, of course, be accepted or rejected”. A hypothesis is judged satisfactory if, accepted by the group, it “increases intelligibility and clarifies relationships between members” and “if the group can use it to return to action, to understand both its own initiatives and the responses of its partners. This return towards social practice we have called permanent sociology” (Touraine et.al 1983a:7).

The role of the academic, then, is not simply that of an expert observer but primarily one of an enabler or facilitator, and the role of the participants is one of co-researcher. However, two differences remain. The first is that in the present thesis, the research is done not with any particular group but is rather situated in the more fluid and transient field of anarchist movement. This is both necessary and appropriate given the networked structures in which anarchist political articulation takes place. A parallel might be drawn here with techniques used in ethnographic research, incorporating what George Marcus calls “multi-sited” ethnography, which “moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space” (Marcus and Fischer 1999:96). Second, in Touraine’s model the researcher remains an intervening outsider, whereas this thesis works with a more decidedly participatory agenda wherein the movement is studied not only in interviews and group discussions, but by inhabiting it as a social environment – through close involvement in movement activities and in the reproduction of its cultural codes.

Recently, anthropologist David Graeber has described an approach to anarchist social theory, which has some resonance with the present work (Graeber 2004:5–6). In addition to the initial assumption that “another world is possible”, he also thinks that “any anarchist social theory would have to self-consciously reject any trace of vanguardism”. What this means is that the role of the anarchist theorist is not to arrive at the “correct strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow”. The point, rather, is to answer the needs of anarchists for theoretical expression on the issues that concern them, and “offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities – as gifts” (10–12).

To add a point here, it is unsurprising that the bulk of recognised “anarchist theorists” were first and foremost committed activists, anarchist militants who were deeply involved in the social struggles of the day and whose theorising work was inseparable from their engagement in action. Mikhail Bakunin, who constantly struggled in writing with the moment of spontaneous rebellion, was himself a permanent fixture in almost every European uprising and insurrection of the mid-nineteenth century (Bakunin 1871, Nettlau 1886–1990, Mendel 1981). Peter Kropotkin who wrote extensively about the possibilities for the practical realisation of anarchist social forms was also a tireless organiser in mutual-aid groups, working with the revolutionary Jura federation and closely involved in the everyday activities of workers’ movements in France and England as well as his native Russia (Kropotkin 1988/1899, Woodcock and Avakumovic 1971). Errico Malatesta, who dedicated so many pages to questions of organisation and revolutionary strategy, himself took part in an armed insurrection attempt in Campania, and organised strikes and factory occupations in Milano and Torino (Malatesta 1965, Nettlau 1924, Fabbri 1936). Emma Goldman not only made theoretical contributions to feminism, anti-militarism and direct action but actively campaigned for birth control, set up anti-conscription leagues, and purchased the gun with which Alexander Berkman shot industrialist strike-breaker Henry Clay Frick (Goldman 1970/1931, Shulman 1971, Wexler 1984). Rudolf Rocker, the major theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, helped sweatshop workers organise in London and New York, was a founder of the German Freie Arbeiter Union and the first secretary of the International Workers Association, the coordinating body for anarcho-syndicalist unions (Rocker 1956, Grauer 1997). Gustav Landauer, who made significant contributions to the communitarian and spiritual underpinnings of anarchist theory, was repeatedly jailed for civil disobedience and played a major role in the short-lived Munich Workers’ Republic where he met his violent death (Lunn 1973). The list goes on and on, encompassing not only what later commentators have constructed as the “cynosure” of the anarchist theoretical firmament but also the bulk of its “bright but lesser lights” – figures such as Emile Armand, Voltarine de-Cleyre, Johann Most, Luigi Galleani, Louise Michel, Ricardo Flores Magon, Gaston Leval, Voline, Diego Abad de Santillan, Sam Dolgoff, Federica Montseny – a rollcall of anarchist activist-theorists. In sum, the anarchist enterprise of theory and study has traditionally retained a close relationship to its authors’ activities as militants, with their writings coming in direct response to the unfolding circumstances of anarchist revolutionary efforts.

This type of theorising activity is, I think, part of what makes the anarchist tradition unique, or at least distinct, particularly from orthodox Marxism. To think like a Marxist is, first and foremost, to adopt an ontology and epistemology (dialectical materialism, class analysis), then to read off any political consequences from that basis. To think like an anarchist is, first and foremost, to adopt a certain orientation to doing politics, while acknowledging that a plurality of ontological and epistemological frameworks can fit in with it. This is part of why traditional Marxist theory has trouble addressing the political per se, without reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon of systematic social dynamics that operate behind people’s backs. This is also why it is equally easy to characterise the “anarchist tradition” as materialist (Bakunin), idealist (Stirner), both, or neither.

Following on from these considerations, we may posit three broad stages of theoretical research that can be offered as a structure for initiating and engaging in a collaborative inquiry into anarchist theory. These remarks assume that an individual activist/philosopher is at work, but they are equally relevant for undertaking the same enterprise in a small group.

The first stage (or initial condition) is that of immersion: in order to have access to the theories and arguments that anarchists employ, and which will become the initial building-blocks for analysis, the philosopher either begins from the position of being native to the anarchist movement, or undergoes a process of going native – in any case with the result that s/he is situated seamlessly within its networks and fora. The advantages and pitfalls of such an insiders’ position is discussed below.

The second stage is that of absorption: the philosopher continuously participates in actions, meetings and discussions, closely following the process of anarchist political articulation which has by now become a frame of reference with which s/he has a great degree of intimacy. This stage can be expected to be the most protracted one, with a constant influx of ideas into the philosopher’s emerging framework, and a continuous process of refining the way in which ideas are positioned and connected in the researcher’s own mind. The process can happen initially in an unstructured manner, from the position of observation and non-intervention. However, what can also be expected from this stage is that the philosopher will eventually encounter a number of recalcitrant debates which anarchists continuously return to, thus identifying what are the most valuable and relevant topics of theoretical inquiry. At a more advanced period of this stage, therefore, it can also take the form of the philosopher initiating focused discussions on a particular topic among activists — whether in personal dialogue with numerous activists, or at seminars and workshops (at activist gatherings or in the run-up to mass mobilisations, for example). To all of this is added an informed and contextualised discussion of relevant arguments and approaches provided in anarchist and non-anarchist texts.

The third stage is that of integration, which parallels the “writing up” process of the philosophical output. Here, the activist/philosopher takes a step back from the process of absorption, and undertakes their own exercise of arranging the ideas that they have encountered in a more structured manner on the written page. This stage can, in principle, take place when the philosopher feels that s/he has reached a certain point of saturation, when further discussions that s/he observes and participates in are yielding diminishing returns – the arguments and theories are now familiar and rarely is something new heard. In the production of theoretical output, then, there are two major things that the activist/philosopher can do. The first is to give elaborate articulation to points that are judged to enjoy broad consensus in anarchist movement, taking ideas and concepts over which there seems to be an intuitive agreement among activists and rendering more complex the way in which they are understood. The philosopher can tease out the way in which concepts are used in general free-form discussion, clarify the sources of agreement over them, and translate this consensus into a more comprehensive account. The consensus can, of course, also be challenged, or the philosopher may discover that it leads to some conclusions that activists have yet to consider.

A second function is to engage with particular areas of contention within anarchism, mapping out the different arguments that are made in their context and spelling out the background of social action against which the controversy occurs. In addressing anarchist debates, then, the first task is one of disentangling – differentiating between different aspects of a discussion, identifying patterns whereby speakers tend to argue at crosspurposes, pointing to confused uses of the same concept in different senses, and putting the finger on questions which are the most relevant and meaningfully-debatable ones. From this follows the second task, which is to suggest directions for the reconstruction of certain debates, to formulate substantive arguments of one’s own, and to ask whether and how the conclusions can be seen to filter back into anarchism’s cultural codes. In such a capacity the theoretical intervention does not necessarily involve taking a position within the debate as it is currently structured – the goal can also be to intervene in the way in which the debate itself is structured, questioning the assumptions regarding its parameters and what we are having the debate for.

Finally, the anarchist philosopher may reach tentative judgements within a certain debate, offering a view that sees some positions as more attractive than others, and making substantative arguments which are then fed back into the ongoing dialogue within the anarchist movement.

Before discussing reliable judgement and scholarly distance in participatory research, let me outline the research process undertaken in this thesis. The strategy has involved five years of embedded research with anarchist activists involved in anticapitalist and anti-war activities, which allowed me to be part of diverse local campaigns and projects, discussion groups, as well as mass mobilizations and actions. In Oxford, I have been situated within the local anarchist network, which has grown through numerous direct action campaigns, from anti-corporate campaigning since 2000 through the mobilisation against the Iraq war in 2003, and whose members developed the local Independent Media Centre and now effectively run the East Oxford Community Centre. On the UK level I have participated in the anti-authoritarian process organising for May Day actions and anti-war demonstrations, and in the Dissent! network resisting the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland. On the European level, I have engaged in participant observation at protest mobilisations in Nice (EU, December 2000), Genoa (G8, July 2001), Brussels (EU, December 2001), Barcelona (EU, March 2002), Oslo (World Bank, June 2002) and Evian (G8, June 2003). I also travelled to several international activist gatherings, including the Strasbourg No Border Camp (July 2002), the Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) European Conference in Leiden (September 2002) and the European Social Forum in Firenze (November 2002) and London (November 2004). In addition, I took part in ongoing networking activities as part of Oxford and UK-based campaigns, PGA, the European Social Consulta (ESC) project, and the social forum process. To further trace transnational connections, I have been maintaining contact with anarchist activity in the United States and Canada through continuous email correspondence with activists, monitoring of North American anarchist websites, independent media and discussion e-lists, and meetings with American organisers who regularly arrive in Europe for protests or speaking tours.

I have been constantly following and making notes of the debates that I encountered among activists in all of the groupings and fora mentioned above, as well as monitoring English and Spanish-language email lists and web discussion groups. In the process of doing so, I have encountered what I believe are the key debates that are endemic to contemporary anarchist movements, which are reflected in the selection of chaptertopics in the second part. I have also initiated second-order discussions, that have focused not on collecting primary material but on the developing analysis and arguments in this thesis, whether in personal dialogue with numerous activists, or at workshops I led during gatherings of the UK Earth First! network, PGA Europe and the local anarchist milieu in Oxford. These were in the format of 1–2 hour seminars with up to 30 activists, in which feedback was received concerning my developing approach to anarchism as a political culture (a term that some activists seem to have picked up) and anarchist conceptualisations of ideas such as domination and prefigurative politics. To all of this is added an informed and contextualised discussion of relevant arguments and approaches provided in anarchist texts (see below), from books and essays to flyers, brochures, and web-based news and opinion postings. This dissertation, therefore, specifically involves a combination of accumulated understanding gained by first-hand experience and discussions with activists, a critical reading of anarchist and nonanarchist texts, and expository argumentation.

Discussion

One of the inherent challenges of research on anarchism lies in approaching issues of reliability and of valid documents and arguments. The participant approach undertaken here, it is argued, can generate more confidence in the authenticity of the behaviours and utterances observed by the researcher. As Sociologist Maxine Baca Zinn notes, especially with minority cultures or marginalized constituencies, participant research is “less apt to encourage distrust and hostility, and the experience of being excluded…from communities, or of being allowed to “see” only what people…want [the researcher] to see. People in minority communities have developed so many self-protective behaviors form dealing with outsiders, that it is quite reasonable to question whether many real behaviors and meanings are accessible to outsiders...who often lack insight into the nuances of behavior” (Baca Zinn 1979:212)

Slightly more complex is the issue of texts. There is a great deal of anarchist literature out there – in books, pamphlets and on the web. A stroll through the yearly London Anarchist Bookfair uncovers four broad categories:

Informational books, booklets and pamphlets on contemporary issues and struggles (from the Zapatistas and climate change to squatting and campaigns against GMOs), including recent commentary from Chomsky, Zinn, Said, etc.;

Older literature – anarchist, Marxist and libertarian-left “classics”;

Underground music CDs and material on cultural alternatives (from punk to drugs to earth-based spirituality);

Many self-published, photocopied or cheaply-printed booklets and ‘zines (pronounced as in “magazines” or “fan-zines”), normally in A5 format. These include a mix of essays, action reports, comics, short stories, poetry, and do-it-yourself guides on anything from women’s health to bicycle repair. Almost all pieces in these ‘zines are undated, and are written anonymously, collectively or under a pseudonym.

This last class of materials is highly absorbing, since it is the most grassroots expression of the contemporary anarchist movement and thus offers as an intriguing vista into its political culture. But such materials do not lend themselves to straightforward selection – how is one to determine to what degree a text is relevant and influential? Also, a great deal of anarchist articulation takes place on the web, with literally hundreds of web-sites dedicated to news, announcements and polemics from an anarchist perspective available for consideration by the engaged theorist. However, without any pre-set markers, how can the researcher know whether a certain anarchist group, ideological configuration or set of arguments that we encounter on the web is in any way representative or influential? Since anyone with minimal web-publishing skills and access to a server can set up a website and publish whatever they want on it, it is very easy to present a great deal of material in an attractive set-up, that would give the impression of prominence and importance, where in fact the articulation is misleadingly “louder” on the web than it is in reality. This can cause an especially misleading impression regarding the importance of groups who officially identify as anarchosyndicalist. Contrast the impression of clout given by the website of the Industrial Workers of the World (www.iww.org) – historically one of the largest and most important organs of anarchist unionism – and its U.S. membership of 983 comrades as of June 2004. The participatory approach is crucial when addressing these issues. Without an embedded presence in anarchist networks, the theorist may be led to vastly misguided judgments about the relative importance of various anarchist ideas and tendencies – resulting in an academic account that has little to do with reality. This establishes the importance of the much richer orientation available to the observing participant, who encounters the movement and its culture as a habitus, rather than as an “other” mediated by and limited to the texts it produces.

This is not to say, however, that the participant observer should just be taken on her or his word regarding such judgments on reliability, validity and relevance. There are at least three further ways in which these may be assessed: their mutual consistency, the reader’s own interpretation of the cited source-material, and other reports of participatory research undertaken in direct action movement networks (e.g. Plows 1998, Cox 1999, Wall 1999, Eguiarte 1999, Christensen 2001, Chesters and Welsh 2004, Chesters and Welsh 2005, Juris 2004).

A second challenge is that of interpretation. If this were a thesis in mainstream political theory, it would be reasonable to select some questions about which other theorists have already said something, and then pick them apart to make my own points. This would be easy, because a text that is transparent and precise, according to the conventions of discussion within the academic discipline of political theory, also provides rich pickings for criticism, as long as the rules of the Socratic game are observed. Anarchist literature does not, of course, work in the same way. This literature may include rigorous argumentation, but it is always by definition also polemical writing that can be very well-structured but rarely of a philosophical nature. Anarchist essays are written with very particular audiences in mind, often other anarchists. Materials that are intended for the general public tend to be leaflets, posters, videos and other creative media of propaganda, which address issues but rarely anarchism itself.

What is more, though there there are many very insightful, calmly argued and well thought-out essays out there, much of what one encounters in the polemical section of anarchist literature is just not very good. Though not wanting to take the comparison too far, polemical anarchist literature sometimes displays what is, according to sociologist Erik Olin Wright, part of what is “bullshit” about “bullshit Marxism”: the lack of careful debate, clarifying one’s arguments in a way open to challenge, admitting where there are gaps in one’s knowledge and understanding (interviewed in Kirby 2001). Wright reads this lack as the result of deliberate refusal, since he cannot bring himself to admit dogmatism or mere sloppiness on part of the “sophisticated intellectual[s]” who are, presumably, the only ones who still write about Marxism. For some anarchists, however, the sources of this lack within their own literature gravitate between bad faith of the sectarian and vitriolic kind, and “inarticulate ignorance”. McQuinn (2003), for example, complains of the evasion of rational discussion in the anarchist milieu, which “seems to be the worst on the web, but often it is nearly as bad elsewhere”:

It usually involves the refusal to reflect, self-critically evaluate and self-edit responses. The more unthinking, belligerent and vociferous participants tend to drive out the more thoughtful and considered opinions by making a never-ending stream of attacks, demands, and frivolous comments...In other anarchist media the evasion of discussion tends to be most obvious in the letters columns of periodicals...and in some of the rants that sometimes pass for personal, pointof-view articles. These are also formats that tend to lend themselves to those writers too irresponsible, unprepared and unself-critical to put together more coherent essays that would need to be more thoroughly thought through, more logically structured, and more self-critically examined in light of other perspectives.

McQuinn may be right, but only up to a point. To begin with, as I have said there are many well-constructed and careful arguments in anarchist polemical literature, even if they might not meet academic criteria of rigour. Second, “rants that sometimes pass for personal, point-of-view articles” is a bit condescending, since it does not acknowledge the value of a rant. Their function is not so much to provide a structured argument but to provoke, inspire, and drive through attitudes that are difficult to constrict within rational formulae. Rants may tell the commentator more about what really motivates anarchists and how they see the world around them than any piece of careful argumentation, because they also display emotions and imagination – important constituents of political actors’ cognition.

More importantly, however, McQuinn seems to be casting his net of samples much too narrowly. He may or may not be right in complaining about the level of discussion in anarchist print and web-based media, but the lack of rational discussion is far from the norm outside this media – in the oral conversations among anarchists where the bulk of discussion within the movement takes place. These oral discussions, most often in the form of casual and vernacular political conversations among activists, tend to be of a far higher quality than what McQuinn is seeing in anarchist media. They admit less “bullshit” because they are face-to-face dialogues rather than monologues. For this reason, it is extremely important for whoever wants to write about anarchism to be attentive to these oral discussions and follow them in a consistent way, so as to access a great deal of reasoned and useful arguments. Such a position also allows the theorist to witness the real-time vernacular group discussions in which such concerns are expressed, as well as the exposure to the shared narratives, beliefs and practices which are loaded with significance for theory. The attention to oral debate makes place for coping with issues of explanation and narrative building within social movements which escape other modes of validity (cf. Altheide and Johnson 1994).

This is also relevant to studying anarchism as an ideology. While it is always true that “ideology-producing groups will reflect the impact of articulate and representative individuals, who may be the effective channels that give expression to more widely held beliefs [and who] may offer an excellent illustration of a particular ideological position”, contemporary anarchism is too “young” to have yielded any obvious representatives of this kind. Thus the importance of research embedded in the movement’s vernacular discourse Furthermore, such individual’s “articulated thoughts are meaningless without an understanding of the conceptual and ideational environments which fashion them. We have to bear in mind, all the while, the relationships between those representatives and their social and cultural surrounds...the investigation of ideologies ought to examine mass, or at least large-scale, social thinking” (Freeden 1996:106).

The third and perhaps most important set of challenges raised by the ethnographic nature of participant research is the personal position of the researcher in relation to the field of study. As Hume and Mulcock point out, participant observation requires researchers to use their social selves as their primary research tool, in order to experience and understand the “insider’s” point of view. On the other hand, ethnography also calls for maintaining the type of intellectual distance that can ensure that researchers maintain their ability for critical analysis. “This means that they should be willing, and able, to take a step back from the relationships they form with the people they encounter in the field for long enough to identify and reflect upon some of the taken-for-granted rules and expectations of the social world they are studying” (Hume and Mulcock 2004:xi).

Though the more frequent concern in this context is the researcher’s outsider’s bias – primarily in her or his capacity as a member of ex- (or not-so-ex) colonialist western countries – in the present case the obverse concern is the salient one. How does the researcher who is an insider maintain sufficient distance from the object of research, and does not lose her or his critical faculty having “gone native” in the field (or having been a native to begin with)? While such a situation is relatively rare in ethnography, it has received some attention that can be brought to bear here.

In his ethnography of Croatian immigrants in Australia, Val Colic-Peisker – himself a recently-arrived Australian Croat – was clearly in an insider’s position. His research could thus draw on pre-existing networks and contacts, and on the shared language and cultural background that he and his respondents had. As a result, the process of research was, in part, inevitably autobiographical. A very similar situation obtains in the present study. My presence in anarchist circles over the course of the research was primarily as an activist, and existing / developing contacts within movement networks were an important contribution to my ability to access other activists’ practices and ideas. This raises the question of whether, and to what degree, the researcher is supposed to bring her or his own self and experiences to the process of formulating interpretative judgments. Peisker’s resolution was to “acknowledge and explore my ’positionality’ throughout the research process. In this way my own experience became a valuable heuristic tool, a source of theoretical sensitivity rather than a source of bias...Using our holistic selves in ethnography is not only a rewarding social experience but, fortunately, is increasingly acknowledged among social researchers as a legitimate scholarly approach” (91–2).

Such a position has also informed my own research. Through full participation in movement activities as an insider, I was forced to ponder over interpretative questions and substantive political controversies not only in reference to the behaviours and utterances of other activists, but also with reference to my own reflections, emotions and behaviors. Thus personal experiences and my inner life inevitably fed into the discussion, exemplified in ongoing concerns around the way in which I was wielding power in activist circles; in my experiences of post-traumatic stress in the wake of violence in Genoa; and perhaps most strongly in connection to the situation in Israel/Palestine. Far from erasing my critical faculties, however, this personal involvement imbued the critical process with a far more intense and powerful dimension – since by default it had to involve a component of self-criticism. The theoretical issues I was dealing with had to be confronted, not only for the sake of detached understanding, but also in pursuit of personal and political growth. Precisely because of this personal stake, engaging in an honest and critical discussion became a matter of direct self interest. Only by constantly pushing myself to question my assumptions and interpretations, and to avoid easy or seemingly-comfortable answers, could I generate within myself the kind of clear thinking that would address, or at least make better sense of, the very personal dilemmas and anxieties created by the issues I was discussing.

This relates to a more specific concern confronting the researcher: his political identification with the ideas of the social movement being investigated. Touraine writes:

On the one hand, if he adopts the attitude of a remote and objective observer, he cannot reach the very thing which he seeks to understand: the coldness of objectivity will hold him back from the heat of the social movement. Conversely, if he identifies with the actors’ struggle, he ceases to be an analyst and becomes nothing more than a doctrinaire ideologist; in this case, is role becomes entirely negative. The method’s response to this difficulty is to say that the researcher must identify not with the actors’ struggle in itself, but with the highest possible meaning of this struggle, which is nothing other than the social movement: the element in a struggle which challenges the general orientations of a society and of the social systems for controlling the use of the main resources, cultural and in particular economic. In this way the researcher is neither external to the group, nor identified with it; it is through him that the group will attempt to isolate, amongst the various meanings of its action, the one which challenges the central core of the society (Touraine 1983a:8, my emphasis).

Surely, however, the actively endorsed “highest possible meaning” of a given struggle is nothing else than an ideology. Touraine is using laundered language to say that he is a pro-democracy socialist, just like the members of Solidarity. He expresses his affinity with an interpretation of the struggle, which he is also satisfied that the participants share. A struggle which “challenges the general orientations of a society” etc. – this is an ideological statement if there ever was one. Another weakness here is that, if identification with the particular struggle is not allowed, then valid research is excluded for no good reason – say, a graduate student conducting research with fellow non-unionised staff and teaching assistants, during a strike in her own university. Finally, inasmuch as Touraine’s resolution is taken for what it is – an admittance of the ultimately-ideological position of the researcher with a social conscience, then the present thesis follows it. The research is geared to Touraine’s ends by definition, since anarchism is a consciously multi-issue movement, where the participants are constantly reflecting on the “highest possible meaning” of their actions (in terms of systemic change which are at least as strong as what Touraine has in mind).

It should be clarified, however, that such ideological identification with a movement does not in any necessary way handicap the observer’s faculties. Otherwise no liberal could study real-life liberal politics. The researcher’s interpretations of a movement’s cultural codes and vocabulary should not need to suffer from the fact that s/he also thinks that “another world is possible”. On the contrary: it provides an impetus to resist the temptation to present inaccurate findings in order to portray one’s own community in a positive light. This is because the most valuable “contribution” to a movement would be to point out practices and constructions of meaning of which the participants may not be aware, or which they are not keen to confront. Moreover, the substantive argumentation in the second part of the thesis includes both agreement and disagreement with various anarchists’ statements on different topics – it is precisely through the immanent critique of anarchist writing that further theoretical insight could be gained. For these reasons, I can strongly relate to the following statement from ethnographer Nancy Ramsey Tosh, a Pagan Wicca who investigated that community:

I reject the dichotomy of insider-outsider. I, along with other researchers, claim to work as neither and insider nor an outsider but as both simultaneously. Rather than viewing these roles as separate and distinct I see them as two ends of a continuum. In this theoretical stance, the role of insider or outsider is a matter of degree, not of kind. By residing in both worlds of insider and outsider, I can look at the world from the inside out and from the outside in. Insider status provides me with the insights missed by outsiders, but I must also step outside in order to explore objectively the meaning of who I am and what I study (Ramsey Tosh 2001:212)

Thus the present project, which bridges between insider’s ethnography and philosophical argumentation, makes room for a self-aware, “serious partiality” (Clifford 1986:7) which can engage with the field in a critical and disillusioned manner precisely because of the motivation to contribute to the self-awareness and reflexivity of oneself and one’s fellow activists.

Some final remarks on the integration of material and production of academic output. This final stage is where the relationship between the activist-theorist and the broader academic field comes into play. If theoretical methods driven by political commitment and guided by a theory of practice largely break down the distinction between researcher and activist during the research process, the same cannot be said for the moment of integration, when one has to confront vastly different systems of standards, awards, selection, and stylistic criteria (Routledge 1996, Fuller and Kinchin 2004). However, as far as the output of a research project is concerned, there is no reason why the formulations that an activist-theorist arrives at, during and after the process of engaged research, cannot also be presented in high-quality writing. By providing critically engaged and theoretically informed analyses generated through collective practice, this thesis aims to provide tools for the ongoing reflection of social movement participants, while remaining interesting and relevant to a broader academic audience.

Part I. Explaining Anarchism

Chapter 1: What Moves the Movement?

Anarchism as a Political Culture

What is anarchism? What does it mean to be an anarchist? Why? Because it is not a definition that can be made once and for all, put in a safe and considered a patrimony to be tapped little by little...Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, old people or children, is not something definitive: it is a stake we must play day after day. — Alfredo Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension (Catania, 1996)

This chapter suggests a fresh approach to the perennial question “What is anarchism?“. While the term is often taken from the outset to refer to a political philosophy or theory — the question, as a result, being understood to mean “what does anarchism stand for?” — the present discussion begins by asking more fundamentally what type of thing anarchism is. The interpretation proposed here addresses anarchism first and foremost as a political culture at work in social movement networks. This designation, it is argued, can offer a “thick” interpretative framework in which anarchist praxis and thinking make sense. The advantages of such a framework is that it a) pays close attention to the life-world of the participants who generate anarchism as a political phenomenon, b) may overcome many participants’ reluctance to use “anarchism” self-referentially, and c) can supply insights that the participants might not necessarily recognise or that would challenge their established point of view.

The present discussion, then, serves to establish a structural backdrop against which the rest of the thesis is to be contextualised. I begin by reflecting on the limitations of conceptions of anarchism that restrict it either to the horizons of political theory or to the applicability of historical antecedents — relating both perspectives to the anxieties among activists regarding the anarchist appellation itself. I then offer an alternative point of departure for investigation in examining anarchism from an empirical standpoint. Drawing on recent literature in social movement research, I engage in a set of approximations that seek to expose the nature of the contemporary anarchist movement. Here, I travel from an understanding of the movement’s network architecture, through an appreciation of the cultural behaviour that enables the reproduction of this network, and finally to a broader account of the political culture that animates the movement (including its ideational elements). I then analyse the antagonistic process of identity formation whereby anarchists consciously draw boundaries that differentiate their own core networks from the broader milieu of movements confronting neoliberal globalisation. Finally, I examine how the proposed categorical shift towards political culture clarifies the lingering divisions between “old-school” and “new-school” anarchist groups.

The A-word

Before approaching anarchism as a political culture, it is worth examining the limitations of alternative lenses. adequately “representative” account of anarchism without any reference to a constituent group of people. But in introducing the requirement for such reference, another difficulty immediately arises: how should the researcher define and demarcate that constituent group itself? This is particularly difficult with anarchism, given the widespread reluctance among political activists today to apply the word self-referentially. For although something that can only be called anarchism is very obviously present in the direct actions, protests, community campaigns and discourses of certain activist groups — the people whom I’d like to call anarchists in this thesis — many of them do not normally call themselves anarchists, and some actively shun the label.

There are some very obvious reasons why many of the activists I have in mind are reluctant to call themselves anarchists, even though they might be attracted to the word. As Bob Black has put it, “to call yourself an anarchist is to invite identification with an unpredictable array of associations, an ensemble which is unlikely to mean the same thing to any two people, including any two anarchists. (The most predictable is the least accurate: the bomb-thrower. But anarchists have thrown bombs and some still do)” (Black 1994:31). To begin with, then, there is the word’s active vilification: for many people the word anarchism still evokes entirely negative images of chaos, mindless violence and destruction, not least so since libertarian ideas continue to be actively demonised through the “anarchist scares” in the corporate media (Sullivan 2004, O’Connor 2001). As a result, representing anything under the banner “anarchism” tends to close people off to what activists are saying. Thus for activists who want to engage with the general public the word becomes a liability — essentially a matter of bad PR. A further point is that an explicit reference to anarchism might be seen as exclusive, one which does not admit many of the individuals and movements that activists cooperate with and with whom they have solidarity, such as peasant and indigenous movements from Asia and Latin America, who have never made reference to anarchism or to any other set of ideas rooted in a western historical experience. Finally, many activists do not want to call themselves anarchists because they don’t want to adopt any label at all. They identify with very many political and cultural threads, but believe that circumscribing their beliefs under any one “ism” is unnecessarily constricting and implies (however unjustly) that they have a fixed and dogmatic set of beliefs. In the words of one activist,

Personally I am not down with any titles, tags, or designations. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to find ways to do away with genres and borders and envelopes, so I think we are always better off if we don’t label ourselves or allow anyone to label us. Anarchy or anarchism is really something we seek and live and struggle for, so it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves (or don’t) if we are in the midst of action doing it” (Imarisha and Not4Prophet 2004).

This line of expression is related to another reason for resistance to the anarchist self-appellation. As David Graeber points out, “there are some who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they are sometimes reluctant to call themselves ‘anarchists’ for that very reason” (Graeber 2002). The reason here is the expectation that anarchism should be understood as a closely-defined “ideology”. As the authors of the popular “An Anarchist FAQ” are at great pains to argue,

Anarchism is a socio-economic and political theory, but not an ideology. The difference is very important. Basically, theory means you have ideas; an ideology means ideas have you. Anarchism is a body of ideas, but they are flexible, in a constant state of evolution and flux, and open to modification in light of new data. As society changes and develops, so does anarchism. An ideology, in contrast, is a set of “fixed” ideas which people believe dogmatically, usually ignoring reality or “changing” it so as to fit with the ideology, which is (by definition) correct. (McKay et.al. 2003 §A)

This popular notion of ideology as dogma is far removed from the approach taken in this thesis. Anarchists too construct reality according to their biases, generating a distinct political epistemology or mode of ideological thinking. Doubtlessly many anarchists do hold some judgements — “government and hierarchy are bad”, for example — to be correct by definition. The fear at the back of such statements is the atrocities committed in the name of “revolutionary” ideologies — whether socialist, fascist or fundamentalist — “the destruction of real individuals in the name of a doctrine, a doctrine that usually serves the interest of some ruling elite”. But what causes atrocities is not the doctrine itself, but its compulsory application to society through the state. Anarchists, like every other social movement, have an identifiable ideological orientation, however unstable and shifting in response to debate and selfcriticism. However, this is only one aspect of what defines the anarchist movement.

As for theory, it is questionable how far we can say that anarchism “is” a political theory in any privileged sense. Beyond the openness and diversity of perspectives within anarchism (which means it should not expected to be “a” political theory), a more basic issue is whether the way in which anarchist activists actually think and communicate can be described as theory. Writers within the anarchist tradition, classical and contemporary, have also been party to the unquestioned assumption that anarchism is primarily a matter of theory. Thus Kropotkin, in his seminal Encyclopaedia Britannica article, defines anarchism as “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government” (Kropotkin 1910 — emphasis added here and below). Emma Goldman similarly defines it as “The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law” (Goldman 1917). For Daniel Guerin anarchism is “one of the streams of socialist thought, that stream whose main components are concern for liberty and haste toabolish the State” (Guerin 1965). While Noam Chomsky says it is “an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary” (Chomsky 1996).

However, the chief problem with talking about anarchism primarily as a political theory is that, in doing so, we usher in a set of expectations that would attach themselves to any political theory. Under such a regime of expectations, anything qualifying as anarchism would have to consist in a series of claims and arguments, substantiated by logical and/or empirical reasoning, with careful attention to the use of concepts. To be sure, such an account can be provided to the most precise degree. Thus, for John Dunn (2000), a “common version of anarchism” asserts several things:

firstly, that centralized coercive power can never be justified; secondly, that it is never a precondition for organized social life; thirdly, that it never (or at least seldom) on balance has consequences more desirable than those which would follow from its absence; fourthly, that human beings who belong to a single community potentially have both the will and the capacity to cooperate with each other to whatever degree such cooperation will be necessary to serve their several (real?) interests; and fifthly, that individual communities in their turn have both the potential will and the potential capacity to cooperate with each other to the same degree.

On the surface there seems to be nothing wrong with this statement — no anarchist would disagree with any of the five assertions. The issue, however, is Dunn’s presumption that this is a “common version” of anarchism. Common where? Perhaps among the dozen or so professional philosophers who have formulated a version of anarchism that adheres to the disciplinary expectations of academic political theory. But it is hard to imagine a single self-defined anarchist who, in response to an open question about the meaning of anarchism, would annunciate this or any other roll-call of interconnected assertions. What we would hear, rather, is a combination of attitudes, opinions, emotions and outlooks — a piece of narrative rhetoric — which may cohere in the respondent’s mind but which does not conform to the expectations we would have from a theory. Bonanno may be too categorical in his statement that anarchism “is not” a political theory — inside a philosophical frame of discourse (such as this thesis) it may well be addressed and developed as political theory. However, if anarchism “is” a political theory, plain and simple, then anarchists can only be activists who endorse something that is recognisably a theory in their heads. Since none of them does, we come to the absurd conclusion that no activists are anarchists.

A response could be that, very well, activists may not independently think their anarchism in such terms, but it is enough that they will agree with the philosopher’s definition once presented to them to make it valid a-posteriori. But this still leaves us with two problems. First, although activists may not, as I said, disagree with Dunn’s statement or with other putative expositions of “anarchist principles”, they may still have good reasons to feel that the statement is too thin. While such a statement may describe a distilled version of activists’ opinions on authority, cooperation etc., it stillsays nothing about such fundamental things as their praxis or indeed their motivations — about what makes them take political action. It is easy to imagine a person who agrees with Dunn’s propositions from the comfort of an armchair; it is much harder to imagine that thousands of people would put themselves in life endangering situations, sit through endless action-planning meetings, and generally dedicate their lives to what often seems an utterly hopeless cause, just on the strength of a principled opinion. Second, falling back on the argument from a-posteriori applicability would mean that the entire anarchist movement, if there is such a thing, is suspended between existence and non-existence — an entire clan of Schrödinger’s Cats who are-and-are-not anarchists until a philosopher comes along to apply the litmus test of agreement.

A similar thing happens when David Graeber attempts to establish an explicitly “anarchist” label by appealing to historical antecedents. Writing about the presence of anarchism in the movements confronting neoliberal globalisation, he states:

I am writing as an anarchist; but in a sense, counting how many people involved in the movement actually call themselves “anarchists”, and in what contexts, is a bit beside the point The very notion of direct action, with its rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative — all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition. Anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what’s new and hopeful about it.

Here, then, is a second lens through which it is suggested anarchism might be pinned down. Moving away from theory, Graeber elects a historical perspective which links key elements in the praxis of the “more radical, direct-action end” of the movement — elements which I think he identifies correctly — to the “libertarian tradition” (clearly a synonym for anarchism, as in “libertarian socialism”). The attempt to generate an understanding of anarchism based praxis is, by itself, superior to a theory-driven definition in that it bases itself on the observable, selfgenerated political behaviour of activists rather than on statements of principle which they do not independently think. However, what enables Graeber to refer to these elements of praxis as “anarchism” is a historical logic — the activists in question are anarchists because what they do “emerges directly” from a connected thread of praxis that is labelled anarchism. In other words, guilt by association.

Such an approach remains unsatisfying. To begin with, it is extremely questionable how “direct” the connection is between the activists Graeber refers to and the anarchist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As I will argue in the next chapter, the relationship between the two in terms of social movement genealogy is in fact very subterranean and roundabout. More fundamentally, there is something suspicious about an act of identification that could be made by an external observer, and which is said to be valid for the purpose of discussion, whether or not the human beings who generate the present-day praxis see this connection themselves, or are even aware of a “libertarian tradition” in whatever terms the external observer constructs it. To be sure, there is no escaping an element of external categorisation when using language to impose order on a multitude of phenomena. But the fact that such an imposition is inevitably an act of power, even coercion, requires an anarchist speaking about anarchism to at least mitigate it in some way through an invitation to dialogue towards the people s/he is categorising, an insistence that the object of discussion includes self-conscious and reflective subjects.

Hence, a concept of anarchism is needed which the activists who it will be applied to will be prone to reclaim and embrace self-referentially. Such a concept needs to meet two basic conditions. First, it must address anarchism in terms that are immediately recognisable to many activists from their own experience, inviting them to endorse “anarchism” as an acceptable title for something with which they already identify. Second, it must explicitly make space for a lack of theoretical closure, moving instead to a framework of discussion where ideational flexibility, even ambiguity, come to be seen as necessary and even functionally-positive components. The orientation from which to elaborate such a framework should clearly be empirical rather than conceptual. Assuming that the anarchists that are “out there”, whoever they are, are not detached individuals, our attention now turns to the notion of anarchism as referring to some form of social movement.

From Networks to Political Culture

So is there really such a thing as an “anarchist movement” in the present day? In other words, can a framework be constructed to integrate the multiple sites of what we would like to define as anarchist activity into a recognisable whole? Asking such questions is especially urgent since, to date, there has been not a single attempt to analyse the organisational structures and dynamics of contemporary anarchist movement in its own right. While there exists an extensive literature on social movements in the age of globalisation, very little of it makes any reference to anarchism. Where such reference exists it is invariably couched in terms of discerning “broadly” anarchist resonances in the structures and action repertoires of these movements as a whole, rather than putting the anarchist movement specifically at the centre of analysis (Chesters 2003, Carter and Morland 2004). The task of defining and analysing the anarchist movement as it exists today is, thus, an important avenue for research for which the investigative field remains wide open for intervention.

The lack of attention to the anarchist movement as such stems, perhaps, from three main factors. The first is that we are dealing with a fairly recent phenomenon. It has only been in the recent five years or so that a recognisable anarchist movement has come to wide attention, and it should be expected that analysis would lag behind the development of its own object of investigation. The second reason is that the presence of a large part of the anarchist movement today is submerged, rather than overt. While there do exist a large number of self-defined “anarchist” organisations, the bulk of the anarchist movement operates through informal and ad-hoc political formations that have no name at all, anarchist or otherwise, and thus often evade the view of sociologists and political scientists. The third and final reason is that the emerging anarchist movement has been obscured by the broader and more polyphonic setting in which it is partially embedded — the so-called “anti-globalisation” movement (an appellation that by itself deserves some criticism) — and is difficult to separate from this broader context.

I suggest to clarify our way towards an understanding of the anarchist movement by way of a few approximations. As a point of departure, we can look at a model suggested by Fitzgerald and Rodgers (2000:578), who theorise a category of “radical social movement organizations” (RSMOs). They differentiate these from the social movement mainstream in terms of their organizational structure, ideology, tactics, communication, and assessment of success. Generalising from three examples — the Industrial Workers of the World, the Student Non-violent Coordination Committees, and women’s liberation groups, they arrive at the following five characteristics:

Internal structure: “Non-hierarchical leadership; participatory democratic organization; egalitarian; “membership” based upon involvement; support indigenous leadership”.

Ideology: “Radical agenda; emphasis on structural change; flexible ideology; radical networks; global consciousness and connections; anti-militaristic stance”.

Tactics: “Non-violent action; mass actions; innovative tactics”.

Communication: “Ignored/misrepresented by media; reliance on alternative forms of communication (music, street theater, pamphlets, newsletters)”.

Assessment of success: “Limited resources; may be purposefully short-lived; substantive rationality; contribute to larger radical agenda; subject to intense opposition and government surveillance”.

The keywords used in this formulation are already very close to a recognisably anarchist orientation, which will be examined in more detail below. The move from “radical” to “anarchist”, in this context, lies in a thicker account of the substantive content of the attributes outlined above, including some corrective statements (especially around tactics, which are not necessarily on a mass action model and not necessarily non-violent), and in devoting more attention to the connexions between tactics, organisation and ideology. First, however, the model has to be expanded so as to encompass not only a collection of discrete groups (as in “social movement organisations”) but their interconnection and integration into a “movement” tout court.

The way in which such an integration can be achieved, I believe, is by focusing not on the nodes of a movement but on the ties that bind them. Fitzgerald and Rogers’ model is in fact dated as far as the thrust of contemporary social movement theory is concerned, since this has moved from the focus on organisations to discussing movements as networks. For example, in Mario Diani’s statement (which enjoys considerable scholarly currency), a social movement is defined from the start as “a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity” (Diani 1992:13). This definition already does a lot of work for us in integrating a network-based understanding of social movements, as well as including the cultural aspects of conflict and emphasising the power of identity. The recognition of networks as the primary structuring principle for social movements was suggested in pioneering studies of the Pentecostal and Black Power movements of the late 1960s (Gerlach and Hine 1970). Gerlach (2001) writes:

The diverse groups of a movement are not isolated from each other. Instead, they form an integrated network or reticulate structure through nonhierarchical social linkages among their participants and through the understandings, identities, and opponents these participants share. Networking enables movement participants to exchange information and ideas and to coordinate participation in joint action. Networks do not have a defined limit but rather expand or contract as groups interact or part ways.

While the network model goes a long way towards explaining the architecture of the present-day social movement which I would designate as anarchist, a further step needs to be taken. The network as such is all form: the lines of communication and resource-flows of which it consists are presented as given, remaining silent about how these networks are consciously produced, reproduced and transformed by the concrete activities of individuals and groups in their specific political, social and cultural circumstances. For this reason Jeff Juris (2004:68) introduces the idea of a “cultural logic of networking” to designate the broad principles which, as cultural dispositions, guide activists who generate movement networks:

The cultural logic of networking has given rise to what grassroots activists...call the “new way of doing politics.” By this they mean precisely those network-based forms of political organization and practice based on non-hierarchical structures, horizontal coordination among autonomous groups, open access, direct participation, consensus-based decision making, and the ideal of the free and open circulation of information...While the command-oriented logic of traditional parties and unions is based on recruiting new members, developing unitary strategies, political representation through vertical structures and the pursuit of political hegemony, network-based politics involves the creation of broad umbrella spaces, where diverse organizations, collectives and networks converge around a few common hallmarks, while preserving their autonomy and identity-based specificity. Rather than recruitment, the objective becomes horizontal expansion and enhanced “connectivity” through articulating diverse movements within flexible, decentralized information structures that allow for maximal coordination and communication.

The move from inanimate structure to self-reproducing activity is clearly a step in the right direction. I would go further, however, and argue that the cultural logic of networking represents one area of a broader political culture, which is the most adequate referent for anarchism. The idea of political culture can be explained as a set of shared orientations towards “doing politics”, wherein issues are framed, strategies are legitimised and collective interaction takes on enough regularity to structure members’ mutual expectations. It is such a account of culture that can address movement networks in terms of their substantive characteristics, the context in which political “events, behaviors, institutions or processes...can be intelligibly — that is, thickly — described” (Geertz 1975:14). Thus the concept of political culture, appropriately framed to account for the realities of anarchist activities, can go a great way towards explaining what “moves” the movement.

Kenneth Tarrow objects to the idea of political culture as an overarching frame for the interpretation of social movement dynamics. He argues that political culture “is seldom sufficiently univocal or detached from the symbols that sustain the system to provide a firm basis for collective action against it” (Tarrow 1992:177). It would seem that although this may cause problems for the use of the term regarding social movements in general, the conditions that Tarrow stipulates are sufficient for enabling the use of political culture as a designation for anarchism in the context of the present study. Anarchist political culture is by no means univocal, but its opposition to both state and capitalism puts it at such a distance from elite and mainstream political cultures, that from the point of view of most of society the differences among anarchists recede into insignificance. As for being “detached from the symbols that sustain the system“ — the dynamic here cannot be reduced to a binary of either participative endorsement of, or deliberate detachment from, that ensemble of symbols. Anarchists are animated, at least in part, by a third cultural logic, the movement of subversive appropriation known as “culture jamming”. The term was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland, and