Jason McQuinn - Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind
Submitted by Reverend Chuck0:Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind
Prologue to Post-Left Anarchy
It is now nearly a decade and a half since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is seven years since Bob Black first sent me the manuscript for his book, Anarchy after Leftism, published in 1997. It's over four years since I asked Anarchy magazine Contributing Editors to participate in a discussion of “post-left anarchy” which ultimately appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999-2000 issue of the magazine (#48). And it's also one year since I first wrote and published “Post-Left Anarchy: Rejecting the Reification of Revolt,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (#54) of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
Aside from creating a hot new topic for debate in anarchist and leftist periodicals, web sites and e-mail lists, one can legitimately ask what has been accomplished by introducing the term and the debate to the anarchist, and more generally radical, milieu? In response I'd say that the reaction continues to grow, and the promise of post-left anarchy primarily lies in what appears to be a continually brightening future.
One of the most troubling problems of the contemporary anarchist milieu has been the frequent fixation on attempts to recreate the struggles of the past as though nothing significant has changed since 1919, 1936, or at best 1968. Partly this is a function of the long-prevalent anti-intellectualism amongst many anarchists. Partly it's a result of the historical eclipse of the anarchist movement following the victory of Bolshevik state communism and the (self‑) defeat of the Spanish Revolution. And partly it is because the vast majority of the most important anarchist theorists—like Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta—come from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. 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.
Since the 1960s the originally minuscule—but since that time, ever-growing—anarchist milieu has been influenced (at least in passing) by the Civil Rights Movement, Paul Goodman, SDS, the Yippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, Fred Woodworth, the Marxist New Left, the Situationist International, Sam Dolgoff and Murray Bookchin, the single-issue movements (anti-racist, feminist, anti-nuclear, anti-imperialist, environmental/ecological, animal rights, etc.), Noam Chomsky, Freddie Perlman, George Bradford/David Watson, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Earth First! and Deep Ecology, neo-Paganism and New Ageism, the anti-globalization movement, and many others. Yet these various influences over the last forty years, both non-anarchist and anarchist alike, have failed to bring to the fore any inspiring new synthesis of critical and practical theory. A few anarchists, most notably Murray Bookchin and the Love & Rage project, have tried and failed miserably in attempting to meld the extremely diverse and idiosyncratic anarchist milieu into a genuinely new movement with a commonly-held theory. I would argue that in our current situation this is a project guaranteed to fail no matter who attempts it.
The alternative argued for by the post-left anarchist synthesis is still being created. It cannot be claimed by any single theorist or activist because it's a project that was in the air long before it started becoming a concrete set of proposals, texts and interventions. Those seeking to promote the synthesis have been primarily influenced by both the classical anarchist movement up to the Spanish Revolution on the one hand, and several of the most promising critiques and modes of intervention developed since the 60s. The most important critiques involved include those of everyday life and the spectacle, of ideology and morality, of industrial technology, of work and of civilization. Modes of intervention focus on the concrete deployment of direct action in all facets of life. Rather than aiming at the construction of institutional or bureaucratic structures, these interventions aim at maximal critical effectiveness with minimal compromise in constantly changing networks of action.
Clearly these new critiques and modes of intervention are largely incompatible with both the old left of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and most of the New Left of the 60s and 70s. And just as clearly they are engaging a growing number of anarchists who gravitate to them because they seem to be much more congruent with the global situation we find ourselves in today than the old theories and tactics of leftism. If anarchism doesn't change to address the lived realities of the twenty-first century—by leaving the outmoded politics and organizational fetishism of leftism behind—its relevance will dissipate and the opportunities for radical contestation now so apparent will slowly vanish. Post-left anarchy is most simply a rubric through which many thoughtful contemporary anarchists would like to see the most vital of the new critiques and modes of intervention coalesce in an increasingly coherent and effective movement, which genuinely promotes unity in diversity, the complete autonomy of individuals and local groups in struggle, and the organic growth of levels of organization which don't hold back our collective energies, spontaneity and creativity.
