Perspectives

J. on Anarchist Theory

Anarchism in Bolivia: Through the Writing of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui A Mestizo's Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto
Translated and introduced by Alejandro de Acosta A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia Translated and introduced by Melissa Forbis and Cale Lay ton

Equality and the Avoidance of Politics

By Todd May

Four Questions for Anarchist Art

By Josh MacPhee

"Neither Butchers nor Lunatics": A Roundtable on New Anticapitalist Organizing in Beirut

By Mary Foster and Jerome Klassen Plus Mark Lance, Ramor Ryan, and Andrea Schmidt on Lnternational Solidarity

Volume 9, Number 1 - Fall 2005 Price $5.00

The IAS Speakers Bureau

Through the IAS Speakers Bureau, your organization can arrange speaking engagements with one of the dynamic speakers drawn from our network of scholars and activists. Speakers include Ashanti Alston, Kazcmbc Balagun, Paul Glavin, Mark Lance, Todd May, Cindy Milstein, Ramor Ryan, Bill Weinberg Host organizations will be asked to provide all transportation costs, and an honorarium and lodg ing. A portion of the honorarium will go to support the work of the IAS, and the rest to support the work of the speaker. A complete list of speakers and presentation topics is available on our Web site. To schedule a speaking engagement, print out the inquiry form available online. Or contact us: Institute for Anarchist Studies Phone: (917) 753-2663 E-mail: speakers@anarchist-studics.org

Editorial Committee: John Petrovato and Andrea Schmidt Guest Editors & Editorial Wisdom: Mark Lance, Erika Biddle, Robert Augman, Louis-Frederic Gaudet, Cindy Milstein Layout and Design: Michael Caplan Copy Editors: Robert Augman, Erika Biddle, Paul Glavin, Helen Hudson, Cindy Milstein Production: Alexis Bhagat IAS Board of Directors: Ashanti Alston, Robert Augman, Erika Biddle, Alexis Bhagat, Louis-Frederic Gaudet, Paul Glavin, Helen Hudson, Mark Lance, Brooke Lehman, Cindy Milstein, Darini Nicholas, John Petrovato, Andrea Schmidt

Subscription Rates: Subscriptions are free for IAS donors. USA and Canada: US$10.00 per year. All other countries: US$15.00 per year. Institutions $20 U.S. per year. Bulk copies are available at a discount. Please make checks payable to: Institute for Anarchist Studies P.O. Box 1664, Peter Stuyvesant Station, NY, NY 10009 info@anarchist-studies.org; www.anarchist-studies.org The views expressed in Perspectives do not necessarily represent the views of the IAS as a whole. Perspectives on Anarchist Theory is published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. ISSN 1715-7552

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Perspectives
J. on Anarchist Theory
Volume 9, Number 1 - Fall 2005 Welcome 4 COLUMNS What's Happening: Recent Books by John Petrovato 5 Words & Revolution: Regarding a Moratorium on "Freedom" & "Democracy" by Alexis Bhagat 10 F E AT U R E S Equality & the Avoidance of Politics by Todd May 14 Anarchism in Bolivia: Through the Writing of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui A Mestizo's Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Translated and introduced by Alejandro de Acosta 16 The Voice of the Peasant by Luis Cusicanqui. Translated and introduced by Alejandro de Acosta 18 A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia by Zulema Lehm A. & Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Translated and introduced by Melissa Forbis and Cale Lay ton 24 Argentina, December 19th and 20th, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection by Colectivo Situaciones. Translated and introduced by Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza 32 Four Questions for Anarchist Art by Josh MacPhee 36 R O U N D TA B L E "Neither Butchers nor Lunatics": New Anticapitalist Organizing in Beirut by Mary Foster and Jerome Klassen 42 TRIPTYCH International Solidarity by Mark Lance, Ramor Ryan, and Andrea Schmidt 48 BOOK REVIEWS Reclaiming a "Hidden" Tradition: Is Anarchist Economics Hitting the Mainstream? by Eric Laursen 54 Operaismo, Autonomia, & the Emergence of New Social Subjects by Stevphen Shukaitis 59 Walking on the Edge of Revolt by Louis-Frederic Gaudet 64 Species of Anarchist Memory by Alexander K. Hirsch 69 IAS UPDATES Summer 2005 Grants Awarded 73 Here's to Chuck! 74 Grant Updates 74 The IAS s 2005 Fundraising Campaign 75 Great Books for IAS Donors 76 Contributors 79

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Welcome
been a long time coming. The IAS has undergone This issue of Perspectivesthe only one in 2005has signicant transformations over the course of the past year. In many ways, the fall issue of Perspectives is emblematic of both the changes and continuities within the organization. Resistance to global apartheid and empire requires that anarchists and anti-authoritarians link our movements and organizing efforts along with the lessons we draw from them. With articles and analyses from Buenos Aires to Baghdad, this issue tries to offer a modest forum within which to make these connections. It is a celebration of the internationalism that has always inspired our projects. Some of the articles, like the translations of Sylvia Cusicanqui s work on anarchist trade unions and mestizo identity in Bolivia, are windows onto anarchist movements and debates that have unfolded in the past. We hope that they will provide resources for thinking out contemporary challenges and strategies. Others, like the round table on anticapitalist organizing in Beirut and Josh MacPhee's "Four Questions for Anarchist Art," examine contemporary movements and practices. They offer a space for critical reection, for asking questions and debating answers "as we walk." Many of the pieces are written or translated by IAS grantees. In that sense, this issue is an example of the community of radical writers that the IAS has long sought to nurture. This past winter, the IAS decided to decentralize its dayto-day work. It speaks well of that process that this issue Perspectives has been so enriched by the talents of many board members. In the spring, we welcomed ve new people to the board: Rob Augman and Erika Biddle (New York), Mark Lance (Washington, DC), and Louis-Frederic Gaudet and Helen Hudson (Montreal). Their skills, energy, and vision have already expanded the horizon of what is possible. Sadly, the spring also brought farewells. Michael Caplan, a former IAS director, stepped down from the board in order to pursue new family and work commitments. We will miss his low-key savoir faire and impressive administrative talents, yet Michael remains present in these pages, which he laid out and designed. We are grateful for his ongoing support. Chuck Morse, founder of the IAS, coeditor of Perspectives, and the veritable backbone of the organization since its inception, also resigned from the board. His mark is nevertheless evident in many of this issue's articles, which he edited in earlier drafts. We pay tribute to Chucks vision and work with the IAS elsewhere in Perspectives. But it is worth noting here that his dynamism, rigor, and irreverent sense of humor were gready missed in the later stages of the journal's production. Over the years, Chuck's gift to the IAS has been his conviction that anarchism is worth taking seriously, and that anarchists can and should develop themselves to become sophisticated enough to grapple with the contemporary political crises with which we are confronted. This requires anarchist institutions able to endure the ebbs and ows of movements and ideological popularityhence Chuck's dedication to the IAS. The many writers with whom he worked as editor of Perspectives and the New Formulation would probably agree that the same attitude shone in Chuck's work on these projects too: he encouraged our writing by demanding a degree of rigor unheard of in most anarchist circles. This readiness to take ourselves seriouslytempered with a good dose of humilityis vital to our collective work as antiauthoritarians at a time when genuinely radical movements in North America are immmobilized. (Even the response to the Bush administration's post-Katrina policiesbasically, ethnic cleansing of an area known for its history of resistance to racism and slaveryhas barely dented that administration's power.) To paraphrase Louis in his review, "Walking on the Edge of Revolt," these moments of low activity are precisely those in which anarchists should build the bases for more sustainable struggles, by nurturing institutions founded on the values that we hold dear and developing our critiques of the systems of domination in which we are enmeshed. The IAS will persist in its efforts to be such an institution. And we leave you to enjoy Perspectives on a self-critical note: As you peruse these pages, you will notice that many of the authors are men, and many are academics. To be worthwhile, Perspectives must become a writing and thinking space for a multitude of anti-authoritarians who are not necessarily supported by universities. If you read this journal and feel alienated, or think that important issues that should be considered through an anarchist lens have been left out, you probably have an essay to contribute. Please write. Solidarity,

yV\aUc

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

What's Happening
Recent Books
by John Petrovato

pecially remarkable year when TThe year it comes 2005 to has the publication been an es of quality books on the subject of anar chismfrom new and original pieces by writers rethinking the anarchist tradition to writings that have been brought back from obscurity and reprinted. I will here briey review some of the interesting newcomers within this recent deluge of books.

Anarchist History
A TV" has recently reprinted a numx~\.X\_ber of books by Paul Avrich. These books were originally published by Princeton University Press, and many have been out of print for a while. Paul Avrich has traditionally been recognized as one of the best-known historians of anarchism, and his views on anarchist history are widely respected within the community. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America is not a conventional historical narrative, but rather draws from hundreds of interviews with anarchists, offering their individual voices and perspectives. This reissue by AK Press (much more affordable than the Princeton original) provides extraor dinarily rich insights into anarchists who participated in the movement throughout the 20,h century in America. The col lection does not discriminate between the "famous" and "obscure" but, instead, collects all of their voices into a single compendium. This book is invaluable to contemporary anarchists interested in historical origins within the United States, and gives us important "real time" insights into previously existing tradi tions. AK Press has also produced two other exciting collections this year: Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magon Reader and Anarchy Will Be! Selected Writings ofLuigi Galleani. Compiled and anno tated by Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Verter, Dreams of Freedom describes the life and times of Ricardo Flores Magon, who along with Francisco Zapata was one of the most important gures of the Mexi can revolution, and was imprisoned for his attempts to build the revolutionary movement from his position within the United States. This book contains the rst English translations of his writings, as well as a chronology, maps, images and bibliography to provide context. Anarchy Will Be! discusses an important gure in the history of American anarchismLuigi Galleani, an Italian immigrant who was extremely vocal and militant in the battle against wage slavery and for the rights of immigrants during the pe riod of the U.S. government's criminal Palmer raids. Importantly, the book also provides newly translated pieces from Galleani's anarchist newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva, printed from the period 1903-1918. With an introduction by anarchist historian Barry Pateman. Additionally, AK Press has reissued another classic work that has long been out of print: The London Years by Ru dolph Rocker. Rocker is perhaps best known in anarchist circles as the author of Nationalism and Culturean impres sive work critiquing nationalism from an anarchist perspectiveand is widely recognized as one of the principal theo rists of anarcho-syndicalism. The London Years is Rocker's autobiographical ac count of early 20,h-century London, and it documents his strategics for the cor rection of unjust workshop conditions for Jewish immigrants in Britain. Though a German Catholic, Rocker eventually be came one of the most inuential gures within the Jewish anarchist milieu. A collection of the writings of the early 20Ih-century American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre has just been pub-

fall 2005 / 5

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory lished by State University of New York Press. Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre: Feminist, Anarchist, Genius seeks to bring the essays and articles of de Cleyre "out of undeserved obscurity." (Evidendy, the editors of this collection are unaware of the AK Press book published just last year, The Voltarine de Cleyre Reader.) Twenty-one of her eloquent and incisive works have been reprinted here, including: "An archism and the American Tradition," "The Dominant Idea" and "Sex Slav ery." The critical writings of de Cleyre focused on an end to women's economic dependence, unequal gender roles, and articulated an important demand for the autonomy of women both within and outside of marriage. Moreover, she of fered a radical and original critique of the role of church and state in sustaining the existing oppressive conditions for wom en. Three original biographical essays are also included: two new ones by Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, and a rarely reprinted one from Emma Goldman. From the 1950s through the 1970s, one of the most articulate historians of anarchism was George Woodcock. His writings included everything from an archist pamphlets to lengthy histories of anarchism, as well as analyses of the his torical method, poetry and more. Con sidered one of Canada's most important writers, Woodcock is best known within radical circles for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Move ments. Long out of print, this classic work of intellectual history and politi cal theory (rst published in the 1960s, revised in 1986) is now available from Broadview Encore Editions. The rst of two volumes of Anar chism: A Documentary History of Lib ertarian Ideas, edited and introduced by Robert Graham, has recendy been released by Black Rose Books. In addi tion to carefully chosen selections from the classical European anarchists, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939) includes substantial sections on Latin American anarchism, as well as anarchism in China, Japan and Korea. Much of this material has never before been published in English. Graham was awarded an IAS grant for this anthology project in January 2004. Two new books have been released on the subject of Italian-American anar chism. The rst concerns Carlo Tresca, one of America's most controversial and charismatic gures of the early 20th cen tury. Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (Palgrave Macmillan) is a biography in which author Nunzio Pernicone recounts Tresca's life through his many roles: newspa per editor, labor agitator and organizer, anti-fascist, anarchist, and indomitable Stalin foe. Eventually murdered by the maa, Tresca had a fascinating life, and the biography does that life ample justice. The most famous Italian-American anarchists were, of course, Sacco and Vanzettitwo Massachusetts shoe makers who were put to death for their politics. Although dozens of books have been published about them and their tri al, a new book entided Representing Sacco and Vanzetti by Jerome Delamater and Mary Anne Trasciatti (Palgrave Macmil lan) attempts something different. The authors take a unique look into the liter ary, artistic, and mass-mediated repre sentations of Sacco and Vanzetti to show how the stereotypes of so-called "foreign ers" and "others" prevailed in the 1920s, then use this material to demonstrate how many of these same representations continue to color contemporary percep tions of immigrants and "foreignness." Two new books about the IWW (International Workers of the World) have just been released. The rst, Wobblies:A Graphic History of the International Workers of the World (Verso) by radical historians Paul Buhle and Nichole Schulman will be a welcome addition to many anarchist libraries. Published for the centenary of the founding of the IWW, the history of the organization has here been both scripted and graphically illus trated by seasoned and younger Wobbly and IWW-inspired artists. Contributors include: Carlos Cortez (former editor of the Industrial Worker), Harvey Pekar (author of American Splendor), Peter Kuper, Sue Coe, Seth Tobocman, Chris Cardinale, Ryan Inzana, Spain Rodriques, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and the circle of artists involved with World War 3 Illustrated. The second new book concerning the IWW is Dancinin the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists &Provos in the 1960s. This Charles Kerr publica tion collects dozens of selections from IWW magazines Rebel Worker (Chicago) and Heatwave (London) of the 1960s. Combining an original radical perspec tive rooted in a critique of capital with inuences from Surrealism, jazz and poetryamong other thingsthe beat nik milieu that made up these editorial groups contributed to innovative social criticism that displayed artistic and play ful creativity, and was a precursor to the Situationist International's emphasis on "the revolution of everyday life." In cludes long biographical introductions by the editors, Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe. Finally, one last book on anarchist history is Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies. Published by East Eu ropean Monographs in conjunction with Columbia University Press, the authors examine the various currents of anar chism in n-de-siecle Hungary.

Anarchist Theory & Criticism

One works of theto most be published inuential in the anarchist late 20th century was Murray Bookchin's The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. The book had a major impact on both anarchist and en vironmental movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Bookchin's unique insightand the thesis of the bookwas that "the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domina tion of human by human." The ideas contained within this text later came to form the theoretical foundation for the Social Ecology movement. An intricate historical account of the emergence of hierarchical relations in society, the book placed anarchist thought in the forefront of the emerging ecology movement. AK Press has just re-released The Ecology of Freedom with a new foreword by Bookchin.

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What's Happening: Recent Books Although Noam Chomsky has ac knowledged himself as an anarchist for several years, he never before produced a book which spoke directly to anarchist thought. Most of Chomsky's political writing has focused on critiquing con temporary forms of powerwhich has been extremely important for genera tions of activists and thinkers. His work historically has exhibited very clear and meticulously documented accounts of social injustice, capitalism, imperial ism and domestic repression. This new book, Chomsky on Anarchism (AK Press), collects Chomsky's essays and inter viewsboth published and previously unpublishedthat specifically deal with anarchism. It shows his commitment to nonhierarchical models of political orga nizing and his hopes for a future without rulers. Includes an introduction by editor Barry Pateman. In their search for new ways of under standing hierarchy, domination and pow er, anarchists and others have produced numerous works that have deepened our understanding of how power works. One philosopher in particular, Todd May, best known in anarchist circles for his 1994 book Toward a Political Theory of PostStructuralist Anarchism, is one such think er. This year he published another book that specically deals with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work has been essential to the development of post-structuralism, and especially poststructural anarchism. Deleuze is a no tably difcult philosopher and dozens of books attempting to clarify and explain his ideas have been published. In Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press), May approaches De leuze in a somewhat different manner. As in many of his other books, May seeks to not only present or clarify ideas, but to ask essential and important questions for the reader, demonstrating the applicabil ity of complex and seemingly abstract ideas to everyday life. Arguing that De leuze offers a view of the cosmos as a liv ing entity that suggests ways of conduct ing lives in manners perhaps never even dreamed of, the book seeks to answer the question "How might we live?" and gives us important clues in the process. Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements by Richard Day will be published by Pluto Press in November 2005. Gramsci and the concept of hegemony cast a long shadow over radical political theory. Yet how far has this theory gotten us? Is it still cen tral to feminism, anti-capitalism, antiracism, anarchism and other radical so cial movements today? Unlike previous revolutionary movements, Day argues, most contemporary radical social move ments do not strive to take control of the state. Instead, they attempt to develop new forms of self-organization that can run in parallel withor as alternatives toexisting forms of social, political and economic organization. This is to say that they follow a logic of afnity, rather than hegemony. This book draws from a variety of different strands in political theory to weave together an innovative approach to contemporary politics. Rig orous and wide-ranging, Day introduces and interrogates key concepts, such as Hegel's concept of recognition, theories of hegemony and afnity, Hardt and Negri's reections on Empire, and the theoretical and philosophical concerns of today's worldwhether in the hallowed corridors of academia or in the politics of the streets. Ideal for all students of political theory, Day's fresh approach combines Marxist, anarchist and poststructuralist theory to shed new light on the politics and practice of contemporary social movements. Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age (Manchester University Press), edited by Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen, sets out to recongure anarchist theory by describ ing contemporary anarchist practice and providing a viable evaluative and analytic framework for understanding it. The contributors are both academics and activists, and they raise salient questions regarding the complex nature of power, as well as resistance to it. Areas covered include: sexuality and identity, psycho logical dependency on technology, liber tarian education, religion, protest tactics, artistic expression, among other matters.

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory This collection epitomizes the rich di versity that exists within contemporary anarchism, as well as demonstrating its ongoing relevance as a sociological tool. The British anarchist writer Colin Ward has also produced a new book called Anarchism: A Very Short Introduc tion (Oxford University Press). Colin Ward has been involved with the anar chist movement in England for many years, was at one time the editor of the British Anarchy magazine, and is the author of numerous books on anarchism, ecology, architecture, city planning, transportation and more. His Anarchy in Action, published in the 1970s, was one of the best introductions to anar chist theory and practice for many years. His new booka small one at only 109 pagesseeks also to familiarize people not normally exposed to anarchist ideas with the traditions and dynamics of an archism. Although a brief and straight forward introductory text, he covers the major ideas, history and personalities of anarchism from a variety of perspectives (theoretical, historical and international), giving greater coverage to specic key thinkers, such as Kropotkin and Chom sky. Avant-Garde: A History of the Situationists International and Modern Art by Roberto Ohrt (Lukas 8c Sternberg). study of the little-known secret and repressive prison system run for two de cades by the U.S. Immigration and Natu ralization Service. The book chronicles this institution's history of brutality and torture of recent immigrants occurring on American soil. On the related subject of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Lila Rajiva has written a book that looks at the re sponse of the U.S. media and Congress to the revelations of abuse and torture, and relates this response to the larger context of U.S. global politics and ideol ogy. Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (Monthly Review Press), illustrates how the media has col luded with the Bush administration in manipulating images of U.S. occupation of Iraq in such a way as to present it as a "clash of civilizations" popularized by Samuel Huntington.

The Prison System

The state ined as has the historically political antimony been imag of anarchism, and the prison as one of the most symbolic and repressive methods of state-sponsored social control. An archists have long been involved with struggles against the prison system, and with attempts to illuminate the race- and class-based injustices that it perpetuates. However, the power of the prison as a form of social repression is not limited to domestic populations. The "new" socalled "war on terror" and U.S. govern ment-dened "security concerns" have given the North American government renewed justication for non-traditional forms of imprisonmentespecially for non-U.S. citizens. Non-US. citizens are prevented from using the rights and safe guard that non-aliens theoretically have to protect their civil liberties. Thousands of peopleso called "enemy combat ants"are now imprisoned by U.S. of cials throughout the world and are de nied the most fundamental rights. The three books below describe this abuse of power, and the ways it is masked by the discourse of "national security." Americas Disappeared: Secret Imprison ment, Detainees, and the "War on Terror" (Seven Stories Press) is a slim but infor mative volume edited by Rachel Meeropol, an attorney who works with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. The book assembles analysis of U.S. "anti-terror" toolsincluding the practice of torture as a counterterrorism tool, the administrative detention of mi grants in the United States, the implica tions of designating a group of people "enemy combatants," and the preserva tion of Guantanamo as a space outside the lawand intersperses it with the testimony of detainees themselves. Another new book that details im prisonment and abuse of foreign nation als is Mark Dow's American Gulag: Inside Immigration Prisons (University of Cali fornia Press). Dow provides an in-depth

Social Control
Related as a to means the use of social of imprisonment control is the increasing criminalization of dissent in recent years. At a time when the FBI is actively monitoring and interfering with individuals and groups who work for social change, it is timely that the book There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Coun terintelligence (University of California Press) should be released. While Ward Churchill's books on the subject of COINTELPRO operations continue to provide an excellent resource on the sub ject, this book is a ne complement. The author analyzed over 12,000 previously classied documents and uncovered the riveting inside story of the FBI's attempts to neutralize both Left and Right politi cal targets in the 1960s. Examining the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO project, Cunningham questions whether such ac tions were aberrations, or are evidence of the Bureau's ongoing mission to restrict citizens' rights to engage in legal forms of dissent. States control their populations in many ways: imprisonment, education, propaganda and technology. Barbed wire, an invention that seeks to control

Anarchism & the Arts

Anarchism on various has movements always hadin an art impact in cluding lm, the visual arts, music, ar chitecture and other forms of cultural expression. A new edited volume, 'To Hell With Culture': Anarchism in Twenti eth Century British Literature (University of Wales Press) is comprised of essays that explore both the negative treatment of anarchism in British novels (Joseph Conrad and G. K. Chesterton) and sym pathetic interpretations (Aldous Huxley, Alex Comfort, Ethel Mannin, Ralph Bates, Herbert Read, John Cowper Powys, et al). Additionally, the collection explores the presence of the anarchist tradition among contemporary British novelists, such as James Kelman, Mark Ravenhill and Niall Grifths. Another book that will be released later in the year describes the inuence of anarchism on the graphic arts: Phantom

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What's Happening: Recent Books movement with pain is the subject of a fascinating new history by Reviel Netz. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press) surveys the development of this peculiar method of punitive social control during the period 1874 to 1954, and describes its use to control cattle during the colonization of the American West, and people in Nazi concentration camps and the Russian Gulag. Told from the perspective of the victim (whether it be human, animal or the environment), Barbed Wire presents modern history through the lens of the prevention of movement and the control of space. number of perspectives. One new book, International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization (Zed Books) attempts to understand the infrastructure of the global Zapatista solidarity network. The author, Thomas Olescn, seeks to understand which activi ties the network has engaged in, and to ask which factors have enabled this net work to develop so successfully. Olesen also wonders about the long-term impli cations of this transnational network for new kinds of political action and interna tional solidarity. Another question that scholars and activists ponder is the gulf between social movement theory and social movement activism. Examining the causes and consequences of this disconnect between theory and practice is the focus of a new book entitled Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship (University of Minnesota Press), edited by David Croteau, William Hoyncs and Charlotte Ryan. The schol ars and activists who have contributed to this collection explore solutions, weigh ing the promise and peril of engaged theory and the barriers to meaningful collaboration. The Global Resistance Reader (Rout ledge) is another large collection that provides a comprehensive account of the phenomenal rise of the transnational social movements in opposition to the nancial, economic and political hege mony of large international organizations such as the WTO, World Bank and the IMF. Amy Spencer has written a popular history of the "do-it-yourself" move ment called DIY: The Rise ofLo-Fi Cul ture (Marion Boyars). Since the 1990s, thousands of people have embraced the zinc revolution and DIY music making. Spencer documents DIY culture from zine archives to SchNEWS, Queercore to Riot Grrl, Situationists to punk rock, and rebel radio to rave. Finally, it is with great pleasure that we witness another LAS-funded project coming to fruition. Marina Sitrin, IAS grant recipient in 2003, has produced a Spanish-language book documenting contemporary voices of radical resistance in ArgentinaHorizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina [Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina]. Sitrin has also participated at the IASsponsored "Renewing the Anarchist Tradition" conference and contributed to the IAS newsletter Perspectives. Her new book is composed of interviews with activists involved with the Argentine Autonomous social movements and their accounts of the neighborhood assemblies, movements of unemployed workers, and occupied factories that are all organizing in ways that are consciously directed to ward democratic and autonomous forms of government, naming this politics hori zontalidad. y/k.

Race
Paul most Gilroy, intellectuals one of the on race, world's has fore pro duced a new book called Postcolonial Melancholia (Columbia University Press). Gilroy s searing analyses of race, politics and culture have always remained atten tive to the material conditions of black populations, and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edice of white supremacy." This book adapts the concept of "melancholia" from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief, but to the social pathol ogy of neo-imperialist politics. The mel ancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants and aliens, but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multicultural world that has evolved organically in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implica tions. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multicultural, and live with otherness without anxiety, fear or violence.

Social Movements
One ments of tine in best-known the world today, social Zapatismove mo has been thoroughly studied from a

FALL 2005 / 9

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Words & Revolution

Regarding a Moratorium on "Freedom" 8c "Democracy"
by Alexis Bhagat more deadly than Inuenza or HumanImmunodeciency because, in addition to mobilizing biopower, they are backed by firepowerincendiary, atomic and financialcapable of wiping out a village or the planet wholesale. Thus, the very survival of planet Earth depends upon the containment, if not eradication, of these dangerous viruses, which have been spreading contagiously "like a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations."2 For those who nd all this to be ut terly preposterous, I ask you to remember that words acquire meaning from their use.3 If you disagree, if you believe that words have an etymological truth, of course you will nd this preposterous. The possibility of restoring these deled words will hold you in the past. Like the American peace activists longing for the isolation of the Progressive era, hold ing Old Glory emblazoned signs that say "Peace is Patriotic," you will hold on to some battered myths of Virus F and Virus D as the prize to be eyed. It boils down to tradition, attachment. There're all those great songs about Virus F, and the legacy of the Virus F Riders and the Virus F Summers. The anarchist move ment has been long claimed that Virus D is a sham anyway and that we adhere to some purer root of Virus D. And of course there's the chant burned into our collective memory from the Battle of Seattle: "This is What Virus D Looks Like!" Virus D looks like xed elections, looks like white supremacy, looks like wars of aggression. Virus D looks like the sovereignty of deception. Virus D looks altogether virulent. In light of this virulence, it's useless to say that the politicians and the dis ciplined media and all the people who repeat politicians and the disciplined media (i.e., most people) are mis-using the words. They are using the words. Inces santly. On Inauguration Day 2005, a friend noted that Virus D, Virus F and the related term 'liberty'4 were repeated like an incantation. We decided to at tempt an audio intervention, to replace, for example: // is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of dem ocratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ul timate goal of ending tyranny in our world. with // is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of reli gious fundamentalist movements and institutions in every nation and cul ture, with the ultimate goal of ending equality in our world. or, // is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institu tions in every nation and culture in the world, except for in Haiti and other nations populated by Africans or former African-slaves. But the fact remains. The utterance. The event. Virus D and Virus F were the words spoken, and through that use, they acquired new valence. This redenition of words is integral to the injection-molded revolution underway, which like the conversion of an industrial quarter into a luxury co-op district, leaves Election Day in the United States, I In November ofradio 2004, justaudience1 before spoke with a studio in Brooklyn, New York about certain words that had become damaged through their use in the rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror. The audience agreed with me that above all, "Freedom" and "Democracy" were completely beyond repair. Most felt that the words should be utterly abandoned, but some nostalgic individuals were unable to go so far. We eventually reached consensus on a mora torium prohibiting the words "Freedom" and "Democracy" until the so-called War on Terror had expired. As this war is, according to its proponents, an end less conict against a ubiquitous foe, our moratorium will in effect be permanent as well. What happens to abandoned words? They are not like old cars or old appli ances, which can be dissembled for spare parts. Words live through us, through our speech. They also live independendy of us in some realm of abstraction where philosophers aim to dwell and poets aim to cause havoc; where they abandon their phonemes and form cysts of meaning; from where they regenerate. If we have need, the dear meanings once spoken as "freedom" and "democracy" will re turn again in different combinations of sounds. I dare say that holding onto meaningless sounds prevents the pronun ciation of their successors. In the interest of bringing these suc cessors forth from our lips, I shall hence forth designate Freedom and Democracy, after the discoveries of Burroughs, as Virus F and Virus D. You make take this as a joke; however, I cannot reiterate enough that this is a grave matter. As viruses go, Virus F and Virus D are far

10 / FALL 2005

Words & Revolution

historical shells intact while inserting alien content within. This revolution re inserts the Great Chain of Being into the capitalist global order. God in the Highest is back on His throne, expressing His will by means of Virus D in the name of

that breath from the Muses. Within writocracy, any governor inspired to di rectly speak the law without rst subject ing it to long sessions of re-write would be declared a "dictator" and promptly

subdued by force of arms. The principal strategy for sneaking around this was "no-means-yes."5 In no-means-yes, the submissive legislators proclaim the exact opposite of their intention. "Save Amer-

Virus F.
The principal strategies of this revolu tion have been myth-making and creative wordplay. As the Russian Futurists un derstoodreflecting during another rev olutionnew myths are the wellspring of new words, and new words are necessary to give form to conceptions that will hold a revolutionary order from slipping back into old regimes. Yet this revolution has taken wordplay far beyond the boldest dreams of the Futurists, the Dadaists or their descendants. The transformation of broadcasting into a subtle append age of power has been well documented, enabling an unprecedented control over consensual reality. Less discussed is that any revolution overturning the constitu tional republican order must entail a rev olution in language. Indeed, the original republican revolution occurred as much through words as through arms; through deecting the ow of power from Heav en to Crown with great pieces of paper (e.g., the English Magna Charta.) When God in the Highest and His appointed Kings were removed from power, a mas sive network of writing was put in His place. We could call the constitutional republican order Writ-ocracy, an age an nounced by declarations, signed and enshrined, ushering in the rule of legisla tors, the writers of laws. Mythically, the legislators are Common Men working out the Common Good and serving the Common Interest. The Common Man myth has strict rules for the channeling of inspiration,

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An excerpt from KASPAR Volume 1 by Peter Schumann

FALL 2005/11

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory ica's Trees!" "Help America to Vote!" "Provide Appropriate Tools!" Confused by sorting out these mixed messages, no one notices that the legislators are actually all taking dictation! The institutions of writocracy are preserved as they are be ing injected with new myths to empower the hearers of the word of God. We should perhaps ask why it was that Virus F and Virus D so easily took to their new injections? Virus D was born as a perverse egalitarianism, a ruling compact among ancient slave-owners, resurrected by modern slave-owners and their slave-trading neighbors. And let us not forget that Virus F is a strange hybrid of two roots which ought never to have been grafted together in the first place-frei and dominus. Dominus meaning to be held in possession by a Lord. Frei meaning to be not in posses sion, not enslaved, unfettered, unbound. Lovely Frei from the Teutonics/no, from the Arynn priyo, which means dear or beloved. Both of these viruses required strong membranes that would bind es sential contradictions together behind a smooth surface without rupturing. I have spoken to many people this past year about useful words to propagate if we eliminate Virus F and Virus D. Besides the ever popular, autonomy, often repeated terms include swarm, mob and free association. These terms take their meaning from forms of being-together. In a regime where acquiescence depends upon alienation, propagating such terms, and more importantly, living out their relationships, continues to be fundamen tally insurgent. We should also look to emergent ways of being-together pro duced by empire and globalization, and also the languages they bring into contact, from the night-time languages in territo ries where English, Spanish and French are the tongues of the day; and from the hybrid slangs of the metropolises. Posse.6 Encuentro. Satyagraha.7 JLvenjuche8could make a good tonic when taken with a shot of anti-authoritarianism. And we need good tonics to resist the contagion. Deforestation. Smallpox blankets. The decimation of the buffalo. Gatling guns on unarmed Philipinos. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Depleted ura nium. All these are precursors, say the victorious revolutionaries. They are just getting ready "for the greatest achieve ments in the history of Virus F."9 What a plague. Let's get out of here! Ona move.10 Mitakuye Oyasin.11 ^ 10. A saying of John Africa, founder and spiritual mentor of Philadelphia's MOVE organization, later enshrined by supporters of the MOVE organiza tion and Mumia Abu-Jamal. 11. A Lakota saying on the interrelatedness of all things, roughly translated as "all my relations," which has become common in certain subcultures as a catchall proclamation, not unlike insha'allah in its use.

Endnotes
1. As part of Tianna Kennedy's ongoing radio-art project, Stubbleeld's Black Box at the Freel03point9 Gallery for Transmission and Intermedia Art in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 2. "Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democ racy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations." George W. Bush, Inaugural Address, January 20th, 2001. 3. As the Latin grammarians would say, "verba valent usu" echoing the Sanskrit grammarians dictum "yogad rudhir baliyah" 4. The 2005 Inaugural Address included 7 instances of "free" and 27 instances of "freedom," only 2 instances of "democratic," 1 of "democracy" and 15 instances of "liberty." 5. "No-means-yes" also happens to be a favorite party game of the class of men the legislators represent. 6. Derived from the legal term posse comitatus or "power of the country," a posse ofcially refers to a deputized force of armed men. Popularized by American cowboys-and-Indians movies, the term was redened by the hip-hop culture of the 1980s. More uid than the related terms crew and gang, posse play fully refers to a tentative association of a group of young men. 7. A Sanskrit neologism, roughly trans lated as "The insistence of truth," coined to describe the political phi losophy of the non-violent Indian na tionalist movement. 8. The Korean word for "self-reliance" is the ironic political philosophy of North Korea, a dictatorship whose existence has always depended com pletely upon a stream of support from Moscow and Beijing. 9. George W. Bush, Inaugural Address, January 20th, 2001.

12 / fall 2005

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

ntw;
Make Art Not WarJosh MacPhcc fall 2005 /13

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Equality & the Avoidance of Politics

by T odd May
chism would be to say that it is a politics of radical equality. One way to characterize anar To say this, however, is not enough. The equality valued by anarchists is not the same thing as the equality valued by, say, liberals. The difference between the two lies not only in the content of the equality. It lies in what might be called the theoretical structure of equality. For liberal theory, equality is something granted, presumably by the state. It is the responsibility of the state to ensure whatever equality there is to be. Wheth er that equality is a matter of equal liber ties, equal opportunity, equal resources, or whatever, the movement of equality in liberal theory starts with the state and ends with the people. Anarchism can be seen as starting from the other end, from the people. Equality is an assumption that people make about themselves and one another. Political action begins from there. De mands that are made, whether upon the state, corporations, or individuals are made startingom, rather than ending with, an activity of equality. This reversal of direction is not merely a theoretical point. It has any number of ramications for political activity. One obvious one is that anarchists are more concerned than either liberals or Marxists with what is often called process. Anarchist process seeks to construct forms of political deliberation that ensure that everyone is treated by everyone else as an equal, and, alongside that, that everyone can consider himself or herself an equal. The importance of equality in political delib eration is a direct consequence of think ing of equality as part of the beginning of political activity rather than its goal. One theorist who has rigorously con sidered equality as a matter of beginnings rather than results is Jacques Ranciere. Although his writings are just beginning to appear in English, he has, for many years, thought through the implications of equality for political theory. A former student of the Marxist Louis Althusser, Ranciere broke with his former teacher after the events of May '68 in France over Althusser's privileging of theoreti cal over other forms of practice. Since then, equality has been a touchstone of Ranciere's political writings. Rather than focus on his view of equality, I would like in this short piece to turn to Ranciere's analysis of how po litical philosophy often avoids equality. Or, since for Ranciere politics is nothing other than acting from the presump tion of equality, the focus will be on his analysis of how political philosophy has avoided politics. Essentially, in his view, it happens in three ways, each of which is best displayed in a famous philosopher. There is archipolitics, exemplied by Pla to; parapolitics, exemplied by Aristode; and metapolitics, exemplied by Marx. Archipolitics seeks to give politi cal expression to the arche, or founding principle, of a community. For Plato, everyone has a proper place in the com munity, just as every part of the soul has its proper place. Justice, for Plato (or, technically, for Socrates) lies in the har mony of the parts. These parts are not equal, however. Specically, there are three parts to a harmonious community: the money-makers, the guardians, and the rulers. In Socrates' imagery, these are the bronze, the silver, and the gold. Although Socrates argues that each is required for the harmony of the city, it is clear who is privileged and who is not. Archipolitics is not a theory of poli tics, in Ranciere's view, because it does not give expression to the presumption of equality. In fact, it is an active avoidance of that presumption. By giving everyone a place, it both hides the inequalities it fosters and leaves no room for the pre sumption of equality to operate. Aristode s parapolitics is more com plex. On the one hand, Aristode pro fesses an embrace of equality; on the other, he concedes that the best should rule. Aristode's resolution of this dilem ma is to have each form of government go against its natural principle. Thus, for instance, an oligarchical government, to be successful, must act on behalf not only in its own interests but also in the inter ests of those it governs. Ranciere sees a continuation of parapolitics with Thomas Hobbes, for whom the individual can be assured of protection only if he or she alienates that individuality to the sover eign. Parapolitics recognizes politics, in contrast to Plato. By acknowledging the value of equality, it opens the possibility for politics. However, it shuts the door just as quickly as it opens it. Equality, although recognized, is too dangerous to be enacted. It is, we might say, to be honored in the breach. Metapolitics, Ranciere argues, does not reduce politics to something higher, as Plato does and Aristode half-does. It reduces politics to something behind it, to a real movement of which politics is merely the surface expression. Here one can see the Marxist operation. Politics, as expressed in movements of people act ing out of the presumption of equality, does not have its own particular integrity but rather is parasitical on what is really driving it: economic exploitation. The politics of equality is grounded on some-

14 / fall 2005

Equality & the Avoidance of Politics

thing else; in order to see the real stakes one must move from surface expression to underlying causes. Anarchists will see here the critique of a Marxism that seeks to reduce all forms of domination to the single form of ex ploitation. Ranciere also sees the Marx ist domination of the intellectual class. If the real stakes are taking place behind the backs of the actors, then it is only an intellectual that can diagnose what is re ally happening. Those who act out of the presumption of equality know not what they do; they must be told by someone who sees beyond that presumption. One can see these three forms of the avoidance of politics everywhere. For instance, the Bush administration seems to opt for archipolitics. One may see that behind the President's message soon after 9/11 that what citizens can do to contribute to the war on terrorism is to shop. Parapolitics lies in all the ambiva lences that characterize many who speak in the name of democracy. Metapolitics appears in the constant analyses of what is really going on behind the expressions of equality that people make when they strike, demonstrate, speak out, organize, form alternative social arrangements, question authority, and recognize those who are said to be The Other as one of

their own. What Ranciere reminds us is that a true politics avoids these traps, avoids the avoidance of politics. It keeps the concept of equality, of what Ranciere sometimes calls the equality of everyone and anyone, at the center of his political thinking. He opts to see politics where it lies rather than to theorize it outside or behind or beneath the struggles that ar ticulate it. In this sense, his thought can

become a contemporary touchstone for recent developments in anarchist theory. ^

Endnotes
Ranciere's primary works on politics in English are On the Shores of Politics and the more theoretical Disagreement. Chapter 4 of the latter book deals with the avoidance of politics.)

Horizontalidad
Voces de Voder Popular en Argentina
This book is the story of a changing society told by people who are taking their lives and communities into their own hands. It is spoken in their own voices. It is a story of cooperation, vision, creation and discovery. It is a history that is told by people in the various autonomous social movements, from the occupied factories, neighborhood assemblies, arts and independent media collectives, to the indigenous communities and unemployed workers movements. Rather than a contextualized history, this book reects and delves into what people are doing, what motivates them, how they are relating to one another, and how they have changed individually and collectively in the creation process. It is not so much a movement of actions, but rather a movement of new social actors, new subjects, and new protagonists. Horizontalidad was printed in the recuperated factory of Chilavert in Buenos Aires, Argentina. To order copies of the book, or contribute to its Latin American distribution please contact Marina at Marina.sitrin@nyu. edu. Books can also be purchased through AK Press, who will be publishing an English version of the book in May of 2006.

fall 2005 /15

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

A Mestizo's Identity
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Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto
by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui translated and introduced by Alejandro de Acosta

Silvia is inuenced Rivera Cusicanqui by anarchism is a contemporary and indigenous Bolivian Quechua subaltern and Aymara theorist, cosmologies who, unlike more many than of by her Marxism. colleagues, She was a longtime member of the Taller de Historia OralAndina [Workshop on Andean Oral History], which published pamphlets by indigenous intellectuals as well as longer oral histories.1 Cusicanqui has also written historical studies of Bolivia2 in which she emphasizes conceptions of time deriving from indigenous cosmolo gies and the radical political perspective known as katarismo.3 Together, these historical studies and oral histories document the struggles of urban and rural peoples: mestizo* and indigenous peasants struggling to retain or regain communal lands and the collectivist economic form of the ayllu5; mestizos, cholos, and criollo citizens working as handicrafts people and struggling in anarchist unions. In the article translated here, Cusicanqui documents an attempt by one anarchist to propose the unity of the two struggles. She shows that the urban cholos indigenous background produces an identication with peasant struggles that was lacking in many of his companions, and which makes it possible for him to propose this otherwise unlikely alliance. In another important text, "Violencias Encubiertas" [Hidden Violences] Cusicanqui proposes an analysis based on a striking combination of anarchist politics and indigenous conceptions of time to critique the acculturating mission of the Bolivian state and the mainstream Left's complicity with it. In the U.S., certain forms of mestizaje have been held up as subversive new forms of subjectivity. But Cusicanqui demonstrates that in Bolivia, and by extension many other "post-colonial" states, the process of mestizaje, or more generally the hy bridization of subjectivities, is controlled by the state, programmed by its institutions as part of the long-term destruction of indigenous knowledges and cosmologies. Nevertheless, there is a role for mestizos and others of mixed cultural backgrounds to play in political struggles: this article and the manifesto included with it are a signicant gesture in that direction. I hope that this translation contributes to rethinking some common anarchist ideas concerning cultural dif ferences and political commitment, and presents new working concepts of historical time and revolution, as well as offering a richly historical and concrete case of the idea of a "multiple self" whose multiplicity is not a block to action but its very motivation.

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To the memory of Catalina Mendoza & Nieves Munguia Chaco war.6 Its author, the mechanic Luis Cusicanqui, was among the most creative and persistent The document anarchist I ideologues. will analyze He is animated a signicant the Grupo example de Propaganda of anarchistLibertaria activity in "LaAntorcha" our countryfrom before the begin the ning of the 1920s, and later the Federacion Obrera Local de La Paz. He was the secretary general of the latter union in 1940, when libertarians had already suffered the violence of state repression and the politics of cooptation and neutralization of Toro and Busch.7 We should not regard Cusicanqui's trajectory as exceptional. Many working class men and women also interwove manual labor with a wide humanistic self-education as well as the everyday tasks of agitation and propaganda. They composed texts of philosophical and doctrinal reection, and ventured into essays and the ater, neither deserting their jobs nor becoming "professional" politicians or ideologues. That is why his politi cal philosophy is closely woven into his everyday experience. In this experience, comradery [convivencia] and solidarity at work alternate with confrontation and suffering before the oppressor's tyranny. The document reveals Cusicanqui's character as an agitator. In it we can observe the combination of ex perience and reection so characteristic of anarchist writings, and, precisely because of that combination, so distant from contemporary political rhetoric. It is a document addressed to the countryside, written in the

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A Mestizo's Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto

Artwork from www.katari.org

rst person. However, it was not writ ten from the countryside, but from the city. Could it be a romantic gesture, a paternalistic approximation of the reality of Aymara peasants? Could it be a mat ter of demagogic impersonation? Or was the document truly written by an Indian, simply translating Indian thought? A rearguard indigenist might afrm, seeing Cusicanqui's photograph that, yes, one has but to see his face to know that he

was Indian. But things are not so simple. Cusi canqui, as a result of his education, be cause of two entwined tongues that per manently did battle in his brain,s because of his familial trajectory, was a mestizo, or at least an acculturated Indian. In these brief notes, I will attempt to elu cidate, however partially, this aspect of anarchist thought and history in Bolivia, as it appears in light of this singular text

and its author's personal stamp. Throughout the entire document, we must attend to the "I" and the "we": usually, the collective "we" refers to the Indian, though sometimes Cusicanqui also uses the word campesino, peasant ["campesino" refers to "campo" country side]. Let us begin with the title: "The Peasant's Voice" does not so much indi cate the content of the text as it eludes

fall 2005 /17

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory it. The identication is clearer in the lines that follow, though it is stated through opposition: "our challenge to the great mistes [white men, or mestizos identied culturally as white] of the State." Miste, misti, State = misti: that is, we, the Indians, against our enemies, the mistis and their state. It is important to clarify that the term campesino, in the de cade of the 1920s, did not convey the ideological hodgepodge [K'umunta] that ineffable Revolutionary Nationalism put into it.9 Among the misti classes it was simply a term adopted as a euphemistic synonym for Indian (that is, by and large, how it continues to be used today) because, perhaps, of the misti classes' shame before others or before themselves due to such a clearly colonial relation. In any case, this shame was likely a hidden mo tivation for its ofcial use after 1952. That is why it continues to evidence a K'umunta, or linguistic servitude [pongueaje]. But Cusicanqui neither speaks nor constructs his sentences as a misti. For him, the use of the term "campesino" seems to have both a rationalizing and an organizing meaning. It is an attempt at precision that becomes transparent through its context. For example, when he writes, "peasants of the commune or of the hacienda" "Indian" would be the broader generic identication wherein shades and differentiations of locality and activity are no longer necessary. "Peasant," on the other hand, would designate Indians of the countryside, as opposed to those of the city. In this case, it would refer specically to those that work and live in communes or haciendas. The same is true when he speaks of shepherds \pastores], using an exemplary construc tion: "The poor peasant sets out to be a shepherd, and in a year's time has all his livestock snatched away." (See the ap pended manifesto). Here, the term "poor" is appended to peasant, in a sense that is compassionate, perhaps even paternalistic. But it is also evident that, while resignation and everydayness accompany these uses of peasant, "Indian" is the term chosen when it is time to present epic truthshistorical truths, I would call themin his text or narration. For example: "We have suffered the most wicked slavery possible in the republican mo ment that offered us independence

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The Voice of the Peasant24

Our Challenge to the Great Mistes of the State Who are the only true thieves and criminals of the present day
fered the most wicked slavery possible since the republican For more moment thanthat one offered hundred us independence. and thirty years It cost we us have life suf and Indian blood to free ourselves from the Spanish yoke. It made us howl for more than four hundred years, four centuries. The club danced wildly, blows fell on our backs in those years of bar barism, and now, in the very century of freedom, the brutality is redoubled. If in those times we worked without pay for the Spanish lord, it is the same today with the criollos, who make us work from sun-up to sun-down without a cent for the hard work. When Spanish justice was blind, deaf, vengeful, we helped the "Mistes" to bring about freedom, only so they could take away our little plots and oppress us: see these injustices of today, peasants of the communes and of the haciendas. The pants-wearing criollos, lash in hand, abuse us, woman, man, child and elder, just as they enslave us. What will we say of the sage Lawyers and other petty ofcials? Oh! These are the greatest thieves and bandits, who rob us, Law in hand, and if we say anything we are beaten and on top of that we are sent to prison for ten years, and meanwhile, they cast out our wife and children, and nish by burning our little houses and we are targets for the bullets of these honorably learned men... Now, we aslc where are the peoples' rights? Who do the Governors call people? ... We, the Indians enclosed in the Andean steppe of America entirely because of the work of our oppressors: the Bolivian Indian has his hypocritical sympathizers in monks and the clergy, but behind all of it, our complete disap pearance is forged in the heart of civiliza tion, which hands out gallows laws... The Identity Card: what good is it for us Indians, seeing as we are beasts of bur den, nothing more? How is it that can we contribute by complying with the sar castic law called rent tax? Our elders left

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18 / fall 2005

A Mestizos Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto it cost us life and Indian blood to free ourselves from the Spanish yoke. Watch out, Indian brothers of the American race: spilt blood will be the harbinger of the revolution over throwing this vile society, cursed a thousand times over..." Epic moments par excellence: in dependence and the future revolution (a revolution explicidy announced as Indian) are diametrically opposed. The oppression of "four hundred years" at the hands of Spanish colonizers has super imposed on it another oppression, even more humiliating for being deceptive: that of living in a republic of formal citi zenship in which, however, one suffers "the most wicked slavery possible in the republican moment." In fact, here we ought to add an his torical detail: the time of this manifesto was one of the most critical moments in a long phase of expropriation and com munal resistance, which would come to a head in the holocaust of the Chaco war. The means that the landholding oligarchy employed in order to perpetrate these expropriations appear to have been familiar to Cusicanqui, perhaps lived in the esh by him or his close relatives. "Thepants-wearing criollos, lash in hand, abuse us, woman, man, child and elder, just as they enslave us. What will we say of the sage Lawyers and other petty ofcials? Oh! They are the greatest thieves and bandits! They rob us, Law in hand, and if we say anything we are beaten and on top of that we are sent to prison for ten years, and meanwhile, they cast out our wife and children, and nish by burning our little houses and we are targets for the bullets of these hon orably learned men..." The chronology of resistance also of fers a proof of the identication Cusican qui makes between the lived experience of the peasants of the high plateau and that of the manual workers of the cities. He mentions, among others, the rebel lion of Zarate Willka in 1899 and the massacre of Jesus de Machaca in 1921, side by side with "the latest events of Cochabamba, Potosi, Sucre." Another text signed by Cusicanqui claries this last reference. "This year the situation has be come more distressing. Because of the threat of war with Paraguay, many Indian workers demonstrated in re sistance to a conict that they knew to be intentionally provoked by capital ists and politicians. The consequence is the repression in Oroco, Coch-

us common lands and today we nd our selves reduced to common slaves. Is that the work of our civilization? Why do we pay twenty cents for a box of matches? Seeing as today we nd ourselves without warm clothing, without food, without even a match and we are reduced to re turning to the primitive era called, by our governors, legislators, a savage era? Why do you, the civilized, make us regress to the savage era? Why do you not allow us to acquire the necessary animals for our hard work, with no tax, so that in that way we could tend the earth, for the good of all hu manity? As we are, we cannot have a team of oxen, nor a necessary mule, without pre viously paying duties, tolls, registration fees on each head of cattle, and more over the whims of the authorities of our leaders... Why do the father priest and the mista impose forced holidays in our county, threatening horrible penalties? ... Knowing that ultimately we are in utter misery as a result of the daily obstacles of their bastard and criminal laws... Military service: going to die in the

Chaco, with no remuneration. Migrant labor: working ten days for free with our own tools and food. Second-rate servi tude [postillonaje]: providing all of our cruel masters' needs at our expense; that is, those very few of those known to the state. We go to the managerial services and as the last straw come from Algeri at the end of the year, to pay four to eight hundred bolivianoslook at this shame ful amount! The poor peasant sets out to be a shepherd, and in a year's time has all his livestock snatched away. Servi tude [pongueaje]: handling his bunch of dried dung, wood broom and, on top of that, food and then to sleep in a door way, being ready all night for it to open and when it does not, a good beating, and then to be hired out to whoever, our services exchanged for big sums and we do not see the wages even in our dreams. Why did the governors not make the servant [pongo] happy with the Remu neration Law? Today he is nothingthe barbarous idiotic Mulattos of the Rotary Club's Zetas have the say here. We the eternal martyrs feel the raw

ness of the scars that you opened on our ancestors. Here is your work: Mosa, Ayoayo, Jesus de Machaca, Yayi, Lakapampa, Ataguallani, and the latest events of Cochabamba, Potosi, Sucre and the martyr of Guaqui, in the heart of the district you have torn the limbs, like a bloodthirsty beast, of our brother Prudencio Callisaya; you bullying soldiers have no right to call yourselves civilized. You are barbarian criminals of the twen tieth century, mutilators and destroyers of humanity. Watch out, Indian brothers of the American race, that spilt blood will be the harbinger of the revolution over throwing this vile society, cursed a thou sand times over. Our caciques bought and assassinated by the "mistes"... Blood must be spilled as before because we are tired of the present domination, we know all too well the Vampires of the dominant state and its dirty tricks; if the poor mes tizo does not guide us to liberation, we the Indians will make torrents of copper blood run in America Bolivia. ^ (Signed) Luis Cusicanqui

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory abamba, Potosi, with some indigenous communists assassinated by the hangmen of Sites, and others imprisoned: Cusicanqui, imprisoned at the foot of the majestic Illimani, in the canton of Cohoni, andM.O. Quispe, imprisoned in Yungas."10 Clearly, for Cusicanqui, these events of repression against the workers' movement of the cities must be situated in the same line as the confrontations of Indian society against the state and the landholders. According to his own words, the demonstrators are "Indian workers," and their leaders, "indigenous communists." That is to say, the collective identity attributed in this text to the urban craftsmen, the exclusive "we" of Cusicanqui,11 as opposed to the inclusive "we" (who would be the Indian) coincides fully with the protagonists of Willca Zarate's rebellion, or that of Jesus de Machada, at least in the context of confrontation with a com mon enemy. That is to say, it is a matter of a shared identity, dened by opposition, that a collective subject is generated. This subject includes Indian peasants and farmers, as well as mestizo crafts men and manual workers. The rst line of solidarity between them would be the struggle against the misti-State; a caste state, which stands for colonial oppression as well as the exclusion of the working majorityand urban craftsmen are not free from this exclusion. We nd here a complex elaboration and interlink ing of anarchist doctrine and lived identity, experienced in an everyday manner by men such as him, inhabitants of the junc tion between two worlds. Ideologically, it was possible to build a bridge between the anti-statism of anarchist doctrine and the historical anti-statism of Indian communities in the colonial context.12 This bridge is clear, for example, in the argument he wields against the identity card. But, existentially, the indigna tion emerged from the same shared experience: that of discrimi nation and exclusion. That is why Cusicanqui's wide, inclusive identity (his Indian identity) gives rise to the most resounding and heartfelt words of his manifesto. All of the moral indignation, the creative rage of the text is concentrated precisely in those phrases where the enemy is identied as the Indian's enemy, or where he denounces the paradoxes, even more contemptible, of a criollo hypocrisy and double morality lived by a false world of citizens (republican, educated). An example: "Why did the governors not make the servant [pongo13] happy with the Remuneration Law? Today he is nothingthe barbarous idiotic Mulattos of the Rotary Club's Zetas have the say here."14 Likewise, his indignation is repeatedly directed against the "bastard, criminal laws" that (as is the case of the Exvinculation Law of 1874) were promulgated under guise of apparent equal ity and citizenship, with the hidden goal of legalizing the violent plunder of communal lands. Although we cannot go into detail here, it should be mentioned that a similar perception of criollo legislation can be found in the internal ideology of the movement of Caciques-apoderados15 led by Santos MarkaT'ula.16 Here we nd a new space of encounters between the experi ence of Indian communities and anarchist doctrine. The notion of law as a tentacle of the state conjoins doctrinal anarchist interpretation (which posited the existence of a moral law in carnate in free individuals) with the com munal action that unmasked the colonial nature of the state and recognized law as a "deception," as we nd explicidy indi cated in many documents produced by the Cacique movement. Let us return once more to the chron ological ordering of resistance, where, as we said, we nd in the same sequence episodes of peasant resistance and mobi lizations of urban craftsmen. The other event, the "most recent," was the murder of Prudencio Callisaya, which occurred nine years earlier, in 1920, by order of the powerful landowner of Guaqui, Benedicto Goytia: "... and the latest events ofCochabamba, Potosi, Sucre and the martyr of Guaqui, in the heart of the district you have torn the limbs, like a blood thirsty beast, of our brother Prudencio Callisaya; you bullying soldiers have no right to call yourselves civilized. You are barbarian criminals of the twentieth century, mutilators and destroyers of humanity." A series of events, an apparendy chronological series, is reversed here by a backward movement. Is this movement a lapse or imprecision? I do not think so. For Cusicanqui, the vital proximity of the Guaqui murder was likely a combination of two phenomena. In 1920, this deed, publicized by the press and denounced in Parliament, must have hurt his sensibil ity, and outraged his conscience, which was already on the alert for situations of oppression and injustice. This early impression would lead him to write, in 1924: Tllampu, Illimani... I contem plate the two colossi. I pay them a tribute of admiration and I speak to them as though to two giants, living witnesses of the great tragedies of my race (...) Oh! If you could speak to me of what you have seen! Illampu, Illimani, tell me the story of the

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A Mestizo's Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto conquerors'persecution, exploitation, and annihilation of my race, the race to which I belong. Speak, you mute witnesses, you impassable monsters! Let us know the history of the great rebellions of the Indians against their cruel masters, the rage of the people against its oppressors. "n The impression left by the assassina tion of Callisaya must have been intensi ed by the encounter that Cusicanqui had in 1928 with Santos MarkaT'ula. The cacique leader went to the Federacion Obrera Local de La Paz in search of soli darity and support for the peasant cause, according to the testimony of the com rades Teodoro Penaloza, Max Mendoza, and Lisandro Rogas.18 Certainly, the composition of The Peasants Voice was heavily inuenced by this direct contact between anarchist leaders and Indian authorities, linked to gether in a perception that, for Cusican qui, was rmly tied to previous experi ences and convictions. Not only the style of the composition, wherein the inuence of the mother tongue is clearly notice able, but also the chronological reversal of the manifesto, allow us to conceive of an "invasion" of Indian logic into the thought of the anarchist ideologue. Moreover, rage is timeless. As in any ethics, the judgment that emanates from this event is projected across time as a moral teaching and evaluation. Even today, reading the verdict on the murder of Prudencio Callisaya,19 it makes one indignant to realize that, after he was assassinated in the Guaqui cuartel, at the hands of Col. Julio Sanjines (son-inlaw of Benedicto Goytia) his relatives discovered the crime and began a long trial, which concluded in enormous frus tration. At many times throughout the trial, they attempted to show the delin quent character of the deed; three times they were subjected to the painful legal procedure of autopsy and appealed to the Superior District Court with reliable proofs. All in vain: the complicit and bastard justice that their caste had cre ated when it assumed its republican face never touched Sanjines and Goytia. Solidarity with Callisaya is, then, fra ternal, almost a kinship tie. It is anger in the name of an assassinated brother. Blood ties are also revealed in other phrases that clarify the inclusive identity assumed by Cusicanqui: "We the eternal martyrs feel the rawness of the scars that you opened on our ancestors. How is it that we can contribute by complying with the sarcastic law called rent tax? Our elders left us common lands and today we nd ourselves reduced to com mon slaves? Was that the work of our civilization?" And the nal condemnation, now from the doctrinal vein of anarchist evolutionism: "Today we nd ourselves without warm clothing, without food, without even a match and we are reduced to returning to the primitive era called, by our governors and legislators, a savage era. Why do you, the civilized, make us regress to the savage era?" The past is therefore dignity and communal life, but also regression, stagnation caused by oppression, by the rupture of the autonomous develop ment of the colonized society. Here the amalgam of anarchist doctrine and the experience of oppression become more evident. The Indian (the victim who is identied frequendy, in the text, with the peasant, with the particularist and exclusive identity) is he who, chained to the yoke of oppression, comes to embody a forced, imposed involution that would lead to stultication, mean behavior, and humiliation. Against this moral regres sion, the future revolution, the emancipa tion (a term dear to the anarchists) would permit access to universality, without the renunciation of one's own history, culture, and collective creativity. But later, we nd an allusion to an alliance with "poor mestizos"the ones who, as opposed to the mistis and their state, could be pos sible interlocutors of the emancipatory proposition.20 To whom is this phrase directed? Other comrades, craftsmen, anarchists like him, more Westernized, who considered the Indian as a hindrance to social progress? What is clear is that, because of the threatening tone of the text, the Indian demand prevails over any other consideration of doctrine:

"Watch out, Indian brothers of the American race: spilt blood will be the harbinger of the revolution overthrowing this vile society, cursed a thousand times over. Our caci ques bought and assassinated by the "mistes" (...) blood must be spilled as before because we are tired of the present domination, we know all too well the Vampires of the dominant State and its dirty tricks; if the poor mestizo does not guide us to libera tion, we the Indians will make tor rents of copper blood run in America Bolivia." It is not possible for us to elucidate this point in greater depth, because the manifesto, and the political proposal it embodies, is ideologically constructed from the point of view of opposition as the source of identity. They tell us little or nothing explicidy about the charac teristics of the future society hoped for by Cusicanqui. However, we can catch a glimpse of the basically humanistic char acter of his postulates: the paradox of op pression in a liberal state consists in that it deceitfully calls for a recognition of the rights of all, as workers and as citizens, but in fact denies even the human condi tion of the oppressed.21 "Now, we ash where is the right of peoples? Who do the Governors call people?... We, the Indians enclosed in the Andean steppe of America entirely because of the work of our op pressors: the Bolivian Indian has his hypocritical sympathizers in monks and the clergy, but behind all of it, our complete disappearance is forged in the heart of civilization, which hands us gallows laws." It could then be that the future soci ety, in its widest and most inclusive sense, translates to this idea: no longer Indians (colonized), but human beings, equal in their rights inasmuch as they are workers, and free to build their own destiny. Was there also recognition of the cultural and linguistic diversity of the society? If we

fall 2005 / 21

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory take into account the constant effort of anarchist ideologues to link lived experience with the doctrine gathered from the clas sics, we can perhaps nd an afrmative answer in the proposal of a "federated" society: "Politically, there should be a wide gov ernmental decentralization, under a federated system, respecting the independence and autonomy of every last village and citizen; free expression of thought and of the press; this diversity of thought, tendencies and afnities would make the sciences and arts evolve."22 For Luis Cusicanqui, anarchist and Indian, emancipation was not therefore incarnated in a messianic hope,23 but rather in the collective historical action of manual laborers (craftsmen and In dian farmers) for whom anarchism comes to be the expression of authentic universality. Chukiawu, April 1998. afc turated (though this is precisely what Cusicanqui contests in this essay). Due to the inherent instability of racial classications, and power relations generally, each of these terms has other uses in other parts of Latin America. Finally, as in the United States, the question of the nomenclature of in digenous peoples very much continues to be a controversial one in much of Latin America. Cusicanqui opts for "Indian," but this term should perhaps be interpreted on analogy with "Black" in the context of the U.S. Black Power movement, or, with less need for trans lation, "Indian" as it continues to be used by some radical native Americans in the United States. The ayllu were the basic political, cultural, and economic unit of indig enous life in the Andes, dating from pre-Inca times. They were, in essence, extended kin groups, but were not always limited to ties of consanguinity. Importandy, they were self-governing units based on collective land owner ship and agricultureprecisely the sort of "primitive communism" that has always captured the imagination of anarchists. The Chaco war was fought between Bolivia and Paraguay over control of the Chaco Boreal region from 1932 to 1935. Indigenous men in Bolivia were forcibly drafted en masse and more died from diseases such as malaria than ghting. [Tr.] David Toro Ruilova, president of Bolivia from 1936 to 1937; German Busch Becerra, president from 1937 to 1939. [Trans.] An even more eloquent proof is the appended document. As is known, Cusicanqui was the son of an indige nous peasant and a mestizo descended from caciques of the ayllu Q'alaq'utu of Pacajes. Aymara was his rst language and he spoke it uendy. According to a well-known text by Luis H. Antezana, Revolutionary Nationalism was the ideologeme or cen tral ideological paradigm of the state in 1952. Its irradiation capacity was based in the exible ideological eld opened up between its two poles: Na tionalism vs. Revolution. See "Sistemas

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This essay was originally published in the Bolivian magazine Contacto (Ano 2 No. 31/32) in 1988, under the tide "La identidadde un mestizo: en torno a un manifesto anarquista de 1929." An additional note identies Cusicanqui as a member of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina and adds: "This work was originally presented in the Fifth Conference on Bolivian Studies, Altiplano Region, June 1988."

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Alejandro de Acosta would like to thank Diego de Acosta for invaluable help with this translation.

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Endnotes
1. Los artesanos libertariosy la etica del trabajo ["Libertarian crafts men and the ethic of labor"] is of particular interest to anar chists. 2. One such study is "Oprimidospero no vencidos": luchas del campesinado aymaray qhechwa de Bolivia ["'Opressed but not defeated': struggles of the Aymara and Quechua peasantry in Bolivia"]. 3. Katarismo was a Bolivian ideological current that began in the late sixties. In La Paz, indigenous Aymara intellectuals who had entered the universities sought to understand the effects of colo nialism in history as well as in everyday life. As Aymaras from the countryside, they sought to reafrm the subversive current of indigenous thought and practice that resisted not only the Western project of domination and acculturation but also the misguided liberal project of the assimilating nation-state. See Javier Sanjines, Mestizaje Upside-Down. 4. A note on the "racial'Vcultural nomenclatures used in the text: conventionally, a mestizo is the child of an indigenous parent and a parent of European descent. More generally, mestizaje is the process of cultural mixture or hybridization concurrent with the cohabitation and mixtures of peoples. In the present con text, it typically denotes acculturation to Hispanic norms. Crio llos are those of European descent. Cholos were originally des ignated as the child of an Indian and a mestizo; the term is used more generally for anyone of mixed or primarily indigenous heritage who lives in the city and is assumed to be more accul-

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A Mestizo's Identity: Concerning a 1929 Anarchist Manifesto y procesos ideologicos en Bolivia," in Zavaleta (ed.) Bolivia hoy. Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1983. 10. Emphasis ours. The reference to "in digenous communists" is clearly to an anarchist communism. This text is a report sent by Cusicanqui to the edito rial board of the Urugayan anarchist newspaper El Hombre (Montevideo, October 1,1929) under the pseud onym "Aymara Indian." He relates the repressive actions of the government, including his own deportation. It was in fact the diffusion of The Peasant's Voice that brought about his imprison ment. 11. In the grammatical structure of Ayma ra, there are two types of rst person plural: the inclusive we (jiwasa), and the exclusive we (jianakd). The rst refers to situations in which the subject includes the interlocutor, while the second refers to a "we" that excludes the interlocutor. 12. Though this does not imply a concep tion of Andean communities as "so cieties against the State," as with the Amazonian societies studied by Clastres, but rather, specically, societies without states, societies that the colo nial invasion rid of their own political state structure. See Pierre Clastres, La societe' centre VEtat, Paris: Minuit, 1974. 13. Apongo is an indigenous person sub ject to pongeaje, a system of forced labor prominent in Bolivia as well as Chile, Ecuador, and Peru. [Trans.] 14. The racial qualication "Mulatto" in reference to the oligarchy of the Rotary Club is puzzling. Linguistic revenge? An allusion to someone in particular? 15. The term cacique is a general term used throughout Latin America for an indigenous leader. The movement of caciques-apoderados dates from 1914, when the Bolivian authorities refused to recognize the authority of heredi tary indigenous leaders. Working from La Paz, they demanded the return of stolen communal lands and the abolition of the draft, as well as rural schools (as competence in Spanish was a crucial tool in dealing with the gov ernment). [Trans.] 16. See Taller de Historial Oral Andina, El indio Santos Marka Tula, cacique principal de los ayllus de Qallapa y apoderado general de las comunidades originates de la Repiiblica. THOA, 1984; Silvia Rivera, "Pedimos la revi sion general de lfmites: Un episodio de incomunicacion de castas en el movimiento de caciques apodcrados de los Andes bolivianos," presentation for the Simposio sobre Reproduccion y Transfor/nacidn de las sociedades andinas, Sighs XVI-XX. Social Science Research Council, Quito, 28-30 July 1986; Zulema Lehm, "La lucha comunaria en torno a la contribution territorialy a la prestacidn de servicios gratuitos durante elperiodo republicano (1920-1925)" unpublished manuscript. 17. El Hombre, Montevideo, April 10, 1924. 18. "Breve didlogo sobre la relacidn entre el movimiento anarquistay el movimiento indio," in Historia Oral 1, La Paz, No vember 1986. 19. Archive de La Paz - UMSA. Fondo Corte Superior de Distrito. 1920. 20. Certainly, there were also anarchists of this type, in Bolivia and elsewhere. But there was also an Ezequiel Urviola in Puno, and an itinerant Paulino Aguilar, leader of the Federacion Indigena Obrera Regional Peruana until his deportation by the Legufa government in 1928. They were also key points of reference for Cusicanqui. In his pri vate archive there are interesting sam ples of the correspondence between Cusicanqui and Aguilar. 21. To consider the other as "not people" had been, according to Jan Szeminski, a constitutive trait of the confrontation between Spaniards and Indians during the rebellion of Tupac Amaru in 17801781. This conrms the continuity of the colonial event in the republican stage. See La Utopia tupamarista, Lima: PUC, 1984, p. 194. 22. "1886 - May 1st - 1938. Manifesto of the Federacion Obrera Local. To the working class in general." Archives of the THOA. 23. A messianism embodied by many mes tizos of the south of Peru, as Flores Galindo has shown, by founding their struggle on the return of the Inca. See, for example, "Los suenos de Gabriel Aguilar" in Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un Inca: identidady Utopia en los Andes, La Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1986. 24. This document was found among the private papers of Luis Cusicanqui, published in the form of a manifesto, with his handwritten signature at the end. Through references obtained in other documents, we know that it was distributed in May 1929, and brought about his imprisonment and the per secution of other anarchist organizers such as Modesto Escobar, who was also closely involved with propaganda activities in the countryside.

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

11

^ G ^ Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia

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by Zulema Lehm A. and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui translatedandintroducedby'Melissa Forbis and Cale Layton

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This of excerpt Los Artesanos from "Anarchist Libertariosy Unions la Etica in Bolivia del Trabajo, 1920-1950" by Zulema is from Lehm a forthcoming A. and Silviatranslation Rivera Cusicanqui. and update The book was originally published in 1988 by the Taller de Historia OralAndina (Andean Oral History Workshop) in La Paz, Bolivia. This segment is drawn from a chapter on the history of anarchism in Bolivia, which serves as the backdrop for the book. The remainder is based on interviews with participants in trade unions (tailors, cooks, carpenters, orists, builders, masons, and mechanics) from the period 1920-1950 in La Paz. These trade unions were a mix of mestizos and indigenous peoples, men and women. The interviews document how this unication was perceived as a threat and resulted in state repression of union members. The anarchist movement was a key actor in La Paz in the rst half of the twentieth century and this book counters claims that characterize Bolivia as a place where organizing efforts were scarce or Marxist-led. In reality, the traditional Marxist unions perceived these diverse sectors of the working class as unorganizable. Successful self-organization of anarchist craftspeople undermined traditional theories of working class orga nizing. In fact, the radical union organizing documented by Cusicanqui and Lehm represents the growth of a particular Bolivian anarchism that responded to discrimination along the race, gender and class lines marking Bolivian society.

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"We know that we are what we are: idealists, dreamers of a better world, regardless of whether the rest of the world accompany us, tire of the struggle or betray us. People are how they can be, not how we want them to be or how we wish they were." Letter from Jose Tato Lorenzo to Luis Cusicanqui, May 18,1942

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the outbreak of the Chaco War of 1932. The testimonies presented in this book conrm this as The apex of the anarchist doctrine's inuence in interviewees Bolivia was participated between the latter in part of the 1910s and sertion, despite the fact that only two of our direcdy the earliest phases of the development of libertarian ideasDesiderio Osuna and Santiago Ordonez. In any case, many of the people we interviewed fondly remember gures like Luis Cusicanqui, Domitila Pareja, Jacinto Centellas and other craftspeople. These were the real pioneers in spreading anarchist thought amongst the workers of La Paz and other urban centers in Bolivia. In their youth, they contributedalongside many others involved in the social struggles of the dayto the intense pursuit by the urban workers to nd suitable ideologies and organizing models to better respond to the ever more oppressive conditions of exploitation that accompanied the consolidation of the liberal capitalist economic model and the successive crises that characterized it. During this period, communication and the circulation and sharing of new ideas increased greatly with others from beyond Bolivia's borders. These new social doctrines provided universalizing anti-establishment elements to help workers interpret the unprecedented situations being experienced in the mines and in the cities. The waves of migrations provoked by the abrupt booms and crises occurring in the numerous produc tive centers of the region contributed to the changes. The consolidation of the great tin mines in the cordillera (the Andean mountain range), the exploitation of saltpeter on the Pacic coast and the construction of new rail lines into the interior of the country during the Liberal Party administrations [1899-1920] combined to generate an intense coming and going of workers of many different nationalities and cultural origins. The formation of trade unions and workers' organizations with anti-establishment ideologiesgroups that went further than the social service framework of the mutual aid associations of the nineteenth centurywas a direct result of the changes of this period. For example, in 1906, the Union Obrera 1 deMayo (May 1st

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A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia

Workers' Union) appeared in Tupiza. This union upheld "socialist principles" and declared itself openly against the abuses and pillaging of the large mining companies in the south of Bolivia. The Union Obrera 1 de Mayo, formed main ly by craftspeople and artisans, edited the newspaper La Aurora Social and main tained a workers' library that included classic texts by such anarchist thinkers as Proudhon, Reclus, Bakunin and Kropotkin.1 These books were Spanish transla tions probably obtained in Argentina. Around 1911, Jaime Mendoza paint ed a rich and multicolored social history of the mines of Uncia and Llallagua where mestizo2 workers and artisans from the cities and rural towns mingled with indigenous unskilled workers (peones), immigrants and repatriated workers from Chile.3 Mendoza accused the repatriated workers of inciting discontent and labor conict.4 In a recent study, Gustavo Rodriguez claries the participation of saltpeter workers from the coast in the social agi tation at the end of the decade of the 1910s. A succession of a "new type" of strikes and riots in the Bolivian mines during the two-year period from 1919 to 1920 coincided with the repatriation of more than 4,000 "pampinos"Boliv ian saltpeter workers who inundated the labor market and were accused of inciting insubordination among the other work ers.5 Although Rodriguez attributes an equally important role in the spreading of new doctrines and ideas to the "intellec tuals" and to these workers who had been deported from Chile, he neglects to men tion that the "intellectuals" were generally artisans living in the cities and mining towns. Thanks to their literacy and their

ability to organize their work schedules with relative freedom, the artisan/in tellectuals could educate themselves through reading and discussion groups where they would discuss books, news papers and pamphlets that arrived from outside Bolivia. The mining proletariat and the artisans were not as different as one might imaginethe miners circu lated intermittendy between mining and artisanal activity on their own account.6 These intellectual craftspeople were able to understand and spread an impor tant amount of ideas and social doctrines through literature that arrived from countries such as Argentina and Chile, where anarchist and socialist ideas were rmly entrenched in the workers' organi zations.7 The situation that Rodriguez de scribesof growing social agitation in the mines of Corocoro and Unciain tensied and became more widespread due to the world price crises8 of 19201921. The crises impacted heavily on both workers and artisans, due to the shrinking job market and the reduced demand for goods and services, intensify ing discontent among broad layers of the population. An example of the culmi nation of this situation was the miner's strike in Uncia-Llallagua at the begin ning of 1923 that threatened to spread to other mining and urban centers. The actions in Uncia were driven by the re cently founded Federacidn Obrera Central de Uncia (Central Workers' Federation of Uncia, FOCU), an entity that included not only the miners, but also several local crafts unions and guilds. One example of the inuence of the artisans in the fed eration was that a carpenter, Guillermo Gamarra, was the head of the federation

driving the events of 1923.9 The most important demand of the strike was that both the state and the mining companies recognize the federation. The conict resulted in the declaration of a state of siege and the arrival of federal troops in the region. On June 4,1923 there was a terrible massacre perpetrated by four units of the Bolivian army, resulting in an untold number of dead and injured.10 The propaganda effect of the strike and the massacre in Uncia was of a mag nitude unknown up to that timees pecially given the atmosphere of social agitation and ideological excitement that existed in the principal centers of worker and artisan concentration in the coun try. In fact, under the protection of the state of siege, the Saavedra government extended the repression to other unions and workers' federations, such as the unions in La Paz and Oruro, which were struggling to break the framework of the mutual associations and were combating the clientalist manipulation of Republi canism and the Liberal Party.11

The Pioneers
During were this also period studyin circles La Paz, and propa there ganda centers that provided a voice for the worker-led protests during the events in Uncia. These included the Centro Obrero de Estudios Sociales (Workers' Center of Social Studies, COES) and the Centro Obrero Libertario (Libertarian Workers' Center, COL). These cultural groups had the common characteristic of being made up exclusively of artisans and man ual laborers. They provided support and ideological orientation to the recendy formed workers' collectives and unions. The COL brought together workers

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory of both anarchist and socialist tendencies,12 but was dominated by the former. The brothers Santiago and Desiderio Osuna, Nicolas Mantilla, Luis Cusicanqui, Jacinto Centellas, Guillermo Palacios and Domitila Pareja were all active in the ranks of the COL. These craftspeople formed a central core around which new study and propaganda groups circled, including the Cen tro Cultural Obrero "Despertar" (Workers' Cultural Center "The Awakening," the Osuna brothers), the Grupo Libertario "Redencidn" (Redemption Libertarian Group, Palacios) and the Grupo de Propaganda Libertaria "La Antorcha" (Libertarian Propaganda Group "The Torch"), which was perhaps the most inuential Bo livian anarchist group of the 1920s. The Antorcha group was inspired by the participation of Luis Cusicanqui, Jacinto Centellas and Domitila Pareja. Alongside other workers, these men and women made up an active core of propagandists that contributed enormously to the establishment of anarchist thinking in the city of La Paz. The Antorcha group was founded on September 9,1923. Within a few months, its members were the victims of repression following the consca tion of yers printed up commemorating the rst anniversary of the Uncia massacre. Cusicanqui, Centellas, Pareja and Guillermo Palacios were all detained because these yers fell into the hands of the government. The three men were exiled to the Rio Cajones region, and it took them almost a year to return to La Paz.13 On their return, Cusicanqui and Centellas participated in the Second Workers' Congress, which took place in La Paz in August 1925. They joined other anarchist craftspeople like the Osuna brothers, Pablo Maraz, Tomas Aspiazu, Luis Abaroa and Felix Conde; at this time, the ideological differences between the anarchists and the socialists became clearer. During the Workers' Congress, they joined committees and participated in the plenary sessionssessions that were marked by heated debate with Marxist and socialist leaders like Guiller mo Maceda, Carlos Mendoza Mamani and the Ordonez broth ers. These debates were to become a persistent characteristic of the syndicalist struggle of the day, as Teodoro Penaloza relates in his testimony. Congress president Romulo Chumacero, a tailor from San Luis Potosi, was also very sympathetic to anarchism. He helped to spread anarchist thinking during the late night activities at the Escuela "Francisco Ferrer Guardia," an anarchist school in Sucre where he was the director.14 By 1926, the anarchist propaganda cells had multiplied and extended their reach throughout the country. In La Paz, besides the three previously mentioned groups, the Agrupacidn Comunista Andrquica "Sembrando Ideas" ("Planting Ideas" Anarcho-Communist Group) and the Grupo "Brazoy Cerebro" ("Arm and Brain" Group) began operating. In Oruro, the Centro Obrero Internacional (International Workers' Center, COI) and in Sucre, the Fer rer Guardia school also began to function. The Antorcha group maintained a certain level of inuence over the cells of workers and artisans in Corocoro, Tupiza and Poopo.15 In March 1926, the newspaper Tierra y Libertadappeared in Sucre, directed by Romulo Chumacero. In the following year, the Antorcha group would begin editing its own newspaper La Tea, with the active collaboration of anarchist cells in Argen tina, mainly through the solidarity labor of comrades such as Tomas Soria, Anto nio Fournarakis and Armando Trivino.16 A notable example of these inter national solidarity links is the trip that Fournarakis made from Buenos Aires to La Paz in 1927. This veteran propagan dist of libertarian ideas had organized the Union Anarquista Batcdnica Sud-Americana (South American Balkan Anarchist Union) in Buenos Aires. The purpose of the union was to erase national borders and to replace them with an international alliance of all the anarchist groups of the continent. In January 1927, Fournarakis made contact via letter with Luis Cusi canqui, and in February, he decided to embark on a tour through several coun tries spreading the word about anarchocommunist ideas. He was able to fund the tour by giving conferences, partici pating in literary evenings and helping to organize political meetings in each of the cities he passed through. In March, he arrived in Tucuman, Argentina where he announced that he would visit La Paz "in spite of everything and regardless of the cost, except in the case of death or prison." In June, he arrived in La Quiaca at the ArgentinaBolivia border, and decided to avoid the border by walking to Tupiza in Bolivia. He had no passport or ofcial documents since these are "requirements that the state and the bourgeoisie demand of us." Once in Tupiza, he solicited the assis tance of Mario Fortunati (Tomas Soria) and Cusicanqui to travel the nal leg to La Paz. He stayed only two months in La Paz, after which he returned to Cordoba, Argentina where he helped to organize the support network for the Antorcha group's newspaper.17 Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Struggle for the 8-Hour Day All the organizing and propaganda activity of the anarchist cultural centers resulted in the formation of com bative libertarian unions like the Sindicato Central de Albanilesy Constructores (Central Union of Masons and Builders) in 1924, the Union de Trabajadores en

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A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia Madera (Woodworkers' Union, UTM) in 1925, the Federacion de Artes Mecdnicas y R.S. (Federation of Mechanical Arts) in 1925, and the Federacion de Sastresy R.S. (Tailors' Federation) which was reorga nized in 1927. Two factors, which were reiterated throughout the testimonies collected, contributed decisively to the rapid spreading of anarcho-syndicalist doctrine and organizing forms amongst the workers of the different worker/crafts sectors of the city. One was the explicit rejection of the participation of intellec tuals of either a petit bourgeois or ruling class background in workers' organizing. The other was an active campaign for the 8-hour day. Together, these factors helped confer on anarchism the character of an anti-capitalist social doctrine; one that was able to articulate the demands of long-marginalized sectors through a fun damentally working class identity, which was based in the dignity of work and the right to citizenship. While the rejection of the so-called intellectual class was a common gesture of both anarchist and Marxist workers,18 the ght for an 8-hour day was a task fundamentally taken on by the anarchists, who were grouped together in the main unions and libertarian and propaganda groups.19 From individual actions, like that of the tailor Luis Salvatierra in 1921, to the massive demonstrations led by the Union de Trabajadores en Madera and the Sindicato Central de Albaniles y Constructores during the period from 1926 to 1929, the call for an 8-hour day was a constant motive for agitation. It was developing as much in the streets as in the workplace, especially since the positive legislation put forth by the Re publican governments of Saavedra and Siles was systematically disregarded by the factory owners. Characteristics of the Federaci6n Obrera Local (Local Workers' Federation) One ceptance contribution to 8-hour the gradual ac of the day was the founding of the Federacion Obrera Local (FOL) in 1927, answering a call from the UTM. In the beginning, the FOL united ve of the most combative crafts unions in the city,20 and rmly situated its actions within the framework of the theoretical and organizational principles of libertarian syndicalism. The FOL adopted the system of a federated orga nization where the upper-level directors, revocable at any time, were subject to the direct democratic decision making of their base. This style of organizing al lowed the FOL to adopt a highly exible structure when confronting state repres sion. Due to the exible nature of the direction of the union, the FOL could rapidly replace its leadership when it suf fered imprisonment or detention. The testimonies of Jose Clavijo, Santiago Or donez and Amed Soliz in Chapter Four of this book illustrate this characteristic, and emphasize the process of worker self-formation that was undertaken by the FOL and by each afliated union or federation, through literary evenings, conferences and study groups. Teodoro Penaloza recuperates this process of self-education, likening the FOL to an authentic workers' university. Union autonomy and the drive to bring dignity to manual labor were re inforced by the use of direct action as a fundamental tactic of worker confronta tion with the state and the business own ers. These practices were based theoreti cally in the anarchist belief in uapoliticismo," which declared that the participa tion of political partieswhether of the right or the leftdegraded the revo lutionary impulse of the unions. This was one of the great themes of debate between the anarchists and the Marxists, and it led to a growing demarcation and autonomy from the intellectuals and pro fessional politicians who were attempting to get involved with the unions in order to control them. The following appears in a document found amongst the papers of Jose Mendoza Vera (the likely author of the writing): "The bourgeoisie sends us an in numerable supply of outside counselors who only ever try to twist the rhythm of our actions. These special envoys, who are extremely well rewarded, appear frequently in the ranks of so cial struggle in the conicts between capital and labor... At times, they represent themselves as novice writ ers, disenchanted with their bourgeois surroundings, desiring only to put their intelligence at the service of the poor... And one day, without ever knowing how they do it, we see them leap over the platforms and sit down at the editorial table of one of our newspapers, slipping into our organization and speaking out in our meetings... At rst, it appears that the cause has won new converts... But the day comes when self-denial is swapped for supplication, hope for disenchantment, sacrice for pain; one's feet bleed from so much walk ing through the abrojos [thistle-like plants], the spirit weakens, the load becomes too heavy... Beaten, the forgotten original personality re appears in them: the centrality of bourgeoisie breeding. They are, once more, that which they werethey preach practicality over idealism, utilizing their experiences. They cre ate new schools as an instrument of castration without ever renouncing the [revolutionarysj uniform that they stole from us... Facing them and other enemies, we are forced to make old themes new; using those themes now to provide the avor of something new. Thus, we afrm that a politician and a libertarian socialist cannot be one and the same person; they are completely opposed. The ideals of the former are born of a need to govern, while the ideal of the latter is born of another needto be free. One arrives in the government via the path of politics, through elec tions or by force, either way, torturous paths. To arrive at liberty, one must opt for revolution, the direct route, snatchingfrom the state that which it previously stole from society, and there you have two concepts that there is no human or divine way to harmo nize.

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory The document concludes signaling that apoliticismo is "not inhibition, it is action and afrmation," and it reveals a conviction deeply rooted in the anarchist movement, as much at the theo retical level as at the level of daily practice. It is nothing less than the libertarian interpretation of the well-known refrain of the First International: "The emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class themselves." This idea was applied to the particularities of the Bolivian national situation, alluding to the barriers that workers erected to oppose the repre sentation of manual laborers by members of the "parasite class." The FOL members dened the parasite class as q'aras.22 Finally, the FOL proposed and brought into practice the equality and organizational autonomy of women workers via the creation in 1927 of the Sindicato Femenino de Ocios Varios (Women's Union of Assorted Occupations), and the develop ment of a series of labor demands amongst the women's unions. The Workers' Convention of 1927 councils gave rise to the formation of a National Council, which functioned as the directorate of the Confederacidn Boliviano de Trabajo (Bolivian Confed eration of Labor), founded during the congress.24 The libertarian inuence was also expressed by the adoption of direct action as a principal method of struggle to obtain the demands of the workers. However, the Workers' Convention did not exclude the possibility that these workers' councils might enter into an al liance with "proletarian parties," surely at the insistence of the socialist attendees of the congress.25 Even if the ambiguities of these documents don't permit us to speak of an "indisputable" ideological afliation, there was consensus around one of the central proposals of the anarchists: that of maintaining union independence from the political parties. On this point, a strong shop oor sector, led by Antonio Carvajal, made their "apolitical" position known, agreeing on major points with the anarchists. An article in the weekly newspaper for workers that Carvajal managed, reported the following: "On the occasion of the III Work ers' Convention, which gave an inde pendent syndicalist front to the orga nization of the Bolivian proletariat, the word "syndicalism" has been popularized... Syndicalism means that the workers organize themselves in trade unions or craft unions with no intermediaries... In their sermons, the socialist and communist politi cians preach that the bourgeoisie is dangerous, but they don't say that they are the new replacements for this hateful task. They only preach the change of executioners; with one politics or the other, there will always be governors and governedmaking the inequality amongst living beings last forever. *26 But the central initiative of the event, that of giving the workers' organizations a national headquarters, was not ap proveddue as much to internal dissent generated by the workers identied with

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The ght socialists between on the anarchists other culminated on one side during and the Marxists Third Workers' and Convention held in Oruro in April 1927. According to histo rian Guillermo Lora, the conictive atmosphere that dominated the meeting was "favorable ground for anarchists' maneuvering and this allowed the libertarians to acquire enormous, although momentary, inuence." However, Lora afrms later on that the declaration of principles that emanated from the congress would have been a document of "indisputable Marxist afliation that can be considered an antecedent of the future Pulacayo Thesis."23 Within the eschatological conception of history maintained by the author, surely he found no other manner to interpret a document that fundamentally proposed a syndicalism indepen dent of all party interference, in accordance with the feelings of a majority of the delegates from the organization's base. During the event, the efforts of the Republicans to interfere in delibera tions of the congress were denounced. The workers also openly rejected the participation of intellectuals like Oscar Cerruto and Tristan Marof who, together with a large student delegation, presented themselves to help "orient" the working masses. After a heated debate, and thanks to the mediation of Romulo Chuma cero (who at that time was aligned with Marof), the intellectuals were nally allowed to enter the congress and participate in the deliberations. The conclusions of the Workers' Convention, as much orga nizational as ideological, revealed the ght that had developed at its core. Among the few points of consensus was an agreement on a series of measures in favor of the rights of the indigenous and the promotion of a women workers' organization. Represen tatives of both of these sectors were present in the congress. The conclusions that reveal an anarchist inuence correspond rather to internal organization: the Convention adopted a federation structure based on the organization of the Consejos de Taller y de Fdbrica (Shop and Factory Councils), which when grouped into industrial or trade unions, would comprise higher-level councils in each state (departamento). The meetings of these state-level

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A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia various currents of social thought, as to the repression directed against the orga nizations' principal leaders. In August 1927, the La Paz press reported the news of the imprisonment of Romulo Chuma cero, as a result of the July communal up rising in Chayanta. For the rst time in Bolivian history, a demonstration of rural indigenous peasants {campesinos) was at tributed to the "pernicious inuence of red socialism." In reality, the main leaders of the up rising, Manuel Michel, Augustin Saavedra and Saturnino Mamani, attended the Oruro congress as part of an indigenous delegation that participated in the event. The press, however, exaggerated the "communist" character of the uprising which had its own goals and organiza tional formswith the goal of justifying the harsh government repression against the communal movement and the work ers' organizations. One Republican Party newspaper editorialized: "By the ample information that we give today, the reader will see how far the revolutionary activities of communism have gone. The indig enous sector was adopted as one of the elements of the subversive movement, and taking advantage of their igno rance and naivete, [the communists] made them come up with the idea of a major territorial claim.... The famous Ferrer School, which has been func tioning in this city with the pretext of fomenting the culture of the work ers and of the indigenous class, has also been one of the focal points from which the revolutionary inspirations have arisen. "27 Meanwhile, in La Paz, anarchists and Marxists returned to their respective organizationsthe FOL and the FOT {Federacion Obrera del Trabajo, Workers' Labor Federation)and the ideological gap between the two groups continued to grow. The documented testimonial evidence indicates that in this ght, the anarchists were a strong majority in La Paz and Oruro, at least until 1930. There were also important anarcho-syndicalist concentrations in Potosi, Huanuni and Corocoro. ^ try. [Trans.] 3. Before 1887, Bolivian territory extend ed to the Pacic and included most of the coast of the Atacama Desert and the port of Antofagasta. The discovery of rich nitrate deposits in the Atacama Desert and rising border tensions led to the outbreak of war between Chile and Bolivia (1879-1883). Chile's vic tory in this war resulted in Bolivia's loss of its outlet to the Pacic. [Trans.] 4. Jaime Mendoza, "En Las Tierras de Potosi," Puerta del Sol, (La Paz, 1976) p. 176. 5. Gustavo Rodriguez, "Industrialization, Proletarizacion y Cultura Minera (Bolivia 1825-1927)," p. 36. Lecmre presented to the VIII International Symposium on Economic History, Buenos Aires, October 26-29,1987. 6. According to Zulema Lehm, the uctuating character of the mining workforce expressed itself in "a rela tive lack of differentiation between the two poles classically known as workers (dispossessed) and artisans/craftspeo ple (property-holders)." Historia Oral y Movimiento Obrero: el testimonio de Jose Orellana, second edition, La Paz: Presencia, January 5,1986. 7. See Carlos M. Rama, Historia del Movimiento Obreroy Social Latinoamericano Contemporaneo, LAIA, Bar celona, 1976. 8. Especially tin prices. [Trans.]

Excerpted from Anarchist Trade Unions in Bolivia 1920-1950, translation and expanded edition of Los Artesanos Libertariosy la Etica del Trabajo by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Zulema Lehm A. La Paz: Ediciones THOA, 1988. This document is still in revision process with its authors and may be slightly changed in its nal form. [Trans.]

Endnotes
1. See La Aurora Social no. 6 (27 October 1907), no. 7 (30 November 1906) and no. 9 (31 January 1907). This notable workers' newspaper was consulted in the library of the International Insti tute of Social History in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. 2. A word used to describe a person of mixed indigenous and Spanish ances

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 9. Guillermo Lora (Historia del Movimiento Obrero Boliviano, 1923-33, Tomo III, La Paz-Cochabamba: Los Amigos del Libra, 1970). This worker, who Lora considered a "Marxist" imply ing that he was "proletarian," was not only a carpenter by trade, but was also an evangelist and anarchist sympathizer accord ing to testimony from Desiderio Osuna. Interview 5 October 1985. This combination of seemingly irreconcilable convictions is fairly common amongst the libertarian leaders of the period, perhaps due to the similarity between the gures of the preacher and the propagandist and the fundamentally ethical character of anarchist doctrine. 10. Rodriguez, loc. cit. p.47. 11. Since 1908, a Liberal Party-inspired Federacion Obrera (Work ers' Federation) existed in La Paz, grouping together the prin cipal mutual societies of the city. Estatuto Orgdnico de la Fed eracion Obrera de La Paz, La Paz: Imprenta Velarde, 1912. In 1921, the Federacion Obrera Internacional (International Work ers' Federation) was organized out of that entity. In 1918, the FOI became the Federacidn Obrera del Trabajo (Workers' Labor Federation, FOT), uniting the progressive workers and artisans. Cf. Moises Alvarez, cited inTrifonio Delgado, CienAnos deLucha Obrera en Bolivia, pp. 65-66. La Paz: Isla, 1984. 12. The concept of political partisanship seems anachronistic for these rst years of the workers' anti-establishment action. Dif ferent currents and doctrines coexisted freely among the workers united by these centers under the common bond of their oppo sition to the traditional workers' organizations. However, Lora afrms that the COL was the result of the fusion of the COI and the "clandestine communist youth," and that their leaders, including Dario Borda and Rigoberto Rivera, "evolved toward Marxism." This assignment of partisanship and afliation to workers' organizations is frequent in Lora's writingusually citing later behavior of their leaders. In this way, he frequendy confused his readers by attributing the word "communist" ex clusively to a Marxist tradition, which hides the fact that the anarchists were calling for "libertarian communism." By 1923, there is evidence of the anarchist sympathies of both Borda and Rivera that contradict Lora's suppositions. See Guillermo Lora, op. cit. pp. 59 and 105. See also letter from Dario Borda to the Secretary of the COL, 18 November 1923, Private archive of Luis Cusicanqui (subsequendy referred to as "PALC"). 13. Tomas Katari, "La Odisea del Grupo Libertario La Antorcha" in Humanidad: Periodico deActividad Contemporanea, (ofcial or gan of the FOL), La Paz, 4 May 1928. Thanks to the connec tions of these Bolivian anarchist groups with foreign groups, the anarchist press in a number of neighboring countries intervened in the campaign for their liberation. For example, La Protesta, Lima, Peru, August 1924 and El Hombre, Montevideo, Uruguay, 15 August 1924 and 15 February 1925. 14. In 1924, on announcing the appearance of his newspaper Tierra y Libertad, Chumacero pointed out the following in a letter to Luis Cusicanqui: "Effectively, the brave soldier, Ricardo Flores Magon, citizen of the anarchist republic of South America, had the great dream of giving to his people LIBERTY together with LAND." PALC, letter from 21 April 1924. Later, Chuma cero would be attracted to the personality of Gustavo Navarro

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A Brief History of Anarchism in Bolivia (Tristan Marof) and he afliated with the socialist party. As usual, Lora redraws this latter activity to make it seem that the 1925 Workers' Congress was dominated by socialists and Marx ists. Lora, op. cit. pp. 11-13. We have received valuable appraisals about the activity of the Ferrer School from Don Gunnar Mendoza. 15. N. N. Zeballos, "El Anarquismo en Bolivia," in La Antorcha, Buenos Aires, 12 March 1926. Also from the corre spondence of Luis Cusicanqui, PALC. 16. Tierra y Libertad: Organo al servicio del proletariado nacionaly de todos los explotados en general, Sucre, vol. 1, no. 3 (28 March 1926); La Tea, Periddico Anarquista, organo de la agrupacidn "La Antorcha," vol. 1, no. 1 (Novem ber 1927). The internationalist Lora makes a particularly tendentious observation about the Argentinean anarchists who supported the libertar ian activities in Bolivia out of a sense of worker's solidarity: "The anarchist organizations were, to a great degree, the work of foreigners amongst whom it is obligatory to mention the fol lowing: Fournarakis, militant of the FORA..., the Chilean shoemaker Ar mando Trevino..., the Peruvians Fran cisco Gamarra, Navarro and Paulino Aguilar..., the Spaniard Nicolas Man tilla..., the Mexican Renjel..., the Ar gentine Huerta." (Lora op. cit. p.63). Lora also tried to describe Fournarakis as a candidate for a leadership position in the FOL and he lied about the na tionality of Mantilla, who was a tailor from La Paz and linked to the libertar ian cultural centers from very early on. The disinformation could not have been more agrant, given that all the "foreigners" mentioned were involved with to the FOL and the libertarian cultural centers at a time when both had already developed into an impor tant activity. 17. Letters from Antonio Fournarakis to Luis Cusicanqui, PALC: Buenos Aires 14 January 1927;Tucuman 24 March 1927; La Quiaca 2 June 1927 and 28 September 1927; Cordoba 23 February 1928. 18. In a pamphlet written by Carlos Men doza Mamani, and cited by Lora, the communist leader refers to intellectuals with the following words: "Of all the groups that form the petit bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and the students be lieve in playing a revolutionary role. In the different leftist poses they assume, they see themselves as the leaders of the revolution, as those who should be in charge and direct the workers and peasants, incapable of organiz ing themselves, in their struggles." Lora, however, considers this position as proof of Mendoza s sectarianism, whose only positive element would be that of "freeing syndicalism of artisanal control." An artisan himself, Men doza did nothing more than express a generalized feeling of the workers and artisans of the periodtheir refusal to be led by intellectuals from outside the world of work no matter how men tally "proletarianized" they considered themselves to be (cf. op. cit. pp. 39596). 19. The fact that the rst protagonists of this conquest were mosdy craftspeople not proletarians is a theme that will be analyzed thoroughly in the epilogue. 20. Besides the four already mentioned, there was the Unidn de Trabajadores de la Zona Norte (Workers Union of the Northern Zone) comprised of the workers of the cardboard and matches factories. Interview with Desiderio Osuna, 5 October 1985. 21. "Apoliticismo e Inhibition." Undated, unsigned manuscript, private archive of Petronila Infantes. 22. An Aymara word, used historically to denote those considered colonizers, exploiters and/or rich. [Trans.] 23. Lora, op. cit. pp. 21-31. 24. Reaction, Semanario Obrero, vol. 1, no. 3 (May 1927) Oruro, p. 6. 25. Lora, op. cit. pp. 30-31. 26. Reaction, Semanario Obrero, vol. 1, no. 3 (May 1927) Oruro, p. 2. Carvajal has earned the bitterest criticisms from Guillermo Lora (op. cit. pp.23-4). On the other hand, Lora praises Trifonio Delgado for his resistance to the "in tellectual tutelage of revolutionaries or professional politicians" (op. cit. p. 94). 27. "Las actividades comunistas en la clase indigena," in ElTiempo, Sucre 4 August 1927. The reader can consult the following for more information about the rebellion in Chayanta: Silvia Rivera and the THOA team, "Ayllus y Desarollo en el Norte de Potosi," unedited manuscript and Eric Langer, "The Great Southern Bolivian Indian Rebellion of 1927: A Microanalysis," speech at the 46th International Con gress of Americanists, Amsterdam, July 1988.

Raven Used Books Specializing in Scholarly and Radical Used Books Open Everyday 59 Boltwood Walk, Amherst, MA 52-B JFK Street, Harvard Square, Cambrige, MA.

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Argentina, December 19th &20th, 2001

A New Type of Insurrection
by Colectivo Situaciones translated and introduced by Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza
iue se vayan todos! Four Spanish words became part of the universal language of rebellion after a multitude of Argen tineans occupied the streets the evening of December 19th, 2001. The words were thrown at every politician, functionary, economist, journalist and at nobody in particular, cutting a threshold in history, a before and after for Argentina that would manifest in a wave of resonances around the world. The revolt surprised analysts, always ready to judge the new with reference to their old interpretive grids. But for many of its protagonists, it had long been fo retold. Argentina had been one of the testing grounds for neoliberalism since 1975, shordy before a dictatorship, initially commanded by General Jorge Videla, insti tutionalized the repression of revolutionary activism while launching a package of eco nomic reforms that began undoing labor rights and welfare state policies that had been the result of decades of workers' stru ggles. Over 30,000 people were tortured, murdered or disappeared by the regime. Eight years later, electoral democracy nally returned. The repression and the military's large-scale process of social en gineering had been successful in demobili zing the population. Neoliberal reforms could now be imposed by consensus. In the 1990s, president Carlos Menem and his nance minister Domingo Cavallo, in alliance with the labor bureau cracy, undertook sweeping structural adjustment reforms, privatizing nearly every state-run company at every level of government, deregulating labor and nance markets, pegging the peso to the dollar, and leaving nearly forty percent of the population unemployed or underemployed. During the Menem era, a new genera tion of activists and new forms of protest slowly emerged. H.I.J.O.S., the organi zation of the children of the disappeared, spoiled ballots, and voter abstention rates came about in 1995 and introduced creative were unprecedented. In November, Caval lo froze withdrawals from bank accounts to ways of denouncing the unpunished tor turers of their often-revolutionary parents, prevent a drain on reserves that would force and preserving their memory. In 1997, the government to unpeg the peso from the dollar. People from all walks of life sud unemployed workers began protest road blocks. Their multiple movements, known denly found themselves without money to as piqueteros, spread throughout the country meet their most basic needs. On December 19th, 2001, the people of Argentina took to very quickly. All attempts of the Peronist the streets in protest. government to co-opt the movement pro ved unsuccessful. To nd alternatives to The following is an excerpt from an the recession, barter clubs were created in English translation of Colectivo Situa different parts of the country, giving rise to ciones' book 19 y 20: Apuntes para el novo a massive underground economy based on protagonismo social (2002) that will be pub the principle of solidarity. lished under the tide 19th and 20,b: Notes In 1999, Fernando de la Rua became for the New Social Protagonism early next president with a promise of change, but year. It captures with vivid eloquence the street actions of December 19th and 20th, kept the neoliberal reforms intact in the name of preserving "governability." When while exposing the inadequate analyses of the failure to repay the (now massive) for the events which fail to acknowledge the eign debt brought the national economy to agency, autonomy and creativity of the the verge of collapse, de la Rua recruited mobilized masses. The two days of street Cavallo. ghting, and the alternative forms of life that appeared afterwardincluding neigh By July 2001, the pace of events had become dizzying. The numerous piquetero borhood assemblies and factory occupa tionsreveal what Colectivo Situaciones movements, which so far had acted mosdy in isolation, started coordinating entire calls the "thought of the multiple," a form of thinking of the multitude that rejects all days of roadblocking throughout the vast centralized forms of power. Argentine geography. In the mid-term elections of October 2001, voters overwhelmingly submitted

Carlos LatufT

32 / fall 2005

Argentina, December 19'" 6f 20th, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection

Colectivo Situaciones is a group of militant researchers based in Buenos Aires who began working together two years before the uprisings they explore in 19y20. The collective came into being motivated by the search for a form of intervention and knowledge pro duction that 'reads' struggles from within, a phenomenology and a genealogy that moves away from the modalities established by both academia and traditional left politics. This method springs from the recognition that "as much potential as thought and practice have, they cannot reach their full potential if not based in a concrete situation."1 Colectivo Situaciones has published several books and pamphlets on different aspects of Argentina's newprotagonism, including the unemployed workers movement MTD of Solano, the peasants' movement Mo.Ca.S.E. and H.I.J.O.S. Their research has extended to forging collaborations with local radical experiments in places like Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, France, Uruguay, Brazil, Italy, Spain and Germany. Some of these afnities are documented in articles, working papers and declarations, which can be found on the collective's website: http://www.situaciones.org.

Insurrection Without a Subject

19th and 20th did not have an The insurrection author. Thereof areDecember no political or sociological theories available to compre hend, in its full scope, the logic of those more than thirty uninterrupted hours. The difculty of this task resides in the volume of personal and group stories, the phase shifts, and the breakdown of the representations that in other condi tions would have been able to shape the meaning of these events. It becomes im possible to intellectually encompass the intensity and plurality nked by the pots and pans2 on the 19th, and by open con frontation on the 20th. The most com mon avenues of interpretation collapsed one by one: the political conspiracy, the hidden hand of obscure interests, and because of that all-powerful combination, the crisis of capitalism. In the streets it was not easy to under stand what was happening. What had awakened those long-benumbed energies from their dreams? What might all the people who were gathered there want? Did they want the same that we, who were also there, wanted? How to know? Did knowing matter? First in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, and then in the Plaza de Mayo, all

sorts of things could be heard: "Who ever does not jump is an Englishman"; "Whoever does not jump is from the military"; "Execute those who sold the nation"; "Cavallo motherfucker"; "Argen tina, Argentina"; and the most celebrated from the night of the 19th /'Stick the state of siege up your asses."3 Then, the rst articulation of "All of them out, none of them should remain." The mixture of slogans made the struggles of the past reappear in the present: against the dictatorship, the Malvinas/Falklands war, the impunity of the genocides, the privatization of public companies, among others. The chants did not overlap, nor was it possible to identify previously ex isting groups among the crowd gathered there. All, as a single body, chanted the slogans one by one. At the same time, the contemporary piquetero methods of barricades, burning and blocking urban arteries, appeared in all the streets. Words were superuous during the most intense moments of those days. Not because the bodies in movement were silentthey were notrather, words circulated, following unusual patterns of signication. Words functioned in another way. They sounded along with pots and pans, but did not substitute for them. They did not remit to a specic

demand. Words did not transmit a con stituted meaning, they just sounded. A reading of these words cannot be done unless the new and specic function they acquired is understood: they expressed the acoustic resources of those who were there, as a collective conrmation of the possibilities of constructing coherence from all the fragments that were begin ning to be recognized in an unanimous and indeterminate will. The fiestabecause Wednesday the 19th was a fiestagradually expanded. It was the end of the terrorizing effects of the dictatorship and an open chal lenge to the state of siege imposed by the government, and at the same time, there was celebration for the surprise of being protagonists of a historical action, even without being able to explain to each other the particular motivations of the rest of the participants. The sequence was the same all over the city: from fear and anger to the balcony, the rooftop, the street corners, and once there, to the transmutation. It was Wednesday; 10:30 p.m. for some, 10 p.m. for others. And on the patios and in the streets a novel situa tion was occurring. Thousands of people were living through a transformation at once: "being taken" by an unexpected collective process. People also celebrated

fall 2005 / 33

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory the possibility of a still-possible esta, as well as the realization of potent social desires, capable of altering thousands of singular destinies. Nobody tried to deny the drama of the events. Joy did not negate each individual's experience of concern and struggle. It was the tense eruption of all these elements at once. Archaic forms of ritualism were adopted, a simula tion of exorcism whose purposean anthropologist would sayseemed to be the re-encounter with the capacities of the multitudinous, the collective and the neighborly. In a matter of minutes, each had to make decisions that are usu ally difcult to carry out: moving away from television; talking to oneself, and to others; asking what was really going on; resisting for a few seconds the intense impulse to go out on the streets with pots and pans; approaching rather prudendy, and then, letting oneself be driven in un foreseeable directions. Once in the streets, the barricades and the re united the neighbors. From there, they moved on swiftly to see what was happening in nearby corners. Then it was necessary to decide where to go: Plaza de Mayo or Plaza de los Dos Congresos, and in each neighborhood, to start nding targets that were more at hand: Videla's house or Cavallo's. The multitude divided itself, in each neigh borhood, and dealt with all the "targets" at once. Acts of radical spontaneity sustained themselves in collectively or ganized memory. Thousands of people acted with clear and precise goals, enact ing a collective intelligence. At dawn, another scene began to be played. While some were going to sleepsome at 3 a.m., others at 5:30 a.m.others held discussions about what was happening and what would come next. Many continued to organize, with the objective of not allowing Plaza de Mayo to be occupied by repressive forces, given that ofcially, the state of siege was still in place. By then, the confrontationwhich had not yet been unleashed in all its magnitudebegan to be prefigured. On the 20th, things presented themselves in a different way. The square became the greatest object of disputes. What took place there, right after midday, was a true battle. It is not easy to say what happened. It is not easy to remember other occasions on which such an air was breathed in the plaza. The violence of the confrontations contrasted with the absence of apparent meaning among the participants. Young people openly confronted the police, while the older ones were hold ing on and helping from behind the frontlines. Roles and tasks were spon taneously structured. Plaza de Mayo revalidated its condition as a privileged stage for community actions with the greatest symbolic power. Only this time, the representations that accompanied so many other multitudes who believed in the power of that massive pink building so jealously and inefciendy defended by the police did not materialize. There were detainees, injured, and many dead as a result of the brutal police repression. Ofcially, they spoke of thirty fatalities in the whole country, but we all know there were more. The city of Buenos Aires became redrawn. The nancial center was de stroyed. Or maybe, reconstructed by new human ows, new forms of inhabiting and understanding the meaning of store windows and banks. The energies un leashed were extraordinary, and as could be anticipated, they did not deactivate. The events of the 19,h and 20,h in the city of Buenos Aires were followed by a feverish activity of escraches,4 assemblies and marches. In the rest of the country, the reaction was uneven. But in every province, the repercussion of the events combined with previous circumstances: roadblocks, looting, protests and upris ings. enormous difculties. It is evident that no power (poder5) could be behind them. Not because those powers do not ex ist, but because the events surpassed the capacities of any mechanism of control that anyone could have sought to mount. The questions about power remain unan swered: Who was behind this? Who led the masses? These are ideological questions. They interpolate ghosts. What is the subject who believes itself to be seeing powers beyond life looking for? How to com prehend the existence of this conspirato rial subjectivity, that believes the only possible sense of the events is the one played out by already instituted powers? If these questions had any value in other situations, they were never as insipid as on the 19th and 20th. The separation be tween the bodies and their movements and the imaginary plans organized by the established powers became tangible like never before in our history. More over, these powers had to show all their impotence: not only were they unable to provide a logic for the situation, but even afterwards they did not come upon anything but to accommodate themselves in the effects of the events. Thus, all the pre-existing interpretative matrices, overturned, caricatured, were activated to dominate the assemblies that wagered on supporting the movement of the 19th and 20th. The diagnoses were many: "social ist revolution," "revolutionary crisis," "anti-democratic fascism," "reactionary market antipolitics," "the second national independence," "a crazy and irrational social outburst," "a citizens' hurricane for a new democracy," "a manipulite from below"6 or the Deluge itself. All these interpretations, heterogeneous in their content, operate in very similar ways: faced with a major event, they cast their old nets, seeking much less to establish what escapes through them than to verify the possibilities of formatting a diverse movement. The movement of the 19th and 20th dispensed with all types of centralized organizations. They were not present in the call to assemble, in the organiza-

Words & Silences: From Interpretation to the Unrepresentable

With silence recovered and their quietude, habitual usages. words The rst interpretations began to circu late. Those who sought the immediate political readings of the events faced

34 / fall 2005

Argentina, December 19,b & 20'b, 2001: A New Type of Insurrection tion of the events, nor in the aftermath, when it was time to interpret the events. This condition, which in other times would have been experienced as a lack, manifested itself on this occasion as an achievement. Because this absence was not spontaneous. There was a multitu dinous and sustained rejection of every organization that intended to represent, symbolize or hegemonize street activity. In all these senses, the popular intellect overcame the intellectual previsions and political strategies. Moreover, not even the state was the central organization behind the move ment. In fact, the state of siege was not as much confronted as it was routed. If confrontation organizes a symmetric op position between two entities, routing highlights an asymmetry. The multitude disorganized the efcacy of governmen tal oppression with the explicit goal of controlling the national territory. The neutralization of the powers (potencias) of the state on the part of a multiple reac tion was made possible by the condition ofand not the shortage ofthe inexistence of a call to assemble and a central organization. In addition, some intellectualsvery comfortable with the consistency of their rolefeel that a multiplicity in action, which destabilizes all solidity upon which to think, threatens their authority. But perhaps we can get even closer to some hard novelties of the movement of the 19th and 20th. The presence of so many people who do not usually participate in the public sphere, unless it is in the capacity of lim ited individuals and objects of represen tation by either the media or the political apparatuses, de-instituted7 any central situation. There were no individual protagonists: every representational situ ation was de-instituted. A practical and effective de-institution, animated by the presence of a multitude of bodies of men and women, extended later in the mo tion of "all of them out, none of them should remain." In this way, without speeches or ags, without words unifying a single logic, the insurrection of the 19th and 20th was becoming potent in the same proportion that it resisted all facile and immediate 2. meanings. The movement of the 19th and 20,h blew up a series of negative be liefs about the capacity for resistance of the men and women who, unexpectedly, gathered there. Unlike past insurrections, the movement did not organize under the illusion of a promise; current demon strations have abandoned certainties with respect to a promising future. The pres ence of the multitude in the streets does not extend from the spirit of the 1970s. ^ This was not about the insurgent masses Vol. 7, no. 2 (2003): 8. Loud banging on saucepans or cacerolas by large crowds has been a com mon practice in the recent uprisings in Argentina. This activity is called a cacerolazo. The sufx -azo, in this case, means "insurrection." Cacerolazo, then, translates literally as "insurrection of the sauce pans." [Trans.] The state of siege refers to the emer gency measures taken by the Argentine government in an attempt to put a lid on unrest. [Trans.] The word "escrache" is Argentinean slang for "exposing something outra conquering their future under the social geous." Escraches started as colorful ist promise of a better life. street demonstrations organized by The movement of the 19th and 20th H.IJ.O.S. in front of the homes of peo draws its logic from the present, not from ple involved in human rights violations the future; its afrmation cannot be read during the dictatorship. During and in terms of programs and proposals about after the rebellion, numerous spontane what the future of Argentina should be. ous escraches were organized by people whenever they spotted a politician in a Of course there are shared longings, yet public place, such as a restaurant, cafe, they did not let themselves be appre or on the street. [Trans.] hended into single "models" of thought, action and organization. Multiplicity 5. In Spanish there are two words for was a key element for the efcacy of the power, poder and potencia(s). Their origins can be traced, respectively, to movement: it gained the strength pos the Latin words potestas and potentia. sessed by an intelligent diversity of dem In general, poder refers to transcendent onstrations, gathering points, different forms of power, such as state power, and groupings, and a whole plurality of forms potencia refers to power that exists in of organization, initiatives and solidari the sphere of immanent, concrete ex ties. This active variety permitted the perience. T o maintain this distinction, simultaneous reproduction of the same we indicate the original term between elaboration in each group, without the brackets when the use is unclear or need of an explicit coordination. And at changes from prior usage. The words the same time, this was the most effective "potent" and "impotence" should be antidote against any obstruction of the read as derivatives of potencia. [Trans.] action. 6 . Manipulite, literally "clean hands" in Consequendy, there was no senseless Italian, represented a national investi dispersion, but an experience of the mul gation into government corruption in tiple, an opening towards new and active Italy during the 1990s. Because the campaign took place at the same time becomings. In sum, the insurrection could not be dened by any of the lacks Argentinean newspapers were unveiling one corruption scandal after another, that are attributed to it. Its plenitude the expression was quickly adopted by consisted in the conviction with which the social body unfolded as a multiple, journalists and politicians. [Trans.] and the mark it was capable of provoking ' In order to preserve the resonances that indicate a power opposite to that on its own history. 3^ which institutes or that which is part of a constitutive process, we have chosen to use the expression "de-institute" as a Endnotes translation of the Spanish word destitu1. Marina Sitrin, "The Shock of the New: ir, which makes reference to the power An Interview with Colectivo Situacio that unseats a regime. [Trans.] nes," Perspectives on Anarchist Theory,

fall 2005 / 35

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Four Questions for Anarchist Art

by Josh MacPhee

Places the U.S. Has Bombed Since World War Twoposter design both stenciled and silkscreened and distributed around the world via art shows, sales, and pasting on the street, 2002.

protest movement in Seattle with both puppets and window smashing, or to ght dam construction in India with complex Anti-authoritarians ceremonies have and direct beenaction extremely theater. successful Historically, in using art has artplayed and spectacle an important in recent role in years, revolutionary whethermovements, to re-energize and the the Left has a long tradition of cultural resistance, particularly in the graphic arts. The graphics collective Atelier Populaire played an integral role in the student-worker uprising in Paris in May 1968. Amilcar Cabral has written extensively on the central role of culture in the African liberation movements in the 60s and 70s. Surprisingly most of this history seems lost to the Left itself, and we are far more likely to have a corporation mine our own visual history to create advertisements than to study and understand the history ourselves. Indeed, art and culture are rarely the focus of debate for anarchists and anti-authoritarians. As art has become increasingly rareed in our society, and relegated to mu seums and expensive galleries, we have tended to spend decreasing amounts of time thinking about it. As a result, our denition of "Anarchist Art" is usually by default simply art created by an anarchist, whether it is a clip-art graphic, a heavy metal song, agit prop street theater or an abstract painting. Rather than being content with shallow, unconsidered, or simply absent of perspectives on art, I think it is extremely important that anarchists develop complex ideas about how art and culture operate in society, inuence emotions and ideas, and are part of

36 / fall 2005

Four Questions for Anarchist Art

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Magonstencils of Ricardo Flores Magon painted in San Francisco, 2003.

movements for social change. For over ten years I have been actively producing art and graphics for anarchist projects and pub lications, attempting to develop anti-authoritarian concepts and ethics in my art practice, and put forward radical ideas through art created for and on streets across the United States. Like any other anarchist agitator, I want to debate the effectiveness of my actions, but as a movement we don't to have the proper tools to assess cultural work. (Generally speaking, I have received little critical response to my artwork from other anarchists.) Developing such conceptual and critical tools is as complicated as it is vi tal, since culture and art are qualitative, not quantitative. You can count the bodies that came to a protest or the amount of money raised by a fundraiser, but there is no clear scale by which to measure the effectiveness of a cultural product or event. So what would a new and more nuanced perspective on "Anarchist Art" look like? If anarchist art isn't just art made by anar chists, what is it? I'm not proposing that there should be a strict denition, or that we should set as our goal the ability to decide what is, or isn't, anarchist culture. But we do need to think through the implications of our activities, whether we are producers, users, or just viewers/listeners of art. Anarchists should think about the effectiveness of the culture we produce, and maybe even question why we produce an endless parade of text-heavy newspapers and pamphlets instead of beautiful posters, street art, or vid eos. I propose that we could ask the following questions about any particular art piece or activity, in order to help illuminate the role(s) it does or might play:

fall 2005 / 37

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Leaf on TVstencil painted on abandoned television, Chicago, 2001.

1
2 3 4

Is it anti-authoritarian in content? Does it directly promote anarchism? Is it a portrait of Bakunin? An advertisement for self-management? Is it anti-authoritarian inform? Is it a play put on by a theater troupe without a director? Is it a series of posters that have been collaboratively produced? Is it a directive telling the audience what to think, or does it pose questions or freely offer in formation to an audience? How does it enter the world? What is its audience? Is it an expensive one of a kind art object in an exclusive gallery? Is it a reproducible and inexpensive print? Is it posted on the street for anyone to see? Is it a mural on the side of a neighborhood community center? Does it directly contest state or corporate power? Is it illegal? Does it challenge capitalist social relations?

38 / fall 2005

Four Questions for Anarchist Art

Are We Free Y et?stenciled poster pasted in Brooklyn, 2003.

I've been trying to grapple with all of these issues in my own art practice over the past ten years. I used to take the rst question very seriously, and thought that the content of my work had to be revolutionary: pictures of heroes, people protesting, shouts against U.S. imperialism. My poster "Places the U.S. has Bombed Since World Wir 2" and my Ricardo Flores Magon stencil are good exam ples of this kind of didactic political art. The Magon stencil clearly responds to the rst question, it is a portrait of an anarchist. The bombs poster is as didactic as the Magon stencil, but not necessarily anarchist. What is interesting is that, unlike the stencil, it expects something of the audience; it asks them to challenge dominant conceptions of the role of the United States in the rest of the world. Increasingly I've been reecting back on this, and feeling that the questions that have oriented traditional revolutionary art, for in stance the question of how to "properly" represent the working class, seem at and increasingly meaningless. I don't want to create art that makes people think like me (or the political party of which I am a member). I want to make art that encourages people to think, period. It is a collective failure to reect, grapple with complexity, and develop critical thinking skills that has undermined so many past movements for social change. In this light, question one becomes far less interesting than the other three. Over time I have attempted to develop more work that asks questions rather than answering them. Five or six years ago I began attempting to create art that operates in radical ways but that isn't simply surface level anarchist propaganda. One of the rst projects I came up with was a series of graphic leaf images that I stenciled in various shapes and sizes around Chicago. Most were larger than life 2' x 3' leaves, although some were smaller, like on the one painted on an abandoned television shown here. What I think made this project effective was its novelty and context. No one expected to see gigantic leaves painted in front of their apartment. They

fall 2005 / 39

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Celebrate People's History poster seriespasted in Nashville TN, 2003. "Wangar Maathai" by Ally Bcansprout; "Fred Hampton" by Claude Moller; and "Elise Reclus" by Shaun S.

weren't traditional grafti, though they were spray painted, which clearly made them illegal. They weren't murals, and didn't operate in the way most community art projects do. They weren't an advertisement, and they weren't communicating a clear or simple mes sage. All of this forced an audience to ponder this alien invasion in the visual landscape, and since there is so little in public view that demands that we think, this was a radical act in and of itself. Although not originally intended as such, the leaves also became an environmental statement. By haunting the cityscape they raised simple questions that arc rarely asked publicly about why the primary green space in the city is becoming the pre-fab owers and trees planted in road medians. The "Are We Free Yet?" pill bottle is intended to operate in a similar manner. In this example, a larger than life object is directly asking the viewer a question, but it is unclear whether the question refers back to the "freedom" that drug companies claim their prod ucts provide, a much larger political question about our entire existence, or something more personal that viewers are to ask them selves. I think these are good examples of why form and context are important to consider when looking at art's potential to radically transform an audience's consciousness or outlook. In the abstract, an image of a leaf is hardly radical, or even political for that matter. It is the how, why and where of the leaf that become important. In these examples, effectiveness demanded that I consciously reject anarchist content in order to catch the viewer off guard. In addition, because it is situated on the street, the work is free and accessible to everyone, but ironically this location makes the art illegal. Its very existence is evidence that someone transcended the boundaries of societally acceptable ways to communicate. Ideally, this contradiction should raise some pretty interesting questions for the viewer

40 / fall 2005

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

"Neither Butchers nor Lunatics"

New Anticapitalist Organizing in Beirut
by Mary Foster and Jerome Klassen
Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel. Shakeeb: The Palestinian Intifada in 2002 provoked a period of enthusiastic activism after decades of civil war and state oppression. I was in twelfth grade and helped to get my schoolmates in volved, alongside university students, in protests to support the Intifada, boycott campaigns of U.S./Israeli products and supporters, and sending nancial aid to the people of Palestine. Actions like the Open Sit-in in downtown Beirut lead to the foundation of IMC Beirut. People felt they were contributing to the stru ggle, having lost condence in the regi mes of the region to act. Then the U.S. administration de clared its intention to attack Iraq, and I participated in organizing the No War, No Dictatorships campaign. I have also been involved in building IMC Beirut, in a country where media is controlled by capital and political gures. We pro duced Leaded, Unleaded, a lm on state repression, and are working on two me dia projects about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. At the same time, I volunteer in the Palestinian refugee camps with the marvelous Al-Najdeh Association, which organizes social programs in the camps to address the immediate needs of wo men and children. What changes in your political orientation have taken place during that time, and how do they relate to the political context in Bei rut and around the world? El Shmaly: My defection from the Le banese Communist Party [LCP] was out of the conviction that the party no longer represents those it claims to represent, and that its policies are driven by the goal of getting a seat in parliament. The LCP was not able to recover from its postwar situation of being on the winning side militarily and the losing side politically (i.e., it had no share in the government or parliament). Eventually I realized that no existing parties in Lebanon represented my beliefs. The two nonsectarian (nonreligious) parties are undemocratic, and one is fascist. This type of defection activists leaving traditional parties to become independentis a growing phe nomenon in Lebanon. For a few years now, people have turned to independent leftist groups, mainly campus based, as the most effective and convenient tool for social change. This is mainly due to the bankruptcy and inefciency of the traditional parties. You could say that the entire political scene in Beirutat least until UN Secu rity Council Resolution 1559operates within a xed framework, with few ex ceptions.1 The ruling party/opposition framework offers no choice: there was no real difference between the nancial policies of Salim El Hoss and Rak Al Hariri, for example.2 Both men conside red privatization to be the only solution to the debt problem. A major element of the framework is the role played by Syria in Lebanese domestic politics. Because of this framework, social resentment does not yet have its true political representa tion. It is not allowed to materialize and it is diluted by the illusion of collective sectarian gain. Things are polarized along sectarian (religious) lines, which blur the social struggle. Mortada: My politics have been shaped

anticapitalist movement has Over the last few years, Lebanon. a diverse emerged in Beirut, This article is a roundtable interview with three young men who are active in this movement and publishing under the names Fouad El Shmaly, Imad Mortada, and Najeeb Shakeeb. Four women from the same political milieu were also invited to participate, but did not accept. The goal of the interview was to discuss anticapitalist organizing in Lebanon and the politics of solidarity. The interview took place in January 2005, and was up dated in August.

Describe your main forms of engagement in social struggles in recent years. El Shmaly: I've been involved in the campaign to boycott U.S. products, the "No War, No Dictatorships" campaign [a coalition of groups and independent activists against the war on Iraq and the Arab dictatorships], Indymedia Beirut [see www.beirut.indymedia.org], AlYasari [Leftist] magazine, a national cam paign to reduce the electoral age to eig hteen, and a campaign for civil marriages. Mortada: Over the past three years, I have been involved in Helem (Lebanese Protection for LGBTQ_people; see www.helem.net), the Independent Media Center Beirut, the No War, No Dictatorships campaign, AlYasari, Escanda [an autonomous collective in northern Spain; see www.escanda. org], animating children's workshops in Palestinian refugee camps (mainly clay animation), nonviolent antioccupation activities in occupied Iraq, and the

42 / fall 2005

"Neither Butchers nor Lunatics" New Anticapitalist Organizing in Beirut

by the reemergence of "think globally, act locally," as well as by the global days of action against the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and so on. These experiences have made me realize that being antiimperialist does not automatically mean alliance. The divisions and diversity in the "movement" are raising questions at the personal, collective, local, and global levels. Are we all ghting for the same "another world"? Are the allies of today the persecutors of tomorrow? These is sues are arising even within small groups. My politics also developed on the level of horizontal, collective self-organi zation in relatively autonomous spaces/ projects as an alternative to conventional "activism" circles (i.e., party structures). This shifted my attention to internal, autonomous space politics, and to raising questions about state dependency, espe cially when it comes to the "justice" sys tem and our failure to create alternatives to police "justice" in cases such as rape, violence, and so forth. Shakeeb: I'm young, and though I've always been on the Left, my political orientation has shifted with my experien ce and the actions I've been involved in. Four years ago, I was a Trotskyist, but I had difculty reconciling the concept of the vanguard party and the Bolshevik he ritage, on the one side, with freedom and socialism, on the other. My basic ideals and the things I found in Trotskyism were in conict. I found answers later on when I started to read about anarchism and libertarian socialism, which are com pletely unheard of in this region. What were the mam expressions of solida rity with people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and

Anti-war inarch in Beirut, February 2003Rawanc (Indymedia Beirut). Palestine during this period? How has your anti-imperialist work related to that of tra ditional Lebanese anti-imperialist parties? El Shmaly: After the outbreak of the second Intifada, Beirut was buzzing with daily protests, marches, and sit-ins. Many political forces, including major Palestinian factions, joined together to start a large sit-in in downtown Beirut, protesting the Israeli invasions and su pporting the Intifada. It lasted six weeks, relying mainly on independent activists and continuing after the political parties decided, at the end of three weeks, to call a halt. Open-air workshops, discussions, exhibitions, and marches were organized. Many campaigns started from that sit-in. Meanwhile, Hezbollah erected a huge model of the Al Aqsa Mosque and loudspeakers opposite the sit-in. They played songs all day long, trying to hijack the action. This can be seen as typical of how the "ruling parties" react to the successful actions of others. It was also typical of traditional parties such as the LCP and the Progressive Socialist Party [the Druze party, or PSP] that they deci ded to stop the action when it started to annoy the government. When the gover nment decided that things had gone far enough, that public tension had been re leased and that sufcient notice had been taken of events in Palestine, people were told to go home and that it was not heal thy to stay on the streets any longer. The PSP did this because it was part of the government, but we have never been able to understand why the LCP always com plies, why it fails in general to address the social challenges people face every day. Traditional Lebanese parties do poli tics. Social change and equality are me rely clauses in their constitutions. None

fall 2005 / 43

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

of them are truly committed or even in volved in a real struggle for change. Mortada: There was the Open Sit-In, which was joined by French, U.S., Ca nadian, and Spanish activists under the "tents of resistance" project. Numerous other actions included the rst peaceful occupations of corporations involved in Israeli apartheid (Burger King and McDonald's); independent mass protests on "F15" and "M15," organized by the No War, No Dictatorships campaign, in which a queer pride bloc marched for the rst time in Arab history (ve members of Helem with rainbow ags and an "Out against the War" banner); and a boycott campaign involving publications, actions, and global networking. We also sent media activists to occupied Iraq to help establish IMC Baghdad, as well as report from there and engage in nonviolent antioccupation actions and monitoring. We organized the rst protest action targeting an Arab embassy in response to Kuwait's involvement in the war on Iraq. This action culminated in the blockade of a highway connecting the embassy to the airport and UN house. Our actions showed that an alternati ve to the conservative/compromising/less radical approach to struggle is possible. It escaped the connes created by the mainstream anti-imperialist movements. The space created by these parties ex cluded several minority (e.g., Kurds) and nonconformist groups (queers, radical feminists). Their approach was mired in borders, nationalism, and/or Islam. The difference between the two spaces went beyond a difference in political perspective to a conict over mobiliza tion strategies and [street] tactics. They were at opposite ends of the pole this time. We were no longer "the Left." It became clear that there is a need to re claim the term "leftist" and demonstrate its inclusiveness for all struggles for total emancipation. Their "another world" is the opposite of ours. Solidarity actions with the Palestinian struggle posed an important question: whether or not to link with the anti-Zio nist, antioccupation, and antimilitariza-

tion movements and individuals in Israel. This is difcult because of the historical and current relations between the Israeli and Lebanese governments, as well as the emotions and memories of people in Lebanon who have suffered, and who are still suffering, from Israeli aggression (Lebanese and Palestinian). The mains tream parties worked in total denial of the existence of the state of Israel, and rejected all contact or collaboration with Israeli radical activists. The groups I was involved in used a "no borders, no natio ns" discourse. We refused to exclude any inspiring anti-imperialist/occupation/mi litarization/Zionist action on the basis of passport and nationalitylet alone on the basis of the policies of the govern ment of the radical activists who carried them out. This was a rst in Lebanon. We made links with radical activists from Israel, who contributed to Al Yasari and IMC Beirut, and cyber coordinated many global protest days with us. Shakeeb: Maybe these actions seem unimportant, but they were really signi cant compared to the level of activism here and the state of depression that ru led after the occupation of Jenin in April 2002. The No War, No Dictatorships campaign was truly remarkable, and not just because it brought together diverse leftist groups, social and environmental nongovernmental organizations, a queer group, and independents. It was also the explicit stance on war, occupation, and regimes, and the fact that we openly refused both Bush's imperialist ambitions and the oppression of Saddam and all the other regimes. "We defend neither butchers nor lunatics," we declared, as the Islamists, Arab nationalists, and tra ditional Left marched with pictures of Saddam, Arafat, Al Assad, and Lebanese president Lahoud. What are the implications of your commit ments to secularism, feminism, and queer liberation for your anti-imperialism ? Mortada: Directly, these commitments mean integrating people who fall into these categories into the struggle against imperialism. Indirectiy, they require creating a dialogue within Lebanese so ciety about the right of such beliefs and groups to exist and to practice freely. In addition to the queer pride bloc, many of our marches were led by a front line of women. This was a statement against sex discrimination practiced so cially and at the state level; it addressed the need for equality and women's par ticipation in society. We also put out a solidarity statement nking the effect of imperialism and capitalism to the daily discrimination (amounting to oppression and even the denial of the right to exist) against queers, seculars, and women. The backlash of Lebanese society against such ideologies and people is a matter of lack of exposure and informa tion. The alternative anti-imperialist movements allow a closer look at these groups and ideas by presenting a positive public image linked to the hardships of everyday people in Lebanon under the "new world order." What forms of state oppression have Leba nese struggles faced in the past several years, and what has the impact been on organi zing?

Anti-war march in Beirut, February 2003 Rawane (Indymcdia Beirut).

44 / fall 2005

"Neither Butchers nor Lunatics" New Anticapitalist Organizing in Beirut and destroy," to use COINTELPRO language. What are some of the other mam impedi ments to the growth of effective anticapita list movements in Lebanon? El Shmaly: There are many, including the ongoing dominance of traditional parties and factions in Lebanon, sectaria nism, the control that religious institu tions exercise over vast sectors of public opinion, and the continuous state of no war/no peace between the Israeli and Arab states. The high level of polarization of the Lebanese public along the lines of the traditional parties and on the basis of religion makes it hard to create a popular movement. The state is still considered to be an institution in which sects are to share "the benets," and almost every sect has its representation in this formula. University admission, jobs, health care, housing loans, and so on, are all subject to this balance of power. An organic re lation between "subjects" and confessions is created; "citizens" do not yet exist in the eyes of the state. The heritage of the civil war still overshadows the country. Only two parties can be considered na tional: the LCP and the Syrian National Socialist Party, a semifascist party foun ded in the 1940s that calls for unity with "natural Syria." The sectarian division is still dominant demographically and geo graphically. Sectarianism and the Syrian inuence are two of the most important factors halting any struggle for social justice. Recently, the failing economy and the state's preaching that privatization is the cure for the huge national debt led to a discussion of how privatization is to be executednot whether it is actually use ful (even though, in previous experiences of privatization, the national debt kept rising). I consider Lebanon to be expe riencing a mutated form of capitalism, one that is entangled with state capita lism and widespread monopoly by politi cians and partisans, combined with severe levels of corruption. In such a situation, you are lucky if you can rally against co-

El Shmaly: One of the rst tactics used by the state after the war was a crackdo wn on labor unionsfor example, divi ding them and prosecuting their leaders. It then reduced freedom of the press, threatened to shut down newspapers and television stations, and nally clo sed down MTV [a Lebanese opposition station]. Other repression? Forbidding demonstrations and prosecuting those who deed this curfew. The existence of a strong and powerful secret service [moukhabarat], existing even in universi ties, which arrests people and gives them long detentions without trial. There is also mandatory military service. Direct military forcefor example, in response to the "revolution of the hungry."3 Police oppression against demonstratorsfor instance, killing ve and injuring many in May 2004, during a general strike in Beirut. Mortada: We could add that arrests and interrogations that violate human rights are frequently reported. And MTV is not the only example of censorshipa queer Web site [www.GayLebanon.com] was also closed down. Shakeeb: Excluding the time of civil war, when political militias were in control, the Lebanese state has a rich history of suppressing every voice of dissent. Star ting from the strikes of factory workers, tobacco peasants, and shermen, to students' actions, from the mid-1950s until now, the Lebanese state has crushed struggles with violence, including live bullets. The army is used for protesters, while internal security (police, armed with automatic ries) is used to protect politicians. Then there are the security organizations or secret services. We live in a society highly monitored by count less Lebanese intelligence organizations, and even Syrian ones, which get invol ved in people's lives in order to preserve "order." What is especially dangerous is the fact that society accepts state oppres sion as normal. It is getting really hard to organize and act because society has unleashed the state "to disrupt, discredit,

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory rruption, never mind capitalism. What ties do you have with radical groups in other parts of the Middle East? Or in North America? What benets do you see in having such links? Mortada: IMC Beirut (the only active IMC in an Arab state) has created links among radical movements blacked out by mainstream media and mainstream political parties, not to mention smothe red by the repression of governmental (or state) bodies. The boycott campaign against companies supporting Israeli apartheid established another pan-Arab bridge, which later extended to a world wide network of activists. These links permit solidarity actions with local groups facing repression, the exchange of information and experti se/experience, some mainstream media attention, and the possibility of posing a greater threat to local dictatorships (for example, anti-Lahoud protests, anti-Mubarak protests, and anti-Assad petitions). The presence of feminist and queer groups (Helem and Aswat) in some Arab states, and their greater visibi lity because of these links, has enhanced social integration that is still minimal, but promising. Linking to North American struggles challenges the concept of the "clash of civilizations," the imperialist understan ding of West and East, and Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. It bridges the gap between the South and the Nor th, even if only on the activist scene. It also contributes to the awareness that local struggles are linked to global ones, especially those in industrialized coun tries. The interaction between activists from the Middle East and North Ame rica has generated a better understanding of Middle East politics, affecting the way radical North American groups organi ze on issues related to the Middle East. This better understanding was clear in international forums when activists from North America challenged the demago gues of mainstream political parties from the Middle East. It is creating a network of skill sharing and solidarity in facing oppression, repression, and capitalism. Shakeeb: I am starting to get in contact with anarchists in Cyprus, Palestine, and Egypt. On the global side, I am in touch with people in France and North Ame rica. Developing links with people who think and work similarly is essential, not only because it strengthens bonds bet ween radicals and dissidents, but because it has also allowed me (and my like-min- ded comrades) to learn from others' stru ggles and experiences, especially those who have a great heritage in autonomous, nonauthoritarian self-organizing. What do you see as the responsibilities of anti-imperialists in North America? Mortada: I think North Americans should be ghting Islamophobia without falling into Islamophilia and disregarding the continuous human rights violations dictated by political Islam. This can only be achieved with a clear understanding of the difference between Islam as a religion and political Islam practiced on the state and social levels. It involves presenting a counterimage of Islam and "Arabs" for the public, and creating a counterawareness to state propaganda. North American governments are in volved in a continuous aggravated attack on human and environmental rights, in their own countries and worldwide. It is the responsibility of North American ac tivists to confront and impede this (with increased direct action intervention), including the system of border closures, interrogations, detentions, visas, and de portations. ^ was assassinated in a car bombing in February 2005, thereby provokingor used to orchestratea largely nationa list backlash against Syria, eventually leading to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. While the withdrawal has not brought a new dawn of democracy, nontraditional political initiatives such as Hayya Bina (www.hayyabina.org) emerged to chal lenge the reestablished sectarian order. In the Baalbak and Hermill area in the northern parts of the Bekaa Val ley, a poor and neglected area, people depend heavily on hashish cultivation as a livelihood. Such cultivation was banned after the war, with promises of "alternative crops," under pressure from the United Nations and Western states, mainly the United States. As usual, the money for the alternative crops did not arrive. Under the lea dership of Sheikh Tofayli, a former secretary general of Hezbollah, they took up arms, attacking symbols of the state and taking to the streets. The army was sent in to deal with them. It ended with Tofayli calling on people to return to their homes, when the state promised amnesty (a promise that was not kept).

Endnotes
1. Resolution 1559 (September 2,2004) calls for Hezbollah to disarm and Syria to leave Lebanon, but it is also seen as the latest U.S. tool to intervene in Lebanon. It has created a lot of pola rization in the country. 2. Salim El Hoss served three terms as prime minister of Lebanon, the last ending in 2000. Rak Al Hariri was prime minister from 1992 to 1998, and again from 2000 to 2004. He

46 / fall 2005

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

raitHfe

Mike Flugcnnock fall 2005 / 47

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

International Solidarity
by Mark Lance, Ramor Ryan, & Andrea Schmidt

Triptych

In recent years, more and more anti-authoritarians have undertaken "international solidarity work" as a contemporary re Anarchists have long issues. wrestled with questions of imperialism and anti-imperialism, colonialism and national liberation. sponse to these International solidarity work often involves traveling to places where economic or military violence is blatandy deployed in or der to maintain global injustices, and working to support communities struggling against those injustices. Rich political dialogues and conicts often arise, and Perspectives asked three activists who have participated in this type of work in Palestine, Chiapas, and Iraq to share their experiences with us. Specically, we encouraged them to reect on the following questions: What is international solidarity, and how is it different from humanitarian aid or human rights work? Why has it been im portant to you as an anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist to undertake this work? What conicts or questions arose while doing international solidarity work that you found particularly challenging? Mark Lance, Ramor Ryan, and Andrea Schmidt respond.

Chiapas
by Ramor Ryan

Palestine
by Mark Lance

iRAa
by Andrea Schmidt I went to occupied Iraq to nd the Zapatistas, and found myself editing reports for the neo-Baath. I was sent to Baghdad for three months as a delegate of the Iraq Solidar ity Project (ISP), a grassroots collective based in Montreal. The ISP was setting up a permanent presence in Baghdad to provoke international awareness of Iraqi life under occupation and foster the out rage necessary to remobilize the waning antiwar movement in Canada. I took the opportunity to visit occupied Iraq out of the conviction that an anarchist stance involves a critique of and opposition to all forms of domination, whichin an era of deadly imperialist warsde mands a commitment to anti-imperialist struggles. The ISP chose to anchor its presence at the International Occupation Watch Center in Baghdad, a center set up by a number of international nongovern mental organizations (NGOs) during the summer that followed the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq in 2003. These NGOs

It was on January thrilling 1,1994, to wake to the up news in Dublin of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. It quickly became clear that this was a new kind of Latin insurgency that superseded the ideological straightjacket of the cold war era and embraced a whole new formula tion of how to start a revolution. Subcomandante Marcos was standing in the central square of San Cristobal talking a more enlightened form of liberation than had been articulated before. Gone was the old Leninist language and, as we learned soon enough, ways of organizing. For anarchists across the globe, it was as if all their Christmases had come at once. An apparendy anti-authoritarian-lean ing peasant guerrilla army was rising up against an international neoliberal trade agreement! With red-and-black ags! And with those old ries and antiquated uniforms, they even had a passing resem blance to the Spanish anarchist militias of 1936! I would have been out on the rst plane to Chiapas ready to join the in-

I began estinian work national in solidarity struggle with at about the Pal the same time that my broad political views were beginning to take shape. In the mid-1980s, I was a philosophy graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh involved in work against nuclear weap ons, apartheid, and U.S. imperialism in Latin America. Shortly after this, through a series of coincidences really, I became involved in Palestine solidar ity work, while at the same time I was developing a general sense of myself as an anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial ist, feminist, anarchist-communist. Or something along those lines. My commitment to a broad radical politics has grown deeper and more so phisticated since then, and my work in solidarity with Palestine has continued. During the rst Intifada, I worked with a number of small coalitions and the Pales tine Solidarity Committee. Shortly after the start of the second Intifada, I helped found Stop U.S. Tax-funded Aid to Israel Now! (SUSTAIN). I'm currently on the

48 / fall 2005

Triptych: International Solidarity

Chiapas
surgency, except the nancial limitations of the Irish dole were such that it would be a full year before I nally got there. My mate Mick did manage to get out to Chiapas within two weeks of the upris ing. His rst letter back was exultant (there was no e-mail in those days): an archists from all over Mexico, the United States, and indeed everywhere else were already converging on the rebel zone to seek out a role to play in this new, devastatingly exciting and urgent uprising. I had caught the last few months of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, before they were deposed of power in February 1990. Picking coffee with a Sandinista collective and teaching Eng lish to a Sandinista class, I cut my teeth as an international solidarity volunteer. It was rewarding for me, but I had to leave my anarchy back at homethe Sandinista revolution was leftist and authoritarian, and harbored no anarchist faction. Indeed, it promoted a line that was distincdy unfriendly to such a cur rent of thought. Nevertheless, there were elements of the Sandinista program their anti-imperialism, their grassroots support for education and health, as well as their lack of ideological rigidityal lowed space for anarchists of my ilk (of which there were quite a few working in the country) to take part a little on the side. The early 1990s saw me traveling fur ther into this tumultuous political space of Latin America, involving myself in an ticapitalist campaigns in Colombia (mul tinational exploitation) and Belize (union recognition for banana workers). But it was the Zapatista uprising that sealed my fate, and ensured my presence in Chiapas

Palestine
national steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which is an umbrella coalition of around three hundred Palestine solidarity groups. The tension between Palestinian soli darity work and a broad anti-imperialist orientation has become quite clear to me. Of course in one sense such work is antiimperialist, in that it is a struggle against one manifestation of imperialism. While Zionism1 has an idiosyncratic history and specic goals that are independent of U.S. imperial ambitionsit is quite irrelevant to U.S. geopolitical projects who controls the Jordan Valley or the old city of Hebron, for exampleIsrael is the chief client of the United States in the Middle East, is the largest recipient of U.S. aid, and receives the consistent backing of the United States in interna tional political contexts precisely because Israel is seen as a part of the U.S. impe rial structure in the Middle East. But the mere fact that one's work opposes a manifestation of imperialism does not mean that one is doing antiimperialist work in the deeper sense-that is, work in which the guiding conception and purpose are opposition to the whole military, political, cultural, and economic imperialist system. And it is this deeper sort of anti-imperialism that is in ten sion with Palestinian solidarity work, for Palestinians in general have simply not signed onto an anti-imperialist agenda, much less a progressive anti-authoritar ian one. Litde surprise, given that one would search hard anywhere to nd a national grouping the majority of which were committed to a broad radical project, and in the case of a people suffering a

Iraq.
included the Philippines-based Focus on the Global South, the Italian Bridge to Baghdad, and the U.S. monolith Global Exchange. The center's mandate was to document the ways in which the oc cupation was impacting different sectors and facets of life in Iraq: women, human rights, trade union activity, and oil. My responsibilities included ofce support and editing English versions of reports, as well as some independent reporting for community radio and print mediathe sort of dispatches about life under oc cupation that have become the trademark of international activists working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Palestine. Most important, the solidarity group in Montreal wanted to forge links with progressive Iraqi groups that could speak for "the Iraqi people," and with whom we could collaborate on joint campaigns against the occupation as well as the corporate pillage and privatization of the Iraqi economy, and for social justice in Iraq and Canada. In retrospect, I think that the group expectedas I, in my na ivete, also hopedto discover a dynamic, nonsectarian movement projecting a discourse that appealed to internation als from a wide range of progressive Left tendencies, that would tell us what sort of tangible forms of solidarity it wanted to liberate the country and its people from occupation and to build genuine justice and democracy in Iraq: the Zap atistas in Babylon. Instead, unease with the political foundations of the Occupation Watch Center surfaced on my arrival. The in ternational NGOs that set up the ofce had hired Iraqi directors from the pool

fall 2005 / 49

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Chiapas
intermittently but unrelentingly for the ensuing ten years. Much of the time I involved myself in the Zapatista struggle working in the category designated "in ternational solidarity." In response to the Mexican military advances on the rebel zone, the Zapatis tas put out a call in 1995 for volunteers to come and place themselves on the front line of conict: human shields as such. Our group, the Irish Mexico Group, went one step further. We set up a solidarity encampment in one such frontline community, a cattle farm occu pied by seventy Zapatista families called Diez de Abril, and attempted to consoli date a more interactive role in the com munity. Volunteers busied themselves in the elds and the classrooms, and brought in resources for development projects. The goal was to stand shoulder to shoulder as companeros, not solely as human shields. The harvest of this dayto-day solidarity work became apparent later in 1998, when the Mexican military violendy invaded the community. After the rst wave of volunteers got grabbed and deported by the authorities (thereby raising the prole of the incident to an international story), the Ejercito Zap atista de Liberation Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) offered the remaining volunteers a choice between joining them to confront the military together in the tactical self-defense of the community or leaving. The volunteers stayed. A level of trust and condence between Zapatistas and foreigners had been forged that allowed for such an un usual intimacy of shared struggle. The problem with international soli darity is that at its most effective, it's a tactical deployment, and as it develops into a long-term strategy, it loses its ur gency. When the red alert is sounded and the urgent action communiques are sent out, people can react with the appropriate militant agency. But pro tracted struggles have a tendency to last for interminable years, and international solidarity activists come and go. uCampamentistas are the people who leave,"

Palestine
near complete breakdown of their so ciety, cultural survival and a modicum of rights within the current system are understandably higher on the agenda than world-systemic transformation. Of course there are exceptions: a small but signicant Palestinian Marxist Left, both in Palestine and various parts of the diaspora, and elements of Palestinian civil society that attempt to make com mon cause with anti-imperial struggles over the world, from a variety of Left perspectives. But these elements are scattered and small, and often defer to the nationalist agenda. As for larger and more powerful forces, the goals of the Palestinian Authority (PA) are no more than a liberal state, and for many in the PA, not so liberal a liberal state. Other prominent groups in Palestine and among the refugees are Islamists of one stripe or another, and one needn't accept the caricatures of Islamists popular in the mainstream media to recognize that they are not part of a progressive anti-authori tarian struggle. In the United States, roughly half of Arab Americans and Muslims voted Republican in the last two elections, and a signicant percent age of the Arab American Left is fully in the embrace of sectarian Marxism. Given all this, there is no way to pre tend that a broadly anti-imperialist, antiauthoritarian strategy has been adopted by the Palestinian people, and no way that any common project with a broad portion of the Palestinian population is going to be forged along anti-imperialist lines. So what does one do when con fronting a conict between the long-term projects one is committed to and the more immediate demands of a popula tion suffering under a client regime of the United States? There is, in my view, no good answer this question in the abstract. Everything depends on the particulars of the situa tion. In the case of Palestine, solidarity activism is required of us. Not only are we facing the imminent destruction of Palestinian society but U.S. citizens are direcdy nancing and supporting it with

Iraq.
of contacts that predated the U.S.-U.K. invasion. In Saddam's Iraq, only Iraqis trusted by the Baath regime were allowed any sustained contact with foreign ers to the country, including the U.S. antisanctions activists who deed the U.S. embargo against travel to Iraq and cooperated with the restrictions imposed by Saddam's security apparatus in or der to maintain their visa privileges. In postinvasion Iraq, international NGOs, humanitarian aid organizations, and the small crew of solidarity activists still in the country had to gure out how to navigate new and uncertain politi cal territory with old and compromised contactsand the Occupation Watch Center was faltering. Concern had been voiced by Iraqi acquaintances from an ar ray of political tendencies to international volunteers that the ofce was perceived to be a neo-Baath propaganda project as the former regime struggled to regain power. In an atmosphere characterized by the deep mistrust that suffuses conict zones occupied by foreign powers, activ ists from other political formations would not visit the Baghdad ofce. International volunteers had relayed these concerns to the big shot NGOs funding and directing the project from outside the country. We argued that even if the perception was erroneous, it made building important relationships with wide sectors of the Iraqi population who had been persecuted and impoverished by the Baath impossible. And if the per ception was correct, we were making an unforgivable mistake aligning ourselves with the remnants of a murderous re gime, even if they spoke a good anti-im perialist and antioccupation line. When a response nally came from Global Ex change's California ofce, it denied any signicance to the political context on this ground: given the illegality, injustice, and brutality of the U.S. occupation, the only thing that mattered was that there was an ofce in Baghdad documenting that brutality for the U.S. antiwar move ment during the crucial period of Bush's reelection campaign. In essence, this was

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Triptych: International Solidarity

Chiapas
lamented one Zapatista, "and we can never leave." He was referring to the privilege of those who can step into a dangerous conict zone for a nite time and then leave as the mood dictates. It is a poignant reminder of the inherent and inescapable inequalities involved, of the almost insurmountable contradictions therein, and a cause of understandable resentment for some of those at the coal face of the struggle. Unavoidably, the space of interna tional solidarity has been abused in many ways, even in the hallowed environs of Chiapas. Too many people climbed on the backs of the Zapatistas to promote their own nongovernmental organization outt, or to garner salaries from inter national inders for posts that should have been occupied by locals or at least rendered unnecessary after a short length of time. Too many people used the space opened up by authentic interna tional solidarity to write their beautiful journalistic pieces, craft their splendid dissertations,or make their startling documentariesand then forget their impassioned zapatismo before moving

Palestine
our taxes, while the complicity of others in the global North is only marginally less direct. As long as it is possible to make progressand from my vantage point, enormous progress has been made in the last three yearsthis places an im mediate duty of human solidarity on us. But there are specic problems with solidarity work in the case of Palestine, the largest of which is that there is sim ply no national leadershipno remotely unified voicethat one can work with. The problem is not the mere lack of a radical agenda. The PA is corrupt, some times brutal, always lacking in vision; it has no interest in working with activists, and might well try to sell out the rights of Palestinian refugees in exchange for control of a Bantustan. The only other faction in Palestine with widespread popular support is Hamas, and again, this is not a candidate for a coalition partner on both moral and practical grounds. So what does one do? First, it is lucky that in this case, international law and the framework of international human rights are largely on our side. Whatever one's views about a two-state solution

Iraq.
a version of the "my enemies' enemies are my friends" argument I would hear over and over again from comrades and colleagues at meetings and public events when I returned to North Americaan assertion coated in a veneer of human rights discourse for the liberal Left. This debate claried other weaknesses in the architecture of our solidarity mis sion. A motley crew of social democrats, Quebec sovercignists, Arab nationalists, former Marxist-Leninists, Iraqi Com munists, human rights NGO-types, and anarchists, the ISP lacked political coher ence. The group couldn't develop the capacity to articulate the political goals and parameters of the solidarity it wished to extend, much less determine which political groupings or even new Iraqi NGOs with which to forge links in Iraq. Beyond the fact that everyone in the group was "antioccupation," the most we could agree on was a basic human rights agenda that abstracted life and resistance in occupied Iraq from the conicts that dened its political context. So even if we had encountered an emergent move ment calling for the sort of solidarity a small collective could offer, delegates would probably have been limited to watching the occupation and reporting on human rights abuses perpetrated by the U.S. military. Monitoring human rights abuses is a valuable activity in a country where occupation forces shoot civilians at random, raid houses, desecrate sacred spaces and objects, murder people at checkpoints, and detain and often torture thousands of people. But it is not quite international solidarity. Interna tional solidarity activists do not purport to be neutral in the conict, simply ob serving events. We take sides, commit to political alliances, and struggle alongside movements ghting for self-determina tion; we are complicit. This is a moot point, because in the short period of time during which I worked in occupied Iraq, I was (with a couple of small and fragile exceptions) unable to recognize the sort of resistance to the occupation that I could or would

Kids in front of Caterpillar bulldozerISM Activist.

fall 2005/51

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Chiapas
onto their next career move. The Zap atistas moved to stem the abuses of the solidarity space by introducing the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Committees) in 2003 to oversee all proj ects and outside involvement in the rebel zone. It has been a success, despite the increased bureaucracy and the 10 percent revolutionary tax levied on all solidarity projects in the autonomous municipali ties. Nevertheless, the Zapatistas have rec ognized and lauded the involvement of international solidarity within the rebel zone ("those born on other soil who add their heart to the struggle for a peace with justice and dignity," according to Marcos)from restraining the excesses of military and paramilitary aggression as human shields to introducing useful development projects in the form of po table water systems, solar energy supplies, technologically appropriate means of communication, pirate radio stations, or ganic horticulture, and so on. From the other side, the Chiapas pilgrimage has become almost a rite of passage for activ ists from the global North. The inu ence and inspiration is apparent at every global mobilization and in every activist space. As renowned Mexican writer and political analyst Gustavo Esteva has pointed out, "Zapatismo is nowadays the most radical, and perhaps the most im portant, political initiative in the world." As the Zapatista struggle enters its twelfth year of this phase of struggle, tactical and strategic mistakes have been made, and more will be made in the future. As learned from the ideological demise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (from leftism to neoliberalism in ten short years), it is folly to fetishize and of fer unconditional support for a host or ganization or movement. This is why the Zapatistas demand not solidarity from their international consorts but allegiance to the idea and inspiration of zapatismo. Be a Zapatista wherever you are, they say. When asked, How can internationals best contribute to the Zapatista struggle? an old Zapatista said, "More Seattles."

Palestine
and the concomitant acceptance of a reli giously defined citizenry in Israelevery aspect of the current situation has been condemned by the United Nations and international lawthe 1967 occupation, the apartheid wall, the refusal to allow the return of refugees, the construction of settlements, extrajudicial assassinations, and home demolitions. Given this, we can point to neutral, nonpolitical stan dards that justify ending all support for Israel, thereby justifying the fundamental goal of solidarity work. Second, Palestinian society is com plex, diverse, highly educated, and of ten deeply connected to movements in the West. As I said, these connections are not organized or unifiedthe first Intifada saw some amazing efforts at bottom-up, anti-authoritarian control of society by civil society itself, but this phenomenon has been stamped out by a combination of PA authoritarianism and Israeli brutalityyet they do exist. So in all our work-especially educational work, but also direct actionit is possible to structure things so as to strengthen ties with progressive elements in Palestinian society. In this way, we can even see ourselves as contributing in a small way to a lon ger-term anti-imperialist struggle, so that the connections and bonds of solidarity forged in the process of solidarity work will remain after the limited goals of ei ther a meaningful Palestinian state or lib eral democracy across historical Palestine are achieved. But it is also important not to fool ourselves. When we work with a people demanding national rights within the capitalist/nation-state system, we do so out of our ethical humanist commit ments to end suffering, especially suffer ing that we and our nation contribute to. In doing that, we sometimes take away from longer-term projects of liberation. Such are the compromises life forces onus.

Iraq.
want to ally myself with. I couldn't see any emergent progressive Iraqi move ments committed to building the type of social and political project that would allow the aspirations for self-determina tion of religiously and ethnically diverse Iraqis to be fullled. Nor did I encounter a movement capable of calling for and directing international solidarity efforts in the service of such a project. I found a proud insurgency ghting to regain the power that had been stolen from it by foreign crusaders; a militant Shiite resistance movement able to give voice to the frustration and dispossession of its adherents; a spectrum of political par ties once persecuted under Saddam and now playing power politics in the Interim Governing Council installed by the U.S. occupiers; a self-defeatingly antiMuslim Marxist-Leninist fringe group; human rights groups compromised by their complicity with the old regime and new NGOs seeking USAID funding or aligned with political parties; and rumors of Al-Qaeda. But I didn't nd the Za patista Army of National Liberation in Anbar, or even an Iraqi-led equivalent of the ISM to coordinate international volunteers to accompany Iraqis across the U.S. military checkpoints on the Tigris. Was it unfair to look for them in a so ciety torn apart by the legacy of a brutal and paranoid thirty-ve-year-long dicta torship, shaped by colonial interests, and struggling to reconstitute itself under the shadows of its occupiers' helicopter gunshipsall of which exploited religious and ethnic differences to undermine popular solidarity and shore up their own power? Yes, as unfair as to afrm that no such movement will ever rise up in Iraq, or isn't already there, quiedy preparing. The Occupation Watch Center closed in late 2004, collapsing under its unre solved political issues. And I left a stilloccupied Iraq, preoccupied by questions. As both anti-authoritarians and antiimperialists, it is not good enough to voice support for any form or expression of resistance to U.S. occupation, no mat ter how sectarian its discourse or how

Postscript
It is and a ne contextualization illustration of of the such uidity politi-

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Triptych: International Solidarity

Chiapas If international solidarity implies that you are saying, I support a certain distant movement or organization, this denes the struggle as other. But as John Holloway points out, here, in the Zapatista paradigm, "it is not a question of solidarity with the struggle of others, but of understanding that the Zapatistas and we are part of the same struggle." So the Zapatistas turn the equation upside down: international solidarity becomes a means to export a rebel philosophy. Let zapatismo be an inspiration and encour agement to develop your own form of rebel autonomy. International solidarity is brought down from the grandstands of cheering third world anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, to the playing eld of actually building global autonomy. This kind of stuff is music to the ears of anarchists and anti-authoritar iansconstructing global autonomy, horizontalidad, and mandar obedeciendo (to govern obeying), surely blueprints for a global wide insurgency?! And then they return "home" to New York, Barce lona, Montreal, or Dublin, and it seems hopelesslike there is nothing to build on, no local autonomy, and no radical movements. Zapatismo seems like some quaint metaphysical construct conjured up in an exotically distant jungle where pipe-smoking poet gods and indomitable corn people hold an illusive holy grail of rebel hope that renders you spellbound until you leave the mystical space, and then disappearslike a sieve-fisted find. Or as Old Antonio used to sayper haps not. ^

Palestine cal work that shortly after the above was written, things appear to be changing on the ground. In part out of frustration at the utter lack of a national liberation strategy from above, as well as the de teriorating conditions of occupation, a genuine civil society coalition seems to be emerging in the occupied territories. A large and diverse group of people and organizations has recently come together around a call for boycotts, divestment, and protest. This group is consciously modeling this strategy on the work that went on in solidarity with the South Af rican struggle. In many of the small vil lages, whose very existence is threatened by the apartheid wall, and that are receiv ing no meaningful support from the PA, popular committees are emerging on the model of the rst Intifada. And they are communicating and attempting to devel op a concerted activist agenda against the wall. All in all, solidarity work may soon become easier as a unied credible voice emerges in the occupied territories, ^fk.

Iraq. fascist its political vision for the future. But if we have not yet encountered a pro gressive antioccupation movement in a place like Iraq, what practice of interna tional solidarity is viable? In postdictatorship societies, war zones, and occupied countries, how can foreign anarchists and anti-authoritarians help open up the political space for such movements to coalesce? Perhaps it is best to remember in these instances that the most effective solidarity work is almost always done at home. Then we could get on with fostering the sort of anti-authoritarian, widespread, and militant opposition that could threaten imperialist corporate and state powers where theyand were side: safe within the walls of Fortresses North America and Europe. If we were successful, we might nd that we would have contributed to cracking open the spaces for progressive social movements to emerge. "Walking, we ask questions," say the Zapatistas. As Anbar burns and Babylon is divided up for ease of oil exploitation, the questions persist, and I wish we were running. ^

Endnotes 1. "Zionism," as I use it, refers to any politi cal program in support of a Jewish-only or Jewish-dominant state with political control over the region of Palestine.

Zapatista support base communities work together to build a community water system. Timo Russo / GlobalAware

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Is Anarchist Economics Hitting the Mainstream?

by Eric Laursen
with a bang in 1846, upon the Anarchist economics emerged publication of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's System of Economical Contra dictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty, in which the French revolutionary thinker laid out a transformative program based on mutual aid. The book was immedi ately influentialso much so that a year later, a young German academic named Karl Marx wrote a scathingly dismissive reply entided The Poverty of Philosophy. Ever since then, both Marxist and neo classical free-market economists have been trying to bury anarchist economic thought, if not simply wish it out of ex istence. Why the hostility? Many of the key anarchist theorists, including Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Elisee Reclus, shared Marx'sand Adam Smith'sfaith in the improving effect of scientic progress on human society. And they shared with Marx a more or less implicit faith that rational, scientic reasoning would lead to a unied model of a just social order. But the anarchists were willing to look for intimations of that new order in places that Marxistsand neoclassicistsrefused to explore. Marx and Adam Smith both saw the future as something that would develop out of the industrial capitalism of their day, regard less of whether the bourgeoisie or the proletariat found itself in charge, but the capitalist system in the mid-nineteenth century still occupied a relatively limited number of people. Even in Europe, most people still lived and worked on the land, not in wage-based, large-scale industrial establishments. It wasn't clear, either, that large-scale industrial capitalism, organized on a hierarchical model, had A review of: Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840-1914 oy Rob Knowles (New York: Roudedge, 2004). Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions by Robin Blackburn (London: Verso, 2003). even though for most people at the time, it didn't. To the extent that contemporary social structures didn't conform to the model most suitable to a large-scale in dustrial economy, he assumed, they ulti mately would have to do so. Anarchists, on the other hand, didn't take any of this as a given. Instead, they argued that economic progress could and should be achieved in a way that's most supportive of people's preferred method of social or ganization. Something other than mass industrial capitalism was possible, they thought, and was perhaps immanent in existing methods of worker cooperation and communal agriculture. Just because industrial capitalism pre vailed in twentieth-century capitalist and Marxist societies doesn't mean that real alternatives didn't exist, then or now, and today this anarchist view may be catching on. State socialism has been devastated by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the capitalist transformation of China. The social democratic and welfare-stat ist solutions that once seemed to many middle- and working class Europeans and Americans like the best alternatives are also slowly being abandoned by the same political parties and mainstream labor organizations that put them in place. Contemporary economists on the left, even some from orthodox Marxist backgrounds, are therefore beginning to look beyond the state for new ways to realize a socialist society. In doing so, they're echoing some of the themes laid out by the nineteenth-century anarchists and expanded upon since then. Scholars are also reacquainting them selves with the work of social scientist Karl Polanyi, who like the anarchists, ar gued that "man's [sic] economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships,"3

Reclaiming a "Hidden" Tradition

to dictate the form of the future society. So the anarchists also looked to forms of organization that had no connection with capitalism for their models: to peas ant communities, artisans' cooperatives, workers' self-help societies, and even to stateless institutions like the Internation al Red Crosswhat we would call today nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This wasn't just because they had a broader conception of what was his torically progressive, argues historian Rob Knowles. The anarchists believed that economic ideas must be informed by everything that goes on in the real world. The community's preferred social structure must come rst, and economic organization should be made to t that structurenot the other way around. "For communitarian anarchists," Knowles writes, "the economy was not only un derpinned by their ethics but it was thoroughly embedded in social life, such that human life could not be perceived as being in any way separate from economic ideas."1 Marx, too, believed he was bas ing his model of the economic world on life as people really lived it, but for the most part, he took large-scale industrial capitalism to dene the way people lived,

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Reclaiming a "Hidden" Tradition: Is Anarchist Economics Hitting the Mainstream?

And over the last twenty years, the rise of a new school of "critical realism" in economics has rebelled against the domi nance of abstract modeling in favor of a new assertion that social structures "ex ist only by virtue of human activity, in total."4 Critical realism may be reopen ing economic discourse to anarchism, Knowles, an Australian academic, says in his new book, Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Communitar ian Anarchism, 1840-1914. It's a history of anarchist economic thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, grounded in a careful understanding of the basic differences between anarchism, mainstream Marxism, and neoclassicism and organized into chapters focusing on seven thinkers who together forged the main current of communitarian anarchist thought on economics: Proudhon; the Russians Bakunin, Kropotkin, Alexander Herzen, and Leo Tolstoy; and the French Rcclus and Jean Grave. The Marxist paradigm shows signs of cracking open, too, judging from Robin Blackburn's new book, Banking on Death: Or, Investing in Life: The History and Fu ture of Pensions. An impressive study of the history of pension funds by an editor of the New Left Review, it ends with a series of proposals for achieving public control of capital through ownership of stock by investment funds controlled by occupational and locally-based orga nizations. The latest in a line of "pen sion fund socialists," Blackburn barely acknowledges anarchist economics, and the organizations he describes would be conventional, state-sanctioned ones. He parts company dramatically with the Marxist tradition, however, by rec ommending that ownership of capital

be transferred not to the state itself, or to the workers in their workplaces, but to a decentralized network of institu tions with which workers share a variety of close "afnities" and over which they can exercise more direct control. That's a major change for an orthodox social democrat like Blackburn, and a strong indication that in Marxism's moment of crisis, some of its adherents may be ven turing onto the path that the anarchists paved.

ers' ideas are not "heterodox"in fact, they constitute a large part of the canon. Their writings are hardly a "hidden" tradition to the many people who have studied their work over the years, learned and found conrmation of their own experience in it, but Knowles' book per forms a vital job of historical restoration, distilling a deep reading of each of these theorists into a history of the ideas that formed a new way of looking at society. His analysis shows how anarchist thinking was grounded in direct observa tion of the mechanisms of production and consumption meshed with social organization among French artisans and factory workers, and Russian peasants. It locates the origins of green anarchism and deep ecology in Reclus' writings on geography and human society. Knowles also underlines the large but half-forgot ten inuence of anarchist thinking on mainstream political and social thinking in the nineteenth centurypointing out, for example, how the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer admitted in an early edition of his rst major work, Social Statics, the "right to ignore the state."3 Anarchism as an intellectual tradi tion is too often reduced to the work of a small collection of dead white males, but the seven Knowles has chosen to spot light still have some important things to say to us. That's partly because, as Knowles points out, we know so little of their work. The list of writings unavailable in English is astounding: Proudhon's De la capacitepolitique des classes ouvrieres, in which he drew out his "mutualist" economic ideas most fully, plus plenty of other key texts; Reclus' L'homme et la terre, a massive work of "social geogra phy" that includes his most important

Dr. Robert Knowles

Knowles Below calls an attempt Politicalto Economy retrieve afrom "heterodox" tradition of theory about economic structure that's been written out of the standard economic histories of the past hundred years, and that he en capsulates in three basic principles: it's 1) freely constituted, 2) embedded in soci ety, and 3) places ethics before the actual economy itself. These principles all ap ply, Knowles argues, to the seven thinkers he focuses on. Knowles gives himself a bit too much credit. To an anarchist, these think

fall 2005 / 55

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory observations about a future anarchist society; three of the six volumes of Max Nettlau's exhaustive history of anarchism; nearly all of Kropotkin's voluminous let ters; and Grave's La societe future, which contains his most probing economic thinking. Millions of readers and schol ars who do not speak their languages have received at best a partial and some times distorted idea of what these theo rists really said about economics (and a lot of other things). Knowles benets from having read all or parts of these works in the original. He's quite possibly made a fuller study of Proudhon's economic writings than any other scholar in the anglophone world, and his nuanced discussion of this piv otal gure is important and eye-opening. He's also made extensive use of one of the world's best archives on anarchism, the collection of the International Insti tute for Social History in Amsterdam. Knowles' research yields a picture of nineteenth-century social and economic thinking that's very different from the one in mainstream textbooks. He makes a solid case for integrating Herzen and Tolstoy into our understanding of nine teenth-century anarchism (mainstream historians generally portray the one as a liberal democrat and the other as an uncategorizable religious Utopian). He claries our picture of anarchists like Proudhon and Kropotkin, who are often dismissed as weak theorists, lumped in with Utopian imagineers like Fourier and Saint-Simon. Knowles shows that they observed the workers' world of their day more closely than Marx, who tended to study the economy from the top down, starting with the specic institutions and practices of the capitalist class. Anar chists instead looked from the bottom up, beginning with the structures and practices that working people themselves put in place to provide for their common needs. Thus Proudhon, for example, ob served the cooperative groupings that ar tisans and industrial workers in Lyon and other cities formed. Herzen studied the development of autonomous municipali ties in Italy. Herzen, Bakunin, Kropot kin, and Tolstoy learned from life in the obschina, or Russian peasant communi ties, with their cooperative practices and tradition of local self-government. And Kropotkin and Reclus drew innumerable lessons from their observation of artisan communities in France, Switzerland, and Russia.2 Looking more broadly, they observed neoclassicists, the vast majority of work ers in nineteenth-century Europe were not yet mass-production factory deni zens, capitalist production was far less centralized than today, and many work ers still possessed some degree of ability to shape the emerging industrial world. They were skillful at creating community services for themselves based on mutual aid, which pointed to an alternative route to economic development outside the state-oriented structures that Marxism and neoclassicism prescribed. What all of Knowles' thinkers shared was the belief, based on observation, that an alternative economic order that ful lls more people's needs more equitably has always been possible without rst passing through an "advanced capitalist" stagethe common assumption of both Marxists and neoclassicists. Bakunin's anarchism appealed to "petty produc ers" in Andalusia and southern Italv for whom "it was not ... a last chance choice," Knowles writes, but "a positive and living concept through which they could glimpse a chance of emancipation from the authority and power which was overwhelming them. It was not a reversion to a past mode of existence but rather a means of moving forward to a new way of life and freedom."7

the spread of the mutual aid principle from labor unions and fraternal societies to credit unions and agricultural coopera tives and even to extranational organiza tions like the English Lifeboat Associa tion as evidence that people could band together both locally and across borders to meet each other's needs without the state. Reclus wrote of how cooperative societies were "constituting more and more vast organisms, in a manner to em brace the most diverse functions, those of industry, transport, agriculture, science, art and pleasure which struggle hard to constitute a complete organism for pro duction, consumption and the rhythm of aesthetic life."6 Marxists dismissed some or all of these developments as either obsolete remnants of precapitalist life or camou age for the capital-owning class's eco nomic dominance. But Knowles points out that contrary to both Marx and the

Blackburn, takes a the verysolid different, social top-down democrat, ap proach in Banking on Death. His major perception is that Americans and also many Europeans now live in a regime he calls "grey capitalism." While corporate CEOs, investment bankers, and lawyers control the deployment of productive re sources, the biggest percentage of actual share owners are, in fact, workers. Pen sion funds representing the retirement assets of millions of workers actually hold the lion's share of the corporate ownership structure. They don't often exert real control, because corporate governance rules are rigged to keep the chief executive in the driver's seat. Nev ertheless, Blackburn argues that worker ownership of pensions could supply the leverage that begins the transition to so cialism.

56 / fall 2005

Reclaiming a "Hidden" Tradition: Is Anarchist Economics Hitting the Mainstream? Like Marx, Blackburn believes social ism starts with acceptancenot rejec tionof capitalism as it is: "Socialism could only be built on the basis supplied by developed capitalism"8 Kropotkin or Herzen, observing the multigenerational communal life of the obschina, might have searched for ways to reintegrate the task of elder care into their own com munities. Blackburn instead looks at the superstructure of pension institutions that the corporate culture has created as the locus of class struggle, and considers how they can be converted into vehicles for true worker control of the means of production. He's not the rst to see the potential of pensions. Peter Drucker, for decades America's number one guru of corporate management theory, gave it a name near ly 30 years ago in a book titled The Un seen Revolution: How Pension Fund Social ism Came to America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Blackburn's own propos als take off from the Meidner plan, a scheme hatched in Sweden in the 1970s to create a form of public stakeholding in corporations. "Within two or three decades a full-blooded Meidner scheme would have made the 'wage-earner funds' the masters of the economy,"9 Black burn writes. Corporate interests united to defeat the plan, however, and the few wage-earner funds that were created were wound up in the mid-1990s. Blackburn's variation on the Meidner plan centers on pension funds, which would receive a "capital levy" of shares from corporations and could then use the income to fund a range of activities such as making investments in "social infrastructure, or research and develop ment, or urban renewal, or education and training."10 The pension funds could subscribe to a public bond issue used to build schools or bankroll a program to address a serious social problem. What ever they opted for, the objective would be twofold: to gradually diminish the role of wealthy individuals and capitalists in economic decisions, and to "reconnect the mass of citizens and employees with the process whereby strategic economic decisions are made."12 Blackburn calls his scheme "complex socialisation"a "transitional stage" from pure capitalism to socialism. It could also be called a "new" New Deal, a way to address the problem that the state's ability to regulate capital is limited by the fact that capital is still owned by the capitalists. Far greater transformation is possible, Blackburn implies, if society achieves real collective ownership of capital itself. But as Proudhon could have told him, the status of "owner" has a nasty way of changing one's behaviorof creating new capitalists. Most pension funds, even public employee funds with some degree of worker control, invest pretty much the same way as corporate funds that are controlled by management. In any case, corporate leaders have not reacted well to pension funds' attempts to assert themselves in company affairs. For the last two and a half decades they have been working on numerous fronts to contain and eliminate the power of big pension funds. Today, companies are converting their pension funds into 401 (k) retirement savings accounts and ghting to do the same with public pen sion funds through their allies in Repub lican-controlled state legislatures. Grey capitalism, if anything, is mov ing backward, not forward to the work ers' paradise. Banking on Death is an energetic attempt to explain how one of the most prevalent institutions in contemporary capitalismthe pension fundcould be used to initiate a transi tion to socialism. But it doesn't add up. What's interesting, however, is where Blackburn places the center of gravity in his proposals. Instead of the state, he aims to transfer ownership to a de centralized collection of afnity groups that could be focused on anything from workplaces to neighborhoods to issue or consumer groups. Socialists have tradi tionally been suspicious of schemes that devolve authority and ownership to the local or regional level, thinking they're too easily dominated by property own ers. Blackburn concludes that entrust ing the people's wealth to bureaucrats is not enough: economic control must be democratized. He therefore proposes that control of the pension funds be integrated with credit unions to create a '"new model of social investment and community entrepreneurship.'"11 "The investment of fund resources could help to promote the ability of com munities to respond to the challenges of exibility in a global division of labor in constant ux," he writes, "The institu tions which I have been sketching... would encourage those bound together by a sense of place, of profession, or a common past or future, to help them de vise their own solution." That being the case, regulation of Blackburn's pension funds would not have to be a state func tion either. "If civic monitoring is lodged within civil society itself, it will have a much greater chance of being effective." Unlike classic state socialists, too, Blackburn stipulates that afnity with a particular pension or social fund should be voluntary. He also species that di rection should come from some level below the state: "Progressive advocates should be encouraged to spell out a positive vision for their community and region, and for their relationship with the world."13 Why the corporate world would go along with such a scheme, Blackburn doesn't convincingly explain. What's remarkable, however, is that he makes the effort to envision a more "libertarian," decentralized brand of socialism. Does Blackburn's vision suggest that corporate control of the statefirmer and more encompassing than everis nally driving mainstream Marxists to seek alternatives resembling the ideas the anarchist movement has been generat ing for 150 years rather than traditional state socialist prescriptions? Or is it a last-ditch effort to map a way out of the corner into which state socialism is being painted by today's rampantly reactionary capitalist state? His book doesn't tell us. But to arrive at the future scenario he describes in Banking on Death required getting past some longstanding socialdemocratic prejudices. Nor does Knowles try to argue that the uid, contingent tendency in eco-

fall2005/57

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory nomics that he found in his subjects' writings is the "right" framework for ad dressing today's problems. What both of these works point to, however, is the need to explore beyond the state and institutions fostered by the state for ways to organize an economy whose object, as Knowles writes, is "the well-being of all, without exception and without favor or privilege."14 Proudhon knew it in 1846. A century and a half later, some of his enemy Marx's followers may be coming around. ^ of the concept of the "commune" to include communities of interest with out geographic boundaries. 2. Rob Knowles, Political Economy from Below: Economic Thought in Commu nitarian Anarchism, 1840-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2004) 3. 3. Karl Polyani, The Great Transforma tion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 46, quoted in Knowles, p. 84. 4. Knowles, Political Economy from Below, 11. For a selection of critical realist writings, see Tony Lawson, Econom ics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997), and Steve Fleetwood, ed., Critical Realism in Economics: Develop ment and Debate (London: Routledge, 1998). 5. In a chapter of the 1850 edition, later omitted. Reprinted as a pamphlet, The Right to Ignore the State (London: Free dom Press, 1913). Cited in Knowles, Political Economy from Below, footnote, 92. 6. Elisee Reclus, L'e'volution, la revolu tion et 'ideal anarchique (Paris: P.V. Stock, 1898), translated by and cited in Knowles, Political Eco?iomy from Below, 346. 7. Ibid., 294. Blackburn, Banking on Death: Or, In vesting in Life: The History and Future of Pensions (London: Verso, 2003), 524. 9. Ibid., 15 10. Ibid., 473. 11. Ibid., 477. 12. Jim Stanford, Paper Boom (Ottawa: 1999), pp. 382-3,385-412, quoted in Blackburn, Banking on Death, 515. 13. Blackburn, Banking on Death, 515. 14. Knowles, Political Economy from Below, 491.

Endnotes
1. Knowles' chapter on Kropotkin in cludes numerous examples of the "an archist prince's" astonishing foresightedness, from his schemes for self-suf cient urban gardening to his expansion

Notes from the global intifada.

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58 / FALL 2005

Operaismo, Autonomia,and the Emergence of New Social Subjects

Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Emergence of New Social Subjects

by Stevphen Shukaitis
there has been a growing inter During est thein past autonomist several Marxism. years Fu eled by the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's celebrated and reviled text Empire (2000), new attention has been brought to the Italian current of operaismo [workerism],1 which has long been neglected within discussions of Marxism in the English speaking world. This essay will explore some of the con cepts of autonomist Marxism, focusing on autonomist Marxists whose works have not received as much attention or readership, in particular: Steve Wright's Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism', Paolo Virno's Grammar of the Multitude; and Stefano Harney's State Wort Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality. Although it would be difcult to a provide a complete overview of these texts, it is nevertheless useful to summarize them in relation to the currents of thought from which they emerge, precisely because many of the ideas developed in It aly during the political laboratory of thel960s and 1970s run paral lel to the very same concepts underpinning much of the organiz ing within the global justice movement: the rejection of rigid notions of class and of the working class A review of: Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright (London: Pluto Books, 2002). Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno. Trans. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004). State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality by Stefano Harney (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). as the privileged revolutionary subject; self-organization; an analysis of capital's articulations over the entire social fabric; engaged withdrawal from relations of domination; the primacy of resistance and social collectivity as preceding its ap propriation by capital; and the formation of new collective identities and subjec tivities in struggle. Italian autonomist Marxism, with its curious and contradictory relationship to orthodox Marxism, has for the most part been overlooked by English-speaking audiences whose main reference point for Italian Marxism is Gramsci. David Graeber has argued that Marxists and anarchists have often focused on different issues, with Marxists analyzing the work ings of capitalism and mechanisms for seizing power, while anarchists have been concerned with ethical forms of practice and organi zation that pregure the world we desire. It is in this way that autonomist Marxism could be most useful to anarchists; even if its focus remains centered on labor, it is one that is tuned to the chang ing nature of labor, and contains conceptual tools that can be used in ways that often might be resisted by the very individuals who have theorized them. This review will explore these ideas, in particular that of the multitude and the notion of exo-

j^# j*vw<*l*"

fall2005/59

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory dus, and what they could mean for radi cal organizing. immediate process of production; and (3) individually interchangeable but col lectively indispensable to the workings of capital.2 Wright brings together the vast array of operaisti practices by looking at their emergence and development in relation to the concept of class composition. He uses class composition as a unifying focal point for the development of the Italian extraparliamentary left, starting with or ganizations like Potere Operaio to more dispersed forms of organizing grouped together under the network of Autonomia. The idea of class composition describes the effects, circumstances and behaviors resulting from the development of the working class in specic condi tions of labor, and the ways in which the subjective experiences of a population shape and relate to their circumstances. For Italian autonomist Marxists theoriz ing about their situation, the concept of class composition was central because it highlighted what Wright describes as: "the importance it placed upon the rela tionship between the material structure of the working class, and its behavior as a subject autonomous from the dic tates of both the labor movement and capital."3 While earlier operaisti texts focused exclusively on labor within the factory walls, operaismo's theorization of work broadened beyond this narrow view of the factory itself to the unleashing of new forces of antagonism on the streets in 1968 and the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969, during which students and new social forces emerged into popular con sciousness. It is these newly emerging social forces that worked their way into opera isti theories of the social factory. Tronti described the idea of the social factory as: "At the highest level of capitalist de velopment, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production; the whole of society becomes an articula tion of production; in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its domination over the whole of society."4 Here, the production of surplus value and its extraction no longer occurs only within the factory walls but is diffused through the social milieu. The diffuse nature of production, as described by a concept like the social factory, meant that the privileged revolutionary position of the industrial working class would be ceded to support for all struggles that intervened in broader social reproduc tion. This means that various forms of social struggle, from student organizing to feminist movements, are not resistance outside of what could be considered class struggle but are all interventions in reclaiming the common resources and social energies that capital is continually trying to siphon off for its own uses. Operaisti, morphing their practices in accordance with the changing nature of social and political production, came to argue that the primary objective of orga nization is to "maintain the continuity of open struggle."3 This represents a shift ing away from the dead ends created by the constraints of orthodox Marxist the orization, as well as socialist and commu nist party discipline. However, this does not mean that the new concepts devel oped by operaisti theorists always found their way into practice immediately. Refocusing away from Marxist orthodoxy and workerism in a negative sense (focus on workplace struggle to the neglect of all others) took some years to be worked out effectively. For example, through out the 1970s, operaisti theorists often embraced the struggles of others (such as feminist campaigns like Wages for Housework) only to the extent that they agreed with and extended arguments of the operaistis. And as the social antago nisms unleashed in the 1970s were beset by factionalization and disagreement, massive state repression in response to such acts as the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades would tear apart the proj ect of operaismo for some time.

Class Composition and Unrealized Implications

Turning Class rst Composition to Storming and Struggle Heaven: in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright we can contextualize historically and socially many of the concepts of op eraismo. Wright traces the emergence and development of operaisti thought and practice from the mid-1940s to its dissolution in the late 1970s. His book serves as a corrective by placing Negri's work in the context of the movements he was involved in, and drawing out un derappreciated voices. This is especially important as operaisti concepts did not emerge from the work of isolated theo rists but from those engaged in the ongo ing processes of organizing. The neglect of many of the voices from operaismo that Wright draws at tention tosuch as those of Panzieri, Tronti, Alquati and Bolognais due to the lack of translation of their materials into English. Wright's book is the rst and only text in English to provide an overview of the evolution and develop ment of operaismo, a task that it handles quite successfully. While the detailed history reads at some points like an ex tended version of a "who's arguing with whom" in the radical left, it is important to be able to trace the development of these ideas. It is the setting of Italy's "economic miracle" in the 1950s and the decisions of the Italian Communist Party to emphasize state capitalist devel opment combined with the ideological fallout from the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and massive immigration from southern Italy that created a grouping of workers who were not willing to work within the connes of existing party and union structures. It is these emergent populations and the industrial unrest they fermented that would congeal the gure of the mass worker in the theorization of the operaistis. The gure of mass worker is characterized by labor which is: (1) massied, or the performance of simple repetitive labor, (2) located in the

The Multitude in the New 17 Century

Turning to Paolo Virno's book The Grammar of the Multitude, his main argu ment is that the concept of the multitude is the important category of analysis for

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Operaismo, Autonomia,and the Emergence of New Social Subjects our contemporary age. He draws out this analysis starting from the distinction between the people and the multitude found in the writings of philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. In a periodization that makes this allusion all the more present, he argues that "we are living in a new seven teenth century, or in an age in which the old categories are falling apart and we need to coin new ones."6 Unlike the unitary gure of the people, the multitude never reaches a point of synthetic unity that justies the existence of a state (or is used by governing elites to ra tionalize their actions through state power). For Virno, the multitude is "the form of social and political existence for the many,"7 it "becomes a his torically determined way of being, on tology revealing itself phenomenologically."8 In other words, for Virno the concept of the multitude is a new form and possibility of political organi zation found within experiences and existences created
illlANO M A I

of categories of political thought and the changing nature of social and political life result in conditions of the multitude where there is a perpetual feeling of never being at home, which leads to seeking new forms of refuge from the

sibilities for forms of politics identied as the formation of multitude as a political project. The rapidly changing nature of society, the economy and the world order, rather than preventing the possibility of liberatory projects has created new possi bilities for forms of organization and the self-organization of populations beyond the limits of state power. In some ways Virno's theorization of the multitude's emergence seems more tting precisely for his greater degree of caution and attention to what might be called "the dark side of the multitude," or the common created by a publicness of fear. Virno argues that "if the publicness of intellect does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a po litical space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces terrifying ef fects . .. [it] translates into an unchecked pro liferation of hierarchies as groundless as they are thriving."10 The conditions of fear and apparatuses of security are not just atomizing, but can create common spaces and forms of the multitude experienced paradoxically as a servile and oddly depoliticized

by current transfor mations of exist ing socioeconomic realities. The conditions that multitude emerges from are those in which the categories and boundaries that politics previously coupled such as those of la bor, action and intellect become blurred, hybridized and collapse into each other. The multitude in these conditions "af rms itself, in high relief, as a mode of being in which there is a juxtaposition, or at least a hybridization, between spheres which, until very recently ... seemed distinct and separated.",; The breakdown

the diffused workings of the post-Fordist economy, production shifts from mass stan dardized factory lines to dispersed, decentralized, and exible forms of manufacture. Virno argues that in these conditions people seek refuge in the common places of language and com munication, or in what Virno describes as "the public life of the mind in which we all take part." The emergence of the multitude in this way has two senses, both describing an increased usage of the concept for analysis and organizing, as well as the recent conditions and changes in the world system are creating new pos
N I I

space. Virno locates the emergence of the multitude in relation to the changing na ture of labor and production, where exist ing reservoirs of skills, knowledge, and experience have become welded together and essential to the productive process. For Virno, these characteristics united by linguistic experience increasingly take on the form of performance, and as such "not only characterize the culture indus try by the totality of contemporary social production . . . [it] becomes the proto type of all wage labor."11 It embodies im material labor (which encompasses cog nitive and affective labor), service work, and all forms of work focused on creation

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory that is more an idea or relation than a physical product and is distinguished in that its end product is ephemeral (such as images, relations or ideas) rather than tangible. Virno argues that the emer gence of exible production techniques was the response of capital and the state to resistance to the Fordist assembly line, not just in Italy but also in many other parts of the world. For Virno the challenge is not to re turn to some previously imagined era, but to develop from the networked and com municative capacities of the emergent multitude new forms of social creativity and non-representative democracy that can be taken into exodus, to reapply the skills and knowledge that capital has ap propriated into the apparatuses of the economy and the state into projects for the self-liberation of the many. As Virno argues: "Nothing is less passive than the act of eeing, of exiting. Defection modies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presup posing those conditions to be an unal terable horizon;" and through nding new forms of exodus, one nds that "exit hinges on a latent kind of wealth, on an exuberance of possibilities ... [that] are allusions to what the true political, and not servile, virtuosity of the multitude could be."12 Drawing from his experiences of working in the Antiracism Secretariat of the Ontario Ministry of Intergovern mental Affairs from 1992-1995, Harney explores the techniques of public ad ministration and management that hide the labor of creating the state in endless chains of equivalence and comparison. It is these techniques that create state effects, or the impression that the state is more than the sum of its parts, and natural ize the idea of the state as a necessary organizing principle in people's lives. To look at the construction of the state from the position of labor in the state "would have had the direct effect of voicing labor as labor in the state and of calling the state into questionnot just as an object of constitutional construction based on contract and sovereignty but a material object made by these practical embodi ments."14 That is, it would open avenues for looking at state work in terms of the collective identities and social surpluses involved in the construction of the state, as elements that can be appreciated in terms of how they might be socialized differendy to disperse the state alto gether.15 Transformations in the nature of state work and government labor, for example, the discourses around "reinventing gov ernment" and privatization of state ser vices, represent the continuing creation of state effects and forms of power now created through different means. This angle allows Harney to draw out radical potential from forms of knowledge and practices where one might not expect to nd them, such as public administration. By looking at forms of labor and social self-creation that are embodied in state work and necessary to the appropriation of social creativity, Harney argues that "it is precisely what I am labeling state work that must be brought with us into exodus in order to truly be left behind through the new mediation of difference."16 It is by keeping the antagonisms of capital and state work near enough to be rmly dispelled that a constitutive politics of exodus would maintain its transformative powers. As state work and governmental labor increasingly become immaterial, much like the nature of labor and production itself, the creation of wealth becomes welded into the process of constituting forms of subjectivity. But as the produc tion of social wealth and its appropriation is increasingly founded upon processes of symbolic and linguistic manipulation, ideological effects of state worksuch as citizenship and the idea of the state itselfare potentially antagonistic to the forms of appropriated and alienated labor that produce them. These processes of creating forms of collective identity and subjectivity in state work contain within themselves potentials for pushing the desires embodied in practices of state work beyond that which the administra tive apparatus can handle. Or, as Harney notes, "Perhaps it is possible to continue state work only at the risk of wanting what it cannot have, revealing what it does wanta society of labor as the pleasure and fantasy and social reproduc tion."17 It is in this way that Harney's theorization of state work is most useful; by looking at the labor embodied in state practice (rather than reifying the state as given object) it becomes possible to look for new ways to draw from the creativ ity of that labor and nd ways it can be channeled toward productive social ends, rather than captured within the apparatus of state power.

Laboring in and Away from the State

Moving in the a different usage direction of theseis concepts Stefano Harney in his book State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality, which draws from operaismo as well as performance and cultural studies, labor process theory, and public administration to construct a cultural theory of labor in the state, or "state work." From this per spective he hopes to nd "how to glimpse the state as it transforms labor into work, and in the shimmers of that image, catch the society of producers making the state."13 Harney makes this distinction between the concept of labor and work to describe a world making activity as op posed to the particular quotidian forms that practically embody labor.

A Multitude by, of, and for the Multitude

One operaismo of the distinctive of has beenfeatures the creative, dynamic reinterpretations of Marx that have broken radically with traditional readings. By drawing out ideas from sec tions of Marx's writing which have gen erally received less attention, particularly the Grundrisse, Operaisti theorists such as Tronti, Bologona, Negri, and Virno have been able to refocus their analy sis to provide ways around some of the shortcomings of Marxist orthodoxy. But it should be remembered that whether or not operaismo was unorthodox, it was still autonomist Marxism, and is signicandy molded by that fact. For instance, operaismo still focuses on labor

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Operaismo, Autonomia,and the Emergence of New Social Subjects as the lever for political subjectivity while broadening the range of what is consid ered within the framework of labor. The work of all these authors rep resents the continuation of this line of theorization. It is their ways of breaking from traditional Marxist orthodoxies that open new avenues for the productive meeting of Marxist and anarchist tradi tions. Lines of convergence between au tonomist Marxism and anarchism seem possible precisely because a focus on cooperative forms of resistance, knowl edge creation, and open forms of struggle come very close to positions long found within anarchist practice and theory. But, while the work of Negri, Virno, Tronti and other operaisti theorists are often read as libertarian, it is important to remember that even if their ideas de parted gready from Marxist orthodoxy, they were in other ways far from libertar ian. Some might wonder why such a ver sion of Marxism does not simply break with the idea of being Marxist altogether. But this makes more sense in the context where operaismo originatedin 1970s Italy, with its mass parties and unions of Marxist orientationthat made working in this tradition appear more tangible. In many ways, however, the sharp distinctions that are made about current forms of production are the claims used to foster hope for this new concerted effort to realize the multitude. While texts such as Grammar of the Multitude and the writings of Hardt and Negri are exhilarating in their ability, it's perhaps almost willful self-delusion to see them as possibilities for new forms of revo lutionary social action within current conditions. This is where books such as Storming Heaven and State Work become important: for the purpose of seeing how these ideas emerged within a distinct historical context, and how they might be applied in concrete situations that are quite different from the idealized cre ation of the "multitude" and of coming "exodus." It is also apparent in the new and interesting ways that operaisti ideas are being deployed and worked with in the organizing around precarious labor in Italy, Spain and France, for instance. It is these applications that will bear out the fruits of this theoretical labor, and their outcomes and reections will rene and improve these theoretical tools. The concept of the multitude, exo dus and the currents of operaismo from which they emerge contain a reservoir of theorization and approaches that could inform and be shaped by our organizing practices. Only time and experience will tell whether the possibilities for broaden ing and enriching the languages through which we can communicate and describe our resistance will benet by adding the idea of the multitude to the arsenal. Perhaps it would be wiser, rather than asking what the multitude is, to ask what the concept of the multitude and related ideas could mean for organizers and all those struggling for liberation. One can guess that this will be relative to the de gree to which the idea of the multitude can cease to be a concept associated with or assumed to be the product of one or a few people, and through networked processes of action, reection, commu nication, and reinterpretation become of a concept of, for, and by the concerted multiplicity of the multitude itself. 3^ 12. Ibid., 69-70. 13. Stefano Harney. State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 19. 14. Ibid., 89. An excellent argument made along these lines about the danger of conceptualizing government power as actually unied into the form of the state (rather than as various forms of power united by idea of the idea) is made by Philip Abrams in his excel lent essay "Notes on the Difculty of Studying the State." Journal of His torical Sociology Volume 1 Number 1 (March 1988): 58-89. 15. Ibid., 20. 16. Ibid., 58. 17. Ibid., 187.

Endnotes
1. The translation of operaismo as "workerism" is problematic in that the word in Italian does not have the pejorative connotations that it does in English. The Italian version of the word for workerism, meaning an exclusive focus on industrial struggles over all others, is fabrichismo. 2. Steve Wright. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 107. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. Ibid., 37-38. 5. Ibid., 69. 6. Paolo Virno. Grammar of the Multi tude. Trans. Sylvere Lotringer (New York Semiotext(e), 2004), 24. 7. Ibid., 21. 8. Ibid., 98. 9. Ibid., 49. 10. Ibid., 40-41. 11. Ibid., 56/61.

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Walking on the Edge of Revolt

by Louis-Frederic Gaudet translated by Andrea Schmidt and Louis-Frederic Gaudet
tion, exclusion, and occupation. What is the status of our revolt in this particular historical context? Although separated by half a century, Albert Camus and Francis DupuisDeri offer a philosophical and practical perspective on revolt. These two contri butions can nourish anarchist activists' examination of their resistancean examination at once internal, underta ken with reference to our own systems of values, and comparative, considered with reference to other movements struggling against the present order. If it is clear to both authors that in confronting the forces of humiliation and injustice, the rebels lay the groundwork for emancipation, it is no less the case that the authors interro gate the relationship between the character of the rebel and the manifestation of revolt. Is revolt an instrument, deployed in the pursuit of specic objec tives? Is one type of revolt con demned to exhaust itself and disappear once the rebels have attained their goals? Is it pos sible for an individual to rebel in the absence of more specic or predetermined goals than liberation from oppression and the afrmation of one's own existence? Asking these ques tions, the authors scrutinize the logic and articulation of revolt, and offer a critical perspective that allows us to distinguish between types of revolt, not simply on the basis of their ma nifestations, but rather on the basis of their principles and the degree to which they are reali-

confrontation that animates in Revolt dividuals is a perpetual and societies. stateThrough of times, places, and political contexts, emancipation has always been a result of a series of direct confrontations that has allowed individuals gathered together in struggle to reject humiliation and injus tice. Nevertheless, the history of revolt must be characterized by the repetition of the different. As destabilizing as that may be, it is only a tactic, the expression of which need not be progressive. Dis tinguishing between the different forms revolt can take remains a dif cult task. For anti-authoritarians, new paths of reection through ac tion seemed to open up a few years ago, with the Zapatista uprising and the emergence, in the North, of the concept of a respect for a "diversity of tactics."1 The critical task of emancipation remains un nished, however. Confrontation and violence have regained their quasi-taboo status, blindly condemned or justied, coar sely eliminated from all debate in the name of quasi-theolo gical principles. This is true among leftists and reactionary forces alike. In this moment, we are faced with the constant redeployment of capitalist power on new fronts. The con tinual invocation of the "state of emergency" limiting rights and freedoms, civilian popula tions living under military cur few, and a perpetual social war waged against the excluded, all feed new patterns of segrega-

A review of: L'Homme Revoke [The Rebel] by Albert Camus (1951; reprint, Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Les Black Blocs: La liberte et Te'galite'se man ifestent [Black Blocs: Expressions of Freedom and Equality] by Francis Dupuis-Deri (Montreal: Lux Editeur, 2003).

^ B L A C KB L O C L o O fN E
Mike Flugcnnock

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Walking on the Edge of Revolt

zed in action.

The Ethic of Liberation

Camus than is his known essays. more This for has his probably novels contributed to the obfuscation of some of the complexity of his thought, which was nonetheless accented by an antiauthoritarianism in search of a balance between justice and freedom, absurdity and revolt, the individual and society, life and suicide.2 Born in Algeria to French parents, Camus's youth was difcult, characterized by poverty and illness that would shape his future commitments. His entire body of work was devoted to the search for a just world as well as a world of solidarity. Camus was, above all, a person of action who denounced injustice and offered concrete support to movements that fought it.3 Forty-ve years after his death, Ca mus's work is still referenced, but it is often read hastily and poorly. In the fury that surrounded the events of September 11 and the so-called war on terror, some U.S. analysts pulled quotes from The Rebel in order to found their expeditious condemnations of "terrorist" violence."1 Because Camus's essay examines rst and foremost the case of murder in its rela tion to revolt, it did not take reactionary commentators much more than the fresh horror of Western suffering following the attack on the Twin Towers to cite The Rebelwithout nuance and out of contextin order to affirm that violence cannot constitute a rational response to situations of humiliation and injustice. Such horror could thus only be the result of fanaticism or the last resort of nihilists; there was no reason to consider the so cioeconomic and geopolitical contexts in which it occurred. But to grasp the real scope of The Re

bel and its subject matter, we have to un derstand Camus's position as an engaged intellectual, repulse by injustice but also impatient when faced with ideologically driven political manipulations. Marked by the post-World War II climate and adherence of the most visible French intellectualsamong them, Jean-Paul Sartre and the producers of the maga zine Les Temps Modernesto orthodox Com munism, Camus always refused to endorse the "jus tice" imposed by the dictates of the proletariat. The Rebel was

from which the individual rejects their condition and the state of society. For Camus, only revolt offers humanity the possibility of its fulllment, for it makes the human condition dependent only on an endlessly renewed struggle. It is the process through which the individual embraces the dignity shared by all human beings. Camus's argument distinguishes itself from others when he identies revolt as both the means and end of struggle. Perpetual revolt is not only the way to repel the world's absurdity but also to foil nihilism. Revolt would be condemned to failure or accepted as ab surd, yet at that point re bels transcend and trans form their condition by means that render their own emancipation depen dent on the extermina tion of the group that is contaminating their exis tence. Recognizing this, individuals must resist the call of nihilism, which leads cither to silence or the acceptance of murder. It is only by perpetuating the struggle, and not by struggling to achieve a prophecied Utopia, that the individual and one's peers are able to give humanity meaning and improve their condition. For Camus, resignation (which takes form in suicide), religious faith, and the faith in prophetic ideology are not only the recognition of the absurd but its very acceptance. Through perpetual revolt, the absurd is not suppressed but perpetu-

, . . ;/ .-

written from this critical perspective. The work seeks to elucidate the way in which revolt can drift off course, and the ways in which revolutions betray the principles that gave rise to them. To this end, Camus begins to dene the notion of rebellion from the point of recognition of the absurdity of the world. He situates revolt as a constituent element of the individual, a metaphysical act that takes the shape of a movement

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory ally repelled. Revolt must rst and foremost allow for liberation from oppression, but it must also afrm the essence of the rebel as a being who stands in solidarity with others. Suspicious of the blind faith of the Communists, Camus could not glo rify "praxis" without associating it with the fundamental values of the individual. Despite its pretenses, rebel action in the pursuit of specic objectives guided by a doctrine starts from the absolute in order to shape reality. Revolt, conversely, relies on the real in order to pursue a perpetual struggle for truth. The former seeks to carry itself out from the top down, and the latter attempts this from the bottom up, without ceding before the oppression of enlightened guides who pretend to le gitimate the practice according to a given dogma. In identifying revolt as an aspect of human nature, Camus highlights the rational calculus of efciency in the pursuit of specic ends as the principal reason for the deviation of revolt. The deliberation process should thus not be about what to dothat is, a debate about the most appropriate means to achieve specific endsbut rather about affirming what an individual and their collectivity represent by liberating oneself from all constraint. In this sense, actions should be carried out neither for their intrinsic merit nor by virtue of their capacity to achieve other objectives. Actions carried out in this waywould "de-rationalize" the act in relation to its ends in order to make way for another sort of decision. For Camus, actions have value not only by virtue of the results they carry with them but rather because they are shaped according to a new ethos, which I would call anti-authoritarian, with a new con ception of good, justice, and evil, oriented by the maximization of the relationship to life as well as the annihilation of forms of injustice and humiliation. Because it expands the possibility of critiquing choices of actions, this process of de-rationalizing revolt also reduces the danger that actions will be coopted or tamed as they are repeated and even ritualized, as it expands the possibility for critique. When revolt afrms itself as a tactic that represents the alterna tive itself rather than as a principle that merely foreshadows it, it allows us to deliberate about our own options, and to consider nuances of an ethical and moral order. In this sense, if a process of revolt doesn't reect (to some degree) a sense of univeral morality, and thereby reach a maximum number of people and enlarge the movement, it won't have the ability to expand its base and feed its actions with new energy. The limitations of Camus's work lie in his style and the range of his top ics. Due to the abstract character of his writings and his concern mainly with an era that has ended, his arguments some times descend into confusion. But above all, his work afrms the rebel and their principles. Revolt, for Camus, is an act of solidarity that maximizes the right to life and its fulllment, rather than delv ing into compromise in order to ght an enemy more effectively. extent, repression, anticapitalist activist communities in North America are be ginning to ask themselves how to make the connections between current forms of domination and strategies for struggle. It is because black blocs arrived on the anticapitalist activist scene as one of the important innovations of the past years that it is worth reviewing the topic, de spite a sense that it has been thoroughly covered and exhausted. Autonomous and decentralized in their actions, black blocs were able to produce a creative tension between the symbols of capital ism and grassroots resistance, specically within demonstrations organized on the basis of a respect for a diversity of tactics. This tension, which represented a kind of opportunity for anarchists to make their message and ideas known, had to be exploited by activists in order to reclaim discursive space and action that was barricaded and impossible to penetrate without the help of tactics of confronta tion. An activist and political theorist from Quebec, Dupuis-Deri decided to focus on the phenomenon in Les Black Blocs: La liberie et Tegalitese manifestent. As a pundit, the author had already contrib uted a great deal to demystifying the anarchist movement in the francophone world. Notably, his contributions put the renaissance of the anarchist movement into cultural and historical perspective, and provided a counterbalance to the demonization of the movement by the mass media, labor leaders, and other social democratic players in 2000 and early 2001, as the convergence against the Summit of the Americas was being organized in Quebec City. Thus, Dupuis-Deri's approach to the topic of black blocs is one of an informed observer who has mixed with activists in organizing processes and struggle. Apart from a few on-the-spot analy ses immediately after the big convergen ces where the black blocs were present, few works have analyzed the tactic. This being the case, Dupuis-Deri's work ar rives at just the right moment and allows for a critical review of the tactic. With out being openly anarchist, the analysis

Witness to Uprisings
Although direct controversial, actions have proven blackto bloc be creative and dynamic demonstrations that respond to an ensemble of preestablished principlesprinciples that remain invisible to most people. This form of action, quickly characterized as "violent," was reied and opposed to other forms of protest that were equally radical and demanding. Black bloc-type actions remain marginal, and represent only one sort of anticapitalist activist action. Nev ertheless, a critical review of the essence of this confrontational activity remains worthwhile. Watching from the outside, the phenomenon seemed magnied by the North American media's infatuation with the glamour of black bloc actions. Inter nally, the debates between different ten dencies within the movement for social justice dened the discussion about the respect for a diversity of tactics such that there was little analysis or debate about black blocs beyond their strategic value. Destabilized now by the diminishing size of their convergences and also, to some

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Walking on the Edge of Revolt is concerned primarily with explaining concepts and critiques that are near and dear to anarchists. Clear and concise, Dupuis-Deri's book would suit the nov ice well, while activists will nd in it the echo of debates that permeated recent organizing efforts. In short, this is an important book, as much for its ability to demystify a movement phenomenon for a general population as for its usefulness as a recorded memory for the activist community. The rst edition of Dupuis-Deri's book is divided into three parts. The rst part provides a historical perspective on a phenomenon all too often perceived as having appeared out of nowhere during the "Battle of Seattle." The analysis al lows Dupuis-Deri to demolish a number of falsehoods, including the characteriza tion of the black bloc as a permanent or an apolitical organization that exists as a worldwide underground network. The black bloc made its rst ap pearance in the early 1980s, as a tactic of resistance to the eviction of squats in Germany. The term was rst coined by German security forces. Taken up by a handful of collectives during the antiwar demonstrations at the time of the rst Gulf War in 1991, it was only with the multiplication of big anticapitalist con vergences that the public became more familiar with what the media described as "anarchist hooligans" dressed in black. Dupuis-Deri tries hard to demon strate that black blocs represent "a form of collective action, deliberately chosen by some activists, in order to make vis ible a radical critique of the economic and political system within a demonstra tion."5 In short, he argues, a black bloctype action is the result of a decision making process undertaken in a closed group, and coordinated with others, that respects the ability, judgment, and deci sions of each person to involve oneself in the sort of action one considers the most appropriate in a given situation and con text. Defying the illegitimate authority of the institutions of global capitalism, the black bloc's direct action represents the fulllment of the duty to resist. It af rms and demands an anarchist position. The action only has meaning insofar as the result emerges from an ethic that pla ces direct democracy, equality, and solida rity at the heart of its decisions. Dupuis-Deri's analysis also contextualizes the debate on violence that ensued from the black bloc's reputation, without glorifying an insurrectionary mystique. Examining the nature of di rect action organizing and repression, the author describes the actors in the confrontation as "equal and free," while the security forces, on the other hand, for all that they are more violent and better equipped, are "obedient and unequal."6 Moreover, the confrontations that occur at the gatherings in which black blocs work prove to be much more democratic than those organized by its most noto rious opponents within the social justice movement. By demanding a place within the diversity of tactics framework, black blocs become spokespeople for their uni que political analysis and simultaneously advocates of free spaces for other forms of resistance as well. Black blocs are far from the "one tactic ts all" marches or chestrated by state-sanctioned opposition groups, which limit the free expression of dissidence and occupy highly hierarchical spaces in which the presence of some people is more important than others. The second part of Dupuis-Deri's book allows the architects of the black bloc to speak on their own behalf. The maneuver is interesting because it gives the reader access to a number of com muniques and analyses written by black bloc participants themselves. It allows the reader to glean insight into the or ganizational logic of afnity groups. If some might see in it an organizing guide, the reection and positions defended in these pages are instead evidence of black bloc participants' own ethical and tactical conciousness raising, and they conrm Dupuis-Deri's analysis. The nal section of the book gives space to the debate between Michael Al bert and black bloc participants concern ing the relevance of black bloc-orches trated actions. The idea is interesting: it repositions the reader in the debates that followed the most recent manifestation of the black bloc phenomenon. None theless, it would also have been intrigu ing to lay out the position of activists sympathetic to black bloc actions who have chosen not to participate in them. After all, the most notorious defenders of the concept of respect for a diversity of tactics have rarely been the rst to head to the front lines of demonstrations. The author's approach also does not allow for reference to signicant debates, internal to the anticapitalist movement, about the sexist and racist character of black blocs.7 All in all, above and beyond the demystication of the phenomenon, the book's main contribution lies in DupuisDeri's analysis of the black bloc as a ma nifestation of a revolt anchored in ethical values of self-determination, freedom, equality, and solidarity. The author de monstrates how the participation, debate, and decision making in small afnity groups, at the front line or the periphery of grassroots battles, represents a mecha nism of checks and balances that ensures that black bloc actions won't sacrice the values that motivate their revolt in the name of efciency. The black bloc's act of revolt is at once the reaction to oppres sion and the afrmation of an alternative politics. This is not about bestowing an aura of revolutionary romanticism on black blocs but about emphasizing that in situations of resistence, the tactics of confrontation in the name of social jus tice are always possible without having to deny our origins, the values that animate our identity, and the values of our move ments and collectives. Rarely have we seen such a confron tational relationship between those who govern and those who refuse to be gov erned. Yet it is difcult to determine the specicity of this revolt in the absence of a framework for comparison. The direct action of black blocs can be seen as distinct particularly in its relationship to other forms of resistance that have confronted the symbols of capitalism during the large convergences of the past ten years (in the North). A comparison of black blocs, the WOMBLES, and the Tute Bianche would probably have al lowed for a clearer examination of black

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory bloc analysis and choices. Such a com parison would have allowed for an inno vative exploration of the debates over the macho and racist character of black bloc actionsdebates that are far too often limited by dogma. In all, the strength of Dupui-Deri's work is that he engages with the organizational dynamics of the blocs, and informs his readers quite re markably of the integrity that emerges from the political and moral values of the activists and their actions. We ve in a context of holy wars or chestrated by fundamentalist religious movements and our states, that seek not to maximize their relationship with life but rather their own hegemony. Our goal as anti-authoritarians should there fore take shape in a renewed engage ment in our projects, local struggles, and literature, where we should not only ask questions about the effectiveness of our methods of struggle but also about how to promote the positions that found our revolt, and thereby open up a realm of possibilities. Only a practice guided by principles with something of a universal resonance, like solidarity, equality, justice and self-determination, has the power to recongure the landscape of our concrete situations. Such a practice determines ur capacity to be creative, and prevents our revolt from veering into domination and terror. ^ timating the state and security forces' criminalization of certain forms of re sistance. Thus, the concept of diversity of tactics is one that privileges an open solidarity that respects different types of resistance. 2. See Albert Camus's contributions to Le Monde Libertaire. They are availa ble online at http://federation-anarchiste.org/ml/ 3. Active in the resistance to the German occupation, Camus was also one of the rst French intellectuals to take a stand against the colonial oppression of Algeria, to denounce fascism in Spain, and to protest the authoritarian drift of communism. 4. In the anglophone world, The Rebel is often perceived as a treatise against political revolutions. See Paul Berman's recent book, Terror and Libera lism, (New York WW. Norton, 2003). Basing himself on Camus's work, and mainly on The Rebel, Berman critiques Islamicist totalitarianism and the re course to violence. Slapdash and sim plistic, the author draws on only a part of Camus's analysis in order to justify the "War on Terror," while the latter s arguments could in fact throw into question that very war, waged as it is in the name of perverted principles. 5. Francis Dupis-Deri, Les Black Blocs: La liberteet Vegalitese manifestent (Mon treal: Lux Editeur, 2003), 16. 6. Ibid, 70. 7. At the time, the Black Bloc's con frontational actions were criticized as macho and of making the demons tration environment uncomfortable for many demonstrators from com munities excluded by the capitalist system. The argument was based on the fact that confrontational actions bear different consequences for diffe rent demonstrators, and are generally more severe for groups most affected by structures of domination. On the other hand, the proponents of a res pect for a diversity of tactics claimed that the experience of exploitation, oppression and repression are multiple and cannot be reied for any particular group, thereby determining their beha viour.

Challenging Revolt
Boththat The only Rebel direct and action Blackallows Blocs us show to transcend he absurdity of the world with which we are confronted. Beyond this simple recognition, The Rebel offers anar chists fuel for reection likely to reinforce the legitimacy of their actions, insofar as they remain faithful to the principles that feed their revolt. Dupui-Deri's work has the merit of bringing together the arguments for how confrontation can be creative as well as afrm a political position rather than merely an irrational act, the result of accumulated frustration. Obviously, it deals with only one section of the spec trum of resistance. And resistance is by no means a sealed concept, whose princi ples are frozen in time and space. There is room for discussion and debate on the topic of black blocs and the activity of confrontation. Changes in the nature of convergences orchestrated by social justice activists have shaken some of the bases of that discussion. Nonetheless, the discourse on the topic is proving slow to develop, and at an organizational level, no alternative to the formula of afnity group-based actions has been raised. So long as this is the case, the possibility of a black bloc resurgence is real. The challenge continues to be one of clearly shaping his form of confrontation in or der to create free political spaces. It is at this point that the genuine organizational work begins. It is often only in moments of relative calm that the important work of consolidation and expanding networks of support, so necessary for the creation of such spaces, can really take place.

Endnotes
1. The concept of a diversity of tactics has so farfor better or worseesca ped any attempt at a clear and precise denition. At the very least, one can afrm that the respect for a diversity of tactics recognizes the plurality of forms of dissidence. This plurality results from particular socio-cultural, economic, and political dynamics, based in the day-to-day experience of exploitation, oppression, and repres sion of marginalized communities. Taking into account this plurality of lived experience, the concept promotes the idea that a number of forms of resistance can prove just and legitimate and that no one form of resistance has intrinsic strategic merit. The activists who emphasized this reco gnition, within the framework of the mobilizations against the Summit of the Americas in April 2001 in Que bec City, had two complementary objectives: 1) to reorient the debate about violence and the legitimacy of tactics used by demonstrators toward a criticim of the structural violence perpetrated by a capitalist system; 2) to avoid rifts between those opposing the Summit of the Americas and legi

68/fall 2005

Species of Anarchist Memory

Species of Anarchist Memory

by Alexander K. Hirsch I.
struggle of man against power Milan Kundera is the struggle onceof said, memory "The against forgetting." Indeed, the very language of the politicalof struggle, renewal, contestation, power, collectiv ityis articulated in the incantations of the forgotten and the remembered. It is the assassination of memory that most secures the hegemony of power, and the nothingness of forgetting that most im pedes radical movement. Perhaps never before has this mattered morenever before has the present depended so ut terly upon the silence of the past. To Eric Hobsbawm, "the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phe nomena of the late twentieth century."1 Whether it be the forgotten anarchist rural collectives of the Spanish revolu tion, or the silenced legacy of the slave rebellions of the Haitian revolution, the neglected brilliance of Bakunin or Kro potkin, the derelict memory of the Italian factory councils, or the Haymarket strike, anarchists know that our relationship to the past is one shaped by a power abetted by the amnesia. Our age is striking in its will to dehistoricize, to rationalize disap pearance. Ours is not merely an age that allows the past to become fully bygone, but also one that gives battle to the past as such, one embellished by forgetfulness. Forgetfulness breeds acquiescence, memory disenchantment, and upheaval. Insofar as the detection of the contradictions inher ent in the professed ideals of society and the illumination of the meaning of the social forces implicit in those contradic tions remain important endeavors for A review of: Panegyric by Guy Debord (New York: Verso, 2004). Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman (New York New York Review of Books, 1999). movements of power, Berkman with resisting the obvious reprehensibility of hegemony. Where Berkman saw power as what presses against from the outside, as what subordinates, or sets beneath, Debord saw power as that which denes reality itself, the totality of social and cultural life, an amalgamation of power with which we are complicit and which launches not against us but through us. Though their differences are signi cant, it is the similarities between these two men that are profound. Both Berk man and Debord were born to wealthy families and high social standing, both found anarchism a compelling "third way" against liberalism and marxism, both men considered themselves heroes to the revolutionary classes, champions of the awakened. Both were accused of assassination, and both, ultimately, com mitted suicide. Both men considered themselves to have spent signicant por tions of their lives imprisonedBerkman literally incarcerated, Debord captive to the existential drama of his age. Berk man served most of his sentence in the harrowing profundity of solitary conne ment. Debord lived his life rapt by the overriding boundaries imposed on his freewill. "The pleasures of existence have been redened in an authoritarian way,"3 Debord would lament, "the gen eral decadence is a means in the service of the empire of servitude." The world, to Debord, was "naught but deception," a world not merely appalling by its "troubled times, extreme divisions in so ciety, and immense destruction," but also one dominated by intense alienation, and the monopolization of everyday life by false consciousness. In short Debord saw our world as one subjugated by "the au tonomous movement of non-life."4 The

anarchist theory, memory should remain a principal anarchist issue.

II.
Debord rstand an odd Berkman pair to may sort together. seem at They are after all separated in time by a generationDebord was five when Berkman died in 1936. Their politi cal projects seem far removed as well: Debord the self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International, author of The Society of the Spectacle, provocateur of the May 1968 student rebellion in Paris; Berkman, "revolutionist rst, man second,"2 a classical anarchist inuenced primarily by Johann Most. He served fourteen years in a Pennsylvania state prison after attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick the co-owner of the Steel Homestead plant who employed 300 strikebreakers to defeat the Amal gamated Iron and Steel Workers Union strike of 1892. Whereas Debord s writ ings would encourage us to consider the cultural undercurrents of societies domi nated by modern forces of production, and the visual phantasmagoria twisted up inside the fetishization of consumerism, Berkman's would urge us to react against illegitimate authority, to scorn despotism, to defy the oppressor. Debord was con cerned with discovering the clandestine

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory sensation of connement and bondage, of helplessness and isolation, of compul sory obedience and discipline, the forced labor, arbitrary deprivations, depraved routines, and summary detentions, to Debord, were universally characteristic of modern times. The perverse logic of the prison had been wholly applied. The de jected subject position of the imprisoned had become that of the ordinary citizen, each and every one of us bound to the perverse will of capital, hierarchy, worse, spectacle. Debord agreed altogether with Maurice Blanchot, postmodern French author, who said, "if it weren't for pris ons, we would know we are all already in prison5." violence was by no means simple. Never would he condone violence committed against the innocent nor would he excuse violence for the sake of violence. Berk man, like most anarchists of his age, drew a sharp distinction between political as sassination and murder, the former being a revolutionary action draped in radical fervor, the latter a morally culpable and illegitimate act: Human life is, indeed, sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life... True, the Cause often calls upon the revolutionist to commit an unpleasant act; but it is the test of the true revolutionistnay, more, his prideto sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the Peoples cause. Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause? Why, the very life of a true revolu tionist has no other purpose, no sig nicance whatever, save to sacrice it on the altar of the beloved People. And what could be higher in life than to be a true revolutionist? It is to be a man, a complete MAN. A being who has neither personal interests nor desires above the necessities of the Cause; one who has emancipated himself from being merely human, and has risen above that, even to the height of conviction which excludes all doubt, all regret; in short, one who in the very inmost of his soul feels himself revolutionist rst, human afterwards.6 Prison Memoirs is divided into four parts. The rst comparatively brief sec tion gives a detailed description of the attempted assassination of the authori tarian Henry Clay Frick, and the subse quent trial where Berkman declines aid of legal council, defends himself as an anarchist disbelieving in the mandates of a corrupt legal justice system, and is ultimately convicted and sentenced to twenty-two years imprisonment. The third and fourth sections, equally trun cated, deal with Berkman's "resurrection," or his life after prisonthe inner drama of a man released from incarceration yet still subject to the unjust strictures of the law. The majority of the text, however, is concerned with the experience of being in prison. The organized injustice of the prison, the sadism of unchecked power, the darkness and unbroken sameness of connement, the sinister silence and fearful solitude, the ugliness of the dun geon, all the horrors and brutality of his life, all that Berkman deplored of capital ist societies and wished to tear down of American civilization, all vested as a mi crocosm in a Pennsylvania state prison. It was in prison that he wrote to his beloved Emma Goldman, "the stupen dous task of human regeneration will be accomplished only by the puried vision of hearts that grow not cold."7 Certainly Berkman could never be accused of hous ing a chilled heartthe revolutionary spirit he embodied, his pure intent, and the force of his uncompromising love of freedom, never wavered. The dedication of his memoir "to all those who in and out of prison ght against their bondage" contains the crux of Berkman's character, his will, his altruistic devotion to the emancipation of others.8 Yet Berkman's style of compositioncrude, innocent, simpleis symptomatic of his own naive nostalgia for a Golden Age that never was, and a melancholy covet of a Utopian future. His idealism, his rapture, are often articulated in a mawkish language only the sap of a romance novel could muster, and his glorication of the virtu ous inner-nature of "the People" might strike the reader as millenarian. His invocation of the concept of "freedom," often incessant and redundant, bears re semblance to that of George W. Bush's second inaugural address. Both men use the term in its most abstract sense, and neither detail what a substantive freedom might look like. What maudlin style Berkman presents cannot however sweep away the most sophisticated elements of his work: his relendess self-scrutiny, his arresting and brazen honesty, his inspir ing voice. To nd how one stays alive under the conditions of totalitarianism, to nd what it means to live an internal

III.
Berkman's archist was Prison rst Memoirs published ofby anEmma An Goldman's now renowned journal Mother Earth in 1912. It quickly collected a loyal, albeit undersized, underground audience and then, like so many works of autobiographical literature, was lost in time, submerged in the blackness of neglect. Since September 1999 when the New York Review of Books republished it, the work has been infused with new life, a new readership, and a formidable responsibility only a classic could under take. The central question posed by Prison Memoirs is how such an abyss might form between the idealistic aspirations of a society and its sobering reality. Berk man asks how the chasm between the dream of a harmonious social order and the catastrophe of its actuality shapes our daily existence. Perhaps most intensely, he asks how violence manifests in Ameri can society not as some unwarranted madness or epidemic, but rather as a systemic and calculable effect inherent in the rift between the ideal and the reality. Hardly outdated, the questions Berk man raises seem all the more signicant coming from a man who readily accepts political violence as an activist's instru ment, a position incessandy debated and scrutinized in the media since September 11. Berkman was not a terrorist how ever, and to him the political meaning of

70 / fall 2005

Species of Anarchist Memory life unimpeded by the fear of the "suc ceeding darkness" of modernity, is to nd Alexander Berkman's memories in their raw and very human shape. between the lines where they are either recognized and harvested by the reader or drowned in festering and undiscov ered textual caverns. Bequeathed by the legacy of Surrealism, Panegyric acknowl edges all the philosophical conundrums inherent to recounting with any precision the trajectory of one's life, and instead sweeps out from under the text any refer ence point or resemblance to narrative form. Instead the memoir Malevich's white square on a white back ground, nor even Goya's last pictures, where black takes over everything, as Saturn devours his children."13 Revolu tions, the "surface eddies on the river of time,"14 are what constitute the replen ishment of hope, the thrill of potentiality, the feat of liberty, the life of equality. V. iiOf all the truths which go to make up this volume of Panegyric" Debord al leges "it will be acknowledged that the most profound resides in the very man ner of assembling and presenting them together."15 It is precisely this emphasis of style, of appearance and structure over content, which makes Berkman and Debord worth com paring. In our present era dominated by historical disregard, an age so bereft of collective memory, the art of anarchist memoir writing is a solemn task whose implications are not merely political, but revolutionary. To an ep och that has forgotten how to historicize itself, what these men remember about their lives, vital as it may be, is not nearly as important as how they remember it. A ne example of the way in which collec tive memory functions in contemporary society takes us back to the events of September 11, 2001. The mode of remembrance deployed by the media following the horrifying event was the incessant portrayal of its visual record. We all sat and watched the appalling im ages of planes smashing into the trade towers over and over with terrible awe. The image soon became iconic by the sheer quantity of its representation. The depiction of the event was as ceaseless as it was ubiquitous. The recycling vision was interminable, indeed almost rhyth mic in its regularity. Rather than create a qualitative memory of the catastrophe,

IV.
hoperead to nd within it some trace One in might Debord's memoirs of his life, some chronological series of events that gave rise to the Debord of The Society of the Spectacle, or to the numerous cin ematic techniques he inno vated. But to read Panegyric with such intent necessar ily disappoints. Panegyric is divided into two parts (the third burned during the night of 30 November 1994, in accordance with Debord's wishes, passed on by suicide note). It was published in English for the rst time by Verso in the fall of 2004. The rst part is an autobiographi cal sketch, the second a sequence of images some what haphazardly arranged, neither of which contain within them any traditional information regarding Debord's life. The rst volume of Panegyric, a mere 68 pages, contains at least as many quotes as it does original writing. "Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs," writes Debord of our age, an age marked by, in his terms "a milieu of demolition experts."9 The entire volume reads like an archipelago of quotations, taken from a broad range of sourcesShakespeare, Li Po,Thucydides, Tocqueville, Novalis, Clausewitz loosely strung together by a meandering and self-aggrandizing commentary on no one thing in particular. "My method will be very simple," Debord declares at the outset, "I will tell what I have loved; and, in the light, everything else will become evident and make itself well enough un derstood."10 In typical Debordian fash ion, Panegyric presents information im plicitly, subtly driving ideas and concepts

sovereignty is, how many kinds there are, how one acquires it, how one keeps it, how one loses it11," by refracting insight with skillful awkwardness, producing a stimulating disequilibrium. What Debord does make clear is his love of the revolutionary moment, the "ash on the horizon."12 When human beings, degraded by the authority of total power, nd themselves obliged to view their relationships in light of a pure freedom, thrust themselves into history, and capture for themselves the basis of their own lives, the true source of living emerges. In Debord's esteem, "nothing in art has ever given me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance... nothing else: neither Mallarme's blank page, nor

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory we relied on a quantitative one. This was our way of remembering September 11th, by reprocessing the event until its horror became normalized. Indeed we remem bered the event in such a way that we could be assured that its impact would be forgotten, obsolete. Or otherwise the reiteration of the image of the burning towers has been used instrumentally to legitimize imperial wars and the illegiti mate detention in the United States of non-citizens. This irreverent and gro tesque use of the memory of those who died would perhaps never be tolerated unless the intense impact of the event were rst mitigated by the unremitting visual portrayal of the event. This is the ahistoricism militating against collective remembrance in our day, this is the obso lescence of the past, this is the assassina tion of meaning itself. It may be safely said that by its si lence, collective memory will have signi ed the limits of justice. The boundaries of the thinkable and the limits of the possible are carved by memory. To ask the question why the events the total ity of which we call history occur as it does, to ask what power it is that moves the destinies of people, is also to ask how memory functions in a given social universe. It is because of the way in which the past is staged, the way we read ourselves backwards, that meaning in the present becomes accessible and alterna tive futures imaginable. A reconstruc tive vision for an anarchist politics must nd new forms of memory, new ways of commemorating and invigorating the befallen past. An anarchist memory must negotiate the past not by raising its voice against society or protesting against the obvious injustice of late capitalism, but rather by elevating social criticism to the level of form, thereby embodying its critique, personifying how things might otherwise be. The ways in which Debord and Berk man read themselves backwards provides anarchist theory with a model for think ing the past, for rediscovering how the past matters. By contrast to Berkman, Debord's language is convoluted and conceited. The continual shift of mean ing, present in nearly every sentence, quite deliberate on Debord's part, yields an effect evocative of what life and mem ories are actually like: paradoxical, be wildering, eccentric, ironic. His method of remembrance is layered with multiple meaningsmuddled, fluid, non-linear, packed with planned inconsistencies, and marked with an arbitrary and owing array of images. Rather than personify meaninglessness though, Debord's auto biography protests meaning itself. The way we deploy meaning in pursuit of a political objective is itself laced with all kinds of problematic assumptions, which becomes clear to the reader struggling to interpret the obscurity of Debord's work. Debord's refusal to submit to a conven tional narrative style allows his memories to drift and link into alternative constel lations of meaning, which inspire innova tive strategies of remembrance to emerge. His memories are not anchored in any familiar framework and thus have the power to challenge the axiomatic. "Our only manifestations, which remained rather rare and buried in the rst years," Debord muses of the letters published by the Situationist International, "were meant to be completely unacceptable."16 To celebrate the unacceptable is not merely the legacy of Dadaism but also the work of a revolutionary form of memory. Berkman's memories are framed somewhat more conventionally. His life emerges from the page in the reader's mind as an undivided sum. His memoirs read as a personal diary, and as such pres ent the reader with a familiar format. Yet Berkman presents his life as a collage of visual impressions which overlay and in terrupt one another. Describing rst the fateful train ride to Frick's ofce, Berk man then digresses into memories of his youthful life, of the buoyant aspirations of his adolescence, and then of his moth er's early death. His frequent digressions into displaced moments which beckon from an outmoded past gives time it self an episodic quality in Berkman's memories. Berkman's invocation of the anachronistic makes the present appear awkward and thus able to be deed. It is an imaginative display of memory, one that renders the reader all too aware that we affect history in our attempts to un derstand it. Perhaps the portraits each man chose to emblazon upon the opening pages of their memoirs most accurately depict the differences between them. Whereas Berkman chose a picture taken from the side, his head turned to meet the gaze of the camera, eyes framed by spectacles, mouth somber and straight, Debord chose a fuzzy image of his palm taken at close range. Whereas Berkman's memories are forthright, glaring, intense, Debord's are sensitive, peculiar, and vague. Taken together the memoirs of Berkman and Debord present a com bined style of remembrance that conjures to life the rhythms and shifting patterns that gesture from the past in a way that provoke rather than comply with the present. 3^

Endnotes
1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Ex tremes: A History of the World, 19141991 (New York Vintage Books, 1994), 3. 2. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 13. 3. Guy Debord, Panegyric 1 (New York: Verso, 2004), 67. 4. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spec tacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. 5. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, (Lincoln: University of Ne braska Press, 1995), 66. 6. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, 97. 7. Ibid.,xix. 8. Ibid., dedication page. 9. Debord, Panegyric, 14. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. Ibid., 56. 13. Ibid., 63. 14. Ibid., 56. 15. Ibid., 11.

721 fall 2005

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Summer 2005 Grants Awarded

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of essay-length works that treat themes of importance to the development of contemporary anarchist The Institute Anarchist Studies awards total of $2,000 annually to radical and translators theory for and practice. We are pleased toaannounce the recipients of the summerwriters 2005 IAS grants. Each author was awarded $350 to support the completion of his project. Kazembe Balagun was awarded a grant for "Queering the X: James Baldwin, Malcolm X and the Third World." The essay is an intellectual intervention in the debates about gender, race and sexuality. By promoting an intertextual dialogue between Malcolm X and Baldwin, the essay will foreground the queer inuences in both men's analysis of racial oppression. Showing how both Malcolm and James' vision of a just society included aspects of an erotic, the essay will shift much of the rhetorical essentialism from both men's work and illustrate means by which radical/revolutionary activists can use both in an anti-authoritarian framework Balagun is a New York-based cultural historian and frequendy contributes articles to the NYC Indypendent and is a member of Estacion-LibrePeople of Color in Solidarity with Chiapas. Evan Daniel was awarded a grant for "Rolling for the Revolution: A Transnational History of Cuban Cigarmakers in Havana, South Florida and New York City, 1868-1895." From the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, Cuban torcedores (cigar makers) exemplied the highly autonomous work culture of skilled artisans and their newspapers and workplace orators, or lectors, articulated an explicidy internationalist anarchist ideology. Despite this internationalist orientation, Cuban cigar makers played a pivotal role in the ght against Spanish rule by raising funds, disseminating propaganda, and eventually participating in armed struggle. This essay will ask how and why Cuban cigar makers who were anarchist internationalists eventually supported a nationalist endeavor, adopting and adapting both anarchism and nationalism in order to respond to their changing social and material realities. Daniel lives in New York City, where he is a processing archivist at the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University and a Ph.D. student in History and Political Science at the New School for Social Research. Ramor Ryan was awarded a grant for "Zapatista Spring: Autonomy and a Water Project." The essay will tell the story of a solidarity project to install a potable water system in a Zapatista base community located on occupied land. Offering their technical knowledge, their solidarity and enthusiasm for the Zapatista struggle for autonomy and self-determination, a group of anarchists from Mexico City, the US and Europe were sent

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by the Zapatista Revolutionary Clandestine Committee to the village of Rafael Moreno deep within the Lacandon Jungle. Living and working with the companer@s for 10 weeks, the activists experienced rebel joy and the wretched hardships of abject poverty in equal measure. "Zapatista Spring" will explore the notion of international solidarity, and examine questions provoked by the water project experience: how are meaningful bridges of solidarity built between privileged activists of the North and those of the disadvantaged South? When is solidarity no more than charity, and when does it really help build autonomy? Ryan lives somewhere in the global rebel underground and has worked on a dozen water projects in different regions of the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas. His book Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile, for which he received an IAS grant in 2002, has been contracted by AK Press and will be published in spring 2006.

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Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Thank You Chuck, and Farewell!

ered a group of us together at his Ten years home ago, in Albany, Chuck New Morse York, gath to initiate a new political project. His idea was to found an organization dedicated to increasing the theoretical development of the anarchist movement. Chuck's proposal was to do this by raising money and then giving grants to assist radical writers. With that rst meeting in 1995, the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) was born. And now, ten years later, the IAS has given away over $50,000 to more than fty writers from twelve countries, and has expanded its projects to include a theoretical journal, the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, the Latin American Archives project, and soon, a book imprint collaboration with AK Press. The IAS continues, but sadly with out Chuck. In April of this year, Chuck resigned his position as a board member. Chuck was both the founder of the IAS and its rst general director. Chuck put in long hours and seless amounts of work to establish the IAS. The rst IAS ofce was in his home, and the organization's activities took up all of Chuck's timeall generously donated. His devotion to the project, moreover, was ceaseless. In addition, Chucks other project, The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Booksa successful project in its own rightwas merged with the IAS publication, Perspectives on Anarchist The ory, making for a much more substantive, comprehensive publication, as is hopefully evident to readers with this current issue. Chuck has that rare combination of an overarching political vision and an ability to concentrate on all the little things nec essary to move us in that direction. He both knows what type of society he wants to live in and all the hard work needed to get us there. He is meticulous in his at tention to details and highly organized some might fondly say to the point of being obsessive-compulsive. Chuck has strong opinions and loves to debate, yet he always wanted to do what was best for the IAS and the movement it servesand still does. He constandy reminded board members of our responsibility to our do nors, and worked to honor those sacrices and nancial contributions that make the IAS possible. The board will miss Chuck's presence and his invaluable contributions. We are also sure he will succeed in whatever proj ects he sets his sights on next. The IAS will forever be in his debt, as will those many anarchist writers, thinkers, and revolutionaries around the world that the IAS has encouraged or inspired.

Grant Updates
Daniel Burton-Rose continues to nd new material for his project Listening to an Enforced Silence: Ba-Jin in Communist China. The project collects the insights of Li Feiganan anarchist organizer who employs the pen name "Ba Jin" and has become a central gure in twentieth-cen tury Chinese literature. While working on Listening to an Enforced Silence, which he hopes to complete in the fall of 2006, Burton-Rose is translating Ba Jin's auto biography, Memoirs (1936). Memoirs is the work of Ba-Jin's which was most af fected by communist censorship, and the translation will indicate sections excised from the post-1949 edition of the book Burton-Rose was awarded an IAS grant in February 2005. Trevor Paglen has completed the Recording Carceral Landscapes project for which he was awarded a grant in July 2004. The project is a collection of im ages, texts and interviews that make visible the social, political, and economic relationships that constitute California's massive prison system. In order to make the material available as widely as possible and to distribute it at no cost, Paglen has produced the project as a website (paglen. org/carceral). The site includes downloadables that can be printed and distributed for educational and organizing purposes. The rst volume of Robert Graham's Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas was published in spring 2005 by Black Rose Books. The twovolume project assembles the denitive texts of the anarchist tradition, organizing them chronologically and thematically. Graham has acquired English translations of classical anarchist essays for inclusion in the rst volume of the project that have never before been published. These in clude substantial selections from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Latin American texts as well as essays by Otto Gross, Gustav Landauer, and Diego Abad de Santillan. Graham is currendy working on the second volume of the two-volume project. Graham was awarded an IAS grant in January 2004. Nate Holdren has completed his translation of the Colectivo Situaciones's 19 and 20: Notes for the New Social Protagonism. The translation of the radical Bue nos Aires collective's account of the social movements that exploded in Argentina on December 19 and 20,2001, will make the book available to an English-speak ing audience for the rst time when it is published by Rowman and Littleeld in 2006. Holdren devotes his spare time to Notas Rojas, a collective that aims to translate Spanish-language political theory and social movement history into English. People interested in getting involved are invited to contact him at: nateholdren@gmail.com. Holdren re ceived in IAS grant in July 2003.

74/fall 2005

Institute for Anarchist Studies Updates

The IAS s 2005 Fund-raising Campaign

Promoting critical scholarship exploring social domination and reconstructive visions of a free society
theoretical tools necessary for critiquing systems of domination and envisioning alternatives to them. For nearly a decade, the IAS has worked to support the development of the At a time when genuinely radical movements in North America are at low ebb, it is more important than ever to create opportunities for anti-authoritarians to analyze contemporary challenges and strategies and to reect critically on movement practices and dilemmas. Through our grant program and other efforts, the IAS supports and sustains forums in which such theoretical work is possible, and contributes to nurturing a global community of anarchist scholars and public intellectuals. Over the past decade, the IAS has funded over fty projects by authors from countries around the world, including Argentina, Canada, Germany, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the United States. We have funded movement research, anthologies, translations, historical studies, online publications, books that serve as organizing tools and others that read like pirates' tales. Last winter, the IAS modied its grant program to fund and provide editorial and publishing assistance for writers and translators of essay-length works only. The IAS has been able to provide this unique and important support thanks to the generosity of our comrades and allies around the world, and we are asking for your assistance once again. We are trying to raise S 15,000 by January 2006 in order to keep awarding grants to radical writers, developing our publishing efforts, and supporting our other projects. Your donation will help the IAS to: Award USS2,000 in grants to writers and translators of essay-length work that treat themes of importance to the development of anarchist theory and practice; Provide editorial and publishing assistance to the essay writers and translators we fund. Many completed essays will be published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory or in a new books series to be published in collaboration with AK Press; Sponsor the annual Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, a scholarly space in which to reexamine and reinvigorate the social and political tradition of anarchism; Publish Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, our bi-annual journal for theoretical debates and projects reective of a diversity of anti-authoritarian tendencies; Coordinate a speakers' bureau. As an expression of our appreciation for your support, we are offering book gifts to IAS donors who reside in the US or Canada, thanks to the good people at Raven Books in Amherst, Massachusetts. IAS donors who give USS25 or more are entitled to receive at least one great book from their collection. All donors will receive an annual subscription to Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Please donate today.

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The IAS s 2005 Fundraising Campaign

Great Books for IAS Donors
Raven Books of Amherst, Massachusetts, has generously made the following books available to IAS donors: For a US$25 donation to the IAS, we will mail you any one of the following books and a one-year subscription to Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. For a US$50 donation, we will send you any two books and a one-year subscription to Perspectives. For a US$100 contribution, you will receive five of these great books, and a one-year subscription to Perspectives. For a US$500 donation, you will receive all of the following books and a one-year subscription to Perspectives. Books will be delivered to U.S. and Canadian destinations free of charge. Other destinations will require that the donor pay for shipping expenses. Abramovitz, Mimi. Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. South End, 1996. Paper, 411 pp., $22. Abu-Jamal, Mumia. Death Blossoms: Reections from a Prisoner of Conscience. Litrnis, 1996. Paper, 153 pp., $12. Barsamian, David. Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from the Progressive Magazine. South End, 2004. Paper, 233 pp., $15. Bohlen,Jim. Making Waves: The Origins and Future of Greenpeace. Black Rose, 2001. Paper, 181 pp., $19.99. Bookchin, Murray. Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998. AK Press, 1999. Paper, 350 pp., $19.95. Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! South End, 1997. Paper, 421 pp., $22. Breines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968. Rutgers, 1989. Cloth, 185 pp., $25. Brownstein, Michael. World on Fire. Open City, 2002. Paper, 180 pp., $14. Bullard, Robert, ed. Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity. South End, 2004. Paper, 244 pp., $18. Chomsky, Noam. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. South End, 2000. Paper, 251 pp., $16. Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, and Gabriel CohnBendit. Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative. AK press, 2000. Paper, 231 pp., $16.95. Desfor, Gene, ed. Just Doing It: Popular Collective Action in the Americas. Black Rose, 2002. Paper, 204 pp., $24.95. Dyson, Rose A. Mind Abuse: Media Violence in an Information Age. Black Rose, 2000. Paper, 225 pp., $19.99. Fernandez, Frank. Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement. See Sharp, 2001. Paper, 152 pp., $10.95. Guevara, Ernesto "Che." The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (lm tie-in). Ocean Press, 2004. Paper, 175 pp., $14.95. Guevara, Ernesto "Che." Diarios De Motocicleta: Notas De Viaje Por America Latina (Spanish edition of Motorcycle Diaries). Ocean Press, 2004. Paper, 168 pp., $14.95. Hiro, Dilip. Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians. Olive Branch, 1999. Paper, 371 pp., $18.95. hooks, bell. Talking Back Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End, 1989. Paper, 184 pp., $14. hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. South End, 1993. Paper, 194 pp., $14. hooks, bell, and Cornel West. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. South End, 1991. Paper, 171 pp., $14. Kunsder, William. Politics on Trial: Five Famous Trials of the Twentieth Century (includes Sacco and Vanzetti). Ocean Press, 2003. Paper, 129 pp., $9.95. La Botz. Democracy in Mexico: Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform. South End, 1995. Paper, 274 pp., $17. Larson, Neil. Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nation in the Americas. Verso, 2001. Paper, 213 pp., $22. Mann, Scott. Heart of a Heartless World: Religion as Ideology. Black Rose, 1999. Paper, 400 pp., $24.95. Marable, Manning. Black Liberation in Conservative America. South End, 1997. Paper, 285 pp., $16. Morris, William. Art and Society: Lectures and Essays. George's Hill, 1993. Paper, 174 pp., $14. Neville, Richard. American Psycho: Behind Uncle Sam's Mask of Sanity. Ocean Press, 2003. Paper, 126 pp., $11.95. Prada, Manuel Gonzalez. Free Pages and Hard Times: Anarchist Musings. Oxford, 2003. Paper, 303 pp., $19.95. Ramonet, Ignacio. Wars of the 21st Century: New Threats, New Fears. Ocean Press, 2004. Paper 181 pp., $16.95. Ray, Ellen. Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way. Ocean Press, 2003. Paper, 80 pp., $9.95. Ray, Ellen, and William Schaap. Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism (articles from Covert Action magazine). Ocean Press, 2003. Paper, 310 pp., $19.95. Roy, Arundhati. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy with David Barsamian. South End, 2004. Paper, 178 pp., $16. Simone, Timothy Maliqalim. About Face: Race in Postmodern America. Autonomedia, 1989. Paper, 243 pp., $12. Stauffer, Julie. The Water Crisis: Finding the Right Solutions. Black Rose, 1999. Paper, 154 pp., $19.99. Waridel, Laure. Coffee with Pleasure: Just Java and World Trade. Black Rose, 2002. Paper, 173 pp., $21.95. Warnock, John. The Other Mexico: The North American Triangle Completed. Black Rose, 1995. Paper, 221 pp., $21.95. William, Raymond. Writing in Society. Verso, 1991. Paper, 269 pp., $20. Zinn, Howard. Postwar America: 1945-1971. South End, 2002. Paper, 278 pp., $15.

I Support the IAS!

Thank you for contributing to the IAS's annual fundraising campaign. Your generosity will help us to continue supporting the development of anarchist theory over the coming year. As an expression of our appreciation for your support, we are offering book gifts to IAS donors who reside in the U.S. or Canada, thanks to the good people at Raven Books in Amherst, Massachusetts. IAS donors who give US$25 or more are entided to receive at least one great book from their collection. All donors will receive an annual subscription to Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Contribution Information I want to make a one-time contribution of I want to make a monthly* contribution of Monthly donations can be automatically deducted from a credit card and will run for a renewable twelve-month period.

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State/Region/Province: D I prefer to make this contribution anonymously Please keep me informed of IAS activities via e-mail Payment Type Check Money Order Credit Card Donations

The IAS accepts donations with most major credit cards through our website at http://www.anarchist-studies.org/support. BOOK GIFTS (See page 62 for a complete book list) Choose as many as apply. 1

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Please mail this form and your donation to:

Institute for Anarchist Studies P.O. Box 1664 Peter Stuyvesant Station New York, NY 10009

Thank you for your support!

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

Contributors
Alexis Bhagat is a sound artist and writer from New York City and is co-ed itor of Sound Generation, a survey of con temporary sound art, forthcoming from Autonomedia. He serves on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Alejandro de Acosta lives in Austin, Texas and teaches philosophy at South western University. His current research and teaching interests are in Latin American philosophy (especially ques tions of language, territory, history, and cosmology), and the theoretico-practical intersection of anarchist theory, experi mental therapeutic practices and assorted "limit-experiences." He is also interested in studying and intensifying the tension between philosophy as an academic dis cipline and philosophy as self-fashioning, or as way of life. Mary Foster lives in Montreal where she is active in Block the Empire-Mon treal. Melissa Forbis lives in Austin, Texas. She is working on a translation of Zulema Lehm and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's Anarchist Trade Unions in Bolivia: 1920-1950. Louis-Frederic Gaudet is a re searcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Quebec, Mon treal, (UQAM). He has organized with a number of human rights and anticapitalists organizations. He is currendy involved with the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair collective and a board member of the LAS. Alexander Hirsch is a doctoral stu dent in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His forthcoming review "The Political Acoustics of the Poetic Imagination," on Adrianna Cavarero's latest text For More Than One Voice: toward a philosophy of the voice, and Simon Critchley's Things Merely Are will be published by Theory and Event shortly. He can be reached at akhirsch@ucsc.edu. Nate Holdren co-translated the book 19th and20fh: Notes for the New Social Protagonism by Colectivo Situaciones, a proj ect the IAS generously supported. He is involved in Notas Rojas, a small e-mail st seeking to support and encourage radical translations. He can be reached at nateholdren@gmail.com. Jerome Klassen is a student in To ronto. Eric Laursen is writer, editor, and activist based in New York City. He has contributed to a wide variety of publica tions and is currently researching a book on social welfare provision in a stateless society. He works with the International Solidarity Movement-NYC and the Black Key Media Collective. Mark Lance is a professor of philoso phy and professor of justice and peace at Georgetown University, a board member of the IAS, and a member of the national steering committee of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Cale Layton lives in Austin, Texas. He is working on a translation of Zulema Lehm and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's Anarchist Trade Unions in Bolivia: 19201950. Josh MacPhee is an artist and activ ist currently living in Troy, NY. He loves exploring abandoned buildings lled with grafti, using art as an excuse for large-scale social re-organization and is co-editing two new books, one on art and anarchism for AK Press, and also a collection of radical graphics for Soft Skull Press. He is currently obsessed with 1970s British Anarchist book de sign; if you are too, drop him an email at josh@justseeds.org. Todd May is Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University. He works on political philosophy and recent French thought, including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist An archism. He has been involved in a num ber of progressive struggles, including Palestinian rights, gay and lesbian rights, and anti-racism work John Petrovato is a long-time board member and former director of the IAS. He is a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, human rights activist, and owner of Raven Used Books in Cambridge, MA. Ramor Ryan lives somewhere in the global rebel underground and for several years was based in Chiapas, Mexico, do ing international solidarity work His book Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile will be published by AK Press in spring 2006. Andrea Schmidt lives and works from Montreal. She is a board member of the IAS and co-editor of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. Stevphen Shukaitis is a Ph.D. stu dent at the University of Leicester Cen tre for Philosophy and Political Econo my. He is a member of the Ever Reviled Records Worker Collective, the Planetary Autonomist Network, and is currendy writing a book {Between Sisyphus and Self-Management) on the history of worker self-management and its continu ing relevance and possibilities in an age of globalized capital. He can be reached at stevphen@mutualaid.org. For more of his writing see refusingstructures.net. Sebastian Touza is the co-translator 19th and 20"': Notes for the New Social Protagonism. He is involved in other transla tion projects and has written articles on Colectivo Situaciones and other radical experiments taking place in Argentina. His email address is lstouza@sfu.ca.

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