SubStance

The rise of a global anti-capitalist protest movement is widely regarded as a sign of anarchism's revival. For some, the protest movement's complex diversity points to inherently anarchistic principles of organization. As Naomi Klein argues, the movement has a "decentralized, non-hierarchical structure." Instead of "forming a pyramid … with leaders up on top and followers down below," it "mirrors the organic, decentralised, interlinked pathways of the internet … a network of hubs and spokes … [of] hundreds, possibly thousands of 'affinity groups'…" ("Vision"). Anarchist activists make a stronger claim: no matter how the protesters describe their affiliations, the movement as a whole is rightly regarded as anarchist. Anarchism, David Graeber argues, "is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what's new and hopeful about it" (61). Other grass-roots activists warmly endorse this contention, treating the global protest movement as the clearest and strongest assertion of practical anarchism since 1968. After the protest in Seattle—the movement's "coming out party" (Klein 81)—Fifth Estate led with the headline "Much More Than A Few Broken Windows." The mass direct action, the report continued "and the new alliances formed in the streets and across international borders mark a hopeful escalation in a newly forming and worldwide movement of resistance to corporate globalization and capital" (1). In a more general discussion of summit protests and networks, Andrew Flood has argued:

With the emergence of the summit protest movement into the public eye after J18 and Seattle, anarchism gained an influence way beyond what the numbers of anarchists and the level of anarchist organization might have led to you to predict. Quite quickly in the English-speaking world, anarchism emerged from being a fairly obscure and historical critique of the left to become one of the main poles in the globalization movement.

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The resurgence of anarchism in the international anti-capitalist movement has excited renewed academic interest in anarchist ideas. Particular attention has been focused on the relationship between the protest movement and so-called post-anarchism: anarchism that reworks the [End Page 67] "classical" theory that animated the nineteenth-century anarchist movement through the lens of poststructuralism and/or postmodernism. In a recent examination of anarchist organization, Patrick Reedy argues that the contemporary relevance of anarchism derives from "its affinity with post-structural thought" (186). Valérie Fournier finds a similar link, positing a triadic relationship between anarchism, grass-roots protest, and a Deleuzean concept of "rhizomatic action."

In post-anarchist camps the link between postanarchist theory and the global protest movement is often made in exclusionary terms, and the rise of the protest movement is said to highlight the out-modedness of classical anarchism. Jon Purkis and James Bowen argue that this brand of anarchism, (associated with a broad spectrum of thinkers including Michael Bakunin, Alexander Berkman, William Godwin, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Erico Malatesta and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) raises "issues and principles that … are still worthy of debate" and which are of historic interest. But when it comes to political practice, classical anarchism is ripe for a "major overhaul" ("Twenty-First Century Anarchism" 3). In their view, the rise of mass anti-capitalist protest and the emergence of post-anarchist thinking mark a "paradigm shift" in anarchism ("Changing Anarchism" 2-5).

Post-anarchists theorize the apparent shift from classical anarchism in different ways. Todd May's well-known poststructuralist critique is not so much a rejection of classical anarchism as a revival of the Nietzschean and Stirnerite currents of thought that he claims were wrongly marginalized in the historical tradition.² May's argument turns on the conception of power. Mainstream classical anarchism, he argues, focuses too narrowly on the oppressive power of a single entity—the state—and wrongly conceptualizes liberation in terms of its removal or abolition. Though power is located in the state and the economy, this is not its only location, and in any case, power...