empowering anarchy

Empowering Anarchy: Power, Hegemony and Anarchist Strategy (2003?) by tadzio müller via post anarchism: a reader p 70-85 (not in anarchist library)

notes/quotes:

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5. Empowering Anarchy: Power, Hegemony and Anarchist Strategy [49]

endnote 49: This chapter originally appeared in Anarchist Studies 11(2) (2003). The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for Anarchist Studies, as well as Ben Day and Jamie Cross, for their insightful critiques and comments – some of which I ignored at my own peril.

Tadzio Mueller

tadzio müller

Prologue: Anarch-y/-ists/-ism

*How does one define something that draws its lifeblood from defying convention, from a burning conviction that what is, is wrong, and from the active attempt to change what is into what could be? Definitions necessarily try to fix the ‘meaning’ of something at any given point, and they imply that I, who do the defining, have the power to identify the limits of ‘anarchism’, to say what is legitimately anarchist. It is probably better, then, to start with clarifying what anarchism is not: it is definitely not a question of ancient Greek etymology, as in: ‘the prefix “an” linked to the word “archy” suggests that “anarchism” means …’; neither is it a question of analysing the writings of one dead white male or another, a type of approach that would look at books written by anarchist luminaries like Kropotkin or Proudhon, and would then proclaim that the essence of anarchism can be found in either one, or a combination of the two; nor is it, finally, a question of organizational continuity with the rebels who were killed in Kronstadt or the anarchists who fought in the Spanish civil war.

*you don’t.. let go.. wilde define law et al.. marsh label law et al

*This is not to say that a historical approach to anarchism is not relevant – only that an attempt to seek a purely historical definition of anarchism would in some sense commit an act of intellectual violence against those people who today think of themselves as anarchist, anarchist-inspired, or as ‘libertarian socialists’: most of those have not read Kropotkin, Bakunin, or even more contemporary anarchists such as Murray Bookchin, or did not read any of their works prior to thinking of themselves as anarchists. Barbara Epstein has tried to come to terms with this relative lack of ‘ideological purity’ by arguing that today’s anarchism is not really ideologically proper anarchism, but rather a collection of what she terms ‘anarchist sensibilities’ (Epstein, 2001: 4). However: in suggesting that today’s anarchists are not really anarchists, even if they think of themselves as such, **Epstein has made precisely the mistake that academics frequently make when talking about activists, that is, to define a ‘proper’ way of doing/being/thinking, and then identifying the ways in which activists diverge from the true path as identified by the intellectual elite.

*yes. had to be something already on each heart

**indeed.. everyone to date..

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*How can we then avoid this type of definitional ‘violence’, but still have something to talk about, that is, something that is identifiably ‘anarchist’? First, I suggest, by letting those people who actually think of themselves as anarchists or acknowledge certain anarchist influences in their political work speak and act for themselves. Because if anarchism is anything today, then it is not a set of dogmas and principles, but a set of practices and actions within which certain principles manifest themselves. Anarchism is not primarily about what is written, but about what is done: it is the simultaneous **negation of things as they are, the anger that flows from viewing the world as riddled with oppression and injustice, and the belief that this anger is pointless if one does not seek to do something different in the here and now. What makes these practices specifically anarchist in the eyes of today’s activists does of course vary from group to group, from person to person. For now, however, I will understand anarchist practices in the realm of political organization and expression as those practices that consciously seek to ***minimize hierarchies and oppose oppression in all walks of life, a desire which manifests itself in various organizational forms such as communes, federations, affinity groups and consensus-seeking structures. In other words, anarchism is a scream, not one of negation, but of affirmation: ****it is about going beyond rejecting, about starting to create an alternative in the present to that which triggered the scream in the first place (‘prefigurative politics’)[55]. *****This is not to say that anarchist practices always achieve that – in fact, the main body of this chapter will deal with the question of which barriers there are in anarchism itself to reaching its own goal. Instead, this merely gives a broad frame of reference to a discussion of anarchism, a frame that will be refined as the chapter develops.

*deeper.. why do we think we have to talk about it/things.. willard talking law.. jung talking law.. gibran talking law.. et al.. black science of people/whales law et al

**if negating.. any form of re ness.. then cancerous distraction

***will always only minimize.. because consensus, et al.. cancerous distractions.. and part\ial ness is keeping us in the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world

****if doing/being via triggering by the scream.. then re ness.. then cancerous distraction.. need to try/hear itch-in-the-soul first thing everyday

*****i guess that’s what i’ve been about .. those loopholes that keep perpetuating the things we keep obsessing with in order to be free.. we need a legit nother way

endnote 55: Graeber relates this notion of prefiguration directly to the anarchist wing of the globalization movement (Graeber, 2002: 62). It refers to a politics which in its current practice seeks to ‘prefigure’ the future society it struggles for – a notion of politics juxtaposed to a more ‘systemic’ approach, which would deny the possibility or efficacy of such ‘utopian’ communities.

only prefigure ness we need.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. not about struggle.. about listening..

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. to facil the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake..

ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

One disclaimer before the discussion starts: since I have suggested that it is only by letting today’s anarchists talk and act that we can find out what anarchism ‘really’ is, I have been forced to rely on the anarchists that I have met, and those anarchist texts that I have been able to get and read, to gather my ‘data’. These are, for a number of reasons, mostly from Europe and the United States. The questions faced by anarchists that I will discuss in this chapter come from this context, and the answers will be relevant, if at all, only in that context.

cancerous distraction.. need to listen deeper.. if we want to get to root of problem

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

Anarchists, Hegemony and Power

Having suggested what anarchism is about, the next question is: where is anarchism to be found? It is not, to begin with, the same as the globalization-critical movement (below: globalization movement), or even the latter’s biggest part. However, because many anarchists have been very engaged with this movement, many of the examples used here will be drawn from its mobilizations. Anarchism is also not the same as the by now internationally (in)famous ‘black bloc’, although some of the voices on which I will draw here will emanate from under a balaclava. Anarchists, then, should be seen as a ‘submerged network’ of groups, people and identities (Melucci, 1989), as a counter-community (Gemie, 1994) that gets involved in mobilizations (e.g. against the International Monetary Fund) and tactics (e.g. the black bloc), but does not exhaust itself in these: the subcultures where people are attempting to construct different ways of life, that centre around cafes and squats, groups and individuals, that can be found in Berlin or London, Malaga or Stockholm – that is where anarchists and therefore anarchism can be found.

if ‘getting involved’ in them.. already being ‘exhausted’ by them.. (cancerous distractions)

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Anarchism might today be back on the agenda after some decades in the political wilderness, but its existence is far from trouble-free, with *challenges coming from the ‘outside’, from the engagement with dominant structures of power, as well as from the inside, in terms of the ability to sustain itself as a subculture/movement.. Finally, the last problem is demonstrated by the fact that **there is hardly anyone over 30 who is interested in anarchism. In other words: the anarchist subculture is plagued by its inability to sustain participation, by its limited size and mobilization capacities, its social isolation, and the vulnerability to repression that this produces.

*both cancerous distractions.. have to get to root of problem.. if want it to ‘sustain’

**defn ness rather than over 30 ness.. if have to ‘sustain participation’ and why we need a global leap.. for (blank)’s sake

These political challenges have been widely discussed within anarchist circles, and many proposed solutions have emerged, most of which can be summarized under two headings: *they focus on the need firstly to overcome the isolation of the anarchist/left-libertarian subculture (extensive organizing), and **secondly to deepen that subculture’s political and social structures so as to strengthen its capacity of maintaining participation, or simply: to allow for people above, say, 29 to live an ‘anarchist’ life (intensive organizing).

*again.. why we need a global detox leap.. if it’s not all of us.. will be none of us

**and again.. has to be a problem deep enough to get to root of problem

Today’s anarchists are obviously not the first radical force encountering the problem of how to maintain its strength over time and in the face of attacks, and how to grow beyond its current strength. About 80 years ago, the Italian Communist Party’s strategist Antonio Gramsci asked himself the same question – and came up with an analysis of structures of power in advanced capitalism that I believe make him an important touchstone for any project of resistance operating under such conditions. His starting point was: why did the revolution succeed in Russia, and not in Italy or anywhere else in Western Europe, where classical Marxism had predicted it would be more likely to occur due to the more advanced development of capitalism? ..The revolution would therefore have to aim not only to conquer state power, but much more importantly, to create an *alternative civil society, which would have to be able to attract the majority of people by convincing them of the validity of the project, which was in turn premised on its ability to perform ‘all the activities and functions inherent in the organic development of a society’ (ibid.: 16). This alternative society has come to be referred to as a ‘counter-**hegemony’, a term I would translate as ‘sustainable communities of resistance’. The key to Gramsci’s analysis therefore was the suggestion that the organization of resistance would somehow have to ***mirror the structures of power.

*need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs.. perform all as is is cancerous distraction.. need to try something legit diff

**any form of re ness = same song

***aka: same song

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What is the relevance of this to anarchist practice? First of all, Gramsci’s alternative society would involve both extensive and intensive political organizing, as suggested in the proposals cited above: to extend the appeal of anarchism/communism by opening up to other groups and individuals, and to increase the sustainability of the anarchist/communist subculture by strengthening its social functions. There is, however, a major problem involved in transporting this concept into anarchist practice: Gramsci was a Leninist, and as such did not really have a problem with an anti-capitalist strategy that entailed hierarchies both internally and externally. It was in essence setting one power up against another. This clearly creates a problem for anarchists, if we understand anarchism as the struggle against all forms of hierarchies and power. If (1) a strategy of counter-hegemony, of building sustainable communities of resistance, is in essence a strategy of power, and if (2) anarchism is understood as rejecting all forms of power, and (3) the strategy outlined here in the crudest terms (internal and external expansion) is necessary to sustain the radical project of anarchism, have we then not reached the end of anarchism as a political project? Is anarchism as the rejection of hierarchies and power dead because it needs hierarchies and power in order to survive?

ugh.. legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance..

Anarchism, Parts 1 and 2

1. No Power for No-One!

*The question therefore becomes, is anarchism really the rejection of all forms of power? The obvious difficulty with this question lies in the word ‘really’: for if it is true that anarchism is not a unified body of theory but a set of practices, it might be quite difficult to figure out anything that anarchism ‘really’ is. A look at any flyer written by an anarchist group will usually reveal the coexistence of a variety of conceptual positions, some of which may even be mutually contradictory. **In order to pick apart the various ‘strands’ existing in anarchist discourse, then, it will be necessary to engage after all with anarchism as a historically created set of practices, that is: to critically analyse the various ideas and discourses that have shaped today’s practices.

*yeah.. to really.. as in vs whalespeak in sea world et al.. but also.. if rejecting power.. actually will be perpetuating it (any form of re ness)

**yeah to all the diff parts (the it is me ness).. but (and/or because of) all are cancerous distractions

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This assumption at the core of what I will call the ‘classical’ strand of anarchism has important politico-theoretical implications: having posited a pure human essence in a constant struggle against forces that seek to oppress it, the possibility of anarchist practice leading to a total liberation from power after some sort of revolution is maintained. This conclusion is based on a conception of power as being external to human essence, as coming from institutions that impose themselves on an organically free humanity (Newman, 2001: 37).

at a meeting at the largely anarchist-inspired ‘No Border’ camp in Strasbourg in July 2002, I witnessed a discussion about how to organize the set-up of toilets for the camp, where one speaker suggested that the question of who cleans the toilets was merely a ‘technical’ question. This may sound trivial, but if one considers that who cleans the toilets is very much a question of power, and therefore political rather than technical (whether it is the untouchables in India, or low-waged women both at their jobs and at home, it is almost always the oppressed who clean the toilets), then this argument must be seen as the articulation of a view that understands ‘power’ to reside only out there/up there, but not inside anarchism, with its privileged links to a naturally solidaristic human essence.

2. Multi-Sited Power, and Power among Anarchists

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This open strand of anarchism can therefore be summarized as opposing ‘capitalism, inequality (including the oppression of women by men), sexual repression, militarism, war, authority, and the state’ (Goodway, 1989: 2). 

Whither Anarchism?

Oppressive Anarchists

My contention is this: the view of power as external/opposed to some sort of ‘human nature’ has directly oppressive effects, as it serves to obscure the domination of one group of people/activists over another...What becomes clear here is that the idea of power as being external to human nature, expressing itself in the expectation that women could now, being liberated in the free space of the camp, finally conform to the ideal of free love, had become oppressive in itself: it put pressure on women to conform to the ideal of what the ‘human essence’ is, to live up to an ideal they never constructed.

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Open Anarchism – Open, Yes, but Going Where?

*So anarchist practice can in itself be oppressive, or at least entail relations of power, especially if that power is masked behind the idea of a possible power-free practice. .. It appears that there is no real difference then: **both strands claim to be able to ‘really’ get rid of power.

*legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and if not all.. then oppressive.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

**getting-rid-of ness only perpetuates that thing..which only perpetuates the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world

..the integrity of the individual that some anarchists value so highly: even a person who is oppressed on several counts (homosexuality, femininity) will be an oppressor on others (upper class, white). Therefore, flowing logically from the premises of the second strand, and from the political logic thus implied (no struggle is necessarily worth more than another), we get a picture of power relations criss-crossing all of society, penetrating even ourselves as subjects. Given this diffusion of power into our very own being, the conclusions must be that: (1) one cannot continue to think revolution as a one-off event, since that implies the existence of one or only a small number of centres of power. If power is also embedded in value structures as the example of patriarchy demonstrates, then ‘revolution’ must be seen as a process, since it is clearly impossible to ‘revolutionize’ values and attitudes from one day to the next; and (2) we cannot escape power, because every human relation involves (but is not exclusively constituted by) power relations, and thus power ‘over’ someone. Therefore, power is everywhere.

everywhere and since forever..

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From Open Anarchism to Post-Structuralist Anarchism

*Having thus shown power as inescapable, we are faced with another point where anarchism could simply self-destruct, as its original project – **the emancipation from all forms of hierarchies and power – seems to have become a theoretical and practical impossibility. However, this is where post-structuralist analysis can come in useful, in order, as it were, to think open anarchism to its logically and politically necessary conclusions. I do not so much ***seek to prove that anarchism and post-structuralism are compatible and even likely theoretical allies – that has been done] – but rather to understand how poststructuralism and anarchism can be practical allies, how post-structuralist analysis can be used to advance anarchist practice, and vice versa.

*is it?

**legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

***let’s just try (graeber model law et al) a nother way..

ie: the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

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Foucault’s key critique of Marxism related to the way the knowledge claims inherent in Marxism are structured: that there is a reality out there, which is hidden under appearances (e.g. the oppression of the worker as reality is hidden under the appearance of alienation and commodity fetishism). Given that there is then one ‘true’ reality, it must be possible to gain knowledge of that reality, *of course only after having absorbed the ‘proper’ doctrine of Marxism–Leninism. Foucault came to view the ‘truth claims’ made from this position, i.e.: the PCF knows the ‘true’ nature of the situation, while *those who are not sufficiently steeped in theory cannot know the truth – all eternal truth claims, in fact – as fundamentally oppressive, because they immediately introduce hierarchies: I know, and you don’t. Therefore, I am more powerful than you. ‘Knowledge’, that is the claim to know what ‘really’ is, is then a form of power (Foucault, 1980: 132–3).

*intellectness as cancerous distraction.. if org around legit needs.. all we need to ‘know’ already on each heart.. no prep.. no train needed.. (and so they are red flags we’re doing it/life/rev wrong)


So, how does that link to anarchism? It allows us for example to understand the situation on the above-mentioned protest camp: Foucault suggests that the view of power as fundamentally repressive, and therefore opposed to something that can be called ‘truth’ (or ‘anarchism’, or a ‘free society’), is *actually one of the key methods of maintaining certain relations of power, for it allows them to be hidden behind the mask of their being the ‘opposite’ of power (Foucault, 1990: 86). In our example, anarchy as ‘non-power’ is merely a facade behind which certain groups of activists (the more experienced ones; the ones with more knowledge; men) hide their power. In turn, a Foucauldian analysis would understand the ability of the protest site’s anonymous critic to deploy her argument as enabled by her having access to the knowledge necessary to write and disseminate her piece: if all truth claims are products of power, then the truth claims made by feminist analysis must be as well. ‘Patriarchy’ is then nothing that exists as a category before feminists constructed it, but was created in order to use it to alter the power relations between genders, by creating the ‘absence of freedom for women’ as a lack felt by women (‘freedom’ again being a category that does not pre-exist its social construction), which can then become the source of emancipatory activity. The upshot: a post-structuralist analysis radicalizes anarchism as a critique of power relations by extending it into the very field of resistance. Whereas anarchism had previously viewed the existence of power relations within spaces of resistance as simply an aberration (e.g. Anonymous5, 2000; Levine, 1984), thus keeping open the possibility of a privileged place of freedom which anarchist practice could potentially reach, we have now arrived at a picture where a *practice of resistance must itself be viewed as establishing a power relation (or altering an existing one) – from power being everywhere by default to power being everywhere by necessity.

*aka: any form of re ness.. so any form of m\a\p

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Post-Structuralist Anarchism, Power and Identity

*Having now understood any form of resistance as a form of power, where does this leave us? Do we have to give up resisting, simply because any statement to the effect that people are oppressed presupposes a power relation? This seems like a valid conclusion: even if we take power to be productive of our every action, and therefore unavoidable, we could still argue that it is necessary to minimize the power we exert over others. **One way of doing this would be by avoiding the construction of common identities between people who would then engage in social struggle as a collective force.

*yeah.. but defending that idea via talk about power is also a cancerous distraction.. defending ness is a cancerous distraction

**still us & them ness.. still not sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do.. still not problem deep enough

But let me backtrack for a moment: from where did this ‘identity’ question suddenly appear? As I suggested above, the claims of feminists that all women in the world are oppressed by a power structure of patriarchy involved an attempt to restructure power relations between genders: *the attempt to construct an identity common to all women by telling women that they ought to feel oppressed (because of course, in ‘reality’ they are), and that they therefore ought to struggle against this oppression, the attempt to create a political identity under the leadership of those who construct it. As Laclau and Mouffe put it: ‘hegemonic articulations retroactively create the interests they claim to represent’ (2001: xi). This is not to minimize or ridicule the oppression of women – only to suggest that political strategies that aim at mobilizing people for a struggle against this oppression involve attempts to construct collective identities, and therefore the establishment of power relations. And in turn, the strategies ask those who will have been successfully mobilized into this new collective identity, whether it is called ‘a global sisterhood’, ‘the people’, or ‘the working class’, to attempt to alter their power relations with those who are seen as oppressors. **In short: politics is about the construction of collective identities as the basis for action, and therefore about power. The question now is quite simple: do we think that engaging in politics is still a good idea, or not?

*has to be all of us for the dance to dance.. otherwise perpetuate the whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world

**even deeper.. need to let go of the whole idea of engaging ness.. and try something legit diff.. ie: listening.. via a means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

Post-Structuralist Anarchism as Non-Political Non-Politics?

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*The final battle the Enlightenment has yet to win, Sloterdijk suggests, is to expose the power hiding behind the notion of identity, to expose the ego, or subject, as constructed (Sloterdijk, 1983: 131–2). Tracing the construction of a bourgeois class identity (and the somewhat less successful attempt to construct a positive working-class identity), Sloterdijk reveals these to have been political projects, altering and establishing relations of power **by creating the very political force the leaders claimed to represent (ibid.: 133–54).

*already so many red flags.. oof.. great ie of the whac-a-mole-ing ness

**yet still doing it.. [just buried deeper and deeper in the whac-a-mole-ing ness.. in the cover up].. if any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

Politics, therefore, becomes a struggle between identities and power knowledges: any mobilization around any political topic, *however anarchistic or progressive, necessarily involves not ‘essences’ (as in: we are all essentially oppressed workers), but the construction of ‘a new knowledge-power and the creation of a new subject of power-knowledge’. It is against this background that Sloterdijk’s Enlightenment struggles to break open ‘the frozen identities’, celebrating against this necessary product of politics an ‘existential antipolitics’ that would **seek to reject all attempts at identifying us, to break through the disciplinary mechanisms that make us conform to a particular view of what we should do, and how we should be. Because ‘politics is, when people try to smash each others’ heads in’ (ibid.: 250; 315–19). Sloterdijk identifies his ***(non-)strategy to achieve this as ‘kynicism’: an attempt to break through social conditionings/disciplinary mechanisms by ****physically asserting our ability to enjoy life in spite of these conditionings –

*ooof.. if power.. if intellectness.. then still same song

**again.. need to try something deeper than re ness

***rather than non (which is re ness) need unjustifiable strategy

****but can’t.. because 1\ imagine a turtle and 2\ has to be all of us

So where does Sloterdijk’s (non-)politics, which I will treat as representative for any tendency of anarchism and post-structuralism that moves from the critique of politics to abandoning politics, leave us? With, I would suggest, a number of glaring inconsistencies. *The first and probably most damaging to Sloterdijk’s position is the fact that even his non-politics are necessarily embedded in power relations, and are thus political. In order either to withdraw from ‘established society’ or to physically defy social disciplinary mechanisms, one has to have a good number of privileges: many anarcho-activists who are today on the dole tend to forget that this dole is the result of the state skimming off some of the surplus value produced by workers, either in their own countries, or in another; to establish a commune requires, at least, **both intellectual and financial resources (skills and money), which are the products of power;.. ***In other words: to try to bypass power relations is to reaffirm them, and to deny yourself the ability to do anything about them.

*yeah.. that.. and why we need to try ie: a sabbatical ish transition.. of life over survival ness et al.. so that **these become irrelevant s (without the need to reject/fight/non them)

***yep.. in sea world.. why we need hari rat park law.. aka: a legit global re\set.. a legit global detox leap

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The second criticism is linked to the first, but not identical: *having affirmed that power is unavoidable, **I will now argue that ‘identity’ – that is, a more or less conscious inside/outside distinction – is simply a general condition of communication and social existence, and it is not only unavoidable (by default), but enabling and necessary. Sloterdijk, however, has already anticipated this move: he asserts that the desire to dive back constantly into new identifications once an old one is shattered is itself **part of a more fundamental ‘programming’ of ourselves, where we come to think of our subjectivity as necessarily linked to an identity. In addition, to state that such a tendency exists is identified by Sloterdijk as an exercise of ‘master knowledge’, which deviously suggests that ***most people would rather have more security than freedom, a position that in turn leads to claims to representing these ‘poor people’, to exercising power over them, to domination (ibid.: 155–6, 348).

*again.. in sea world.. aka: not trying life over survival ness

**ooof.. identity ness (beyond the it is me ness) is big part of the whac-a-mole-ing ness.. marsh label law et al.. need to try curiosity (itch-in-the-soul) as our only ‘label/identity’ via nonjudgmental expo labeling

***rather.. most whales

Three arguments can be deployed against this view. First, that in arguing that any claim to identity is oppressive and therefore concluding that it is the ‘essence’ of human freedom not to be tied to any identity, Sloterdijk has overshot his target. He has *constructed a new ‘identity’ or human essence, that of the person who seeks constantly to escape his/her being forced into an identity. The necessary implication of this is that any search for ‘sameness’, community, for collective identity, is the expression of the ‘deep programming’ identified above, and therefore not ‘essentially’ free and human. ..On the side, it appears that the practice of social ‘hypermobility’ is, somewhat like Sloterdijk’s kynicism, premised on a whole lot of resources to maintain such a life: in other words, it is a strategy of the privileged.

*again.. nothing new (legit free) unless sans any form of m\a\p

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In other words: *even the most perfect anarchist community needs disciplining – anything else would imply everyone’s freedom to do anything, no matter that such actions might be oppressive towards others.

*not if legit free.. again.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

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..employ methods of direct action and civil disobedience (PGA, n.d.)…an example of ‘intensive’/internal movement building, based on a set of defined principles that aim for the greatest possible diversity of practices and structures while also creating some limits in terms of what is acceptable.

his ‘deeper’ ie’s still not deep enough to get to the root of problem

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It takes only one hour-long meeting during which one’s supposedly power-free proposal is ripped to shreds by people arguing that it oppresses women, newcomers, older people, physically challenged people, immigrants, or whomever, for the realization to hit home that nothing one could ever say would be devoid of power.

why we need legit alt.. ie: graeber model law via hari rat park law

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Epilogue: Anarchists, Modest and Uncertain – but Still Counter-Hegemonic?

The Strasbourg camp accommodated between 2,000 and 3,000 activists over a period of over one week. In spite of massive disagreements, it represented a very successful example of anarchist living involving a large number of people, who developed bonds of solidarity based on common principles that allowed them to organize anarchistically the very details of everyday life – even who cleans the toilets: in the end, a functional group of volunteers was formed to do so. The camp operated under the constant threat (and fact) of police repression, and nonetheless managed to make some (albeit limited) contact with groups of illegal immigrants – although contact building with Strasbourg locals seemed, at least from my vantage point, woefully limited. The camp was certainly not perfect – *but then, today’s anarchism can no longer claim to be. All it can do is to try to create spaces and relations where domination and oppression are kept to a minimum.

*today we can go deeper.. deep enough.. ie: there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. to facil the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake..

ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

As I have suggested above, this type of political modesty must ultimately flow from an *acceptance of the unavoidability of power. The fundamental uncertainty this introduces into anarchists’ political actions might be disconcerting at first, but can be used productively to recognize that all our politics are guided by our ethics, and that ethics, not historical truth or destiny, becomes the essence of political work. While there may be many who draw comfort from the belief that – as an anarchist graffiti put it – ‘in the end, we will win’, and the sense of historical mission, truth and inevitability this implies, surely we all realize in our daily political work that there is no historical inevitability in anything political: **mobilizing means appealing to, and changing, people’s perceptions of what is good and bad. Their ethics, in short.

*cancerous distraction.. and why we have not yet gotten to global equity ness

**ooof.. not about good/bad ness.. judgment ness will never get us there (why we need tech w/o judgment – aka: nonjudgmental expo labeling).. rather.. about heart ness.. itch in soul ness.. life over survivial ness

From there, I have argued, it is only a short step towards accepting the necessity and ethical acceptability of a strategy of an anarchist counter-hegemony, or the creation of sustainable communities of resistance. Projects such as the PGA, the consulta, or the No Border camps suggest that there are people actively trying to construct such communities. In doing so, they will always have to return to the fundamental uncertainty of political organizing today, *to find a route that negotiates between two types of oppression: that of too few rules/identities, and that of too many. This does not sound much like a political project; such projects seem somehow always to need certainty. But at a time when the project of neoliberalism is having obviously disastrous consequences; when social democracy is in a coma, if it hasn’t quite kicked the bucket yet; when fascists and proto-fascists are on the rise; and when the authoritarian left cannot mobilize sufficient resistance; **this uncertain and modest post-structuralist anarchism seems to be our best shot at a new emancipatory project. In it, a movement (anarchism) found an analysis (post-structuralism) found a strategy (counter-hegemony) found a movement, etc. An uncertain synthesis, I admit. But uncertainty, perhaps even more than variety, is the real spice of life.

*no longer an issue.. we have means for legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake

**there’s a nother way.. and we’re missing it

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