Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement
by Barbara Epstein [UC Santa Cruz]
Monthly Review
Many among todays young radical activists, especially those
at the center of the anti-globalization and anti-corporate
movements, call themselves anarchists. But the
intellectual/philosophical perspective that holds sway in
these circles might be better described as an anarchist
sensibility than as anarchism per se. Unlike the Marxist
radicals of the sixties, who devoured the writings of Lenin
and Mao, todays anarchist activists are unlikely to pore
over the works of Bakunin. For contemporary young radical
activists, anarchism means a decentralized organizational
structure, based on affinity groups that work together on an
ad hoc basis, and decision-making by consensus. It also
means egalitarianism; opposition to all hierarchies;
suspicion of authority, especially that of the state; and
commitment to living according to ones values. Young
radical activists, who regard themselves as anarchists, are
likely to be hostile not only to corporations but to
capitalism. Many envision a stateless society based on
small, egalitarian communities. For some, however, the
society of the future remains an open question. For them,
anarchism is important mainly as an organizational structure
and as a commitment to egalitarianism. It is a form of
politics that revolves around the exposure of the truth
rather than strategy. It is a politics decidedly in the
moment.
Anarchism and Marxism have a history of antagonism. Bakunin,
writing in the late nineteenth century, argued that the
working class could not use state power to emancipate itself
but must abolish the state. Later, anarchists turned to
propaganda of the deed, often engaging in acts of
assassination and terrorism in order to incite mass
uprisings.
In the early twentieth century, anarcho-syndicalists
believed that militant trade unionism would evolve into
revolution as a result of an escalating logic of class
struggle. Marx (and also Lenin) had pointed out that
constructing socialism would require a revolutionary
transformation of the state (and ultimately a withering
away of the state based on class). Anarchists, however,
criticized Marxists for tending in practice to treat the
state as an instrument that could simply be taken over and
used for other ends. Anarchists saw the state not as a tool,
but as an instrument of oppression, no matter in whose
hands. The Stalinist experience lent credence to that
critique.
The anarchist mindset of todays young activists has
relatively little to do with the theoretical debates between
anarchists and Marxists, most of which took place in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has more
to do with an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian
perspective. There are versions of anarchism that are deeply
individualistic and incompatible with socialism. But these
are not the forms of anarchism that hold sway in radical
activist circles, which have more in common with the
libertarian socialism advocated by Noam Chomsky and Howard
Zinn than with the writings of Bakunin or Kropotkin. Todays
anarchist activists draw upon a current of morally charged
and expressive politics.
There is considerable overlap between this contemporary
anarchism and democratic socialism partly because both were
shaped by the cultural radicalism of the sixties. Socialists
and contemporary anarchists share a critique of class
society and a commitment to egalitarianism. But the history
of antagonism between the two worldviews has also created a
stereotype of anarchism in the minds of many Marxists,
making it difficult to see what the two perspectives have in
common. Anarchisms absolute hostility to the state, and its
tendency to adopt a stance of moral purity, limit its
usefulness as a basis for a broad movement for egalitarian
social change, let alone for a transition to socialism.
Telling the truth to power is or should be a part of radical
politics but it is not a substitute for strategy and
planning.
There are also things that Marxists could learn from the
anti-globalist activists. Their anarchism combines both
ideology and imagination, expressing its fundamentally moral
perspective through actions that are intended to make power
visible (in your face) while undermining it. Historically,
anarchism has often provided a too-often ignored moral
compass for the left. Today, anarchism is attracting young
activists, while Marxist socialism is not, or at least, not
in the same numbers. What follows is an effort to make sense
of the reasons for this attraction.
1.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
anarchism anchored the militant, radical side of the U.S.
labor movement and left in something like the way that
Communism would in later decades, in the wake of the
Bolshevik Revolution. Though there were anarchist
organizations, most importantly the anarcho-syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), organization was not
a strength of the anarchist movement, as it was, later, of
the Communist movement. Anarchist identity was not linked to
membership in any organization in the way that Communist
identity was later linked to membership in the Communist
Party. Despite such differences anarchism occupied something
like the position within the broader left that Communism
later came to occupy.
The leadership of the nineteenth century Knights of Labor,
the first large national labor organization, wavered in
relation to working class militancy. The Knights of Labor
included reform associations as well as labor unions; at
times the leadership of the organization discouraged labor
union militancy that seemed likely to threaten the
organizations reform agenda. Alongside them, a small
anarchist labor movement upheld a consistent militancy,
which contrasted with the stance of the Knights of Labor.
The wavering support of the Knights leadership for trade
union struggles made the organization vulnerable to
competition from the American Federation of Labor (AFL),
which limited its membership to trade unions.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the frequent
slides of the economy into depression encouraged widespread
anti-capitalist sentiment among U.S. workers; in its
formative years the AFL associated itself with this radical
sensibility. But in the early years of the twentieth century
growing prosperity opened up the possibility that skilled
workers, at least, could gain more stability. The AFL
renounced its former gestures towards radicalism, proclaimed
itself concerned only with wages and workplace conditions
and in relation to broader issues willing to respect the
power of capital. The AFLs conservatism, its focus on
organizing skilled, mostly native born workers, and its
unwillingness to organize the unskilled or immigrants left
considerable space for a more radical labor movement.
A radical alternative to the AFL emerged first through the
Western Federation of Miners and other labor organizations,
which engaged in militant struggle and were open to
socialist and anarchist perspectives. The IWW, formed by
these organizations and others, adopted an explicitly
anarcho-syndicalist perspective, organized the unskilled,
foreign-born, and black workers ignored by the AFL, and
stood for militant, radical trade unionism. The socialist
left divided along the same lines as the labor movement,
with some leaning toward the IWW, some toward the AFL. The
Socialist Party included a left wing that supported the IWW
and its militant approach to class struggle and a right wing
that supported the AFL and was inclined towards electoral
politics. The narrowness of the IWWs conception of
revolution, which ruled out any engagement in the political
arena, led many Socialists who at first supported the IWW to
distance themselves from it over time.
The IWW conducted a series of brilliant, often successful,
organizing campaigns, but IWW locals were often short-lived.
They were weakened partly by their reluctance to sign
contracts, based on the view that any agreement with capital
was class collaboration, and partly by the vulnerability of
the IWWs largely immigrant, often non-English speaking,
constituency to harassment by employers and legal repression
by the government. Ultimately the IWWs approach to
revolution was displaced by the Bolshevik Revolution,
enthusiastic support for which swept the U.S. left,
especially its immigrant constituencies, from which
anarchism had drawn its support. The Bolshevik Revolution
also led to a split in and the subsequent decline of the
Socialist Party, and to the ascendance of the Communist
Party within the U.S. left.
In the twenties, thirties, and forties, anarchism was
supplanted by Marxism, which became the leading form of left
thinking. The Communist movement was able to create strong
organizational structures, and was also more able to resist
corporate-led attacks and attempts at legal repression, than
the IWW and other anarchist groups had been. The
vulnerability of anarchism to attack, and the greater
ability of the Communist Party to resist attacks, were
illustrated by the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, anarchists unjustly accused of a payroll robbery
and murder in 1921. The leadership of the Sacco-Vanzetti
defense campaign was expanded to include communists,
socialists and liberals, at the urging of prominent
anarchist Carlo Tresca, who recognized that anarchists alone
would not be able to mobilize mass support. By 1927, when
Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, anarchism had ceased to be
a major tendency within the U.S. left. This was partly due
to the attraction of Bolshevism, but also partly due to the
assimilation of immigrants in the United States. Previously
the major constituency for anarchism, by the late twenties,
most immigrants who might have at one time followed
anarchism had turned to communism, socialism or liberalism.
Two of the most important leaders of the Communist Party,
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Z. Foster, were both
anarcho-syndicalists before they became Communists. Their
political histories are emblematic of a broader trajectory
in the history of the U.S. left. The decline of anarchism
was unfortunate for the Communist Party and for the rest of
the socialist left, which could have benefited from the
anti-authoritarian perspective and moral critique that
anarchists might have provided.
In the forties and fifties, anarchism, in fact if not in
name, began to reappear, often in alliance with pacifism, as
the basis for a critique of militarism on both sides of the
Cold War. The anarchist/pacifist wing of the peace movement
was small in comparison with the wing of the movement that
emphasized electoral work, but made an important
contribution to the movement as a whole. Where the more
conventional wing of the peace movement rejected militarism
and war under all but the most dire circumstances, the
anarchist/pacifist wing rejected these on principle. The
Communist Party supported the anti-fascist allies in the
Second World War, while many anarchists and some socialists
refused to serve. The anarchist/pacifist wing of the
movement also employed civil disobedience, which involved
personal risks that most people in the more conventional
wing of the movement were not willing to take.
2.
Within the movements of the sixties there was much more
receptivity to anarchism-in-fact than had existed in the
movements of the thirties. In the thirties, Communists,
radical trade unionists and others demanded state action on
behalf of working people and the poor, and succeeded in
pushing the New Deal toward the left. In a context in which
the left was, with some success, demanding a shift in the
orientation of the state, anarchism had little place. But
the movements of the sixties were driven by concerns that
were more compatible with an expressive style of politics,
with hostility to authority in general and state power in
particular. Relatively few sixties activists called
themselves anarchists or, for that matter, anything else.
Especially in the early sixties, many activists rejected all
ideologies and political labels. Nevertheless, many
activists were drawn to a style of politics that had much in
common with anarchism. Many of them, if asked what left
tradition they felt closest to, would probably have named
anarchism.
Civil rights struggles in the South pointed to the
discrepancy between democratic values and the policies of
those in power. The civil rights movement won the right of
blacks to vote, and thus transformed the South, largely
through the use of nonviolent direct action. Anarchist
ideology was not a factor in the development of the civil
rights movement. But the beliefs of many Christians, that
shaped the civil rights movement, had in common with
anarchism a deeply moral approach to politics and a focus on
direct action as a tactic. A generation of young activists
in the North drew inspiration from the civil rights movement
and wanted to adopt its style, but they were too firmly
secular to identify with Christianity, and besides, many of
them were Jews. In the emerging student movement in the
North, the Christian orientation of Southern blacks
translated into a politics with a moral base and a style
that revolved around expression.*
The early New Left, like the civil rights movement, was
concerned with the gap between the words and deeds of those
in power, in particular the contradiction between the
ostensible liberalism of the Democratic Party and its
pursuit of the Cold War. The war in Vietnam turned what had
been a relatively mild critique of liberalism into an angry
radicalism, which regarded the liberal state as the enemy.
By the late sixties, political protest was intertwined with
cultural radicalism based on a critique of all authority and
all hierarchies of power. Anarchism circulated within the
movement along with other radical ideologies. The influence
of anarchism was strongest among radical feminists, in the
commune movement, and probably in the Weather Underground
and elsewhere in the violent fringe of the anti-war
movement.
In the late sixties, a messianic mood, a sense that victory
could come any moment, swept through the movement. This was
linked to a tendency to equate radicalism with militancy, to
rapidly escalating standards for militancy, and to a
tendency to equate militancy and radicalism with violence,
or at least with threats of the use of violence. In the late
sixties and early seventies, the movement was pervaded by
rage against the war and the culture that had produced it,
and wild fantasies of immanent revolution, fantasies
regarded by those who held them as realistic views of what
the movement could accomplish with enough effort. In fact,
movement activists rarely initiated violence. But something
like madness took hold. In response perhaps to the
continuing international terror represented by the Vietnam
War, violent fantasies swept the movement, frightening many
people out of political activity. The radical movement of
the late sixties and early seventies mostly collapsed when
the war in Vietnam came to an end. The end of that movement
more or less coincided with the end of the draft and the
exit of the baby boom generation from the universities. It
was followed by a downturn in the economy which was taken as
a warning, by many young people who had participated in the
movement, that it was time to resume their careers or at
least find some stable means of making a living. The
generation of students that followed was smaller, more
cautious, and had no unifying cause.
In the late seventies activists influenced by a perspective
that drew from anarchism, pacifism, feminism and
environmentalism initiated a movement against nuclear power,
which they hoped would go on to address other issues,
eventually becoming a movement for nonviolent revolution.
They created a distinctive style of politics by drawing the
concept of the affinity group from the history of Spanish
anarchism, the tactic of large-scale civil disobedience from
the U.S. civil rights movement, and the process of
decision-making by consensus from the Quakers. The
nonviolent direct action movement, as it called itself,
conducted campaigns against nuclear power and nuclear arms.
The version of anarchism that circulated within the movement
called for egalitarian community based on small, autonomous
groups. The commitments to nonviolence, and to decision
making by consensus, were intended to shield the movement
from the problems that had plagued the anti-war movement of
the late sixties. Groups in various parts of the country
held large, dramatic protests which helped to mobilize
public opinion first against the nuclear industry and then
against the arms race, and a small army of activists gained
experience in non-violent civil disobedience.
Mass civil disobedience demonstrations became the signature
of the movement, and inability to move beyond this tactic
became a liability. In each campaign a point was reached at
which the size of civil disobedience protests leveled off
because the maximum number of people willing to be arrested
on that issue had become involved. At this point it would
become clear that civil disobedience protests alone could
not overturn the nuclear power industry, or the arms race.
The problems of the nonviolent direct action movement were
compounded by its rigid adherence to decision making by
consensus. The decline of the nuclear industry in the late
seventies and the de-escalation of the arms race in the
mid-eighties brought these campaigns to an end.
3.
The approach to politics developed by the nonviolent direct
action movement has outlasted the movement itself. Activists
throughout the progressive movement have adopted elements of
the movements style of politics. The current
anti-globalization movement has roots in the nonviolent
direct action movement, with which it shares a structure
based on small autonomous groups, a practice of
decision-making by consensus, and a style of protest that
revolves around mass civil disobedience. Each of the major
organizations of the nonviolent direct action movement began
with great promise but soon went into decline, in large part
due to the structural and ideological rigidities associated
with insistence on consensus decision-making and reluctance
to acknowledge the existence of leadership within the
movement. This raises a question for the anti-globalization
movement: will it share the fate of the nonviolent direct
action movements of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, or
will it gain the flexibility that will allow it to evolve
with changing circumstances?
The anarchist sensibility has made important contributions
to the radical tradition in U.S. history. It has brought an
insistence on equality and democracy, a resistance to
compromise of principle for the sake of political
expediency. Anarchism has been associated with efforts to
put the values of the movement into practice and to create
communities governed by these values. Anarchism has also
been associated with political theater and art, with
creativity as an element of political practice. It has
insisted that radical politics need not be dreary. But the
anarchist mindset also has its doctrinaire side, a tendency
to insist on principle to the point of disregarding the
context or likely results of political action. In this
regard the anarchist sensibility has something in common
with the outlook of Christian radicals who believe in acting
on their consciences and leaving the consequences to God.
The moral absolutism of the anarchist approach to politics
is difficult to sustain in the context of a social movement.
Absolute internal equality is hard to sustain. Movements
need leaders. Anti-leadership ideology cannot eliminate
leaders, but it can lead a movement to deny that it has
leaders, thus undermining democratic constraints on those
who assume the roles of leadership, and also preventing the
formation of vehicles for recruiting new leaders when the
existing ones become too tired to continue. Within radical
feminism a view of all hierarchies as oppressive led to
attacks on those who took on the responsibilities of
leadership. This led to considerable internal conflict, and
created a reluctance to take on leadership roles, which
weakened the movement. Movements dominated by an anarchist
mindset are prone to burning out early.
4.
Despite its problems, the appeal of anarchism has grown
among young activists, especially within what is generally
called the anti-globalization movement. This description is
not entirely accurate: the movements main focus is not on
stopping globalization but transforming the terms on which
it takes place, and it shades into the domestic
anti-corporate movement. The movement might better be
described as against neoliberalism, or against U.S.
imperialism and domination by U.S.-based transnational
corporations. But these are cumbersome phrases. So, like
most people, I describe this as the anti-globalization
movement.
The most dramatic moment of the anti-globalization movement
thus far, at least in the United States, was the
mobilization against the World Trade Organization in Seattle
in late November and early December of 1999. In the series
of demonstrations that took place over the course of several
days, the young, radical activists who engaged in civil
disobedience were greatly outnumbered by trade unionists and
members of mostly liberal environmental organizations. But
it was the young radicals who blockaded the meetings of the
WTO, fought the police, liberated the streets of Seattle,
and whose militancy brought the attention of the media to a
mobilization that would otherwise have gone relatively
unnoticed outside the left. The alliance that formed in
Seattle between young radicals, the trade unionists and the
liberal environmentalists was loose, and it has become even
looser since then. It is the young radicals who have pushed
the anti-globalization movement forward.
The anti-globalization movement includes the countless
individuals, groups, and coalitions that have joined in
demonstrations-in Seattle and elsewhere-against the WTO,
the IMF, the World Bank, and the two major parties that
support the existing international order. It includes the
organizations-many of them the same ones, now mobilizing in
this hemisphere against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
It overlaps with the anti-corporate movement. It includes
groups working against sweatshops, against destruction of
natural environments, and around a range of other issues.
These groups share an opposition to transnational
corporations and to the neoliberal government policies
that enable them to flourish. Most of the core activists in
this movement, in the United States at least, are young, in
their teens or twenties. Older people are involved as well,
including intellectuals and activists associated with such
organizations as Global Exchange and the International Forum
on Globalization. Many activists involved in anti-corporate
efforts, such as the Campaign for a Living Wage on
university campuses, consider themselves part of this
movement. And there are important links to the labor
movement. Most movement activists are white and culturally
middle-class, but this is changing with increasing
involvement of Latinos, particularly in connection with the
campaign against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
There are many in the movement who do not consider
themselves anarchists. These would include some of the older
intellectuals, as well as some younger activists with
experience in movements with other ideological leanings,
such as the international solidarity/anti-imperialist
movement, in which anarchism has not been a major influence.
There are activists who do not identify with any ideological
stance. Nevertheless anarchism is the dominant perspective
within the movement. The movement is organized along lines
understood as anarchist by movement activists, made up
largely of small groups that join forces on an ad hoc basis,
for particular actions and other projects. Movement
activists call this form of organization anarchist. It is
supported not only by those who call themselves anarchists
but by many who would not. Journalist Naomi Klein, in a
defense of the movement that appeared in The Nation, points
out that this form of organization allows the movement to
include many different styles, tactics, and goals, and that
the internet is an excellent medium for linking diverse
groups. The greatest tactical strength of the movement, she
argues, is its similarity to a swarm of mosquitoes. This
anarchist form of organization makes it possible for groups
that disagree in some respects to collaborate in regard to
common aims. At the demonstrations in Quebec City in May
2001, affinity groups formed sectors defined by their
willingness to engage in or tolerate violence, ranging from
those committed to nonviolence to those intending to use
unconventional tactics. This structure made it possible to
incorporate groups which otherwise would not have been able
to participate in the same demonstration.
There are probably more people in the anti-globalization
movement attracted to the movements culture and
organizational structure than to anarchism as a worldview.
Nevertheless anarchism is attractive as an alternative to
the version of radicalism associated with the Old Left and
the Soviet Union. Many activists in the anti-globalization
movement do not see the working class as the leading force
for social change. Movement activists associate anarchism
with militant, angry protest, with grassroots, leaderless
democracy, and with a vision of loosely linked small-scale
communities. Those activists who identify with anarchism are
usually anti-capitalist; among these, some would also call
themselves socialists (presumably of the libertarian
variety), some would not. Anarchism has the mixed advantage
of being rather vague in terms of its proscriptions for a
better society, and also of a certain intellectual fuzziness
that allows it to incorporate both Marxisms protest against
class exploitation, and liberalisms outrage at the
violation of individual rights. I spoke with one
anti-globalization activist who described the anarchism of
many movement activists as liberalism on steroids, that is,
they are in favor of liberal values, human rights, free
speech, diversityand militantly so.
The main target of the anti-globalization movement is
corporate power, not capitalism, but these perspectives do
not necessarily exclude one another. Some activists want
regulation of the corporations, forcing them to comply with
human and environmental rights; some want corporations
abolished. These aims are not necessarily incompatible.
Depending on how one defines the limitations to be imposed
on corporations, the line between regulation and abolition
can evaporate. There are activists in the movement,
especially among the more radical, younger people, for whom
the ultimate target is capitalism. In the late sixties many
of the radical activists who adopted one or another version
of Marxism were unwilling to entertain ideas that did not
fit a socialist perspective. The radical activists in the
anti-globalization movement tend to have a more fluid
approach to ideology. Despite their preferences for
anarchist forms of organization, and the anarchist visions
some hold of a future society, they are likely to read
Marxist-oriented accounts of global political economy. The
decentralized form of the movement and its commitment to
leaving room for a range of perspectives allows for a
certain flexibility of perspective. Activists may vacillate
between various outlooks, remain ambivalent, or combine
elements of anarchism, Marxism, and liberalism. This can
lead to ideological creativity. It can also lead to a habit
of holding various positions simultaneously which, if more
rigorously examined, would prove incompatible.
The most heated debate within the movement is over the
question of violence. The debate over violence within the
anti-globalization movement in the United States concerns
violence toward property, and the danger of inciting police
violence. In Seattle, groups of black-clad young people, who
later identified themselves as the Black Bloc, smashed
windows and destroyed property of corporate targets within
the downtown area over which protesters and police were
vying for control. These attacks took the organizers of the
protest by surprise, and, provoked more police violence
against protesters generally. Some nonviolent protesters
tried to restrain those smashing windows. In the wake of the
demonstration some protesters condemned the violence,
arguing that it discredited the movement as a whole and that
tactics should be decided democratically, not by small
groups acting autonomously. Others argued that window
smashing, and the police violence that it provoked, had
brought the attention of the media and given the
demonstration a prominence that it would not have otherwise
had. In subsequent demonstrations the Black Bloc and others
with similar approaches have become more integrated into the
movement and have modulated their actions, while some others
have become more willing to accept some violence against
property.
The fact that there is no section of the anti-globalization
movement in the United States that defends or routinely
engages in violence against people distinguishes the U.S.
movement from the movement in Europe. Demonstrations in
Prague and other European cities have included attacks on
policemen, and such attacks have come to be expected as a
part of any major mobilization of the movement.
In the context of the debate about violence in the United
States, within which violence against people is excluded,
the differences between the advocates of violence and those
who are willing to countenance violence under certain
circumstances are not clear-cut. In the early eighties
activists, especially religious activists, did things like
attempting to damage missiles as part of nonviolent direct
action. Destruction of property can be part of a nonviolent
politics. During the Vietnam War, pacifists and former
Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan led raids on
draft centers, destroying draft files by pouring blood on
them and, in one instance, by the use of homemade napalm. In
the eighties the Berrigans and other Christian pacifists, in
a series of Ploughshares Actions, invaded arms-producing
plants and attacked missiles with hammers and bare hands. It
seems to me that the importance of the current debate over
violence, in the anti-globalization movement, lies less in
whether or not the opponents of violence to property
prevail, and more in what kind of ethical guidelines the
movement sets for itself. What is important is whether the
movement establishes an image of expressing rage for its own
sake, or of acting according to an ethical vision.
5.
The traditional socialist left in the United States now
mostly consists of several magazines and journals, a few
annual conferences, a small number of intellectuals. Hope
for the revival of the left appears to lie with the
anti-globalization movement and the young radical activists
at its core. There are reasons to fear that the
anti-globalization movement may not be able to broaden in
the way that this would require. A swarm of mosquitoes is
good for harassment, for disrupting the smooth operation of
power and thus making it visible. But there are probably
limits to the numbers of people willing to take on the role
of the mosquito. A movement capable of transforming
structures of power will have to involve alliances, many of
which will probably require more stable and lasting forms of
organization than now exist within the anti-globalization
movement. The absence of such structures is one of the
reasons for the reluctance of many people of color to become
involved in the anti-globalization movement. Though the
anti-globalization movement has developed good relations
with many trade union activists, it is hard to imagine a
firm alliance between labor and the anti-globalization
movement without firmer structures of decision-making and
accountability than now exist. An alliance among the
anti-globalization movement and organizations of color, and
labor, would require major political shifts within the
latter. But it would also probably require some relaxation
of anti-bureaucratic and anti-hierarchical principles on the
part of activists in the anti-globalization movement.
For several decades radicalism has been at low ebb in the
United States, present in innumerable organizing projects
but lacking focus and momentum. The anti-globalization
movement provides focus and momentum, and holds out more
hope for a revival of the left than any other movement has
over the last two decades. The radical ideology that
prevails among its core activists represents a soft and
fluid form of anarchism. It is open to Marxist political
economy, prefers small-scale communities but does not
necessarily rule out the need for larger ones as well, is
suspicious of structures of authority, especially the state,
but does not necessarily deny the need for state power in
some form. Actually existing anarchism has changed and so
has actually existing Marxism. Marxists who participated
in the movements of the sixties tend to have a sharper
appreciation of the importance of social and cultural
equality, and of living according to our values in the
present, than did many members of previous generations of
Marxist activists. If a new paradigm of the left emerges
from the struggle against neoliberalism and the
transnational corporate order, it is likely to include
elements of anarchist sensibility as well as of Marxist
analysis.
* I am indebted to John Sanbonmatsu in my discussion of the
expressive politics of the sixties.
--------------
BARBARA EPSTEIN teaches in the History of Consciousness
Department at UC Santa Cruz and is working on a book on the
underground movement in the ghetto in Minsk, Belarus, during
the Second World War. She is the author of Political Protest
and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the
1970s and 1980s (University of California Press, 1991). She
would like to thank John J. Simon for his careful reading of
several drafts of this article, and for editing suggestions
which clarified and strengthened it.
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