Anarchism and Prefigurative Politics

At the suggestion of Andrew in the comments to my last post, I took up reading through Richard Day’s Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements in order to come to some understanding of how modern day anarchism is responding to the general malaise of contemporary leftism. (A malaise, I argue, that is most blatantly clear in the absence of any real movement to systematically change the current model of capitalism, despite the biggest crisis of our economic system since the Great Depression. Instead, at best, we have discussions of regulating banks and financial markets, and perhaps reforming the decision-making bodies of the international financial institutions. It’s not even a return to the welfare state, as there is little argument being made for more social provisions or automatic stabilizers.)

While Day’s book is excellent and intriguing on a number of levels (some of which I’ll point out later), it still ultimately fails to get past the problems of modern leftism – in particular, its inability to transform social systems. In Day’s argument, this inability is in fact a benefit – a sign that present leftism is moving beyond the ‘hegemony of hegemony’ and instead working towards the ‘affinity of affinity’. For Day, hegemony refers to the idea that in order to effect change, one must control the levers of power and bring about change in as wide as possible of a way (often through the state). The hegemony of hegemony refers to the notion that this conception of how to bring about change has itself been hegemonic. But as an anarchist that refuses all relations of hierarchy and oppression, there’s a contradiction in trying to impose one’s ideas on another. One can’t subscribe to a vision of an egalitarian society and simultaneously justify using structures of authority to impose this vision on others.

The alternative, then, and one which Day sees as operative throughout modern day anarchism (and in fact, also in Negri and Hardt) is the logic of affinity. In this model, change is not brought about by taking over state power, or by inciting a widespread revolutionary uprising, but rather by operating outside these circuits – through direct action that immediately creates the sort of community being aimed at (a post-capitalist, post-statist society).

As Day states, these types of non-hegemonic tactics can include: “dropping out of existing institutions; subversion of existing institutions, through parody; impeding existing institutions, via property destruction, ‘direct action case work’, blockades, and so on; prefiguring alternatives to existing institutions, often via modes of activity that otherwise fall within the purview of a hegemonic politics, for example protests; and finally, construction of alternatives to existing forms that render redundant, and thereby take power from, the neoliberal project.” (Gramsci is Dead, 19)

The problem with all this, however, is that anarchism has self-consciously withdrawn from all the levers of power that might actually make a significant and concrete difference! The result, I would argue, is that at best, anarchism merely opens up small and often temporary spaces of community that escape the logic of capitalism or the state-form. And at worst, these small and temporary spaces only function to mitigate capitalism’s worst excesses, thereby undermining their own goals by perpetuating capitalist relations even further. There is no way in which anarchism can effect a concrete social change on any significant scale. It is left believing in the power of its ideas and hoping that others will agree and join in.

That being said, there are numerous things that are laudable about anarchism. Most notable is its willingness to grapple with concrete political problems and local situations – something missing from most other ‘radical’ leftisms. Anarchism is effective in the small-scale situations in which it tends to operate; the problem is simply that it willingly refuses any significant method of propagating its form of social organization. (This is a problem for any political theory, but unlike anarchism, most are fighting and scrapping over every available means to spread their ideas.)

Anarchism should also be acknowledged for its creation of prefigurative politics – a form of direct action that works to immediately create a new social organization without waiting for a revolution and without attempting to reform current social institutions. We can think here of how a protest movement may be planned based on universal consensus, or how communities may informally organize together to provide social goods like health care and food for each other. In this, anarchism at least attempts to answer the question of what a new post-capitalist, post-statist society would look like. While I disagree with much of anarchism (in particular, it’s belief that a withering of the state would lead to a better society, or its belief that important state functions can be replaced by communities based on affinity), it’s nevertheless the case that it’s much more relevant to the real world than the abstract ruminations of much of the politics espoused by continental philosophy.

Prefigurative politics, it seems to me, offer important examples of how post-statist, post-capitalist communities can function, and what their own limitations are. Both are worthwhile subjects for theorists to analyze.