A critique of the (left and right) Anarchist Vision of Power, by David Harvey

Please carefully read the following quotes:

1.

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 – physical as well as institutional and administrative – 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 “state”, 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).

2.

We badly need to disabuse ourselves of what Bookchin calls the “Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers….can slowly eat away at capitalism” (2014: 59). The 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.”

3.

The market … “has turned out not only to be the most successful form of decentralized decision making ever invented – as Marx so elegantly demonstrated in Capital – but also a force for an immense centralization of wealth 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: “at 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”

David Harvey, himself a ‘marxist’ geographer, featured the discussion below in a polemic against Simon Springer, a anarchist geographer.

What is of interest here are the following:

1) the critique of the left anarchist vision discusses the historical experience in Catalonia, in the 1930’s (prior and during the Spanish Civil War), which failed to create any counter-hegemonic power that could have resisted a unified enemy, and sees this as the archetypal weakness of these type of approaches

2) the critique of right anarcho-capitalism, which considers p2p as a networked market, and not as a distributed commons, as we do in the P2P Founcdation, wants to weaken all public and state controls on predatory market practices

David Harvey:

“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 “the anarchist disdain for power” (2014: 139; as represented, for example, in John Holloway’s 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’s (2010) detailed 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 – the radical anarchists in particular – 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 “very 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 ‘our’ union” (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, “were incapable of converting isolated local actions into a more offensive action that could lead to a powerful transformation at regional or state level” (2010: 122). The movement’s central weakness in the run-up to the civil war, Ealham argues, “was its failure to generate an overarching institutional structure capable of coordinating the war effort and simultaneously harmonizing the activities of the myriad workers’ collectives. In political terms, the revolution was underdeveloped and inchoate…..the revolution in Barcelona failed to generate any revolutionary institution……workers’ power remained fragmented and atomised on the streets, dispersed among a multitude of comités without any coordination at regional or national level” (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 “growing disquiet” about their “elitism” and the undemocratic ways in which they would launch continuous insurrectionary actions. They depicted their actions as “catalytic” rather than “vanguardist”, but most people recognized this was anarchist 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 “grupistas” in Barcelona were disruptive rather than constructive. “Our revolution” they wrote in their daily paper, “requires 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” (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’s account that are relevant to my 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.

Springer prefers insurrectionary to revolutionary politics. He does so on the grounds that revolutionaries typically sit for ever in the “waiting room of history” endlessly planning for the revolution that never comes whereas the insurrectionists “do it now.” Well sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. But much of the rhetoric these days about the “coming insurrection” (announced by The Invisible Committee (2009) in 2007 in France but yet to materialize) is just that: rhetoric. I hope that Springer’s 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’t trust continuous insurrections that spring spontaneously from self-activity, which are thought of as “a means without end” and predicated on the idea that “we cannot liberate each other, we can only liberate ourselves” (Springer, 2014: 262-263). Self- liberation through insurrection is all well and good but what about everyone else?

I find Bookchin’s 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 naïve 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 – physical as well as institutional and administrative – 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 “state”, 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’s response is to insist that anarchist strategy “is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it” (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’s 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 ‘government by NGO’ provides a classic example of how ruling 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 “free individual” 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’ 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 “oxymoronic” anyone that places anarchist thinking too close to its liberal (and by extension neoliberal) roots as defined, for example, in Nozick’s 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’s dream was once more a possibility. Piore and Sabel became fierce advocates for the new forms of industrial organization – termed “flexible specialization” – 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’s 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 “Proudhonist myth that small associations of producers….can slowly eat away at capitalism” (2014: 59). The 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 – as Marx so elegantly demonstrated in Capital – but also a force for an immense centralization of wealth 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: “at 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” (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’s vision so unintendedly reactionary.

Which brings me to the question of the relations between Marx and Proudhon. I have freely recognized (e.g. in the companions to Marx’s 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 – this was just Marx’s way). But Marx drew as much from the Jacobin Auguste Blanqui (who I think coined the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, 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 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’s defense before the court of assizes in 1832 is an astonishing statement; Corcoran, 1983). But Marx’s dependence on these 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’s critique 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’s free credit bank was an instantaneous disaster though it may have been bourgeois sabotage that made it so). Marx’s critique of Proudhon’s 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.

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’s Association led by Eugene Varlin who insisted upon women’s equality and right to work (Harvey, 2003). Proudhon’s book, Pornography: The Situation of Women, is, according to his biographer Edward Hyams, full of “every illiberal, every cruelly reactionary notion ever used against female emancipation by the most extreme anti-feminist” (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’s 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 “lost” 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, “Anarchist organizing is limited only by our imagination, where the only existent criteria are that they proceed non-hierarchically and free from external authority…..This could 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” (2014: 253). There is, however, something deceptive about such lists. Having experienced the “joys” 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.

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’s 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’s characterization of the indigenous 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, “when money dissolves the community it becomes the community” 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’s position on all of this is interesting. On the one hand he argues that the notion that “human freedom can be achieved, much less perpetuated, through a state of any kind is monstrously oxymoronic” (2014: 39). On the other hand, he also holds that anarchists have wrongly “long regarded every government as a state and condemned it – a view that is a recipe for the elimination of any organized social life whatever”. A “government is an ensemble of institutions designed to deal with the problems of consociational life in an orderly and hopefully fair manner.” Opposition to the state must not carry over to opposition to government: “The libertarian opposition to law, not to speak of government as such, has been as silly as the image of a snake swallowing its tail” (2014: 13). Consensus decision making, he says, “threatens to abolish society as such.” Simple majority voting suffices. There must also be a “serious commitment” to a “formal constitution and appropriate by-laws” because “without a democratically formulated and approved institutional framework whose members and leaders can be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of responsibility cease to exist…..Freedom 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 “rule” or by libertarian metaphors that conceal their reality” (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. “Harvey,” he writes,

scorns what he refers to as the ‘naïve’ and ‘hopeful gesturing’ of decentralized thinking, lamenting how the term ‘hierarchy’ is ‘virulently unpopular with much of the left these days’. 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’s spent ideas (2014: 265).

My central complaint in Rebel Cities from which his initial citation is drawn is that the “left as a whole is bedeviled by an all-consuming ‘fetishism of organizational form’” (2013a: 125). I make common cause on this with Bookchin who writes: “No organizational model, however, should be fetishized to the point where it flatly contradicts the imperatives of real life” (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. “Just to be clear,” I wrote, “I am not saying horizontality is bad – indeed I think it an excellent objective – but that we should acknowledge its limits as a hegemonic organizational principle, and be prepared to go far beyond it when necessary” (2013a: 70). In the case of the management of the commons, for example, it is difficult if not impossible (as Elinor Ostrom’s 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 “confederal” or “nested” (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 “have 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” (Graeber, 2009: 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’s proposal for municipal libertarianism organized confederally was “by far the most sophisticated radical proposal to deal with the creation and collective use of the commons at a variety of scales” (2013a: 85). I supported Bookchin’s proposal for a “‘municipal libertarianism’ 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,” I suggested, “that the world of practical politics fruitfully intersects with the long history of largely anarchist-inspired utopian thinking and writing about the city” (2013a: 138). There were, however, some limits to extending Bookchin’s organizational ideas all the way (although there 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 “horizontalists”, which cut across other more confederal and in some instances vertical structures. I ended up with a fairly utopian sketch of intersecting organizational forms – both vertical and horizontal – that might work in governing a large metropolitan area such as New York City (2013a: 151-153).

This is what Springer considers “treading water in the sea of yesterday’s spent ideas” (2014: 265)!! The problem here, I submit, is Springer’s 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 “the rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments” 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.”

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