I could stop there if I wanted to preserve the illusion of scholarly detachment, but it is really too late for that; I must be counted among the many researchers who have gotten too close to the material. I came of age in the suburban and semi-rural U.S. after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the heyday of TINA (There Is No Alternative), when, after more than half a century of consolidation, the dominant model of life—roughly speaking, the one I was surrounded by, like a 360° diorama—had come to seem all but inescapable. It has been breathtaking and disorienting to witness, over the past decade, the reemergence of something like concerted opposition to that model, an opposition that has worn many names—“anticapitalism,” “horizontalism,” “Zapatismo,” “altermondialisme,” “alternative globalization movement,” “autonomous movement,” “movement of movements”—and occasionally, that of “the new anarchism.”57 From the perspective of these new times, in which those reigning structures seem to have once again entered a real crisis, I want to seek the intersection of new lines of flight with old ones.58 Where might our tunnels intersect and diverge? In other words: what lessons, if any, can be taken from this history for any future anarchist cultural resistance?
A quick note, before we go on, about the nomenclature of anarchist history: many historiographers are wont to distinguish between what they call “classical anarchism” (vaguely after the title of George Crowder’s Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (1991), and the “new anarchism” that is said to have emerged, as if sprung fully grown from a god’s head, in the period after the end of the Cold War, making its real public debut in Seattle in 1999. Classical anarchism, supposedly founded on the thought of this handful of philosopher-founders, has been the subject of many philosophical critiques (e.g., Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan), which suffer from many kinds of reductionism, not least that of reducing anarchism to the history of a few thinkers’ thoughts, but also making a fairly reductive representation of those thoughts, and all but completely ignoring developments taking place after the end of the Spanish Civil War. More cannily, the late John Moore suggested that we should distinguish between “first-wave” and “second-wave” anarchisms, the second wave appearing only after the Second World War, with its finest moment being defined by the May ’68 events; the intellectual stars of this constellation would include the situationist and post-situationist thinkers, and perhaps also the autonomous movements of Italy and Germany, as well as the new Zapatismo. Daniel Colson has suggested a three-part model:
The first period is that of its appearance as a current in political philosophy.… During this period—from the beginning of the 1840s to the creation, twenty-five years later, of the International Workingmens’ Association/Association Internationale des Travailleurs (IWA/AIT)—anarchism does not exist as an effective political current, identifiable in organizations, groups, or symbols in public demonstrations.
Fig. 3: Cover for Ricardo Flores Magón’s play, “Tierra y Libertad” (1917).
This first period, then, can be thought of as a period of ideological gestation, a process fomented by some—but not all—of the founding figures of “classical anarchism” (Proudhon and Bakunin, but not Godwin or Kropotkin; Colson also cites Joseph Déjacque [1821–1864], Max Stirner [1806–1856], and Ernest Coeuderoy [1825–1862]). Yet even without organizations adequate to its ambitions, anarchism is not thinkable without relation to “the transformations and the explosive situation of Europe in the middle of the 19th century, and more particularly to the events and the revolutionary movements of 1848.” Moreover, while “its reality is mainly philosophical and journalistic,” these are “thoroughly blended into the theoretical and political ferment of the time as to the material and social upheavals which Europe was experiencing”—e.g., Proudhon’s ties to the Lyons mutuellistes, Bakunin’s experience of the uprising in Berlin.
Colson’s second period elaborates upon “this practical dimension of the anarchist idea”:
It crystallizes in London, in 1864, with the creation of the First International, and disappears rather precisely in Barcelona, in May 1937, when … the republican State and the Communist International put an end to the Spanish and Catalan revolutionary movements. It is of considerable duration, lasting a little more than seven decades—involving around five or six generations of workers—and it comprises a great number of specific moments or modes of being.
Here, we encounter not only individual thinkers like Kropotkin but a host of tinkerers not counted in the ranks of political philosophers. Their experiments and experiences range from
the anti-authoritarian First International of 1871 to 1881, the attentats and attempts at insurrectionary “propaganda by the deed” at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, French “revolutionary syndicalism,” illegalism, Argentinian “forism,” Spanish “anarcho-syndicalism,” etc.
Also present in this period but absent from the register of philosophy are the great anarchist rhetors, from Pietro Gori to Emma Goldman, whose cultural work, as Nathan Jun and Kathy Ferguson have convincingly argued, has been denied a fair reckoning by academic histories for which practice is the reading-off of theories first thought by thinkers.
Colson imagines anarchism’s “third period”—somewhat inaccurately, I will argue—as emerging after a near total eclipse, a historical blackout stretching from the beginning of the Second World War to the opening of the Sixties. The return of anti-authoritarian thought and practice carries an “eruptive force” proportional to the optimism of that historical moment, but is marked by some discontinuity with the traditions and organizations established in the second period, together with the new predominance of Marxist, Freudian, and Nietzschean thought. The result: a revival of anarchism in several guises, from the Dutch Provos and Kabouters to the French Situationists and Italian Autonomists, from poststructuralism to eco-anarchism and anarcha-feminism. In every case, the new anarchism presented an idea which “was not new, but which, having been forgotten, then appeared as an astounding innovation.”59 And here it is, then, that we find an astonishing and unforeseen crossing between generations, ideologies, and destinies. Well dug, old mole—well dug indeed.
A final note about limitations: inevitably, this book suffers from them. Because it relies so heavily on original translations of previously untranslated literary and scholarly works (victims of the general oblivion to which anarchist history has been consigned), it reflects the uneven distribution of my linguistic skills: I am capable enough as a reader of French, able to muddle through Spanish and Portuguese, far worse in other European languages, and barely capable of deciphering anything else. This means that while I can do some justice to the anarchist cultures of Western Europe and the Americas, I can offer only a glimpse of the anarchist cultures of Eastern Europe and Asia (and a blurry picture of the terrifically important Yiddish and Italian contributions). Sometimes, as in chapters 3–5 of Part II (“Speaking to Others: Anarchist Poetry, Song, and Public Voice”), although I am describing a global phenomenon (anarchist poets’ shift away from public, rhetorical modes of address), my attention is focused on one or two particular cases (mainly those of the United States and Britain). Despite my comparative ambitions, I have given more attention to the second period than to either the first or third. Even if scholarly coverage of punk vastly exceeds that given to Pouget or the Cinéma du Peuple, it has received unforgivably short shrift here. Important thinkers, movements, and events have gone unmentioned. So much for the panoptical promise. Mainly, what I hope to show, however incompletely and indirectly, is what I have been astonished to discover: how much more there is to be seen.
There is a McDonalds, a Lancôme, an Urban Outfitters. One and a half thousand employees go to work at the building formerly known as El Penal de Punta Carretas; a million consumers flow through every month.60 Where is their tunnel for escape?
1 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (Uruguay), Actas Tupamaras