[LAF] Fwd: Neo-anarchism by Manuel Castells

[Volodya]

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I don't agree with all of it, but it is non-the-less very interesting.
                        - VolodyA! V Anarhist


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Neo-anarchism by Manuel Castells <http://www.negations.net/?p=114>

Translated by Chick Morse from Catalonia's "La Vanguardia"
<http://www.lavanguardia.es/>, where the essay appeared on May 21, 2005.


(Manuel Castells is one of the leading intellectuals of our time. His
work has had a significant impact on sociology, urban studies,
communication, and many other fields. Anarchists may be especially
interested in his writings on social movements and the city
(particularly "The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of
Urban Social Movements") and also his comprehensive and inspiring
trilogy, "The Information Age". In addition to being an extremely
productive scholar, he is also a public figure who comments on trends
and developments in world affairs. He is best known in Spain and Latin
America, where he regularly contributes columns to daily newspapers.)

________________________________


Anarchism's new vitality, an ideology for the 21st century with the
support of technology

* * *

We do not live in an era of the end of ideologies but the rebirth of
those that resonate in the present. This is the case with anarchism,
which was long taken for dead by its many gravediggers and yet today,
expressing itself in new ways, seems to enjoy excellent health in the
social movements that sprout everywhere from the depths of the
resistance to our increasingly destructive global social order.

It is enough to follow the debates in the movement against capitalist
globalization, online or otherwise, to note the prevalence of anarchist
principles, such as self-organization and the rejection of the state in
any form ("que se vayan todos!").

And while old left intellectuals, especially in Latin America, still
regurgitate the mediatic catchphrases of the movement, popular
sympathies lean toward loosely organized and largely self-managed
patterns of mobilization and discourse, as evidenced at the most recent
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre.

Likewise, the autonomist perspective, which is so closely linked to
anarchism, has a very strong presence on the theoretical and political
terrains. Michael Hardt and Toni Negri articulate this view, as does the
"Multitudes" magazine group, which is a direct heir of France's May '68.
(Hardt and Negri's most recent book-also named "Multitudes"-has a very
high ranking on the sales list at Amazon.com.)

Though organized anarchists are few in number--for example, Spain's CNT
newspaper has approximately 6000 subscribers and there are roughly one
hundred thousand members of the CGT, a union which I place in the
libertarian tradition-the principles of anti-statism, international
solidarity, individual liberty, and free association are common to
otherwise very diverse movements (from Barcelona's squatters, to the
Ecuador's "outlaws," to Argentina's piqueteros, to Italy's autonomists).
All these share a commitment to an emancipation accomplished without
delegating power to professional political intermediaries.

What is the source of anarchism's new robustness, which seems like an
ideology for the 21st century while Marxism appears confined to the one
that just ended? The strength of ideologies (whose myths are
ahistorical) depends on the historical context. And it is my
hypothesis-in contrast to popular opinion- that anarchism was ahead of
its time.

A pervasive ideology in the early days of the workers' moment (the First
International), from Andalusia and Catalonia to Tsarist Russia, the
French Charte d'Amiens, and Chicago, the birthplace of May Day,
organized anarchism did not survive the repression it suffered under
both capitalism and communism. Its vulnerability was above all a
consequence of the fact that it identified the nation-state as the
cardinal enemy at the very moment that the state was becoming the center
and principle of social organization. After all, the twentieth century
was the century of the nation-state.

Classical anarchism encompassed a broad ideological spectrum, from
Stirner's irreducible individualism to Proudhon's social cooperativism,
to Bakunin and Kropotkin's libertarian communism. It inspired social
struggles in contexts as distinct as Makhno's peasant revolution in
Russia, urban social movements in Mexico in the 1920s, and the embryonic
social revolution that Spanish and Catalan anarchists attempted during
the first phase of the Civil War.

In this varied ideological current, which millions fought for and
embraced, there is a central idea: the complete liberation from the
ultimate source of oppression, the state. This, just when the
Nazi-fascist, Stalinist, and liberal-democratic war machines were arming
themselves to exterminate one another and using the state to take
control of as many people as they could.

And yet the state's victory, under whatever flag, led to a crisis a
half-century later. Communist governments were unable to absorb
precisely that which Marx had intended them to absorb: the development
of the productive forces. This is because the informational,
technological revolution could not take place without a society that is
informed-that is, autonomous from the state. And capitalism, in its
expansive dynamic, globalized itself and thereby undermined the
foundation of the nation-state, upon which it rested politically. The
economy became global, the state remained national, and society-between
the two, orphaned by the state and at the mercy of global
fluctuations-became increasingly entrenched in the local.

Or, it transformed itself into a collection of individuals, each with
his or her own preoccupations and plans. As a result, many people,
particularly the youth, who have yet to write their ideological page,
have stopped believing in politicians, although not in politics as such,
not in another politics. So, while the great powers position themselves
in the complex relation between globalization and the nation-state,
survival and resistance emerges from the individual and the local: in
other words, from the material with which anarchist ideology is
constructed.

Anarchism's great difficulty has always been reconciling personal and
local autonomy with the complexities of daily life and production in an
industrialized world on an interdependent planet. And here technology
turns out to be anarchism's ally more so than Marxism's. Instead of
large factories and gigantic bureaucracies (socialism's material base),
the economy increasingly operates through networks (the material
foundation of organizational autonomy). And instead of the nation-state
controlling territory, we have city-states managing the interchange
between territories. All this is based on the Internet, mobile phones,
satellites, and informational networks that allow local-global
communication and transport at a planetary scale. This is not only my
interpretation; it is also explicit in the discourse of the social
movements, as Jeffrey Juris's recent book on the topic splendidly
documents. There too we see a call for the dissolution of the state and
the construction of an autonomous social organization based on
individuals and affinity groups, debating, voting and acting through an
interactive network of communication. Is this utopia? No, it is
ideology. Consider the distinction: utopia prefigures a desired world.
Ideology configures practice. With utopia one dreams. With ideology one
struggles. Anarchism is an ideology. And neo-anarchism is an instrument
of struggle that appears commensurate with the needs of the twenty-first
century social revolt.

Well, one of the two instruments: while anarchism cries out "no God, no
master!" as it always has, its chief competitor in the rebellion against
global capitalism proclaims: "God is my only master!" In the face of an
out-of-control global capitalism, and a socialism settling into
retirement, resistance arises from the contradictory opposition between
fundamentalism and neo-anarchism.

* * *

Translated to English by Chuck Morse.

Translated and published here with the kind permission of La Vanguardia.




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