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<a href="http://eagainst.com/articles/the-new-anarchists/"
rel="bookmark">David Graeber – The new anarchists</a><br>
<br>
<small>by <strong><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber"
target="_blank">David Graeber</a></strong><br>
Republished from the <strong><a
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368" target="_blank">New
Left Review</a></strong></small>
<p>It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a
gulf between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of
revolution and its practitioners. Writers who for years have been
publishing essays that sound like position papers for vast social
movements that do not in fact exist seem seized with confusion or
worse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are everywhere
emerging. It’s particularly scandalous in the case of what’s
still, for no particularly good reason, referred to as the
‘anti-globalization’ movement, one that has in a mere two or three
years managed to transform completely the sense of historical
possibilities for millions across the planet. This may be the
result of sheer ignorance, or of relying on what might be gleaned
from such overtly hostile sources as the <em>New York Times</em>;
then again, most of what’s written even in progressive outlets
seems largely to miss the point—or at least, rarely focuses on
what participants in the movement really think is most important
about it.</p>
<p>As an anthropologist and active participant—particularly in the
more radical, direct-action end of the movement—I may be able to
clear up some common points of misunderstanding; but the news may
not be gratefully received. Much of the hesitation, I suspect,
lies in the reluctance of those who have long fancied themselves
radicals of some sort to come to terms with the fact that they are
really liberals: interested in expanding individual freedoms and
pursuing social justice, but not in ways that would seriously
challenge the existence of reigning institutions like capital or
state. And even many of those who would like to see revolutionary
change might not feel entirely happy about having to accept that
most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming
from anarchism—a tradition that they have hitherto mostly
dismissed—and that taking this movement seriously will necessarily
also mean a respectful engagement with it.</p>
<p>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.<a
name="_ednref1" href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_edn1">
[1]</a> 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. In what follows, then, I will try to clear up what seem
to be the three most common misconceptions about the movement—our
supposed opposition to something called ‘globalization’, our
supposed ‘violence’, and our supposed lack of a coherent
ideology—and then suggest how radical intellectuals might think
about reimagining their own theoretical practice in the light of
all of this.</p>
<p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"><strong>A globalization
movement?</strong></span></p>
<p>The phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US
media and activists have never felt comfortable with it. Insofar
as this is a movement against anything, it’s against
neoliberalism, which can be defined as a kind of market
fundamentalism—or, better, market Stalinism—that holds there is
only one possible direction for human historical development. The
map is held by an elite of economists and corporate flacks, to
whom must be ceded all power once held by institutions with any
shred of democratic accountability; from now on it will be wielded
largely through unelected treaty organizations like the IMF, WTO
or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be
possible to say this straight out: ‘We are a movement against
neoliberalism’. But in the US, language is always a problem. The
corporate media here is probably the most politically monolithic
on the planet: neoliberalism is all there is to see—the background
reality; as a result, the word itself cannot be used. The issues
involved can only be addressed using propaganda terms like ‘free
trade’ or ‘the free market’. So American activists find themselves
in a quandary: if one suggests putting ‘the N word’ (as it’s often
called) in a pamphlet or press release, alarm bells immediately go
off: one is being exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite.
There have been all sorts of attempts to frame alternative
expressions—we’re a ‘global justice movement’, we’re a movement
‘against corporate globalization’. None are especially elegant or
quite satisfying and, as a result, it is common in meetings to
hear the speakers using ‘globalization movement’ and
‘anti-globalization movement’ pretty much interchangeably.</p>
<p>The phrase ‘globalization movement’, though, is really quite
apropos. If one takes globalization to mean the effacement of
borders and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas,
then it’s pretty clear that not only is the movement itself a
product of globalization, but the majority of groups involved in
it—the most radical ones in particular—are far more supportive of
globalization in general than are the IMF or WTO. It was an
international network called People’s Global Action, for example,
that put out the first summons for planet-wide days of action such
as J18 and N30—the latter the original call for protest against
the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its origins
to the famous International Encounter for Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism, which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of
rainy-season Chiapas, in August 1996; and was itself initiated, as
Subcomandante Marcos put it, ‘by all the rebels around the world’.
People from over 50 countries came streaming into the
Zapatista-held village of La Realidad. The vision for an
‘intercontinental network of resistance’ was laid out in the
Second Declaration of La Realidad: ‘We declare that we will make a
collective network of all our particular struggles and
resistances, an intercontinental network of resistance against
neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for
humanity’:</p>
<blockquote>
<p> Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power
wages on them.<br>
A network of voices that not only speak, but also struggle and
resist for humanity and against neoliberalism.<br>
A network that covers the five continents and helps to resist
the death that Power promises us.<a name="_ednref2"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_edn2"> [2]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an organizing
structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no
central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who
resist.’</p>
<p>The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya
Basta! groups organized a second<em>encuentro</em> in Spain, where
the idea of the network process was taken forward: PGA was born at
a meeting in Geneva in February 1998. From the start, it included
not only anarchist groups and radical trade unions in Spain,
Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist farmers’ league in
India (the KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan
fisherfolk, the Argentinian teachers’ union, indigenous groups
such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the
Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement, a network made up of
communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central
America—and any number of others. For a long time, North America
was scarcely represented, save for the Canadian Postal Workers’
Union—which acted as PGA’s main communications hub, until it was
largely replaced by the internet—and a Montreal-based anarchist
group called CLAC.</p>
<p>If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its
demands. The three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for
instance, calls for a universally guaranteed ‘basic income’,
global citizenship, guaranteeing free movement of people across
borders, and free access to new technology—which in practice would
mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious
form of protectionism). The noborder network—their slogan: ‘No One
is Illegal’—has organized week-long campsites, laboratories for
creative resistance, on the Polish–German and Ukrainian borders,
in Sicily and at Tarifa in Spain. Activists have dressed up as
border guards, built boat-bridges across the River Oder and
blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra to
protest against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died
of suffocation on Lufthansa and KLM flights). This summer’s camp
is planned for Strasbourg, home of the Schengen Information
System, a search-and-control database with tens of thousands of
terminals across Europe, targeting the movements of migrants,
activists, anyone they like.</p>
<p>More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to
the fact that the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is pretty
much limited to the movement of capital and commodities, and
actually increases barriers against the free flow of people,
information and ideas—the size of the US border guard has almost
tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were
not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the
world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for
Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a
free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would
collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk
about the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world: the
main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been
the establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers
across the world. It is precisely this international system of
control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine
globalization.</p>
<p>These connexions—and the broader links between neoliberal
policies and mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons,
militarism)—have played a more and more salient role in our
analyses as we ourselves have confronted escalating levels of
state repression. Borders became a major issue in Europe during
the IMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings in Nice. At the
FTAA summit in Quebec City last summer, invisible lines that had
previously been treated as if they didn’t exist (at least for
white people) were converted overnight into fortifications against
the movement of would-be global citizens, demanding the right to
petition their rulers. The three-kilometre ‘wall’ constructed
through the center of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state
junketing inside from any contact with the populace, became the
perfect symbol for what neoliberalism actually means in human
terms. The spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters
and grappling hooks, joined by everyone from Steelworkers to
Mohawk warriors to tear down the wall, became—for that very
reason—one of the most powerful moments in the movement’s history.<a
name="_ednref3" href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_edn3">
[3]</a></p>
<p>There is one striking contrast between this and earlier
internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting
Western organizational models to the rest of the world; in this,
the flow has if anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps
most, of the movement’s signature techniques—including mass
nonviolent civil disobedience itself—were first developed in the
global South. In the long run, this may well prove the single most
radical thing about it.</p>
<p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"><strong>Billionaires and
clowns</strong></span></p>
<p>In the corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind
of mantra—invariably, repeatedly—whenever a large action takes
place: ‘violent protests’, ‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid
headquarters of violent protesters’, even ‘violent riots’ (there
are other kinds?). Such expressions are typically invoked when a
simple, plain-English description of what took place (people
throwing paint-bombs, breaking windows of empty storefronts,
holding hands as they blockaded intersections, cops beating them
with sticks) might give the impression that the only truly violent
parties were the police. The US media is probably the biggest
offender here—and this despite the fact that, after two years of
increasingly militant direct action, it is still impossible to
produce a single example of anyone to whom a US activist has
caused physical injury. I would say that what really disturbs the
powers-that-be is not the ‘violence’ of the movement but its
relative lack of it; governments simply do not know how to deal
with an overtly revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into
familiar patterns of armed resistance.</p>
<p>The effort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite
self-conscious. Where once it seemed that the only alternatives to
marching along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil
disobedience or outright insurrection, groups like the Direct
Action Network, Reclaim the Streets, Black Blocs or Tute Bianche
have all, in their own ways, been trying to map out a completely
new territory in between. They’re attempting to invent what many
call a ‘new language’ of civil disobedience, combining elements of
street theatre, festival and what can only be called non-violent
warfare—non-violent in the sense adopted by, say, Black Bloc
anarchists, in that it eschews any direct physical harm to human
beings. Ya Basta! for example is famous for its <em>tute bianche</em>
or white-overalls tactics: men and women dressed in elaborate
forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner tubes to
rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white
jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles). As this
mock army pushes its way through police barricades, all the while
protecting each other against injury or arrest, the ridiculous
gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon characters—misshapen,
ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. The effect is only
increased when lines of costumed figures attack police with
balloons and water pistols or, like the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and
elsewhere, dress as fairies and tickle them with feather dusters.</p>
<p>At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or
Gore) dressed in high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to
press wads of fake money into the cops’ pockets, thanking them for
repressing the dissent. None were even slightly hurt—perhaps
police are given aversion therapy against hitting anyone in a
tuxedo. The Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their high
bicycles, rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by
attacking each other (or the billionaires). They had all the best
chants: ‘Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!’, ‘The pizza united can never be
defeated’, ‘Hey ho, hey ho—ha ha, hee hee!’, as well as
meta-chants like ‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’ and—everyone’s
favourite—‘Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant!’</p>
<p>In Quebec City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines
(with help from the left caucus of the Society for Creative
Anachronism) lobbed soft toys at the FTAA. Ancient-warfare
techniques have been studied to adopt for non-violent but very
militant forms of confrontation: there were peltasts and hoplites
(the former mainly from the Prince Edwards Islands, the latter
from Montreal) at Quebec City, and research continues into
Roman-style shield walls. Blockading has become an art form: if
you make a huge web of strands of yarn across an intersection,
it’s actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped
like flies. The Liberation Puppet with its arms fully extended can
block a four-lane highway, while snake-dances can be a form of
mobile blockade. Rebels in London last Mayday planned Monopoly
Board actions—Building Hotels on Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of
the Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla Gardening—only partly
disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even the most
militant of the militant—eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation
Front—scrupulously avoid doing anything that would cause harm to
human beings (or animals, for that matter). It’s this scrambling
of conventional categories that so throws the forces of order and
makes them desperate to bring things back to familiar territory
(simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa, of encouraging
fascist hooligans to run riot as an excuse to use overwhelming
force against everybody else.</p>
<p>One could trace these forms of action back to the stunts and
guerrilla theater of the Yippies or Italian ‘metropolitan Indians’
in the sixties, the squatter battles in Germany or Italy in the
seventies and eighties, even the peasant resistance to the
expansion of Tokyo airport. But it seems to me that here, too, the
really crucial origins lie with the Zapatistas, and other
movements in the global South. In many ways, the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) represents an attempt by people who
have always been denied the right to non-violent, civil resistance
to seize it; essentially, to call the bluff of neoliberalism and
its pretenses to democratization and yielding power to ‘civil
society’. It is, as its commanders say, an army which aspires not
to be an army any more (it’s something of an open secret that, for
the last five years at least, they have not even been carrying
real guns). As Marcos explains their conversion from standard
tactics of guerrilla war:</p>
<blockquote>
<p> We thought the people would either not pay attention to
us, or come together with us to fight. But they did not react in
either of these two ways. It turned out that all these people,
who were thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions, did not want to rise up with us but . . .
neither did they want us to be annihilated. They wanted us to
dialogue. This completely broke our scheme and ended up
defining <em>zapatismo</em>, the <em>neo-zapatismo</em>.<a
name="_ednref4"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_edn4"> [4]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now the EZLN is the sort of army that organizes ‘invasions’ of
Mexican military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in
entirely unarmed to yell at and try to shame the resident
soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the Landless Workers’
Movement gain an enormous moral authority in Brazil by reoccupying
unused lands entirely non-violently. In either case, it’s pretty
clear that if the same people had tried the same thing twenty
years ago, they would simply have been shot.</p>
<p><strong><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">Anarchy and peace</span></strong></p>
<p>However you choose to trace their origins, these new tactics are
perfectly in accord with the general anarchistic inspiration of
the movement, which is less about seizing state power than about
exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while
winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it. The critical
thing, though, is that all this is only possible in a general
atmosphere of peace. In fact, it seems to me that these are the
ultimate stakes of struggle at the moment: one that may well
determine the overall direction of the twenty-first century. We
should remember that during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, when most Marxist parties were rapidly becoming
reformist social democrats, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism were
the centre of the revolutionary left.<a name="_ednref5"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_edn5"> [5]</a> The
situation only really changed with World War I and the Russian
Revolution. It was the Bolsheviks’ success, we are usually told,
that led to the decline of anarchism—with the glorious exception
of Spain—and catapulted Communism to the fore. But it seems to me
one could look at this another way.</p>
<p>In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed that
war between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial
adventures were a constant, but a war between France and England,
on French or English soil, seemed as unthinkable as it would
today. By 1900, even the use of passports was considered an
antiquated barbarism. The ‘short twentieth century’ was, by
contrast, probably the most violent in human history, almost
entirely preoccupied with either waging world wars or preparing
for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came to
seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure of political
effectiveness became the ability to maintain huge mechanized
killing machines. This is one thing that anarchists, by
definition, can never be very good at. Neither is it surprising
that Marxist parties —who have been only too good at it—seemed
eminently practical and realistic in comparison. Whereas the
moment the Cold War ended, and war between industrialized powers
once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism reappeared just where it
had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international
movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left.</p>
<p>If this is right, it becomes clearer what the ultimate stakes of
the current ‘anti-terrorist’ mobilization are. In the short run,
things do look very frightening. Governments who were desperately
scrambling for some way to convince the public we were terrorists
even before September 11 now feel they’ve been given <em>carte</em><em>blanche</em>;
there is little doubt that a lot of good people are about to
suffer terrible repression. But in the long run, a return to
twentieth-century levels of violence is simply impossible. The
September 11 attacks were clearly something of a fluke (the first
wildly ambitious terrorist scheme in history that actually
worked); the spread of nuclear weapons is ensuring that larger and
larger portions of the globe will be for all practical purposes
off-limits to conventional warfare. And if war is the health of
the state, the prospects for anarchist-style organizing can only
be improving.</p>
<p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"><strong>Practising direct
democracy</strong></span></p>
<p>A constant complaint about the globalization movement in the
progressive press is that, while tactically brilliant, it lacks
any central theme or coherent ideology. (This seems to be the left
equivalent of the corporate media’s claims that we are a bunch of
dumb kids touting a bundle of completely unrelated causes—free
Mumia, dump the debt, save the old-growth forests.) Another line
of attack is that the movement is plagued by a generic opposition
to all forms of structure or organization. It’s distressing that,
two years after Seattle, I should have to write this, but someone
obviously should: in North America especially, this is a movement
about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It
is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in
ideology. Those new forms of organization <em>are</em> its
ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks
instead of top-down structures like states, parties or
corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized,
non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be
much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent
daily life as whole. But unlike many other forms of radicalism, it
has first organized itself in the political sphere—mainly because
this was a territory that the powers that be (who have shifted all
their heavy artillery into the economic) have largely abandoned.</p>
<p>Over the past decade, activists in North America have been
putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups’
own internal processes, to create viable models of what
functioning direct democracy could actually look like. In this
we’ve drawn particularly, as I’ve noted, on examples from outside
the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on some
process of consensus finding, rather than majority vote. The
result is a rich and growing panoply of organizational
instruments—spokescouncils, affinity groups, facilitation tools,
break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns, vibe-watchers and so
on—all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow
initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective
solidarity, without stifling dissenting voices, creating
leadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which
they have not freely agreed to do.</p>
<p>The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting,
you try to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone—or at
least, not highly objectionable to anyone: first state the
proposal, then ask for ‘concerns’ and try to address them. Often,
at this point, people in the group will propose ‘friendly
amendments’ to add to the original proposal, or otherwise alter
it, to ensure concerns are addressed. Then, finally, when you call
for consensus, you ask if anyone wishes to ‘block’ or ‘stand
aside’. Standing aside is just saying, ‘I would not myself be
willing to take part in this action, but I wouldn’t stop anyone
else from doing it’. Blocking is a way of saying ‘I think this
violates the fundamental principles or purposes of being in the
group’. It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposal
completely by blocking it—although there are ways to challenge
whether a block is genuinely principled.</p>
<p>There are different sorts of groups. Spokescouncils, for example,
are large assemblies that coordinate between smaller ‘affinity
groups’. They are most often held before, and during, large-scale
direct actions like Seattle or Quebec. Each affinity group (which
might have between 4 and 20 people) selects a ‘spoke’, who is
empowered to speak for them in the larger group. Only the spokes
can take part in the actual process of finding consensus at the
council, but before major decisions they break out into affinity
groups again and each group comes to consensus on what position
they want their spoke to take (not as unwieldy as it might sound).
Break-outs, on the other hand, are when a large meeting
temporarily splits up into smaller ones that will focus on making
decisions or generating proposals, which can then be presented for
approval before the whole group when it reassembles. Facilitation
tools are used to resolve problems or move things along if they
seem to be bogging down. You can ask for a brainstorming session,
in which people are only allowed to present ideas but not to
criticize other people’s; or for a non-binding straw poll, where
people raise their hands just to see how everyone feels about a
proposal, rather than to make a decision. A fishbowl would only be
used if there is a profound difference of opinion: you can take
two representatives for each side—one man and one woman—and have
the four of them sit in the middle, everyone else surrounding them
silently, and see if the four can’t work out a synthesis or
compromise together, which they can then present as a proposal to
the whole group.</p>
<p><strong><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">Prefigurative
politics</span></strong></p>
<p>This is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of
democracy among people who have little experience of such things
is necessarily a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of
stumblings and false starts, but—as almost any police chief who
has faced us on the streets can attest—direct democracy of this
sort can be astoundingly effective. And it is difficult to find
anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of
human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a
result. It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It’s
another to experience it, however momentarily. Perhaps the best
way to start thinking about these organizations—the Direct Action
Network, for example—is to see them as the diametrical opposite of
the sectarian Marxist groups; or, for that matter, of the
sectarian Anarchist groups.<a name="_ednref6"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_edn6">[6]</a> Where
the democratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a
complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological
uniformity and tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian
future with extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the
present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always focuses on
particular courses of action; it’s taken for granted that no one
will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of view. The
motto might be, ‘If you are willing to act like an anarchist now,
your long-term vision is pretty much your own business’. Which
seems only sensible: none of us know how far these principles can
actually take us, or what a complex society based on them would
end up looking like. Their ideology, then, is immanent in the
anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their practice, and
one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay
this way.</p>
<p>Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the
direct-action networks raise about alienation, and its broader
implications for political practice. For example: why is it that,
even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary
politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be
sympathetic to its project consists of artists, musicians,
writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated
production? Surely there must be a link between the actual
experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into
being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision
social alternatives—particularly, the possibility of a society
itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might
even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on
a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its
most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have
tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap.</p>
<p>This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to
be peasants and craftsmen—or even more, newly proletarianized
former peasants and craftsmen—who actually overthrow capitalist
regimes; and not those inured to generations of wage labour. It
would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous
people’s struggles in the new movement: such people tend to be
simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people
on earth. Now that new communication technologies have made it
possible to include them in global revolutionary alliances, as
well as local resistance and revolt, it is well-nigh inevitable
that they should play a profoundly inspirational role.</p>
<p><em>Previous texts in this series have been Naomi Klein,
‘Reclaiming the Commons’ (NLR 9), Subcomandante Marcos, ‘The
Punch Card and the Hourglass’ (NLR 9), John Sellers, ‘Raising a
Ruckus’ (NLR 10) and José Bové, ‘A Farmers’ International?’ (NLR
12).</em></p>
<p><em>_________________________________________</em><br>
<a name="_edn1"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_ednref1">[1]</a>
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.<br>
<a name="_edn2"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_ednref2">[2]</a> Read
by Subcomandante Marcos during the closing session of the First
Intercontinental <em>Encuentro</em>, 3 August 1996: <em>Our Word
is Our Weapon: Selected Writings</em>, Juana Ponce de León, ed.,
New York 2001.<br>
<a name="_edn3"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_ednref3">[3]</a>
Helping tear it down was certainly one of the more exhilarating
experiences of this author’s life.<br>
<a name="_edn4"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_ednref4">[4]</a>
Interviewed by Yvon LeBot, <em>Subcomandante Marcos: El Sueño
Zapatista</em>, Barcelona 1997, pp. 214–5; Bill Weinberg, <em>Homage
to Chiapas</em>, London 2000, p. 188.<br>
<a name="_edn5"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_ednref5">[5]</a> ‘In
1905–1914 the Marxist left had in most countries been on the
fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of Marxists
had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social
democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was
anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the
mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical Marxism.’
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’, <em>Revolutionaries</em>,
New York 1973, p. 61.<br>
<a name="_edn6"
href="http://newleftreview.org/?view=2368#_ednref6">[6]</a> What
one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the North
East Federation of Anarchist Communists—whose members must accept
the Platform of the Anarchist Communists set down in 1926 by
Nestor Makhno—do still exist, of course. But the small-a
anarchists are the real locus of historical dynamism right now.<br>
</p>
<p><br>
also:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://eagainst.com/articles/an-interview-with-david-graeber/">http://eagainst.com/articles/an-interview-with-david-graeber/</a><br>
<br>
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