No subject
Thu Jun 11 10:59:23 CEST 2015
re-thought. For example, Marx insisted that transportation is value and
potentially surplus-value producing. The booming logistics sector is rife
with value and surplus value production. And while General Motors has been
displaced by McDonalds as one of the largest employers of labor in the US,
why would we say that making a car is productive of value while making a
hamburger is not? When I stand at the corner of 86th and 2nd Avenue in
Manhattan I see innumerable delivery, bus and cab drivers; workers from
Verizon and Con Edison are digging up the streets to fix the cables, while
down the street the water mains are being repaired; other workers are
constructing the new subway, putting up scaffolding on one side of the
street while taking it down on the other; meanwhile the coffee shop is
making coffees and in the local 24-hour diner workers are scrambling eggs
and serving soups. Even that guy on the bicycle delivering Chinese take-out
is creating value. These are the kinds of jobs, in contrast to those in
conventionally defined manufacturing and agriculture, that have increased
remarkably in recent times and they are all value and surplus value
producing. Manhattan is an island of huge value creation. If only half of
those employed in the production and reproduction of urban life are
employed in the production of this sort of value and surplus value, then
this easily compensates for the losses due to the industrialization of
agriculture and the automation in conventional manufacturing. This is the
contemporary proletariat at work and Springer is quite right to complain
that much of mainstream Marxist thinking has a hard time getting its head
around this new situation (which, it turns out, is not wholly new at all).
This is the proletarian world in which many social anarchist groups have
been and still are embedded.
But we need to take the argument further. There is a big distinction in
Marx=E2=80=99s theory between how, when and where value is produced and how=
, when
and where it is realized. Value produced in China is realized, for example,
in Walmart and Apple stores in North America. There are perpetual struggles
over the realization of value between consumers and
merchant/property-owning capitalists. The battles with landlords, the
phone, electricity and credit card companies are just the most obvious
examples of struggles within the sphere of realization that pervade daily
life. It is in such realms that the politics of refusal often make a lot of
sense.
None of this is central in the standard Marxist theoretical cannon when
clearly, to me, as an urbanist, it should be. I feel entirely comfortable
with daily life perspectives and applaud the social anarchist position on
this. I do, however, have a caveat: everyday life problems from the
perspective of the individual or of the local neighborhood look quite
different from everyday life in the city as a whole. This is why the
transition from Kropotkin to Patrick Geddes, Mumford and the anarchist-
inspired urban planners becomes an important issue for me. How to organize
urban life in the city as a whole so that everyday life for everyone is not
=E2=80=9Cnasty, brutish and short=E2=80=9D is a question that we radical ge=
ographers need
to consider. This aspect of the social anarchist tradition =E2=80=93 the
preparedness to jump scales and integrate local ambitions with metropolitan
wide concerns =E2=80=93 is invaluable if obviously flawed and I am distress=
ed that
most anarchists, including Springer apparently, ignore if not actively
reject it presumably because it seems hierarchically inspired or entails
negotiating with if not mobilizing state power. It is here, of course, that
the Marxist insights on the relation between capital accumulation and
urbanization become critical to social action. And it is surely significant
that the urban uprisings in Turkey and Brazil in 2013 were animated by
everyday life issues as impacted by the dynamics of capital accumulation
and that they were metropolitan-wide in their implications.
It would be wrong to conclude from all this that Marxists do not work
politically and practically on the politics of daily life or in the sphere
of value realization. I meet such people all over the place all the time,
involved in, say, anti-gentrification struggles and fights over the
provision of health care and education as well as in right to the city
movements. The Marxist critique of education under capitalism has been
profound (Bowles and Gintis, 1977). This is a realm where Marxist practices
often go well beyond the theoretical content (a gap which I as well as
other Marxist geographers like Neil Smith (1992, 2003) and, from a somewhat
different angle, Gibson-Graham (2006) have attempted to close). But it is
also clear to me that many people working politically on these daily life
questions do not care about Marxism or anarchism ideologically but simply
engage in radical practices that often converge onto anti-capitalist
politics for contingent rather than ideological reasons. This is the kind
of world of non-ideological collective action that Paul Hawken (2007)
writes so enthusiastically about. I have met workers in recuperated
factories in Argentina whose primary interest was nothing more than having
a job and activists within solidarity economies in Brazil who are simply
concerned with improving daily life. Sure, most of those involved will
praise horizontalism when asked, but for most of them that was not what
spurred them into action (Sitrin and Azzelini, 2014). Those working in such
contexts seize on any literature and any concepts that seem relevant to
their cause no matter whether articulated by anarchists, Marxists or
whoever.
If, as Springer (2014: 252) says, anarchism is primarily =E2=80=9Cabout act=
ively
reinventing the everyday through a desire to create new forms of
organization=E2=80=9D, then I am all for it. If it does not separate workin=
g,
living, creating, acting, thinking, and cultural activities, but keeps them
together within the seamless web of daily life (as a totality) and tries to
re-shape that life then I am totally with it. The search to re- shape daily
life around different =E2=80=9Cstructures of feeling=E2=80=9D (as Raymond W=
illiams might
have put it) is as critical for me as it is for Springer and the
autonomistas who have taken up biopolitics.
But the implications are, I think, even broader. What unifies all our
perspectives is what I can best call =E2=80=9Ca search for meaning=E2=80=9D=
in a social
world that appears more and more meaningless. This requires a real attempt
to live as far as possible an unalienated life in an increasingly
alienating world. I admire the social anarchists I have known because of
their deep personal and intellectual commitment to do just that.
Social anarchists are not, however, alone in this. I am all for it too. I
featured alienation (a taboo concept for many Marxists of a scientistic or
Althusserian persuasion) as the seventeenth and in many respects crucial
contradiction in my *Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism*
(2014). You don=E2=80=99t have to be either an anarchist or a Marxist to at=
tempt to
create a personal and social world which has meaning and within which it is
possible to live in a relatively unalienated way. Millions of people are
perpetually struggling to do just that and in so doing create islands of
unalienated activities. This is what many religious groups do all the time.
Many young people in the world today, faced with meaningless employment
opportunities and mindless consumerism are searching and opting for a
different lifestyle. Much of contemporary cultural production in the
Western world is building upon exactly this sensibility and the broad left,
both anarchist and Marxist, has to learn to respond appropriately.
The result, David Graeber suggests, is that:
even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics
in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to its
project consists of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in
some form of non-alienated production=E2=80=A6.Surely there must be a link =
between
the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into
being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social
alternatives=E2=80=94particularly, the possibility of a society itself prem=
ised on
less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that
revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between
a society=E2=80=99s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revoluti=
ons, one
could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most
broadly overlap (2002: 70).
Whether this was true in the past can be debated (I personally think there
were elements of this configuration at work in the Paris Commune). But
Graeber=E2=80=99s statement undoubtedly captures an important feature of ra=
dical
activism in our time and one that I both appreciate and relate to.
So what, then, is the central problem in the midst of all this positive
feeling about the social anarchist approach to daily life questions? The
answer for me lies in what Bookchin calls =E2=80=9Cthe anarchist disdain fo=
r power=E2=80=9D
(2014: 139; as represented, for example, in John Holloway=E2=80=99s *Change=
the
World Without Taking Power* (2010)). And behind this, of course, lies the
thorny problem of how to approach the question of the state in general and
the capitalist state in particular.
The best I can do here is to take up the most compelling historical example
I have come across of the failure of an amazingly well-developed anarchist
movement to mobilize collective power and to take the state when it clearly
had the opportunity to do so. I rely here on Ealham=E2=80=99s (2010) detail=
ed and
sympathetic account of the anarchist movement in Barcelona from 1898-1937
and in particular on its failure to consolidate the power of a mass
movement in 1936-7. I propose to use this example to illustrate what seems
to be a general problem with anarchist practices, including those that
Springer advocates.
The Barcelona movement was based on the instinctive collective
organizations of working class populations in the *barris* (neighborhoods)
of the city along the lines of integrated social networks and mutual aid,
coupled with deep distrust of a state apparatus that neglected their social
needs and essentially criminalized, marginalized, and merely sought to
police and repress their aspirations. Given these conditions, large
segments of the working class fell in line with anarcho-syndicalist forms
of organization as represented by the National Confederation of Labor
(CNT), which at its height had over a million adherents throughout
Catalonia. There were, however, other anarchist currents =E2=80=93 the radi=
cal
anarchists in particular =E2=80=93 that often opposed the syndicalists and
organized themselves (often clandestinely) through affinity groups and
neighborhood committees to pursue their aims. But the overall structure of
this working class movement was neighborhood based and territorially
segregated. The CNT was =E2=80=9Cvery much a product of local space and the=
social
relations within it; its unions made the *barris* feel powerful, and
workers felt ownership over what they regarded as =E2=80=98our=E2=80=99 uni=
on=E2=80=9D (Ealham,
2010: 39). But it had great difficulty in thinking the city as a whole
rather than in terms of those separate territories it did control. The
militant affinity groups, for example, =E2=80=9Cwere incapable of convertin=
g
isolated local actions into a more offensive action that could lead to a
powerful transformation at regional or state level=E2=80=9D (2010: 122). Th=
e
movement=E2=80=99s central weakness in the run-up to the civil war, Ealham =
argues,
=E2=80=9Cwas its failure to generate an overarching institutional structure=
capable
of coordinating the war effort and simultaneously harmonizing the
activities of the myriad workers=E2=80=99 collectives. In political terms, =
the
revolution was underdeveloped and inchoate=E2=80=A6..the revolution in Barc=
elona
failed to generate any revolutionary institution=E2=80=A6=E2=80=A6workers=
=E2=80=99 power remained
fragmented and atomised on the streets, dispersed among a multitude of
*comit=C3=A9s* without any coordination at regional or national level=E2=80=
=9D (2010:
168; also Bookchin, 2014: Chapter 8). The reluctance of the anarchists of
whatever sort to take state power for ideological reasons when it clearly
had the power to do so left the state in the hands of the bourgeois
republicans and their Stalinist/communist allies who bided their time until
they were well-organized enough to violently crush the CNT movement in the
name of republican law and order.
Even worse, the movement largely betrayed its own principles by practices
that ignored the will of the people. The radical affinity groups pursued
insurrectionary tactics that produced a =E2=80=9Cgrowing disquiet=E2=80=9D =
about their
=E2=80=9Celitism=E2=80=9D and the undemocratic ways in which they would lau=
nch continuous
insurrectionary actions. They depicted their actions as =E2=80=9Ccatalytic=
=E2=80=9D rather
than =E2=80=9Cvanguardist=E2=80=9D, but most people recognized this was ana=
rchist
vanguardism under another name. The insurrectionists expected and appealed
for mass support (which rarely materialized) for actions decided upon by no
more than at most a hundred but in many instances just a dozen or so
members of a particular affinity group. This created problems for everyone
else. The anarcho-syndicalists of Madrid and Asturias complained that the
cascading insurrectionary actions of the radical anarchist =E2=80=9Cgrupist=
as=E2=80=9D in
Barcelona were disruptive rather than constructive. =E2=80=9COur revolution=
=E2=80=9D they
wrote in their daily paper, =E2=80=9Crequires more than an attack on a Civi=
l Guard
barracks or an army post. That is not revolutionary. We will call an
insurrectionary general strike when the situation is right; when we can
seize the factories, mines, power plants, transportation and the means of
production=E2=80=9D (quoted in Ealham, 2010: 144). What is the point of
insurrectionary action, they said, if there is no idea let alone concrete
plan to re-organize the world the day after?
There are two broad lines of critique of the conventional anarchist
position in Ealham=E2=80=99s account that are relevant to my argument. Firs=
tly
there is the failure to shape and mobilize political power into a
sufficiently effective configuration to press home a revolutionary
transformation in society as a whole. If, as seems to be the case, the
world cannot be changed without taking power then what is the point of a
movement that refuses to build and take that power? Secondly, there is an
inability to stretch the vision of political activism from local to far
broader geographical scales at which the planning of major infrastructures
and the management of environmental conditions and long distance trade
relations becomes a collective responsibility for millions of people. Who
will manage the transport and communications network is the question. The
anarchist town planners (including Bookchin) understood this problem but
their work is largely ignored within the anarchist movement. These
dimensions define terrains upon which anarchists but not Marxists are
fearful of operating (which is not to say the Marxists have no failures to
their credit). And it is here that the whole history of anarchist
influences in centralized urban planning deserves to be resurrected. This
is a complicated topic that I cannot possibly probe into more deeply here.
But this is clearly the most obvious point where anarchist concerns for the
qualities of daily life and Marxist perspectives on global capital flows
and the construction of physical infrastructures through long-term
investments could come together with constructive results.
Springer prefers insurrectionary to revolutionary politics. He does so on
the grounds that revolutionaries typically sit for ever in the =E2=80=9Cwai=
ting
room of history=E2=80=9D endlessly planning for the revolution that never c=
omes
whereas the insurrectionists =E2=80=9Cdo it now.=E2=80=9D Well sometimes th=
ey do and
sometimes they don=E2=80=99t. But much of the rhetoric these days about the=
=E2=80=9Ccoming
insurrection=E2=80=9D (announced by The Invisible Committee (2009) in 2007 =
in
France but yet to materialize) is just that: rhetoric. I hope that
Springer=E2=80=99s version is democratically based and not elitist and that=
he does
the detailed organizing required to keep the electricity flowing, the
subways running and the garbage picked up in the days that follow. I
personally don=E2=80=99t trust continuous insurrections that spring spontan=
eously
from self-activity, which are thought of as =E2=80=9Ca means without end=E2=
=80=9D and
predicated on the idea that =E2=80=9Cwe cannot liberate each other, we can =
only
liberate ourselves=E2=80=9D (Springer, 2014: 262-263). Self- liberation thr=
ough
insurrection is all well and good but what about everyone else?
I find Bookchin=E2=80=99s line on all of this interesting, even if incomple=
te.
Resolutely opposed as he was to the state and hierarchies as unreformable
instruments of oppression and denial of human freedom, he was not na=C3=AFv=
e
about the necessity of taking power:
Every revolution, indeed, even every attempt to achieve basic change, will
always meet with resistance from elites in power. Every effort to defend a
revolution will require the amassing of power =E2=80=93 physical as well as
institutional and administrative =E2=80=93 which is to say, the creation of
government. Anarchists may call for the abolition of the state, but
coercion of some kind will be necessary to prevent the bourgeois state from
returning in full force with unbridled terror. For a libertarian
organization to eschew, out of misplaced fear of creating a =E2=80=9Cstate=
=E2=80=9D, taking
power when it can do so with the support of the revolutionary masses is
confusion at best and a total failure of nerve at worst (Bookchin, 2014:
183).
Graeber=E2=80=99s response is to insist that anarchist strategy =E2=80=9Cis=
less about
seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling
mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it=E2=
=80=9D
(2002: 73). Only within such autonomous spaces can true democratic
practices become possible. From my perspective this means creating a
parallel state (like the Zapatistas) within the capitalist state. Such
experiments rarely work and when they do, as in the case of the
paramilitary forms of organization that dominate in Colombia or the various
mafia like organizations that exist around the world (e.g. in Italy), they
are rarely benign (in fact they are typically hornet=E2=80=99s nests of ext=
ortion,
violence and corruption). Even left revolutionary guerilla movements (such
as the FARC in Colombia) experienced defaults of this kind and there is no
guarantee that any parallel power structure devised by anarchists will not
suffer from similar problems. In any case, the present penchant for
=E2=80=98government by NGO=E2=80=99 provides a classic example of how rulin=
g powers can
co-opt and de-fang the radical idea of autonomy for their own purposes.
The anarchist and autonomista reluctance to take and consolidate power is
rooted, I suspect, in the concept of the =E2=80=9Cfree individual=E2=80=9D =
upon which much
anarchist and autonomista thinking rests. The critique of radical
individualism runs as follows. The concept of the free individual bears the
mark of liberal legal institutions (even of private property in the body
and the self) spiced with a hefty dose of that personalized protestant
religion which Weber associated with the rise of capitalism. To say, as
Reclus did with great pride, that he had gone through life as a free
individual, was to place himself firmly in the liberal and protestant
tradition (Reclus=E2=80=99 father was a protestant minister and for a while=
Reclus
trained for the ministry; see Chardak, 1997). His sort of anarchism has its
roots in liberal theory and the Judeo- Christian tradition even as it
constructs its anti-capitalism through the negation of the market and a
critique of the class and environmental consequences of liberal theory and
capitalist practices. There is nothing wrong with this (Marx also
constructs largely by way of negation of classical political economy and
its liberal and Judeo-Christian roots). But the result is an awkward
overlap at times (which exists in both Marx and Proudhon) in which the
critique incorporates and mirrors far too much of that which it criticizes.
There is a real problem here which Springer evades by denouncing as
=E2=80=9Coxymoronic=E2=80=9D anyone that places anarchist thinking too clos=
e to its liberal
(and by extension neoliberal) roots as defined, for example, in
Nozick=E2=80=99s *Anarchy,
State, and Utopia* (1974). This is an issue that has to be rationally
unpacked because it has had and potentially will continue to have real
consequences.
In 1984 two MIT professors, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, for example,
published a book called *The Second Industrial Divide* (1984). Back in
1848, they argued, industrial capitalism faced a moment of technological
possibility in its organization in which it could either move towards mass
factory production of the sort that Marx predicted and embraced or take the
path that Proudhon advocated, which was the linking together of small,
independent workshops in which associated laborers could democratically
control their work and their lives. The wrong choice was made after 1848,
they claim, and thereafter mass factory production, with all of its evils,
dominated industrial capitalism. But in the 1970s new technologies and
organizational forms were emerging which posed that same choice anew. With
flexible specialization and small batch and niche production, Proudhon=E2=
=80=99s
dream was once more a possibility. Piore and Sabel became fierce advocates
for the new forms of industrial organization =E2=80=93 termed =E2=80=9Cflex=
ible
specialization=E2=80=9D =E2=80=93 most classically represented at that time=
by the emerging
industrial districts of the Third Italy. Both Piore and Sabel, armed with
their reputations, their MacArthur grants and supported by so-called
progressive thinkers and institutions of the time, set out to persuade the
unions to embrace the Proudhonian vision rather than oppose the new
technologies. Sabel became an influential advisor to the International
Labour Organization. Many of us on the Marxist left were deeply troubled by
this turn. I added my voice to the critics by arguing in *The Condition of
Postmodernity* (1989; as well as at the AAG in Baltimore in 1987 when Sabel
and I clashed fiercely), that flexible specialization was nothing other
than a tactic of flexible accumulation for capital. The campaign to
persuade or cajole (via the International Monetary Fund) countries to adopt
policies for the flexibilization of labor was a sign of this intent (and it
still goes on through IMF mandates, as now in Greece). In retrospect it is
clear that this scheme, supported by Piore and Sabel and given an aura of
progressive radicalism in the name of Proudhon, was a core element of
neoliberalization, with all the consequences that flowed for the
disempowerment of labor and labor=E2=80=99s declining share of gains from
productivity. This left nearly all of the newly produced wealth in the
hands of the one percent. We badly need to disabuse ourselves of what
Bookchin calls the =E2=80=9CProudhonist myth that small associations of
producers=E2=80=A6.can slowly eat away at capitalism=E2=80=9D (2014: 59). T=
he autonomistas,
along with Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapelin in *The New Spirit of Capitalism=
*
(2007), even go so far as to suggest that it was the working class
practices of the autonomistas and the anarchists that were taken over by
capital to create new forms of control and new networked organizational
forms during the 1970s.
Capitalist anarchism is a real problem. It has its coherent central theory
as set out by Nozick, Hayek and others, and a doctrine of market freedoms.
It has turned out not only to be the most successful form of decentralized
decision making ever invented =E2=80=93 as Marx so elegantly demonstrated i=
n
*Capital* =E2=80=93 but also a force for an immense centralization of wealt=
h and
power in the hands of an increasingly powerful oligarchy. This dialectic
between decentralization and centralization is one of the most important
contradictions within capital (see my *Seventeen Contradictions and the End
of Capitalism*) and I wish all those, like Springer, who advocate
decentralization as if it is an unalloyed good would look more closely at
its consequences and contradictions. As I argued in *Rebel Cities* (2013a),
decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater
inequality and centralization of power. Once again, Bookchin sort of
agrees: =E2=80=9Cat the risk of seeming contrary, I feel obliged to emphasi=
ze that
decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, and even confederation, each
taken singly, do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a rational
ecological society. In fact all of them have at one time or another
supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even despotic regimes=E2=
=80=9D
(2014: 73-74). This was, by the way, my main problem with the stance taken
by Gibson-Graham in their pursuit of totally decentralized anti- capitalist
alternatives.
While left anarchism of the Proudhon sort has no coherent theory,
right-wing capitalist anarchism has a coherent theoretical structure that
rests upon a seductive utopian vision of human freedom. It took the genius
of Marx to deconstruct this theory in *Capital*. Small wonder that Marx in
deconstructing it would find Proudhon=E2=80=99s vision so unintendedly reac=
tionary.
Which brings me to the question of the relations between Marx and Proudhon.
I have freely recognized (e.g. in the companions to Marx=E2=80=99s *Capital=
,* 2010:
6, 2013b: 189) that Marx drew far more from the French socialist tradition
(including Proudhon) than he acknowledged and that he was often unfair in
his criticisms of Proudhon (but then he was also just as unfair in his
criticisms of Mill, Malthus and even Ricardo =E2=80=93 this was just Marx=
=E2=80=99s way).
But Marx drew as much from the Jacobin Auguste Blanqui (who I think coined
the phrase =E2=80=9Cthe dictatorship of the proletariat=E2=80=9D, which Mar=
x rarely used
and should have put in scare quotes, thereby saving us from a lot of
trouble), as well as Fourier (the opening of the chapter in *Capital* on
the labor process is a hidden dialogue with him), Saint-Simon (who Marx
admired to the degree that he saw the association of capitals in the form
of the joint stock company as possibly a progressive move), Cabet, as well
as Robert Owen (Blanqui=E2=80=99s defense before the court of assizes in 18=
32 is an
astonishing statement; Corcoran, 1983). But Marx=E2=80=99s dependence on th=
ese
thinkers, as was also the case with his dependency on classical political
economy, was marked for the most part by fierce critical interrogation as
Marx sought to build his own theoretical apparatus to understand how
capital accumulated. What Marx accepted and what he arrived at by negation
in his interrogations from any of these people is a complicated question.
But to go from this recognition to suggest that Marx plagiarized everything
from Proudhon in particular is indeed totally absurd. The idea of the
exploitation of labour by capital, for example, was far more strongly
articulated by Blanqui than by Proudhon and was completely accepted by the
socialist Ricardians. It was obvious to pretty much everyone and Marx made
no claims of originality in pointing to it. What Marx did was to show how
that exploitation could be accomplished without violating laws of market
exchange that theoretically (and in the utopian universe of classical
political economy) rested upon equality, freedom and reciprocity. To
promote those laws of exchange as the foundation of equality was to create
the conditions for the centralization of capitalist class power. This was
what Proudhon missed. When Marx pointed to the importance of the
commodification of labor power he may well have been drawing on Blanqui
without acknowledgement but even here it was Marx and not Blanqui who
recognized its significance for the theory of capital. Marx=E2=80=99s criti=
que in
the *Grundrisse* of the Proudhonian conception of money and of the idea
that all that was needed for a peaceful transition to socialism was a
reform of the monetary system was accurate (and of course Proudhon=E2=80=99=
s free
credit bank was an instantaneous disaster though it may have been bourgeois
sabotage that made it so). Marx=E2=80=99s critique of Proudhon=E2=80=99s th=
eories of
eternal justice is also penetrating. It is here precisely that Marx points
out how theories of justice are not universal but specific, and in the
bourgeois case specific to the rise of liberal capitalism. To pursue the
aim of universal justice as a revolutionary strategy ran the danger of
simply instanciating bourgeois law within socialism. This is a familiar
problem, as everyone working critically with notions of human rights
recognizes. When Marx appealed, as he often did, to ideas of association he
was almost certainly drawing more on Saint-Simon than Proudhon.
While Proudhon undoubtedly had important things to say, there are dangers
of viewing him as representative of some perfected social anarchism. He had
a weak grasp of political economy, did not support the workers in the
revolution of 1848, was against trade unions and strikes and held to a
narrow definition of socialism as nothing more than the association of
workers mutually supporting each other. He was hostile to women working and
his supporters campaigned vigorously in the workers commissions of the
1860s in France to have women banned from employment in the Paris
workshops. The main opposition came from the Paris Branch of the
International Working Men=E2=80=99s Association led by Eugene Varlin who in=
sisted
upon women=E2=80=99s equality and right to work (Harvey, 2003). Proudhon=E2=
=80=99s
book, *Pornography:
The Situation of Women*, is, according to his biographer Edward Hyams, full
of =E2=80=9Cevery illiberal, every cruelly reactionary notion ever used aga=
inst
female emancipation by the most extreme anti-feminist=E2=80=9D (1979: 274).=
OK, so
Marx was no saint either on such matters. Both anarchism and Marxism have
had and continue to have a troubled history on the gender question but on
this topic Proudhon is an extreme and ugly outlier.
What is really odd is that before the Commune, in the 1860s, Marxists and
anarchists were not at logger-heads in the same way as they later became.
Reclus and many Proudhonians attended the meetings of the International
Working Men=E2=80=99s Association and I recall reading somewhere that Marx =
asked
Reclus if he would be willing to translate *Capital* from German into
French. Reclus did not do so. I do sense, however, that Marx felt that
Proudhon was his chief rival for the affections of the French revolutionary
working class and in part concentrated his critical fire against him for
that reason. But the clash of ideologies within the Paris Commune was
between many factions, such as the centralizing and often violent
Jacobinism of the Blanquists and variations of the Proudhonian
decentralized associationists. The communists, like Varlin, were a
minority. The subsequent appropriation of the Commune by Marx, Engels and
Lenin as a heroic if fatally flawed uprising on the part of the working
classes does not stand up to historical examination any more than does the
story that it was the product of a purely urban social movement that had
nothing to do with class. I view the Commune as a class event if only
because it was a revolt against bourgeois structures of power and
domination in both the living spaces as well as in the workplaces of the
city (Harvey, 2003). Who =E2=80=9Clost=E2=80=9D the Commune became, however=
, a major issue
in which the finger-pointing between Marx and Bakunin played a critical
role in creating a huge gulf between the anarchist and Marxist traditions
(a gulf that Springer seems concerned to deepen if he can).
The individualism that lies at its emotional base does not, of course, lead
social anarchism to ignore the importance of collective activities, the
construction of solidarities or building a variety of organizational forms.
As Springer puts it, =E2=80=9CAnarchist organizing is limited only by our
imagination, where the only existent criteria are that they proceed
non-hierarchically and free from external authority=E2=80=A6..This could in=
clude
almost any form of organization, from a volunteer fire brigade for safety,
to community gardens for food, to cooperatives for housing, to knitting
collectives for clothes=E2=80=9D (2014: 253). There is, however, something
deceptive about such lists. Having experienced the =E2=80=9Cjoys=E2=80=9D o=
f living in a
housing coop in New York City I can assure everyone that there is nothing
particularly liberatory or progressive about it. The standard anarchist
response to this is to say that this would not be so if the anarchists were
in charge. This, of course, begs the question of which organizational forms
are truly anarchist as opposed to just convenient for any form of hegemonic
power (including that of the anarchists). The rule, here, seems to be that
all forms of social organization are possible except that of the state.
For this reason anarchists are often drawn to adopt indigenous communities
as one of their favored forms of association because of their ability to
pursue communal forms of action without creating anything that resembles a
state. This underpins Chomsky=E2=80=99s embrace of the Mapuche in Southern =
Chile
(the Mapuche kept the Spanish invaders and the Chilean government at bay
for hundreds of years) and James Scott=E2=80=99s characterization of the in=
digenous
populations of Highland Southeast Asia as prototypical anarchist in form.
In some ways this is an odd coupling because for most indigenous
populations the radical individualism that underpins much of Western
anarchism is meaningless given their relational collectivism and their
general appreciation of harmony and spiritual membership as core cultural
values. Unfortunately in the case of the Mapuche, the penetrations of
commodification, money and merchant capitalism are currently doing far more
damage than either Spanish colonialism or the Chilean state ever did to
their core cultural values. As Marx puts it, =E2=80=9Cwhen money dissolves =
the
community it becomes the community=E2=80=9D and what is happening to many
indigenous societies is exactly that. While these social orders and their
value systems are of great merit, I fear that a political program that
argued for the populations of North America and Europe to live like the
Mapuche, the highland tribes of Asia or the Zapatistas would not go very
far and in any case would do little or nothing to curb the avaricious
practices of capital accumulation through dispossession that are currently
at work in Amazonia and other hitherto relatively untouched regions of the
world. And in some instances, such as Otavalo in Ecuador or even more
spectacularly in El Alto in Bolivia (with more than a million people mostly
indigenous Almara), the embrace of the market produces a vibrant indigenous
culture with entrepreneurial merchant capitalist characteristics.
This is, however, a good point to take up the question of the state as
perhaps the conceptual rubicon that neither side is prepared to cross. For
most anarchists and many non-anarchists, opposition to and rejection of the
state and of the hierarchical institutions that support and surround it
(like parliamentary democracy and political parties) is a non-negotiable
ideological position. This is not to say that anarchists do not on occasion
engage with the state (they often have no choice in the face, for example,
of repressive police actions) or even vote (as many did in the 2015 Greek
election for example). But after his break with anarchism, Bookchin
continued to view the state as a structure set up from the very first in
the image of hierarchical domination, exploitation and human repression,
and therefore unreformable.
I disagree with that view. The state was the subject of a huge and divisive
debate (in which Holloway was a major protagonist) within Marxism for two
decades or more. I still think Gramsci and the late Poulantzas worth
reading for their insights and Jessop nobly continues the struggle to adapt
the Marxist position to current realities. My own simplified view is that
the state is a ramshackle set of institutions existing at a variety of
geographical scales that internalize a lot of contradictions, some of which
can potentially be exploited for emancipatory rather than obfuscatory or
repressive ends (its role in public health provision has been crucial to
increasing life expectancy for example), even as for the most part it is
about hierarchical control, the enforcement of class divisions and
conformities and the repression (violent when necessary) of
non-capitalistic liberatory human aspirations. Monopoly power within the
judiciary (and the protection of private property), over money and the
means of exchange and over the means of violence, policing and repression,
are its only coherent functions essential to the perpetuation of capital
while everything else is sort of optional in relation to the powers of
different interest groups (with capitalists and nationalists by far the
most influential). But the state has and continues to have a critical role
to play in the provision of large-scale physical and social
infrastructures. Any revolutionary (or insurrectionary) movement has to
reckon with the problem of how to provide such infrastructures. Society (no
matter whether capitalist or not) needs to be reproduced and the state has
a key role in doing that. In recent times the state has become more and
more a tool of capital and far less amenable to any kind of democratic
control (other than the crude democracy of money power). This has led to
the rising radical demand for direct democracy (which I would support). Yet
even now there are still enough examples of the progressive uses of state
power for emancipatory ends (for example, in Latin America in recent years)
to not give up on the state as a terrain of engagement and struggle for
progressive forces of a left wing persuasion.
The odd thing here is that the more autonomistas and anarchists grapple
with the necessity to build organizations that have the capacity to ward
off bourgeois power and to build the requisite large-scale infrastructures
for revolutionary transformation, the more they end up constructing
something that looks like some kind of state. This is the case with the
Zapatistas, for example, even as they hold back from any attempt to take
power within the Mexican state. Bookchin=E2=80=99s position on all of this =
is
interesting. On the one hand he argues that the notion that =E2=80=9Chuman =
freedom
can be achieved, much less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is
monstrously oxymoronic=E2=80=9D (2014: 39). On the other hand, he also hold=
s that
anarchists have wrongly =E2=80=9Clong regarded every government as a state =
and
condemned it =E2=80=93 a view that is a recipe for the elimination of any o=
rganized
social life whatever=E2=80=9D. A =E2=80=9Cgovernment is an ensemble of inst=
itutions
designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly and
hopefully fair manner.=E2=80=9D Opposition to the state must not carry over=
to
opposition to government: =E2=80=9CThe libertarian opposition to law, not t=
o speak
of government as such, has been as silly as the image of a snake swallowing
its tail=E2=80=9D (2014: 13). Consensus decision making, he says, =E2=80=9C=
threatens to
abolish society as such.=E2=80=9D Simple majority voting suffices. There mu=
st also
be a =E2=80=9Cserious commitment=E2=80=9D to a =E2=80=9Cformal constitution=
and appropriate
by-laws=E2=80=9D because =E2=80=9Cwithout a democratically formulated and a=
pproved
institutional framework whose members and leaders can be held accountable,
clearly articulated standards of responsibility cease to exist=E2=80=A6..Fr=
eedom
from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear, concise and
detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions that power and leadership
are forms of =E2=80=9Crule=E2=80=9D or by libertarian metaphors that concea=
l their reality=E2=80=9D
(2014: 27). All of this looks to me like a reconstruction of a certain kind
of state (but this may be nothing more than semantics). Hardt and Negri
have also recently recognized the limitations of horizontalism, the
importance of leadership, even suggesting that the time may be ripe to
reconsider the question of taking state power. In the course of this, Negri
has publically noted a certain evolution and convergence between his and my
views on some of these questions (2015).
Let me conclude with a commentary on how Springer misrepresents my critique
of certain forms of organization that anarchists currently advocate.
=E2=80=9CHarvey,=E2=80=9D he writes,
scorns what he refers to as the =E2=80=98na=C3=AFve=E2=80=99 and =E2=80=98h=
opeful gesturing=E2=80=99 of
decentralized thinking, lamenting how the term =E2=80=98hierarchy=E2=80=99 =
is =E2=80=98virulently
unpopular with much of the left these days=E2=80=99. The message rings thro=
ugh loud
and clear. How dare anarchists (and autonomists) attempt to conceive of
something different and new, when we should be treading water in the sea of
yesterday=E2=80=99s spent ideas (2014: 265).
My central complaint in *Rebel Cities* from which his initial citation is
drawn is that the =E2=80=9Cleft as a whole is bedeviled by an all-consuming
=E2=80=98fetishism of organizational form=E2=80=99=E2=80=9D (2013a: 125). I=
make common cause on
this with Bookchin who writes: =E2=80=9CNo organizational model, however, s=
hould be
fetishized to the point where it flatly contradicts the imperatives of real
life=E2=80=9D (2014: 183). Springer and many other anarchists and autonomis=
tas
consider the only legitimate form of organization to be horizontal,
decentered, open, consensual and non-hierarchical. =E2=80=9CJust to be clea=
r,=E2=80=9D I
wrote, =E2=80=9CI am not saying horizontality is bad =E2=80=93 indeed I thi=
nk it an
excellent objective =E2=80=93 but that we should acknowledge its limits as =
a
hegemonic organizational principle, and be prepared to go far beyond it
when necessary=E2=80=9D (2013a: 70). In the case of the management of the c=
ommons,
for example, it is difficult if not impossible (as Elinor Ostrom=E2=80=99s =
work had
demonstrated) to take consensual horizontality to much larger scales such
as the metropolitan region, the bioregion, and certainly not the globe (as
in the case of global warming). At those scales it was impossible to
proceed without setting up =E2=80=9Cconfederal=E2=80=9D or =E2=80=9Cnested=
=E2=80=9D (which means inevitably
hierarchical in my view but then this too may just be semantics) structures
of decision making that entailed serious adjustments in organized thinking
as well as forms of institutionalized governance.
I cited both Murray Bookchin and David Graeber in support of this point.
The latter had noted that decentralized communities =E2=80=9Chave to have s=
ome way
to engage with larger economic, social or political systems that surround
them. This is the trickiest question because it has proved extremely
difficult for those organized on radically different lines to integrate
themselves in any meaningful way in larger structures without having to
make endless compromises in their founding principles=E2=80=9D (Graeber, 20=
09:
239). I was interested in taking up what some of those endless compromises
might have to be. I then went on to suggest that Bookchin=E2=80=99s proposa=
l for
municipal libertarianism organized confederally was =E2=80=9Cby far the mos=
t
sophisticated radical proposal to deal with the creation and collective use
of the commons at a variety of scales=E2=80=9D (2013a: 85). I supported Boo=
kchin=E2=80=99s
proposal for a =E2=80=9C=E2=80=98municipal libertarianism=E2=80=99 embedded=
in a bioregional
conception of associated municipal assemblies rationally regulating their
interchanges with each other as well as with nature. It is at this point,=
=E2=80=9D
I suggested, =E2=80=9Cthat the world of practical politics fruitfully inter=
sects
with the long history of largely anarchist-inspired utopian thinking and
writing about the city=E2=80=9D (2013a: 138). There were, however, some lim=
its to
extending Bookchin=E2=80=99s organizational ideas all the way (although the=
re are
apparently current attempts to do so under the auspices of the Kurdish PKK
to the recently liberated Kobane; see TATORT, 2013).
And I thought it important to state what these might be. Looking more
closely at the organizational forms that were animated in the revolutionary
upsurges in El Alto in the early 2000s, I suggested that we might need to
look at a variety of intersecting organizational forms, including those
favored by the =E2=80=9Chorizontalists=E2=80=9D, which cut across other mor=
e confederal and
in some instances vertical structures. I ended up with a fairly utopian
sketch of intersecting organizational forms =E2=80=93 both vertical and hor=
izontal
=E2=80=93 that might work in governing a large metropolitan area such as Ne=
w York
City (2013a: 151-153).
This is what Springer considers =E2=80=9Ctreading water in the sea of yeste=
rday=E2=80=99s
spent ideas=E2=80=9D (2014: 265)!! The problem here, I submit, is Springer=
=E2=80=99s
fetishization of consensual horizontality as the only admissible
organizational form. It is this exclusive and exclusionary dogma that
stands in the way of exploring appropriate and effective solutions. I
accept what Graeber calls =E2=80=9Cthe rich and growing panoply of organiza=
tional
instruments=E2=80=9D that anarchists of various stripes have adopted (or in=
some
cases adapted from indigenous practices) in recent years. These have
contributed significantly to the repertoire of possible left political
organizational forms and of course I agree (who could not) that the
critical aim of reinventing democracy should be a central concern. But the
evidence is clear that we need organizational forms that go beyond those
within which many anarchists and autonomistas now confine themselves if we
are to reinvent democracy while pursuing a coherent anti-capitalist
politics. I support Syriza, for example, as did Negri and several Greek
anarchists I know, and Podemos not because they are revolutionary but
because they help open up a space for a different kind of politics and a
different conversation. The mobilization of political power is essential
and the state cannot be neglected as a potential site for radicalization.
On all these points I beg to differ with many of my autonomist and
anarchist colleagues.
But this does not preclude collaboration and mutual aid with respect to the
many other common anti-capitalist struggles with which we are engaged.
Honest disagreements should be no barrier to fertile collaborations. So the
conclusion I reach is this: let radical geography be just that: radical
geography, free of any particular =E2=80=9Cism=E2=80=9D, nothing more, noth=
ing less.
References
B=C3=B6hm S, Dinerstein A and Spicer A (2008) (Im)possibilities of autonomy=
:
Social movements in and beyond capital, the state and development. *Social
Movement Studies* 9: 17-32.
Boltanski L and Chiapello E (2007) *The New Spirit of Capitalism*, Elliott
G, tr. London: Verso.
Bookchin M (2014) *The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise
of Direct Democracy*. London: Verso.
Bookchin M (1971) *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*. San Francisco: Rampart Press.
Bowles S and Gintis H (1977) *Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational
Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life*. New York: Basic Books.
Chardak H (1997) *Elis=C3=A9e Reclus: L=E2=80=99Homme qui aimait la Terre*.=
Paris:
Editions Stock.
Clark J and Martin C, eds. (2004) *Anarchy, Geography, Modernity*; The
Radical Social Thought of Elis=C3=A9e Reclus. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Corcoran P (1983) *Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France*,
1930-48. London: Macmillan.
Dunbar G (1978) *Elis=C3=A9e Reclus: Historian of Nature*. Hamden, CT: Arch=
on
Books.
Ealham C (2010) *Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution
in Barcelona, 1898-1937*. Oakland: AK Press.
Fleming M (1988) *The Geography of Freedom*. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Folke S (1972) Why a radical geography must be Marxist. *Antipode* 4: 13-18=
.
Gibson-Graham, J K (2006) *The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A
Feminist Critique of Political Economy*. Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press.
Graeber D (2002) The new anarchists. *New Left Review* 13: 61-73.
Graeber D (2009) *Direct Action: An Ethnography*. Oakland: AK Press.
Harvey D (1975) Class structure and the theory of residential
differentiation. In Peel R, Chisholm M and Haggett P, eds., 354-369, *Brist=
ol
Essays in Geography*. London: Heinemann Press.
Harvey D (1977) Labor, capital and class struggle around the built
environment. *Politics and Society* 7: 265-295.
Harvey D (1984) On the history and present condition of geography: An
historical materialist manifesto. *The Professional Geographer* 36: 1-11.
Harvey D (1987) Three myths in search of a reality in urban studies.
*Environment
and Planning D:* *Society and Space* 5: 367-386.
Harvey D (1989) *The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change*. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey D (2000) *Spaces of Hope*. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Harvey D (2003) *Paris: Capital of Modernity*. New York: Routledge.
Harvey D (2009) *Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom*. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Harvey D (2010) *A Companion to Marx=E2=80=99s Capital*. London: Verso.
Harvey D (2013a) *Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban
Revolution*. London: Verso.
Harvey D (2013b) *A Companion to Marx=E2=80=99s Capital, Volume 2*. London:=
Verso.
Harvey D (2014) *Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism*.
London: Profile.
Hawken P (2007) *Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in History is
Restoring Grace and Beauty to the World*. New York: Viking.
Holloway J (2010) *Change the World without Taking Power*. New York: Pluto
Press.
Hyams E (1979) *Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind and
Works*. London: John Murray.
Johnston R J and Claval P, eds. (1984) *Geography Since the Second World
War*. London: Routledge.
Negri A (2015) An interview with Toni Negri: From the refusal of labour to
the seizure of power. *Roar Magazine* January, 2015 (
http://roarmag.org/2015/01/negri-interview-multitude-metropolis/ accessed
March 20, 2015).
Nozick R (1974) *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*. New York: Basic Books.
Peake L and Sheppard E (2014) The emergence of radical/critical geography
within North America. *ACME* 13: 305-327.
Pelletier P (2009) *Elis=C3=A9e Reclus: Geographie et Anarchie*. Paris: Les
Editions du Monde Libertaire.
Piore M and Sabel C (1984) *The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for
Prosperity*. New York: Basic Books.
Reclus E (1982) *L=E2=80=99Homme et la Terre*, Ghiblin B, ed. 2 vols (abrid=
ged).
Paris: La D=C3=A9couverte.
Scott J (2012) *Two Cheers for Anarchism*. Princeton, Princeton University
Press.
Sitrin M and Azzelini D (2014) *They Can=E2=80=99t Represent Us: Reinventin=
g
Democracy from Greece to Occupy*. London: Verso.
Smith N (1992) History and philosophy of geography: Real wars, theory
wars. *Progress
in Human Geography* 16: 257-271.
Smith N (2003) *American Empire: Roosevelt=E2=80=99s Geography and the Prel=
ude
to Globalization*. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Springer S (2014) Why a radical geography must be anarchist. *Dialogues in
Human Geography* 4: 249-270.
TATORT (2013) *Democratic Autonomy in Northern Kurdistan: The Council
Movement, Gender Liberation and Ecology*. Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass
Press.
The Invisible Committee (2009) *The Coming Insurrection*. Los Angeles,
Semiotext(e).
--
To view previous posts, create a Google account with your current email and
log in using gmail to access the archives.
https://accounts.google.com/newaccount?hl=3Den
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "
debate-list at fahamu.org" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to debate-list+unsubscribe at fahamu.org.
To post to this group, send email to debate-list at fahamu.org.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/fahamu.org/group/debate-list=
/
.
_______________________________________________
NetworkedLabour mailing list
NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org
http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour
--=20
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Update=
s:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
--089e011767f929137205188c6911
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<div dir=3D"ltr">very interesting article, recommended<div><br><div class=
=3D"gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class=
=3D"gmail_sendername">Orsan</b> <span dir=3D"ltr"><<a href=3D"mailto:ors=
an1234 at gmail.com">orsan1234 at gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, Jun 15, =
2015 at 12:05 AM<br>Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Mar=
xist v Anarchist riffs in geography and politics<br>To: "<<a href=
=3D"mailto:networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour at lists.contra=
st.org</a>>" <<a href=3D"mailto:networkedlabour at lists.contrast.o=
rg">networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org</a>><br><br><br><div dir=3D"auto"=
><div><br></div><div>Begin forwarded message:<br><br></div><blockquote type=
=3D"cite"><div><b>From:</b> Patrick Bond <<a href=3D"mailto:pbond at mail.n=
go.za" target=3D"_blank">pbond at mail.ngo.za</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 14 juni =
2015 18:58:54 CEST<br><b>To:</b> DEBATE <<a href=3D"mailto:debate-list at f=
ahamu.org" target=3D"_blank">debate-list at fahamu.org</a>><br><b>Subject:<=
/b> <b>[Debate-List] (Fwd) Marxist v Anarchist riffs in geography and polit=
ics</b><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type=3D"cite"><div>
=20
=20
=20
=20
The two very interesting Springer articles are in .pdf, here:
<a href=3D"https://uvic.academia.edu/SimonSpringer" target=3D"_blank">h=
ttps://uvic.academia.edu/SimonSpringer</a><br>
<div>
<h2><a href=3D"http://davidharvey.org/2015/06/listen-anarchist-by-dav=
id-harvey/" rel=3D"bookmark" title=3D"=E2=80=9CListen, Anarchist!=E2=80=9D =
by David Harvey" target=3D"_blank">=E2=80=9CListen,
Anarchist!=E2=80=9D by David Harvey</a></h2>
<div> <span><a href=3D"http://davidharvey.org/2015/06/listen-anarchis=
t-by-david-harvey/" title=3D"=E2=80=9CListen, Anarchist!=E2=80=9D by David =
Harvey" target=3D"_blank">June 10, 2015</a></span>
<span> / </span> <span><a href=3D"http://davidharvey.org/author/dav=
idharvey/" title=3D"Posts by David Harvey" rel=3D"author" target=3D"_blank"=
>David Harvey</a></span>
<span> / </span> <span>Comments Off<span> on =E2=80=9CListen, Anarc=
hist!=E2=80=9D by David
Harvey</span></span> </div>
</div>
<p><strong>=E2=80=9CListen, Anarchist!=E2=80=9D A personal response to =
Simon
Springer=E2=80=99s =E2=80=9CWhy a radical geography must be anarchi=
st=E2=80=9D</strong></p>
<p><strong>David Harvey<br>
</strong>City University of New York, USA</p>
<p><em><a href=3D"http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/lcts/summer-school-2015/Spri=
nger%20Commentary%20-%20David%20Harvey.pdf" target=3D"_blank">Download as P=
DF</a></em></p>
<p>Simon Springer (2014) has written a lively and polemical piece in
which he argues that a radical geography must be freshly anarchist
and not tired-old Marxist. As with any polemic of this sort, his
paper has its quota of misrepresentations, exaggerations and ad
hominem criticisms, but Springer does raise key issues that are
worthy of discussion.</p>
<p>Let me first make clear my own position. I sympathize (but don=E2=80=
=99t
entirely agree) with Murray Bookchin, who in his late writings
(after he had severed his long- standing connection to anarchism),
felt that =E2=80=9Cthe future of the Left, in the last analysis, depe=
nds
upon its ability to accept what is valid in both Marxism and
anarchism for the present time and for the future coming into
view=E2=80=9D (Bookchin, 2014: 194). We need to define =E2=80=9Cwhat =
approach can
incorporate the best of the revolutionary tradition =E2=80=93 Marxism=
and
anarchism =E2=80=93 in ways and forms that speak to the kinds of prob=
lems
that face the present=E2=80=9D (2014: 164).</p>
<p>Springer, judging from his piece, would want no part in such a
project. He seems mainly bent on polarizing the relation between
anarchism and Marxism as if they are mutually exclusive if not
hostile. There is, in my view, no point in that. From my Marxist
perspective, the autonomist and anarchist tactics and sentiments
that have animated a great deal of political activism over the
last few years (in movements like =E2=80=9COccupy=E2=80=9D) have to b=
e
appreciated, analyzed and supported when appropriate. If I think
that =E2=80=9COccupy=E2=80=9D or what happened in Gezi Park and on th=
e streets of
Brazilian cities were progressive movements, and if they were
animated in whole or in part by anarchist and autonomista thought
and action, then why on earth would I not engage positively with
them? To the degree that anarchists of one sort or another have
raised important issues that are all too frequently ignored or
dismissed as irrelevant in mainstream Marxism, so too I think
dialogue =E2=80=93 let us call it mutual aid =E2=80=93 rather than co=
nfrontation
between the two traditions is a far more fruitful way to go.
Conversely, Marxism, for all its past faults, has a great deal
that is crucial to offer to the anti-capitalist struggle in which
many anarchists are also engaged.</p>
<p>Geographers have a very special and perhaps privileged niche from
which to explore the possibility of collaborations and mutual aid.
As Springer points out, some of the major figures in the
nineteenth century anarchist tradition =E2=80=93 most notably=C2=A0Kr=
opotkin,
Metchnikoff and Reclus =E2=80=93 were geographers. Through the work o=
f
Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and later on Murray Bookchin,
anarchist sentiments have also been influential in urban planning,
while many utopian schemas (such as that of Edward Bellamy) as
well as practical plans (such as those of Ebenezer Howard) reflect
anarchist influences. I would, incidentally, put my own utopian
sketch (=E2=80=9CEdilia=E2=80=9D) from <em>Spaces of Hope</em> (2000)=
in that
tradition.<span></span></p>
<p>Social anarchists have typically been much more interested in and
sensitive to questions of space, place and environment (core
concepts that I think most geographers would accept as central to
their discipline). The Marxist tradition, on the whole, has been
lamentably short on interest in such topics. It has also largely
ignored urbanization and urban social movements, the production of
space and uneven geographical developments (with some obvious
exceptions such as Lefebvre and the Anglo-French <em>International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research</em> that began in 1977,
and in which Marxist sociologists played a prominent founding
role). Only relatively recently (e.g. since the 1970s) has
mainstream Marxism recognized environmental issues or urbanization
and urban social movements as having fundamental significance
within the contradictions of capital. Back in the 1960s, most
orthodox Marxists regarded environmental issues as preoccupations
of petite bourgeois romanticists (this was what infuriated Murray
Bookchin who gave vent to his feelings in his widely circulated
essay, =E2=80=9CListen, Marxist!=E2=80=9D, from 1971=E2=80=99s <em>Po=
st- Scarcity
Anarchism</em>).</p>
<p>Shortly after I got interested in Marx and Marxism in the early
1970s, I figured that part of my mission might be to help Marxists
be better geographers. I have frequently joked since that it
proved much easier to bring Marxist perspectives into geography
than to get Marxists to take geographical questions seriously.
Bringing Marxist perspectives into geography meant taking up
themes on space, place making and environment and embedding them
in a broad understanding of =E2=80=9Cthe laws of motion of capital=E2=
=80=9D as
Marx understood them. Most social anarchists I know (as Springer
admits) find the Marxist critical expos=C3=A9 and theoretical account
of how capital circulates and accumulates in space and time and
through environmental transformations helpful. To the degree that
I was able, and continue to work on, how to make Marx=E2=80=99s criti=
que
of capital more relevant and more easily understood, particularly
in relation to topics such as urbanization, landscape formation,
place- making, rental extractions, ecological transformations and
uneven geographical developments, I would hope that social
anarchists might appreciate and not disparage the effort. The
contributions of Marxism in general and Marxist political economy
in particular are foundational to anti-capitalist struggle. They
define more clearly what the struggle has to be about and against
and why.</p>
<p>Behind all this, however, there lies a fascinating problem.
Elis=C3=A9e Reclus was one of the most prolific anarchist geographers
of the nineteenth century. Looking at his nineteen volume <em>Geograp=
hie
Universelle</em>, there is little trace of anarchist sentiments
(any more than there were in Kropotkin=E2=80=99s studies of the physi=
cal
geography of central Asia). For this reason the Royal Geographical
Society in London could plead=C2=A0for the release of both Reclus and
Kropotkin from imprisonment when they got into political trouble
because they were first rate a-political geographers. The reason
behind this was quite simple. Hachette, Reclus=E2=80=99 publisher, wo=
uld
not tolerate any foregrounding of his politics (given the
reputations of anarchists for violence at that time) and Reclus
needed the money to live on. Reclus seems to have been either
resigned or content with this. He could be content because he held
that objective and deep geographical knowledge of the world and
its peoples was a necessary condition for building an emancipatory
life for the whole of humanity. A deep humanism encompassing
egalitarian respect for cultural diversity and respect for the
relation to nature are characteristic of his work (Fleming, 1988;
Dunbar, 1978). In his open letter to his anarchist colleagues
(which I cited in the concluding paragraph of <em>Cosmopolitanism
and the Geographies of Freedom</em>, 2009: 283), Reclus wrote:
=E2=80=9CGreat enthusiasm and dedication to the point of risking one=
=E2=80=99s
life are not the only ways of serving a cause. The conscious
revolutionary is not only a person of feeling, but also one of
reason, to whom every effort to promote justice and solidarity
rests on precise knowledge and on a comprehensive understanding of
history, sociology and biology=E2=80=9D as well as, it went without
saying, the geography to which he had dedicated so much of his
life=E2=80=99s work (Clark and Martin, 2004). Anarchists might like t=
o
heed that advice.</p>
<p>When, however, Reclus wrote <em>L=E2=80=99Homme et la Terre</em> (19=
82)
towards the end of his life, in which he freely allowed anarchist
sentiments to flow into his geographical work, he could not find a
publisher. Historically there has been a separation between
geographical work and politics. This same problem is there, though
for quite different reasons, in Pierre George=E2=80=99s geographical =
work.
George was a French communist geographer who worked assiduously to
ensure that only party members got appointed to those French
university geography departments over which he had influence. Yet
his geography bears few marks of his communism, any more than the
geographers in the Soviet Union produced politicized geographical
texts (see Johnston and Claval, 1984). Geography, it seemed, was
forever destined to fulfill the role of describing as accurately
as possible the physical material base required for the exercise
of political power, of no matter what sort. Everyone in political
power (both state and commercial) needed accurate physical
geographical information (the same way they needed accurate maps),
but no one seems to have wanted it politicized. =E2=80=9CSocial=E2=80=
=9D geography
was avoided in Reclus=E2=80=99 day because it smacked of socialism. R=
eclus
was systematically excluded from the history of French geography
by the followers of Vidal de la Blache for political reasons. Only
recently has he been rediscovered and taken seriously in France
(Pelletier, 2009).</p>
<p>All of this changed in the radical movement in Anglo-American
geography after 1969 with the founding of <em>Antipode</em> at
Clark University (an initiative I had nothing to do with). That
radical movement (which I became involved with in 1971) initially
mixed together all manner of different political views and
opinions =E2=80=93 anarchist, Marxist, anti-imperialist, feminist,
ecological, anti-racist, fourth-worldist, culturalist, and so on.
The movement was, like the discipline from which it emanated,
predominantly white and male heterosexual (there were hardly any
women or=C2=A0people of color in academic positions in geography at
that time and the women involved were all graduate students, some
of whom ultimately became powerful players in the discipline).
This undoubtedly produced, as was the case in the broad left of
the time, biases in thinking. Various hidden structures of
oppression (on gender and sexuality for example) were certainly
manifest in our practices. But we were, I think it fair to say,
broadly united in one mission. Let the politics flow, whatever
they were, into the kinds of geographical knowledges we produced
while criticizing ruthlessly =E2=80=93 deconstructing, as it was late=
r
called =E2=80=93 the hidden oppressive politics in the so-called
=E2=80=9Cobjective presentations=E2=80=9D of geographical knowledge s=
erved up by
the servants of capitalist, state, imperialist and
patriarchal/racist power. In that mission we all made common
cause, even as we argued fiercely about the details and
alternatives. This movement pushed the door open in the discipline
of Geography for all sorts of radical possibilities, including
that of which Springer now avails himself. The history of all this
has been documented by Linda Peake and Eric Sheppard (2014).</p>
<p>Sadly, Springer=E2=80=99s bowdlerized history eradicates all the
complexity and the openness to new ideas that was involved. He
makes it seem as if I wrote an influential paper in 1972 that
inaugurated the radical turn which Steen Folke (1972) capped by
insisting that radical geography had to be only Marxist. After
that, my =E2=80=9Cprolific writings=E2=80=9D imprisoned radical geogr=
aphy in the
Marxist fold as my work =E2=80=9Cbecome the touchstone for the vast
majority of radical geographers who have followed=E2=80=9D (Springer,
2014: 250). Springer aspires, apparently, to liberate radical
geography from this oppressive Marxist power so that it can return
to its true anarchist roots.</p>
<p>Folke, however, was writing in the context of a highly
politicized Danish student movement and, rightly or wrongly, none
of us in the Anglo-Saxon world took that much notice of his essay
at the time. So it seems mighty odd that Springer has elected to
write a rebuttal to this not very influential piece some forty two
years after its publication and without, moreover, paying any mind
to its historical and geographical context. We, rightly or
wrongly, were too wrapped up in providing the mutual aid (spiced
with great parties and fierce arguments) across multiple
traditions (including anarchist) that might allow us both to
intervene in the trajectory of mainstream geography and to survive
within the discipline while producing a more openly political
geography.</p>
<p>Survival in the discipline was an issue. Having pushed the door
open we had somehow to keep it open institutionally in the face of
a lot of pressure to close it. Hence the founding of the Socialist
Geographers Specialty Group within the Association of American
Geographers. Given my situation, in a university that was ruthless
about publication, the only way to survive was to publish at a
high level. And yes I will here offer a <em>mea culpa</em>: I was
from the very beginning determined to publish up a storm and I did
emphasize to my students and all those around me who would listen
that this was one (and perhaps the only) way to keep the door
open. It was more than the usual publish or perish. For all those
suspected of Marxist or=C2=A0anarchist sympathies, it was publish twi=
ce
as much at a superior level of sophistication or perish. Even then
the outcome was touch-and-go, as the long- drawn out battle over
Richard Walker=E2=80=99s tenure at Berkeley abundantly illustrated. T=
he
Faustian bargain was that we could survive only if we made our
radicalism academically respectable and respectability meant a
level of academicism that over time made our work less accessible.
It became hard to combine a radical pedagogy (of the sort
pioneered by Bill Bunge in the Detroit Geographical Expedition)
and social activism with academic respectability. Many of my
colleagues in the radical movement, those with anarchist leanings
in particular, did not care for that choice (for very good
reasons) with the result that many of them, sadly, failed or chose
not to consolidate academic positions and the space that we had
collectively opened was threatened.</p>
<p>Springer should correct his erroneous view from =E2=80=9Chindsight=
=E2=80=9D as to
what actually happened in radical circles in North America after
1969. We were a very diverse group, free to be radical in any way
we wanted. The written record is much more biased initially to
Marxism and anti-imperialism (reflecting understandable
preoccupations with the Vietnam War), for reasons I have already
stated, and the voices of women and minority groups often had
difficulty being heard even though there was no specific hegemonic
faction (as opposed to influential individuals). The idea that I
=E2=80=9Csolidified what Folke had considered obligatory=E2=80=9D (Sp=
ringer, 2014:
250) is way off the mark. There was a brief period in the late
1970s when many geographers explored the Marxist alongside other
radical options. But by 1982, when I published <em>Limits to
Capital</em> (a book I had worked on for nearly ten years), that
was pretty much all over. By 1987 I was venting my frustrations at
the widespread rejection of Marxist theoretical perspectives.
=E2=80=9CThree myths in search of a reality in urban studies,=E2=80=
=9D published
in <em>Society and Space</em>, was greeted with strong criticism
from both friends and foes alike. In retrospect the piece looks
all too accurate in what it foretold.</p>
<p>The radicalism that remained in the discipline (after many of my
erstwhile colleagues had run for the neoliberal hills or, in the
British case, to seek their knighthood) was thereafter dominated
by the postmodern turn, Foucault, post- structuralism (Deleuze and
Guattari along with Spinoza clearly displacing Marx), postcolonial
theory, various shades of environmentalism and sophisticated forms
of identity politics around race, gender, sexual orientation,
queer theory, to say nothing of theories of non-representation and
affect. During the 1990s, before the rise of the
alter-globalization movement, there was little interest in Marxian
political economy or Marxism more generally within the discipline
or without. As always there were some islands of resistance in
various departments. With the exception of <em>The Condition of
Postmodernity</em> (1989) =E2=80=93 which stood out as a pillar of
resistance within Marxist thinking to postmodern trends and which
elicited fierce criticism from radical, particularly feminist,
quarters within and without geography (as at the AAG in 1990) =E2=80=
=93
most of my really =E2=80=9Cinfluential writings=E2=80=9D have come ou=
t over the
last ten years. Springer=E2=80=99s bowdlerized history of Marxism in
radical geographical thought suggests he is simply concerned to
build a fantasy narrative of anarchism in=C2=A0geography as victimize=
d
by Marxism to support his central objective, which is to polarize
matters at this particular historical moment (for reasons I do not
understand). Sadly, this comes not only at a time when the
conjuncture is right for a revival of interest in Marxist
political economy, but it also coincides with a political moment
when others are beginning to explore new ways of doing politics
that involve putting the best of different radical and critical
traditions (including but not confined to Marxism and anarchism)
together in a new configuration for anti- capitalist struggle.</p>
<p>So what are the main differences and difficulties that separate
my supposed (but often suspect) Marxism from Springer=E2=80=99s anarc=
hism?
On this I find Springer=E2=80=99s discussion less than helpful. He
caricatures all Marxists as functionalist historians peddling a
stages theory of history, besotted with a crude concept of a
global proletarian class who believe in the teleology of a
vanguard party that will inevitably establish a dictatorship of
the proletariat in the form of a communist state that will
supposedly wither away as communism approaches its steady state to
end history. Now it is undeniable that some communists and in some
instances communist parties at certain historical periods have
asserted something along those lines as party dogma (though rarely
in so crude a form). But I have not personally encountered any
geographer with Marxist leanings who thinks that way and there are
a mass of authors in the Marxist tradition who come nowhere near
representing anything of this sort (start with Lukacs, Gramsci and
then go to E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton).
And much of contemporary Marxist political economy is so busy
trying to figure out what is going on with the crisis tendencies
of contemporary capital to bother with such nonsense. But all we
Marxists do, Springer asserts, is re-hash tired old themes which
he (rather than any geographer with Marxist inclinations) has
selectively identified and which have been so obviously disproven
by historical events. Furthermore, when we Marxists look at
anarchists the only thing we apparently see are people who are
against the state as the unique and only enemy, thus denying that
anarchists are anti-capitalist too. All of this is pure caricature
if not paranoid nonsense. It crams all the actual and intricate
complexity of the relation between the two traditions into an
ideological framework defined at best by the fight between Marx
and Bakunin in 1872, which occurred at a time when the bitter
defeat of the Paris Commune poisoned the political atmosphere.
Strange that Springer, the open-minded freedom-loving anarchist,
should seek to foreclose on the intellectual and political
possibilities open to us at this time in this way.</p>
<p>There are, of course, many anarchisms and many Marxisms. The
identity of anarchism in particular is very hard to pin down.
There is frequently as much bad blood between factions within
these traditions (if such they are) as there is between them. By
the same token, there are as many commonalities between factions
across traditions as there are differences. These commonalities
prefigure the potentiality for a new left force, maybe of the sort
that Bookchin envisages and which I, too, find interesting to
explore. For example, I share with Bookchin as I do with Erich
Fromm and Terry Eagleton a deep commitment to the humanist
perspective as opposed to=C2=A0the scientism that dominates the
Althusserian and scientific communism traditions. I also share
with Bookchin a dialectical approach (which I think he learned
during his early years in the Marxist corner and which he does not
always stick to) rather than positivist, empiricist or analytical
methods and interpretations. Our attitude is, for lack of a better
term, historical and geographical (which is why I often refer to
historical-geographical materialism as my foundational frame of
reference). From his dialectical humanist perspective, Bookchin
was hostile (in ways that only Bookchin could be) to the anarchist
primitivists and deep ecologists as well as to those anarchists
who he scathingly referred to as =E2=80=9Clifestyle anarchists=E2=80=
=9D (he would
be appalled by crimethInc; see <a href=3D"http://www.crimethinc.com/"=
target=3D"_blank">www.crimethinc.com</a>).
He was sympathetic to but also suspicious of the
anarcho-syndicalism that was so dominant in Barcelona during the
1930s. Bookchin=E2=80=99s favored anarchism was resolutely social and
ecological but it also incorporated some features that elicited
numerous attacks from fellow social anarchists in the 1990s.</p>
<p>In part in response to these attacks, Bookchin ultimately severed
his links to the anarchist tradition, but he was also troubled and
frustrated by the fact that anarchism, unlike Marxism, has no
discernable theory of society:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The problems raised by anarchism belong to the days of its
birth, when writers like Proudhon celebrated its use as a new
alternative to the emerging capitalist social order. In reality,
anarchism has no coherent body of theory other than its
commitment to an ahistorical conception of =E2=80=9Cpersonal autono=
my,=E2=80=9D
that is, to the self-willing asocial ego divested of
constraints, preconditions, or limitations short of death
itself. Indeed, today, many anarchists celebrate this
theoretical incoherence as evidence of the highly libertarian
nature of their outlook and its often dizzying, if not
contradictory, respect for diversity=E2=80=9D (2014: 160- 161).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This lack of theoretical coherence is a criticism that can be
made also of the Marxist autonomistas. As B=C3=B6hm, Dinerstein and
Spicer argue, autonomy (no matter of what particular sort) is an
=E2=80=9Cimpossibility=E2=80=9D in and of itself. It is theoretically=
and
relationally defined solely by that which it seeks to be
autonomous from. There is, therefore, nothing to stop =E2=80=9Ccapita=
l,
the state and discourses of development continuously seeking to
=E2=80=98recuperate=E2=80=99 autonomy and make it work for their own =
purposes=E2=80=9D
(2010: 26). And this is, of course, exactly what they have done.</p>
<p>Anarchists are fond, however, of arguing that anarchism is not
about theorizing but about practices and the continuous invention
of new organizational forms. But what sort of practices and forms?
Horizontality, rhizomatic practices and decentralization of power
are litmus tests it seems for anarchists as well as autonomistas
these days. Springer asserts, however, =E2=80=9CEvery time you have e=
ver
invited friends over to dinner, jaywalked, mowed your neighbor=E2=80=
=99s
lawn, skipped a day at work, looked after your brother=E2=80=99s kids=
,
questioned your professor, borrowed your mother in law=E2=80=99s car,
disregarded a posted sign, or returned a favor, you have =E2=80=93 pe=
rhaps
unknowingly =E2=80=93 engaged in anarchist principles=E2=80=9D (2014:=
265).</p>
<p>Now this is an extraordinary statement. It is tempting to parody
it by imagining Springer setting off on his preferred
insurrectionary path by borrowing his mother in law=E2=80=99s car (wi=
th or
without her permission he does not say). It contains some absolute
principles like =E2=80=9Cdisregarding posted signs=E2=80=9D (such as =
=E2=80=9Cpoisonous
snakes are in this area=E2=80=9D) which, when coupled with that other
absolute, that =E2=80=9Call authority is illegitimate=E2=80=9D (itsel=
f an
authoritative statement that stands self-condemned as
illegitimate), supposedly leads us to the anarchist heaven. Having
lived in Baltimore where the population, being apparently
anarchistically inclined, loved to run red lights (and having had
my car totaled by someone who just happened, being a good
anarchist, to have borrowed his brother=E2=80=99s car without permiss=
ion),
I find such assertions ridiculous if not dangerous. They give
anarchism a bad name, even as James Scott (2012) offers two cheers
for anarchism when people pluck up courage to cross the street at
red lights when there is no traffic in sight. Scott even suggests
the abolition of traffic lights altogether might be a good
anarchist idea. I am much more skeptical having witnessed 1st
Avenue on Manhattan turned into a continuous roaring race-track
northwards during a power outage, to the detriment of all those
locked on the cross streets. And I certainly would not welcome a
pilot landing at JFK proclaiming that as a good anarchist she does
not accept the legitimacy of the air traffic controllers=E2=80=99
authority and that she proposes to disregard all aviation rules in
the landing process.</p>
<p>Historically, mutual aid societies (whether anarchist inspired or
not) had, like the commons, codes and rules of behavior that had
to be followed as part of the membership pact and those who did
not conform to these rules found themselves excluded (a problem
which marks the problematic boundary between individualistic and
social anarchism). Perpetually questioning authority, rules and
codes of behavior and disobeying stupid or irrelevant rules is one
thing: disobeying all such mandates on anarchist principle, as
Springer proposes, is quite another. No anarchist commune I have
ever known would tolerate such behaviors. It would not survive
more than a day if it did. The standard anarchist response is that
rules and exclusions are ok provided they are freely entered into.
The myth here is that there is some sort of absolute freedom that
exists outside of some mechanisms of exclusion and even, sorry to
say, domination. The dialectic of freedom and domination cannot be
so easily set aside in human affairs (see Harvey, 2014: Chapter
14).</p>
<p>If I take a generous reading of Springer=E2=80=99s statement it woul=
d be
this: social anarchists are fundamentally concerned with the
intricacies and problematics of daily life. The ultimate
aspiration, says David Graeber (2002: 70), is =E2=80=9Cto reinvent da=
ily
life as a whole=E2=80=9D, though he conveniently leaves aside the tho=
rny
question of where does =E2=80=9Cthe whole=E2=80=9D begin and end. Mar=
xists have,
by way of contrast, historically been far too preoccupied with the
labor process and productivism as the center of their theorizing,
often treating the politics of realization in the living space as
secondary and daily life issues as contingent and even derivative
of the mode of production (this tendency was early on exhibited
with Engels=E2=80=99 otherwise interesting treatment of <em>The Housi=
ng
Question</em> back in 1872). Being an
historical-geographical=C2=A0urbanist I have always been troubled by =
if
not at war with this Marxist prioritization of production at the
expense of the politics of daily life. Class and social
inequalities are as much a product of residential differentiation,
I have long argued, as they are of divisions of labor in the
workplace, while the city as a =E2=80=9Cwhole=E2=80=9D is itself a ma=
jor site of
class as well as other forms of social struggle and much of that
struggle occurs in the sphere of daily life. Such struggles are
about the realization of value rather than its production (Harvey,
1975, 1977). As long ago as 1984 I was arguing that =E2=80=9Ca people=
s=E2=80=99
geography must have a popular base (and) be threaded into the
fabric of daily life with deep taproots into the well-springs of
popular consciousness=E2=80=9D (1984: 7).</p>
<p>From an urban perspective even the production of value needs to
be re-thought. For example, Marx insisted that transportation is
value and potentially surplus-value producing. The booming
logistics sector is rife with value and surplus value production.
And while General Motors has been displaced by McDonalds as one of
the largest employers of labor in the US, why would we say that
making a car is productive of value while making a hamburger is
not? When I stand at the corner of 86th and 2nd Avenue in
Manhattan I see innumerable delivery, bus and cab drivers; workers
from Verizon and Con Edison are digging up the streets to fix the
cables, while down the street the water mains are being repaired;
other workers are constructing the new subway, putting up
scaffolding on one side of the street while taking it down on the
other; meanwhile the coffee shop is making coffees and in the
local 24-hour diner workers are scrambling eggs and serving soups.
Even that guy on the bicycle delivering Chinese take-out is
creating value. These are the kinds of jobs, in contrast to those
in conventionally defined manufacturing and agriculture, that have
increased remarkably in recent times and they are all value and
surplus value producing. Manhattan is an island of huge value
creation. If only half of those employed in the production and
reproduction of urban life are employed in the production of this
sort of value and surplus value, then this easily compensates for
the losses due to the industrialization of agriculture and the
automation in conventional manufacturing. This is the contemporary
proletariat at work and Springer is quite right to complain that
much of mainstream Marxist thinking has a hard time getting its
head around this new situation (which, it turns out, is not wholly
new at all). This is the proletarian world in which many social
anarchist groups have been and still are embedded.</p>
<p>But we need to take the argument further. There is a big
distinction in Marx=E2=80=99s theory between how, when and where valu=
e is
produced and how, when and where it is realized. Value produced in
China is realized, for example, in Walmart and Apple stores in
North America. There are perpetual struggles over the realization
of value between consumers and merchant/property-owning
capitalists. The battles with landlords, the phone, electricity
and credit card companies are just the most obvious examples of
struggles within the sphere of realization that pervade daily
life. It is in such realms that the politics of refusal often make
a lot of sense.</p>
<p>None of this is central in the standard Marxist theoretical
cannon when clearly, to me, as an urbanist, it should be. I feel
entirely comfortable with daily life perspectives and applaud the
social anarchist position on this. I do, however, have a caveat:
everyday life problems from the perspective of the individual or
of the local neighborhood look quite different from everyday life
in the city as a whole. This is why the transition from Kropotkin
to Patrick Geddes, Mumford and the anarchist- inspired urban
planners becomes an important issue for me. How to organize urban
life in the city as a whole so that everyday life for everyone is
not =E2=80=9Cnasty, brutish and short=E2=80=9D is a question that we =
radical
geographers need to consider. This aspect of the social anarchist
tradition =E2=80=93 the preparedness to jump scales and integrate loc=
al
ambitions with metropolitan wide concerns =E2=80=93 is invaluable if
obviously flawed and I am distressed that most anarchists,
including Springer apparently, ignore if not actively reject it
presumably because it seems hierarchically inspired or entails
negotiating with if not mobilizing state power. It is here, of
course, that the Marxist insights on the relation between capital
accumulation and urbanization become critical to social action.
And it is surely significant that the urban uprisings in Turkey
and Brazil in 2013 were animated by everyday life issues as
impacted by the dynamics of capital accumulation and that they
were metropolitan-wide in their implications.</p>
<p>It would be wrong to conclude from all this that Marxists do not
work politically and practically on the politics of daily life or
in the sphere of value realization. I meet such people all over
the place all the time, involved in, say, anti-gentrification
struggles and fights over the provision of health care and
education as well as in right to the city movements. The Marxist
critique of education under capitalism has been profound (Bowles
and Gintis, 1977). This is a realm where Marxist practices often
go well beyond the theoretical content (a gap which I as well as
other Marxist geographers like Neil Smith (1992, 2003) and, from a
somewhat different angle, Gibson-Graham (2006) have attempted to
close). But it is also clear to me that many people working
politically on these daily life questions do not care about
Marxism or anarchism ideologically but simply engage in radical
practices that often converge onto anti-capitalist politics for
contingent rather than ideological reasons. This is the kind of
world of non-ideological collective action that Paul Hawken (2007)
writes so enthusiastically about. I have met workers in
recuperated factories in Argentina whose primary interest was
nothing more than having a job and activists within solidarity
economies in Brazil who are simply concerned with improving daily
life. Sure, most of those involved will praise horizontalism when
asked, but for most of them that was not what spurred them into
action (Sitrin and Azzelini, 2014). Those working in such contexts
seize on any literature and any concepts that seem relevant to
their cause no matter whether articulated by anarchists, Marxists
or whoever.</p>
<p>If, as Springer (2014: 252) says, anarchism is primarily =E2=80=9Cab=
out
actively reinventing the everyday through a desire to create new
forms of organization=E2=80=9D, then I am all for it. If it does not
separate working, living, creating, acting, thinking, and cultural
activities, but keeps them together within the seamless web of
daily life (as a=C2=A0totality) and tries to re-shape that life then =
I
am totally with it. The search to re- shape daily life around
different =E2=80=9Cstructures of feeling=E2=80=9D (as Raymond William=
s might have
put it) is as critical for me as it is for Springer and the
autonomistas who have taken up biopolitics.</p>
<p>But the implications are, I think, even broader. What unifies all
our perspectives is what I can best call =E2=80=9Ca search for meanin=
g=E2=80=9D in
a social world that appears more and more meaningless. This
requires a real attempt to live as far as possible an unalienated
life in an increasingly alienating world. I admire the social
anarchists I have known because of their deep personal and
intellectual commitment to do just that.</p>
<p>Social anarchists are not, however, alone in this. I am all for
it too. I featured alienation (a taboo concept for many Marxists
of a scientistic or Althusserian persuasion) as the seventeenth
and in many respects crucial contradiction in my <em>Seventeen
Contradictions and the End of Capitalism</em> (2014). You don=E2=80=
=99t
have to be either an anarchist or a Marxist to attempt to create a
personal and social world which has meaning and within which it is
possible to live in a relatively unalienated way. Millions of
people are perpetually struggling to do just that and in so doing
create islands of unalienated activities. This is what many
religious groups do all the time. Many young people in the world
today, faced with meaningless employment opportunities and
mindless consumerism are searching and opting for a different
lifestyle. Much of contemporary cultural production in the Western
world is building upon exactly this sensibility and the broad
left, both anarchist and Marxist, has to learn to respond
appropriately.</p>
<p>The result, David Graeber suggests, is that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>even when there is next to no other constituency for
revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group
most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of
artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of
non-alienated production=E2=80=A6.Surely there must be a link betwe=
en
the actual experience of first imagining things and then
bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the
ability to envision social alternatives=E2=80=94particularly, the
possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms
of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary
coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a
society=E2=80=99s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual
revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when
these two categories most broadly overlap (2002: 70).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whether this was true in the past can be debated (I personally
think there were elements of this configuration at work in the
Paris Commune). But Graeber=E2=80=99s statement undoubtedly captures =
an
important feature of radical activism in our time and one that I
both appreciate and relate to.</p>
<p>So what, then, is the central problem in the midst of all this
positive feeling about the social anarchist approach to daily life
questions? The answer for me lies in what Bookchin calls =E2=80=9Cthe
anarchist disdain for power=E2=80=9D (2014: 139; as represented,
for=C2=A0example, in John Holloway=E2=80=99s <em>Change the World Wit=
hout
Taking Power</em> (2010)). And behind this, of course, lies the
thorny problem of how to approach the question of the state in
general and the capitalist state in particular.</p>
<p>The best I can do here is to take up the most compelling
historical example I have come across of the failure of an
amazingly well-developed anarchist movement to mobilize collective
power and to take the state when it clearly had the opportunity to
do so. I rely here on Ealham=E2=80=99s (2010) detailed and sympatheti=
c
account of the anarchist movement in Barcelona from 1898-1937 and
in particular on its failure to consolidate the power of a mass
movement in 1936-7. I propose to use this example to illustrate
what seems to be a general problem with anarchist practices,
including those that Springer advocates.</p>
<p>The Barcelona movement was based on the instinctive collective
organizations of working class populations in the <em>barris</em>
(neighborhoods) of the city along the lines of integrated social
networks and mutual aid, coupled with deep distrust of a state
apparatus that neglected their social needs and essentially
criminalized, marginalized, and merely sought to police and
repress their aspirations. Given these conditions, large segments
of the working class fell in line with anarcho-syndicalist forms
of organization as represented by the National Confederation of
Labor (CNT), which at its height had over a million adherents
throughout Catalonia. There were, however, other anarchist
currents =E2=80=93 the radical anarchists in particular =E2=80=93 tha=
t often
opposed the syndicalists and organized themselves (often
clandestinely) through affinity groups and neighborhood committees
to pursue their aims. But the overall structure of this working
class movement was neighborhood based and territorially
segregated. The CNT was =E2=80=9Cvery much a product of local space a=
nd
the social relations within it; its unions made the <em>barris</em>
feel powerful, and workers felt ownership over what they regarded
as =E2=80=98our=E2=80=99 union=E2=80=9D (Ealham, 2010: 39). But it ha=
d great difficulty in
thinking the city as a whole rather than in terms of those
separate territories it did control. The militant affinity groups,
for example, =E2=80=9Cwere incapable of converting isolated local act=
ions
into a more offensive action that could lead to a powerful
transformation at regional or state level=E2=80=9D (2010: 122). The
movement=E2=80=99s central weakness in the run-up to the civil war, E=
alham
argues, =E2=80=9Cwas its failure to generate an overarching instituti=
onal
structure capable of coordinating the war effort and
simultaneously harmonizing the activities of the myriad workers=E2=80=
=99
collectives. In political terms, the revolution was underdeveloped
and inchoate=E2=80=A6..the revolution in Barcelona failed to generate=
any
revolutionary institution=E2=80=A6=E2=80=A6workers=E2=80=99 power rem=
ained fragmented and
atomised on the streets, dispersed among a multitude of <em>comit=C3=
=A9s</em>
without any coordination at regional or national level=E2=80=9D (2010=
:
168; also Bookchin, 2014: Chapter 8). The reluctance of the
anarchists of whatever sort to take state power for ideological
reasons when it clearly had the power to do so left the state in
the hands of the bourgeois republicans and their
Stalinist/communist allies who bided their time until they were
well-organized enough to violently crush the CNT movement in the
name of republican law and order.</p>
<p>Even worse, the movement largely betrayed its own principles by
practices that ignored the will of the people. The radical
affinity groups pursued insurrectionary tactics that produced a
=E2=80=9Cgrowing disquiet=E2=80=9D about their =E2=80=9Celitism=E2=80=
=9D and the undemocratic ways
in which they would launch continuous insurrectionary actions.
They depicted their actions as =E2=80=9Ccatalytic=E2=80=9D rather tha=
n
=E2=80=9Cvanguardist=E2=80=9D, but most people recognized this was an=
archist
vanguardism under another name. The insurrectionists expected and
appealed for mass support (which rarely materialized) for actions
decided upon by no more than at most a hundred but in many
instances just a dozen or so members of a particular affinity
group. This created problems for everyone else. The
anarcho-syndicalists of Madrid and Asturias complained that the
cascading insurrectionary actions of the radical anarchist
=E2=80=9Cgrupistas=E2=80=9D in Barcelona were disruptive rather than =
constructive.
=E2=80=9COur revolution=E2=80=9D they wrote in their daily paper, =E2=
=80=9Crequires more
than an attack on a Civil Guard barracks or an army post. That is
not revolutionary. We will call an insurrectionary general strike
when the situation is right; when we can seize the factories,
mines, power plants, transportation and the means of production=E2=80=
=9D
(quoted in Ealham, 2010: 144). What is the point of
insurrectionary action, they said, if there is no idea let alone
concrete plan to re-organize the world the day after?</p>
<p>There are two broad lines of critique of the conventional
anarchist position in Ealham=E2=80=99s account that are relevant to m=
y
argument. Firstly there is the failure to shape and mobilize
political power into a sufficiently effective configuration to
press home a revolutionary transformation in society as a whole.
If, as seems to be the case, the world cannot be changed without
taking power then what is the point of a movement that refuses to
build and take that power? Secondly, there is an inability to
stretch the vision of political activism from local to far broader
geographical scales at which the planning of major infrastructures
and the management of environmental conditions and long distance
trade relations becomes a collective responsibility for millions
of people. Who will manage the transport and communications
network is the question. The anarchist town planners (including
Bookchin) understood this problem but their work is largely
ignored within the anarchist movement. These dimensions define
terrains upon which anarchists but not Marxists are fearful of
operating (which is not to say the Marxists have no failures to
their credit). And it is here that the whole history of anarchist
influences in centralized urban planning deserves to be
resurrected. This is a complicated topic that I cannot possibly
probe into more deeply here. But this is clearly the most obvious
point where anarchist concerns for the qualities of daily life and
Marxist perspectives on global capital flows and the construction
of physical infrastructures through long-term investments could
come together with constructive results.</p>
<p>Springer prefers insurrectionary to revolutionary politics. He
does so on the grounds that revolutionaries typically sit for ever
in the =E2=80=9Cwaiting room of history=E2=80=9D endlessly planning f=
or the
revolution that never comes whereas the insurrectionists =E2=80=9Cdo =
it
now.=E2=80=9D Well sometimes they do and sometimes they don=E2=80=99t=
. But much of
the rhetoric these days about the =E2=80=9Ccoming insurrection=E2=80=
=9D (announced
by The Invisible Committee (2009) in 2007 in France but yet to
materialize) is just that: rhetoric. I=C2=A0hope that Springer=E2=80=
=99s
version is democratically based and not elitist and that he does
the detailed organizing required to keep the electricity flowing,
the subways running and the garbage picked up in the days that
follow. I personally don=E2=80=99t trust continuous insurrections tha=
t
spring spontaneously from self-activity, which are thought of as
=E2=80=9Ca means without end=E2=80=9D and predicated on the idea that=
=E2=80=9Cwe cannot
liberate each other, we can only liberate ourselves=E2=80=9D (Springe=
r,
2014: 262-263). Self- liberation through insurrection is all well
and good but what about everyone else?</p>
<p>I find Bookchin=E2=80=99s line on all of this interesting, even if
incomplete. Resolutely opposed as he was to the state and
hierarchies as unreformable instruments of oppression and denial
of human freedom, he was not na=C3=AFve about the necessity of taking
power:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every revolution, indeed, even every attempt to achieve basic
change, will always meet with resistance from elites in power.
Every effort to defend a revolution will require the amassing of
power =E2=80=93 physical as well as institutional and administrativ=
e =E2=80=93
which is to say, the creation of government. Anarchists may call
for the abolition of the state, but coercion of some kind will
be necessary to prevent the bourgeois state from returning in
full force with unbridled terror. For a libertarian organization
to eschew, out of misplaced fear of creating a =E2=80=9Cstate=E2=80=
=9D, taking
power when it can do so with the support of the revolutionary
masses is confusion at best and a total failure of nerve at
worst (Bookchin, 2014: 183).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Graeber=E2=80=99s response is to insist that anarchist strategy =E2=
=80=9Cis less
about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and
dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of
autonomy from it=E2=80=9D (2002: 73). Only within such autonomous spa=
ces
can true democratic practices become possible. From my perspective
this means creating a parallel state (like the Zapatistas) within
the capitalist state. Such experiments rarely work and when they
do, as in the case of the paramilitary forms of organization that
dominate in Colombia or the various mafia like organizations that
exist around the world (e.g. in Italy), they are rarely benign (in
fact they are typically hornet=E2=80=99s nests of extortion, violence=
and
corruption). Even left revolutionary guerilla movements (such as
the FARC in Colombia) experienced defaults of this kind and there
is no guarantee that any parallel power structure devised by
anarchists will not suffer from similar problems. In any case, the
present penchant for =E2=80=98government by NGO=E2=80=99 provides a c=
lassic
example of how ruling powers can co-opt and de-fang the radical
idea of autonomy for their own purposes.</p>
<p>The anarchist and autonomista reluctance to take and consolidate
power is rooted, I suspect, in the concept of the =E2=80=9Cfree
individual=E2=80=9D upon which much anarchist and autonomista thinkin=
g
rests. The critique of radical individualism runs as follows. The
concept of the free individual bears the mark of liberal legal
institutions (even of private property in the body and the self)
spiced with a hefty dose of that personalized protestant religion
which Weber associated with the rise of capitalism. To say, as
Reclus did with great pride, that he had gone through life as a
free individual, was to place himself firmly in the liberal and
protestant tradition (Reclus=E2=80=99 father was a protestant ministe=
r and
for a while Reclus trained for the ministry; see=C2=A0Chardak, 1997).
His sort of anarchism has its roots in liberal theory and the
Judeo- Christian tradition even as it constructs its
anti-capitalism through the negation of the market and a critique
of the class and environmental consequences of liberal theory and
capitalist practices. There is nothing wrong with this (Marx also
constructs largely by way of negation of classical political
economy and its liberal and Judeo-Christian roots). But the result
is an awkward overlap at times (which exists in both Marx and
Proudhon) in which the critique incorporates and mirrors far too
much of that which it criticizes. There is a real problem here
which Springer evades by denouncing as =E2=80=9Coxymoronic=E2=80=9D a=
nyone that
places anarchist thinking too close to its liberal (and by
extension neoliberal) roots as defined, for example, in Nozick=E2=80=
=99s <em>Anarchy,
State, and Utopia</em> (1974). This is an issue that has to be
rationally unpacked because it has had and potentially will
continue to have real consequences.</p>
<p>In 1984 two MIT professors, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, for
example, published a book called <em>The Second Industrial Divide</em=
>
(1984). Back in 1848, they argued, industrial capitalism faced a
moment of technological possibility in its organization in which
it could either move towards mass factory production of the sort
that Marx predicted and embraced or take the path that Proudhon
advocated, which was the linking together of small, independent
workshops in which associated laborers could democratically
control their work and their lives. The wrong choice was made
after 1848, they claim, and thereafter mass factory production,
with all of its evils, dominated industrial capitalism. But in the
1970s new technologies and organizational forms were emerging
which posed that same choice anew. With flexible specialization
and small batch and niche production, Proudhon=E2=80=99s dream was on=
ce
more a possibility. Piore and Sabel became fierce advocates for
the new forms of industrial organization =E2=80=93 termed =E2=80=9Cfl=
exible
specialization=E2=80=9D =E2=80=93 most classically represented at tha=
t time by the
emerging industrial districts of the Third Italy. Both Piore and
Sabel, armed with their reputations, their MacArthur grants and
supported by so-called progressive thinkers and institutions of
the time, set out to persuade the unions to embrace the
Proudhonian vision rather than oppose the new technologies. Sabel
became an influential advisor to the International Labour
Organization. Many of us on the Marxist left were deeply troubled
by this turn. I added my voice to the critics by arguing in <em>The
Condition of Postmodernity</em> (1989; as well as at the AAG in
Baltimore in 1987 when Sabel and I clashed fiercely), that
flexible specialization was nothing other than a tactic of
flexible accumulation for capital. The campaign to persuade or
cajole (via the International Monetary Fund) countries to adopt
policies for the flexibilization of labor was a sign of this
intent (and it still goes on through IMF mandates, as now in
Greece). In retrospect it is clear that this scheme, supported by
Piore and Sabel and given an aura of progressive radicalism in the
name of Proudhon, was a core element of neoliberalization, with
all the consequences that flowed for the disempowerment of labor
and labor=E2=80=99s declining share of gains from productivity. This =
left
nearly all of the newly produced wealth in the hands of the one
percent. We badly need to disabuse ourselves of what Bookchin
calls the =E2=80=9CProudhonist myth that small associations of
producers=E2=80=A6.can slowly eat away at capitalism=E2=80=9D (2014: =
59).
The=C2=A0autonomistas, along with Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapelin in =
<em>The
New Spirit of Capitalism</em> (2007), even go so far as to
suggest that it was the working class practices of the
autonomistas and the anarchists that were taken over by capital to
create new forms of control and new networked organizational forms
during the 1970s.</p>
<p>Capitalist anarchism is a real problem. It has its coherent
central theory as set out by Nozick, Hayek and others, and a
doctrine of market freedoms. It has turned out not only to be the
most successful form of decentralized decision making ever
invented =E2=80=93 as Marx so elegantly demonstrated in <em>Capital</=
em>
=E2=80=93 but also a force for an immense centralization of wealth an=
d
power in the hands of an increasingly powerful oligarchy. This
dialectic between decentralization and centralization is one of
the most important contradictions within capital (see my <em>Seventee=
n
Contradictions and the End of Capitalism</em>) and I wish all
those, like Springer, who advocate decentralization as if it is an
unalloyed good would look more closely at its consequences and
contradictions. As I argued in <em>Rebel Cities</em> (2013a),
decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing
greater inequality and centralization of power. Once again,
Bookchin sort of agrees: =E2=80=9Cat the risk of seeming contrary, I =
feel
obliged to emphasize that decentralization, localism,
self-sufficiency, and even confederation, each taken singly, do
not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a rational
ecological society. In fact all of them have at one time or
another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even
despotic regimes=E2=80=9D (2014: 73-74). This was, by the way, my mai=
n
problem with the stance taken by Gibson-Graham in their pursuit of
totally decentralized anti- capitalist alternatives.</p>
<p>While left anarchism of the Proudhon sort has no coherent theory,
right-wing capitalist anarchism has a coherent theoretical
structure that rests upon a seductive utopian vision of human
freedom. It took the genius of Marx to deconstruct this theory in
<em>Capital</em>. Small wonder that Marx in deconstructing it
would find Proudhon=E2=80=99s vision so unintendedly reactionary.</p>
<p>Which brings me to the question of the relations between Marx and
Proudhon. I have freely recognized (e.g. in the companions to
Marx=E2=80=99s <em>Capital,</em> 2010: 6, 2013b: 189) that Marx drew =
far
more from the French socialist tradition (including Proudhon) than
he acknowledged and that he was often unfair in his criticisms of
Proudhon (but then he was also just as unfair in his criticisms of
Mill, Malthus and even Ricardo =E2=80=93 this was just Marx=E2=80=99s=
way). But
Marx drew as much from the Jacobin Auguste Blanqui (who I think
coined the phrase =E2=80=9Cthe dictatorship of the proletariat=E2=80=
=9D, which
Marx rarely used and should have put in scare quotes, thereby
saving us from a lot of trouble), as well as Fourier (the opening
of the chapter in <em>Capital</em> on the labor process is a
hidden dialogue with him), Saint-Simon (who Marx admired to the
degree that he saw the association of capitals in the form of the
joint stock company as possibly a progressive move), Cabet, as
well as Robert Owen (Blanqui=E2=80=99s defense before the court of as=
sizes
in 1832 is an astonishing statement; Corcoran, 1983). But Marx=E2=80=
=99s
dependence on these thinkers, as was also the case with his
dependency on=C2=A0classical political economy, was marked for the mo=
st
part by fierce critical interrogation as Marx sought to build his
own theoretical apparatus to understand how capital accumulated.
What Marx accepted and what he arrived at by negation in his
interrogations from any of these people is a complicated question.</p=
>
<p>But to go from this recognition to suggest that Marx plagiarized
everything from Proudhon in particular is indeed totally absurd.
The idea of the exploitation of labour by capital, for example,
was far more strongly articulated by Blanqui than by Proudhon and
was completely accepted by the socialist Ricardians. It was
obvious to pretty much everyone and Marx made no claims of
originality in pointing to it. What Marx did was to show how that
exploitation could be accomplished without violating laws of
market exchange that theoretically (and in the utopian universe of
classical political economy) rested upon equality, freedom and
reciprocity. To promote those laws of exchange as the foundation
of equality was to create the conditions for the centralization of
capitalist class power. This was what Proudhon missed. When Marx
pointed to the importance of the commodification of labor power he
may well have been drawing on Blanqui without acknowledgement but
even here it was Marx and not Blanqui who recognized its
significance for the theory of capital. Marx=E2=80=99s critique in th=
e <em>Grundrisse</em>
of the Proudhonian conception of money and of the idea that all
that was needed for a peaceful transition to socialism was a
reform of the monetary system was accurate (and of course
Proudhon=E2=80=99s free credit bank was an instantaneous disaster tho=
ugh
it may have been bourgeois sabotage that made it so). Marx=E2=80=99s
critique of Proudhon=E2=80=99s theories of eternal justice is also
penetrating. It is here precisely that Marx points out how
theories of justice are not universal but specific, and in the
bourgeois case specific to the rise of liberal capitalism. To
pursue the aim of universal justice as a revolutionary strategy
ran the danger of simply instanciating bourgeois law within
socialism. This is a familiar problem, as everyone working
critically with notions of human rights recognizes. When Marx
appealed, as he often did, to ideas of association he was almost
certainly drawing more on Saint-Simon than Proudhon.</p>
<p>While Proudhon undoubtedly had important things to say, there are
dangers of viewing him as representative of some perfected social
anarchism. He had a weak grasp of political economy, did not
support the workers in the revolution of 1848, was against trade
unions and strikes and held to a narrow definition of socialism as
nothing more than the association of workers mutually supporting
each other. He was hostile to women working and his supporters
campaigned vigorously in the workers commissions of the 1860s in
France to have women banned from employment in the Paris
workshops. The main opposition came from the Paris Branch of the
International Working Men=E2=80=99s Association led by Eugene Varlin =
who
insisted upon women=E2=80=99s equality and right to work (Harvey, 200=
3).
Proudhon=E2=80=99s book, <em>Pornography: The Situation of Women</em>=
,
is, according to his biographer Edward Hyams, full of =E2=80=9Cevery
illiberal, every cruelly reactionary notion ever used against
female emancipation by the most extreme anti-feminist=E2=80=9D (1979:
274). OK, so Marx was no saint either on such matters. Both
anarchism and Marxism have had and=C2=A0continue to have a troubled
history on the gender question but on this topic Proudhon is an
extreme and ugly outlier.</p>
<p>What is really odd is that before the Commune, in the 1860s,
Marxists and anarchists were not at logger-heads in the same way
as they later became. Reclus and many Proudhonians attended the
meetings of the International Working Men=E2=80=99s Association and I
recall reading somewhere that Marx asked Reclus if he would be
willing to translate <em>Capital</em> from German into French.
Reclus did not do so. I do sense, however, that Marx felt that
Proudhon was his chief rival for the affections of the French
revolutionary working class and in part concentrated his critical
fire against him for that reason. But the clash of ideologies
within the Paris Commune was between many factions, such as the
centralizing and often violent Jacobinism of the Blanquists and
variations of the Proudhonian decentralized associationists. The
communists, like Varlin, were a minority. The subsequent
appropriation of the Commune by Marx, Engels and Lenin as a heroic
if fatally flawed uprising on the part of the working classes does
not stand up to historical examination any more than does the
story that it was the product of a purely urban social movement
that had nothing to do with class. I view the Commune as a class
event if only because it was a revolt against bourgeois structures
of power and domination in both the living spaces as well as in
the workplaces of the city (Harvey, 2003). Who =E2=80=9Clost=E2=80=9D=
the Commune
became, however, a major issue in which the finger-pointing
between Marx and Bakunin played a critical role in creating a huge
gulf between the anarchist and Marxist traditions (a gulf that
Springer seems concerned to deepen if he can).</p>
<p>The individualism that lies at its emotional base does not, of
course, lead social anarchism to ignore the importance of
collective activities, the construction of solidarities or
building a variety of organizational forms. As Springer puts it,
=E2=80=9CAnarchist organizing is limited only by our imagination, whe=
re
the only existent criteria are that they proceed
non-hierarchically and free from external authority=E2=80=A6..This co=
uld
include almost any form of organization, from a volunteer fire
brigade for safety, to community gardens for food, to cooperatives
for housing, to knitting collectives for clothes=E2=80=9D (2014: 253)=
.
There is, however, something deceptive about such lists. Having
experienced the =E2=80=9Cjoys=E2=80=9D of living in a housing coop in=
New York
City I can assure everyone that there is nothing particularly
liberatory or progressive about it. The standard anarchist
response to this is to say that this would not be so if the
anarchists were in charge. This, of course, begs the question of
which organizational forms are truly anarchist as opposed to just
convenient for any form of hegemonic power (including that of the
anarchists). The rule, here, seems to be that all forms of social
organization are possible except that of the state.</p>
<p>For this reason anarchists are often drawn to adopt indigenous
communities as one of their favored forms of association because
of their ability to pursue communal forms of action without
creating anything that resembles a state. This underpins Chomsky=E2=
=80=99s
embrace of the Mapuche in Southern Chile (the Mapuche kept the
Spanish invaders and the Chilean government at bay for hundreds of
years) and=C2=A0James Scott=E2=80=99s characterization of the indigen=
ous
populations of Highland Southeast Asia as prototypical anarchist
in form. In some ways this is an odd coupling because for most
indigenous populations the radical individualism that underpins
much of Western anarchism is meaningless given their relational
collectivism and their general appreciation of harmony and
spiritual membership as core cultural values. Unfortunately in the
case of the Mapuche, the penetrations of commodification, money
and merchant capitalism are currently doing far more damage than
either Spanish colonialism or the Chilean state ever did to their
core cultural values. As Marx puts it, =E2=80=9Cwhen money dissolves =
the
community it becomes the community=E2=80=9D and what is happening to =
many
indigenous societies is exactly that. While these social orders
and their value systems are of great merit, I fear that a
political program that argued for the populations of North America
and Europe to live like the Mapuche, the highland tribes of Asia
or the Zapatistas would not go very far and in any case would do
little or nothing to curb the avaricious practices of capital
accumulation through dispossession that are currently at work in
Amazonia and other hitherto relatively untouched regions of the
world. And in some instances, such as Otavalo in Ecuador or even
more spectacularly in El Alto in Bolivia (with more than a million
people mostly indigenous Almara), the embrace of the market
produces a vibrant indigenous culture with entrepreneurial
merchant capitalist characteristics.</p>
<p>This is, however, a good point to take up the question of the
state as perhaps the conceptual rubicon that neither side is
prepared to cross. For most anarchists and many non-anarchists,
opposition to and rejection of the state and of the hierarchical
institutions that support and surround it (like parliamentary
democracy and political parties) is a non-negotiable ideological
position. This is not to say that anarchists do not on occasion
engage with the state (they often have no choice in the face, for
example, of repressive police actions) or even vote (as many did
in the 2015 Greek election for example). But after his break with
anarchism, Bookchin continued to view the state as a structure set
up from the very first in the image of hierarchical domination,
exploitation and human repression, and therefore unreformable.</p>
<p>I disagree with that view. The state was the subject of a huge
and divisive debate (in which Holloway was a major protagonist)
within Marxism for two decades or more. I still think Gramsci and
the late Poulantzas worth reading for their insights and Jessop
nobly continues the struggle to adapt the Marxist position to
current realities. My own simplified view is that the state is a
ramshackle set of institutions existing at a variety of
geographical scales that internalize a lot of contradictions, some
of which can potentially be exploited for emancipatory rather than
obfuscatory or repressive ends (its role in public health
provision has been crucial to increasing life expectancy for
example), even as for the most part it is about hierarchical
control, the enforcement of class divisions and conformities and
the repression (violent when necessary) of non-capitalistic
liberatory human aspirations. Monopoly power within the judiciary
(and the protection of private property), over money and the means
of exchange and over the means of violence, policing and
repression, are its only coherent functions essential to the
perpetuation of capital while everything else is sort of optional
in relation to the powers of different interest groups
(with=C2=A0capitalists and nationalists by far the most influential).
But the state has and continues to have a critical role to play in
the provision of large-scale physical and social infrastructures.
Any revolutionary (or insurrectionary) movement has to reckon with
the problem of how to provide such infrastructures. Society (no
matter whether capitalist or not) needs to be reproduced and the
state has a key role in doing that. In recent times the state has
become more and more a tool of capital and far less amenable to
any kind of democratic control (other than the crude democracy of
money power). This has led to the rising radical demand for direct
democracy (which I would support). Yet even now there are still
enough examples of the progressive uses of state power for
emancipatory ends (for example, in Latin America in recent years)
to not give up on the state as a terrain of engagement and
struggle for progressive forces of a left wing persuasion.</p>
<p>The odd thing here is that the more autonomistas and anarchists
grapple with the necessity to build organizations that have the
capacity to ward off bourgeois power and to build the requisite
large-scale infrastructures for revolutionary transformation, the
more they end up constructing something that looks like some kind
of state. This is the case with the Zapatistas, for example, even
as they hold back from any attempt to take power within the
Mexican state. Bookchin=E2=80=99s position on all of this is interest=
ing.
On the one hand he argues that the notion that =E2=80=9Chuman freedom=
can
be achieved, much less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is
monstrously oxymoronic=E2=80=9D (2014: 39). On the other hand, he als=
o
holds that anarchists have wrongly =E2=80=9Clong regarded every gover=
nment
as a state and condemned it =E2=80=93 a view that is a recipe for the
elimination of any organized social life whatever=E2=80=9D. A =E2=80=
=9Cgovernment
is an ensemble of institutions designed to deal with the problems
of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner.=E2=80=
=9D
Opposition to the state must not carry over to opposition to
government: =E2=80=9CThe libertarian opposition to law, not to speak =
of
government as such, has been as silly as the image of a snake
swallowing its tail=E2=80=9D (2014: 13). Consensus decision making, h=
e
says, =E2=80=9Cthreatens to abolish society as such.=E2=80=9D Simple =
majority
voting suffices. There must also be a =E2=80=9Cserious commitment=E2=
=80=9D to a
=E2=80=9Cformal constitution and appropriate by-laws=E2=80=9D because=
=E2=80=9Cwithout a
democratically formulated and approved institutional framework
whose members and leaders can be held accountable, clearly
articulated standards of responsibility cease to exist=E2=80=A6..Free=
dom
from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear,
concise and detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions that
power and leadership are forms of =E2=80=9Crule=E2=80=9D or by libert=
arian
metaphors that conceal their reality=E2=80=9D (2014: 27). All of this
looks to me like a reconstruction of a certain kind of state (but
this may be nothing more than semantics). Hardt and Negri have
also recently recognized the limitations of horizontalism, the
importance of leadership, even suggesting that the time may be
ripe to reconsider the question of taking state power. In the
course of this, Negri has publically noted a certain evolution and
convergence between his and my views on some of these questions
(2015).</p>
<p>Let me conclude with a commentary on how Springer misrepresents
my critique of certain forms of organization that anarchists
currently advocate. =E2=80=9CHarvey,=E2=80=9D he writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>scorns what he refers to as the =E2=80=98na=C3=AFve=E2=80=99 and =
=E2=80=98hopeful gesturing=E2=80=99
of decentralized thinking, lamenting how the term =E2=80=98hierarch=
y=E2=80=99 is
=E2=80=98virulently unpopular with much of the left these days=E2=
=80=99. The
message rings through loud and clear. How dare anarchists (and
autonomists) attempt to conceive of something different and new,
when we should be treading water in the sea of yesterday=E2=80=99s =
spent
ideas (2014: 265).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My central complaint in <em>Rebel Cities</em> from which his
initial citation is drawn is that the =E2=80=9Cleft as a whole is
bedeviled by an all-consuming =E2=80=98fetishism of organizational fo=
rm=E2=80=99=E2=80=9D
(2013a: 125). I make common cause on this with Bookchin who
writes: =E2=80=9CNo organizational model, however, should be fetishiz=
ed to
the point where it flatly contradicts the imperatives of real
life=E2=80=9D (2014: 183). Springer and many other anarchists and
autonomistas consider the only legitimate form of organization to
be horizontal, decentered, open, consensual and non-hierarchical.
=E2=80=9CJust to be clear,=E2=80=9D I wrote, =E2=80=9CI am not saying=
horizontality is bad
=E2=80=93 indeed I think it an excellent objective =E2=80=93 but that=
we should
acknowledge its limits as a hegemonic organizational principle,
and be prepared to go far beyond it when necessary=E2=80=9D (2013a: 7=
0).
In the case of the management of the commons, for example, it is
difficult if not impossible (as Elinor Ostrom=E2=80=99s work had
demonstrated) to take consensual horizontality to much larger
scales such as the metropolitan region, the bioregion, and
certainly not the globe (as in the case of global warming). At
those scales it was impossible to proceed without setting up
=E2=80=9Cconfederal=E2=80=9D or =E2=80=9Cnested=E2=80=9D (which means=
inevitably hierarchical in
my view but then this too may just be semantics) structures of
decision making that entailed serious adjustments in organized
thinking as well as forms of institutionalized governance.</p>
<p>I cited both Murray Bookchin and David Graeber in support of this
point. The latter had noted that decentralized communities =E2=80=9Ch=
ave
to have some way to engage with larger economic, social or
political systems that surround them. This is the trickiest
question because it has proved extremely difficult for those
organized on radically different lines to integrate themselves in
any meaningful way in larger structures without having to make
endless compromises in their founding principles=E2=80=9D (Graeber, 2=
009:
239). I was interested in taking up what some of those endless
compromises might have to be. I then went on to suggest that
Bookchin=E2=80=99s proposal for municipal libertarianism organized
confederally was =E2=80=9Cby far the most sophisticated radical propo=
sal
to deal with the creation and collective use of the commons at a
variety of scales=E2=80=9D (2013a: 85). I supported Bookchin=E2=80=99=
s proposal
for a =E2=80=9C=E2=80=98municipal libertarianism=E2=80=99 embedded in=
a bioregional
conception of associated municipal assemblies rationally
regulating their interchanges with each other as well as with
nature. It is at this point,=E2=80=9D I suggested, =E2=80=9Cthat the =
world of
practical politics fruitfully intersects with the long history of
largely anarchist-inspired utopian thinking and writing about the
city=E2=80=9D (2013a: 138). There were, however, some limits to exten=
ding
Bookchin=E2=80=99s organizational ideas all the way (although there=
=C2=A0are
apparently current attempts to do so under the auspices of the
Kurdish PKK to the recently liberated Kobane; see TATORT, 2013).</p>
<p>And I thought it important to state what these might be. Looking
more closely at the organizational forms that were animated in the
revolutionary upsurges in El Alto in the early 2000s, I suggested
that we might need to look at a variety of intersecting
organizational forms, including those favored by the
=E2=80=9Chorizontalists=E2=80=9D, which cut across other more confede=
ral and in
some instances vertical structures. I ended up with a fairly
utopian sketch of intersecting organizational forms =E2=80=93 both
vertical and horizontal =E2=80=93 that might work in governing a larg=
e
metropolitan area such as New York City (2013a: 151-153).</p>
<p>This is what Springer considers =E2=80=9Ctreading water in the sea o=
f
yesterday=E2=80=99s spent ideas=E2=80=9D (2014: 265)!! The problem he=
re, I submit,
is Springer=E2=80=99s fetishization of consensual horizontality as th=
e
only admissible organizational form. It is this exclusive and
exclusionary dogma that stands in the way of exploring appropriate
and effective solutions. I accept what Graeber calls =E2=80=9Cthe ric=
h and
growing panoply of organizational instruments=E2=80=9D that anarchist=
s of
various stripes have adopted (or in some cases adapted from
indigenous practices) in recent years. These have contributed
significantly to the repertoire of possible left political
organizational forms and of course I agree (who could not) that
the critical aim of reinventing democracy should be a central
concern. But the evidence is clear that we need organizational
forms that go beyond those within which many anarchists and
autonomistas now confine themselves if we are to reinvent
democracy while pursuing a coherent anti-capitalist politics. I
support Syriza, for example, as did Negri and several Greek
anarchists I know, and Podemos not because they are revolutionary
but because they help open up a space for a different kind of
politics and a different conversation. The mobilization of
political power is essential and the state cannot be neglected as
a potential site for radicalization. On all these points I beg to
differ with many of my autonomist and anarchist colleagues.</p>
<p>But this does not preclude collaboration and mutual aid with
respect to the many other common anti-capitalist struggles with
which we are engaged. Honest disagreements should be no barrier to
fertile collaborations. So the conclusion I reach is this: let
radical geography be just that: radical geography, free of any
particular =E2=80=9Cism=E2=80=9D, nothing more, nothing less.</p>
<p>References</p>
<p>B=C3=B6hm S, Dinerstein A and Spicer A (2008) (Im)possibilities of
autonomy: Social movements in and beyond capital, the state and
development. <em>Social Movement Studies</em> 9: 17-32.</p>
<p>Boltanski L and Chiapello E (2007) <em>The New Spirit of
Capitalism</em>, Elliott G, tr. London: Verso.</p>
<p>Bookchin M (2014) <em>The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies
and the Promise of=C2=A0Direct Democracy</em>. London: Verso.</p>
<p>Bookchin M (1971) <em>Post-Scarcity Anarchism</em>. San
Francisco: Rampart Press.</p>
<p>Bowles S and Gintis H (1977) <em>Schooling in Capitalist
America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic
Life</em>. New York: Basic Books.</p>
<p>Chardak H (1997) <em>Elis=C3=A9e Reclus: L=E2=80=99Homme qui aimait =
la Terre</em>.
Paris: Editions Stock.</p>
<p>Clark J and Martin C, eds. (2004) <em>Anarchy, Geography,
Modernity</em>; The Radical Social=C2=A0Thought of Elis=C3=A9e Recl=
us.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.</p>
<p>Corcoran P (1983) <em>Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in
France</em>, 1930-48.=C2=A0London: Macmillan.</p>
<p>Dunbar G (1978) <em>Elis=C3=A9e Reclus: Historian of Nature</em>.
Hamden, CT: Archon Books.</p>
<p>Ealham C (2010) <em>Anarchism and the City: Revolution and
Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937</em>. Oakland: AK
Press.</p>
<p>Fleming M (1988) <em>The Geography of Freedom</em>. Montreal:
Black Rose Books.</p>
<p>Folke S (1972) Why a radical geography must be Marxist. <em>Antipode=
</em>
4: 13-18.</p>
<p>Gibson-Graham, J K (2006) <em>The End of Capitalism (As We Knew
It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy</em>. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press.</p>
<p>Graeber D (2002) The new anarchists. <em>New Left Review</em>
13: 61-73.</p>
<p>Graeber D (2009) <em>Direct Action: An Ethnography</em>.
Oakland: AK Press.</p>
<p>Harvey D (1975) Class structure and the theory of residential
differentiation. In Peel R, Chisholm M and Haggett P, eds.,
354-369, <em>Bristol Essays in Geography</em>. London: Heinemann
Press.</p>
<p>Harvey D (1977) Labor, capital and class struggle around the
built environment. <em>Politics and Society</em> 7: 265-295.</p>
<p>Harvey D (1984) On the history and present condition of
geography: An historical materialist manifesto. <em>The
Professional Geographer</em> 36: 1-11.</p>
<p>Harvey D (1987) Three myths in search of a reality in urban
studies. <em>Environment and Planning D:</em> <em>Society and
Space</em> 5: 367-386.</p>
<p>Harvey D (1989) <em>The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of=C2=A0Cultural Change</em>. Oxford: Blackwell.</=
p>
<p>Harvey D (2000) <em>Spaces of Hope</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.</p>
<p>Harvey D (2003) <em>Paris: Capital of Modernity</em>. New York:
Routledge.</p>
<p>Harvey D (2009) <em>Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of
Freedom</em>. New York: Columbia University Press.</p>
<p>Harvey D (2010) <em>A Companion to Marx=E2=80=99s Capital</em>. Lond=
on:
Verso.</p>
<p>Harvey D (2013a) <em>Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to
the Urban Revolution</em>.=C2=A0London: Verso.</p>
<p>Harvey D (2013b) <em>A Companion to Marx=E2=80=99s Capital, Volume 2=
</em>.
London: Verso.</p>
<p>Harvey D (2014) <em>Seventeen Contradictions and the End of
Capitalism</em>. London: Profile.</p>
<p>Hawken P (2007) <em>Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in
History is Restoring Grace and Beauty to the World</em>. New
York: Viking.</p>
<p>Holloway J (2010) <em>Change the World without Taking Power</em>.
New York: Pluto Press.</p>
<p>Hyams E (1979) <em>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary
Life, Mind and Works</em>.=C2=A0London: John Murray.</p>
<p>Johnston R J and Claval P, eds. (1984) <em>Geography Since the
Second World War</em>. London: Routledge.</p>
<p>Negri A (2015) An interview with Toni Negri: From the refusal of
labour to the seizure of power. <em>Roar Magazine</em> January,
2015
(<a href=3D"http://roarmag.org/2015/01/negri-interview-multitude-metr=
opolis/" target=3D"_blank">http://roarmag.org/2015/01/negri-interview-multi=
tude-metropolis/</a>
accessed March 20, 2015).</p>
<p>Nozick R (1974) <em>Anarchy, State, and Utopia</em>. New York:
Basic Books.</p>
<p>Peake L and Sheppard E (2014) The emergence of radical/critical
geography within=C2=A0North America. <em>ACME</em> 13: 305-327.</p>
<p>Pelletier P (2009) <em>Elis=C3=A9e Reclus: Geographie et Anarchie</e=
m>.
Paris: Les Editions du=C2=A0Monde Libertaire.</p>
<p>Piore M and Sabel C (1984) <em>The Second Industrial Divide:
Possibilities for Prosperity</em>. New York: Basic Books.</p>
<p>Reclus E (1982) <em>L=E2=80=99Homme et la Terre</em>, Ghiblin B, ed.=
2
vols (abridged). Paris: La D=C3=A9couverte.</p>
<p>Scott J (2012) <em>Two Cheers for Anarchism</em>. Princeton,
Princeton University Press.</p>
<p>Sitrin M and Azzelini D (2014) <em>They Can=E2=80=99t Represent Us:
Reinventing Democracy from=C2=A0Greece to Occupy</em>. London: Vers=
o.</p>
<p>Smith N (1992) History and philosophy of geography: Real wars,
theory wars.=C2=A0<em>Progress in Human Geography</em> 16: 257-271.</=
p>
<p>Smith N (2003) <em>American Empire: Roosevelt=E2=80=99s Geography an=
d
the Prelude to=C2=A0Globalization</em>. Berkeley: University of
California Press.</p>
<p>Springer S (2014) Why a radical geography must be anarchist. <em>Dia=
logues
in Human=C2=A0Geography</em> 4: 249-270.</p>
<p>TATORT (2013) <em>Democratic Autonomy in Northern Kurdistan: The
Council Movement,=C2=A0Gender Liberation and Ecology</em>. Porsgrun=
n,
Norway: New Compass Press.</p>
<p>The Invisible Committee (2009) <em>The Coming Insurrection</em>.
Los Angeles, Semiotext(e).</p>
<br><span class=3D"HOEnZb"><font color=3D"#888888">
=20
<p></p>
-- <br>
To view previous posts, create a Google account with your current email an=
d log in using gmail to access the archives.<br>
<a href=3D"https://accounts.google.com/newaccount?hl=3Den" target=3D"_blank=
">https://accounts.google.com/newaccount?hl=3Den</a><br>
--- <br>
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups &=
quot;<a href=3D"mailto:debate-list at fahamu.org" target=3D"_blank">debate-lis=
t at fahamu.org</a>" group.<br>
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an e=
mail to <a href=3D"mailto:debate-list+unsubscribe at fahamu.org" target=3D"_bl=
ank">debate-list+unsubscribe at fahamu.org</a>.<br>
To post to this group, send email to <a href=3D"mailto:debate-list at fahamu.o=
rg" target=3D"_blank">debate-list at fahamu.org</a>.<br>
Visit this group at <a href=3D"http://groups.google.com/a/fahamu.org/group/=
debate-list/" target=3D"_blank">http://groups.google.com/a/fahamu.org/group=
/debate-list/</a>.<br>
</font></span></div></blockquote></div><br>________________________________=
_______________<br>
NetworkedLabour mailing list<br>
<a href=3D"mailto:NetworkedLabour at lists.contrast.org">NetworkedLabour at lists=
.contrast.org</a><br>
<a href=3D"http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour" rel=
=3D"noreferrer" target=3D"_blank">http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinf=
o/networkedlabour</a><br>
<br></div><br><br clear=3D"all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class=3D"gmail_s=
ignature"><div dir=3D"ltr"><div><div dir=3D"ltr"><div>Check out the Commons=
Transition Plan here at: <a href=3D"http://commonstransition.org" target=
=3D"_blank">http://commonstransition.org</a>=C2=A0=C2=A0</div><div><br></di=
v>P2P Foundation: <a href=3D"http://p2pfoundation.net" target=3D"_blank">ht=
tp://p2pfoundation.net</a>=C2=A0 - <a href=3D"http://blog.p2pfoundation.net=
" target=3D"_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href=3D"ht=
tp://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target=
=3D"_blank"></a>Updates: <a href=3D"http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target=3D"=
_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href=3D"http://www.facebook.com=
/mbauwens" target=3D"_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#8=
2 on the (En)Rich list: <a href=3D"http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/=
" target=3D"_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>=
</div></div></div>
</div></div>
--089e011767f929137205188c6911--
More information about the P2P-Foundation
mailing list