David Graeber The New Anarchists 2002 The Anarchist Library Contents A globalization movement? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Billionaires and clowns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Anarchy and peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Practising direct democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Prefigurative politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2 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. Writerswhoforyearshavebeenpublishingessaysthatsoundlikepositionpapers 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 New York Times; 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. Asananthropologistandactiveparticipant—particularlyinthemoreradi- cal,direct-actionendofthemovement—Imaybeabletoclearupsomecommon pointsofmisunderstanding; butthenewsmaynotbegratefullyreceived. Much ofthehesitation,Isuspect,liesinthereluctanceofthosewhohavelongfancied 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. 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.1 The very notion of direct action, with its rejectionofapoliticswhichappealstogovernmentstomodifytheirbehaviour,in favourofphysicalinterventionagainststatepowerinaformthatitselfprefigures 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 supposedoppositiontosomethingcalled‘globalization’,oursupposed‘violence’, and our supposed lack of a coherent ideology — and then suggest how radical intellectualsmightthinkaboutreimaginingtheirowntheoreticalpracticeinthe light of all of this. A globalization movement? 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 byaneliteofeconomistsandcorporateflacks,towhommustbecededallpower 1Therearesomewhotakeanarchistprinciplesofanti-sectarianismandopen-endednessso seriouslythattheyaresometimesreluctanttocallthemselves‘anarchists’forthatveryreason. 3 onceheldbyinstitutionswithanyshredofdemocraticaccountability;fromnow onitwillbewieldedlargelythroughunelectedtreatyorganizationsliketheIMF, 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. Thephrase‘globalizationmovement’, though, isreallyquiteapropos. Ifone takesglobalizationtomeantheeffacementofbordersandthefreemovementof people, possessions and ideas, then it’s pretty clear that not only is the move- ment itself a product of globalization, but the majority of groups involved in it —themostradicalonesinparticular—arefarmoresupportiveofglobalization in general than are the IMF or WTO. It was an international network called People’sGlobalAction, forexample, thatputoutthefirstsummonsforplanet- widedaysofactionsuchasJ18andN30—thelattertheoriginalcallforprotest against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA in turn owes its origins to the famous International Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberal- ism, 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 therebelsaroundtheworld’. Peoplefromover50countriescamestreaminginto 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: ‘Wedeclarethatwewillmakeacollectivenetworkofallourparticularstruggles andresistances, anintercontinentalnetworkofresistanceagainstneoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for humanity’: Let it be a network of voices that resist the war Power wages on them. Anetworkofvoicesthatnotonlyspeak,butalsostruggleandresist for humanity and against neoliberalism. A network that covers the five continents and helps to resist the death that Power promises us.2 This,theDeclarationmadeclear,was‘notanorganizingstructure;ithasno central head or decision maker; it has no central command or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.’ The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya Basta! groups organizedasecondencuentroinSpain,wheretheideaofthenetworkprocesswas 2Read by Subcomandante Marcos during the closing session of the First Intercontinental Encuentro, 3 August 1996: Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, Juana Ponce de León,ed.,NewYork2001. 4 taken forward: PGA was born at a meeting in Geneva in February 1998. From thestart,itincludednotonlyanarchistgroupsandradicaltradeunionsinSpain, Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist farmers’ league in India (the KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan fisherfolk, the Argentinian teachers’union,indigenousgroupssuchastheMaoriofNewZealandandKuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement, a network made up of communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America — and anynumberofothers. Foralongtime,NorthAmericawasscarcelyrepresented, 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. Ifthemovement’soriginsareinternationalist,soareitsdemands. Thethree- 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 wouldmeanextremelimitsonpatentrights(themselvesaveryinsidiousformof protectionism). Thenobordernetwork—theirslogan: ‘NoOneisIllegal’—has organizedweek-longcampsites,laboratoriesforcreativeresistance,onthePolish — 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 thedeportationofimmigrants(deporteeshavediedofsuffocationonLufthansa 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. Moreandmore,activistshavebeentryingtodrawattentiontothefactthat the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is pretty much limited to the movement ofcapitalandcommodities, andactuallyincreasesbarriersagainstthefreeflow of people, information and ideas — the size of the US border guard has almost tripledsincethesigningofNAFTA.Hardlysurprising: ifitwerenotpossibleto effectivelyimprisonthemajorityofpeopleintheworldinimpoverishedenclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to beginwith. Givenafreemovementofpeople,thewholeneoliberalprojectwould collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the declineof‘sovereignty’inthecontemporaryworld: themainachievementofthe nation-state in the last century has been the establishment of a uniform grid of heavilypolicedbarriersacrosstheworld. Itispreciselythisinternationalsystem of control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization. These connexions — and the broader links between neoliberal policies and mechanismsofstatecoercion(police,prisons,militarism)—haveplayedamore andmoresalientroleinour analysesas weourselveshave confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders became a major issue in Europe during the IMFmeetingsatPrague, andlaterEUmeetingsinNice. AttheFTAAsummit 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 thecenterofQuebecCity,toshieldtheheadsofstatejunketinginsidefromany contact with the populace, became the perfect symbol for what neoliberalism 5 actually means in human terms. The spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters and grappling hooks, joined by everyone from Steelworkers to Mo- hawk warriors to tear down the wall, became — for that very reason — one of the most powerful moments in the movement’s history.3 There is one striking contrast between this and earlier internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western organizational mod- els 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 — includingmassnonviolentcivildisobedienceitself—werefirstdevelopedinthe global South. In the long run, this may well prove the single most radical thing about it. Billionaires and clowns In the corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind of mantra — invariably, repeatedly—wheneveralargeactiontakesplace: ‘violentprotests’, ‘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,breakingwindowsofemptystorefronts,holdinghandsastheyblockaded intersections,copsbeatingthemwithsticks)mightgivetheimpressionthatthe onlytrulyviolentpartieswerethepolice. TheUSmediaisprobablythebiggest 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 any- one 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 re- sistance. Theefforttodestroyexistingparadigmsisusuallyquiteself-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 liketheDirectActionNetwork,ReclaimtheStreets,BlackBlocsorTuteBianche 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 tute bianche 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 pro- tecting each other against injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon characters — misshapen, ungainly, foolish, largely in- destructible. The effect is only increased when lines of costumed figures attack 3Helpingtearitdownwascertainlyoneofthemoreexhilaratingexperiencesofthisauthor’s life. 6 police with balloons and water pistols or, like the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and elsewhere, dress as fairies and tickle them with feather dusters. AttheAmericanPartyConventions, BillionairesforBush(orGore)dressed inhigh-camptuxedosandeveninggownsandtriedtopresswadsoffakemoney intothecops’pockets,thankingthemforrepressingthedissent. Nonewereeven slightlyhurt—perhapspolicearegivenaversiontherapyagainsthittinganyone inatuxedo. TheRevolutionaryAnarchistClownBloc,withtheirhighbicycles, 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!’, aswellasmeta-chantslike‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’ and—everyone’s favourite — ‘Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant!’ InQuebecCity, agiantcatapultbuiltalongmediaevallines(withhelpfrom theleftcaucusoftheSocietyforCreativeAnachronism)lobbedsofttoysatthe 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,whilesnake-dancescanbeaformofmobileblockade. RebelsinLondon 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 encouragingfascisthooliganstorunriotasanexcusetouseoverwhelmingforce against everybody else. Onecouldtracetheseformsofactionbacktothestuntsandguerrillatheater oftheYippiesorItalian‘metropolitanIndians’inthesixties,thesquatterbattles 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 crucialoriginsliewiththeZapatistas,andothermovementsintheglobalSouth. 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: Wethoughtthepeoplewouldeithernotpayattentiontous,orcome togetherwithustofight. Buttheydidnotreactineitherofthesetwo ways. It turned out that all these people, who were thousands, tens ofthousands,hundredsofthousands,perhapsmillions,didnotwant 7 toriseupwithusbut...neitherdidtheywantustobeannihilated. They wanted us to dialogue. This completely broke our scheme and ended up defining zapatismo, the neo-zapatismo.4 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’MovementgainanenormousmoralauthorityinBrazilbyreoccupying unused lands entirely non-violently. In either case, it’s pretty clear that if the samepeoplehadtriedthesamethingtwentyyearsago,theywouldsimplyhave been shot. Anarchy and peace 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 criticalthing, though, isthatallthisisonlypossibleinageneralatmosphereof 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.5 The situation only really changed with World War I and theRussianRevolution. ItwastheBolsheviks’success,weareusuallytold,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. In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed that war be- tween 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 anantiquatedbarbarism. The‘shorttwentiethcentury’ was, by contrast, probably the most violent in human history, almost entirely preoccu- pied with either waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came to seem unrealistic, if the ultimate measure ofpoliticaleffectivenessbecametheabilitytomaintainhugemechanizedkilling machines. This is one thing that anarchists, by definition, can never be very goodat. NeitherisitsurprisingthatMarxistparties—whohavebeenonlytoo good at it — seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison. Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, and war between industrialized powers once 4InterviewedbyYvonLeBot,SubcomandanteMarcos: ElSueñoZapatista,Barcelona1997, pp. 214—5;BillWeinberg,HomagetoChiapas,London2000,p. 188. 5‘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,oratleastmuchclosertotheideasandthemoodofanarcho-syndicalismthanto thatofclassicalMarxism.’ EricHobsbawm,‘BolshevismandtheAnarchists’,Revolutionaries, NewYork1973,p. 61. 8 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. 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 frighten- ing. Governmentswhoweredesperatelyscramblingforsomewaytoconvincethe public we were terrorists even before September 11 now feel they’ve been given carteblanche; 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 violenceissimplyimpossible. TheSeptember11attackswereclearlysomething 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 por- tions 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. Practising direct democracy Aconstantcomplaintabouttheglobalizationmovementintheprogressivepress isthat,whiletacticallybrilliant,itlacksanycentralthemeorcoherentideology. (Thisseemstobetheleftequivalentofthecorporatemedia’sclaimsthatweare 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 are 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 consensusdemocracy. Ultimately,itaspirestobemuchmorethanthat,because ultimatelyitaspirestoreinventdailylifeaswhole. Butunlikemanyotherforms ofradicalism,ithasfirstorganizeditselfinthepoliticalsphere—mainlybecause this was a territory that the powers that be (who have shifted all their heavy artillery into the economic) have largely abandoned. Over the past decade, activists in North America have been putting enor- mous 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 theWesterntradition,whichalmostinvariablyrelyonsomeprocessofconsensus 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 democraticprocess that allow initiatives torise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity, without stifling dissenting voices, cre- atingleadershippositionsorcompellinganyonetodoanythingwhichtheyhave not freely agreed to do. The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting, you try 9 to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone — or at least, not highly objectionabletoanyone: firststatetheproposal,thenaskfor‘concerns’andtry toaddressthem. Often, atthispoint, peopleinthegroupwillpropose‘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 notmyselfbewillingtotakepartinthisaction,butIwouldn’tstopanyoneelse fromdoingit’. Blockingisawayofsaying‘Ithinkthisviolatesthefundamental 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. Therearedifferentsortsofgroups. Spokescouncils,forexample,arelargeas- semblies 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 generatingproposals,whichcanthenbepresentedforapprovalbeforethewhole 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 brain- storming session, in which people are only allowed to present ideas but not to criticizeotherpeople’s; orforanon-bindingstrawpoll,wherepeopleraisetheir hands just to see how everyone feels about a proposal, rather than to make a decision. Afishbowlwouldonlybeusedifthereisaprofounddifferenceofopin- ion: 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. Prefigurative politics Thisisverymuchaworkinprogress,andcreatingacultureofdemocracyamong people who have little experience of such things is necessarily a painful and un- even 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 sec- tarian Marxist groups; or, for that matter, of the sectarian Anarchist groups.6 6Whatonemightcallcapital-Aanarchistgroups,suchas,say,theNorthEastFederation of Anarchist Communists — whose members must accept the Platform of the Anarchist Communistssetdownin1926byNestorMakhno—dostillexist,ofcourse. Butthesmall-a 10