Michael Freeden (1996; 2003) has argued that ideologies consist of core and peripheral concepts. For Marxists, class conflict would be a core concept; the Marxist who rejects all formulations of this idea ceases to be a Marxist. For anarchists, it is more of a challenge to identify such core concepts (Bates 2017). Anarchism as an ideology is necessarily difficult to characterise. We might argue that there is not so much an ideological identity called “anarchism” as there are many “anarchisms.” Moreover, the various expressions of anarchism have emerged in contexts of opposition. One such context is the historical opposition between anarchism and Marxist communism. Another is the opposition between the various historical formations of anarchism itself – considered practically and philosophically. Consequently, anarchist ideas of agency – to use a term of Quentin Skinner (1968) – have always had an illocutionary dimension; that is, they were developed (not always intentionally) as a performative political response to their contexts of articulation. This makes it exceptionally difficult to provide a positive definition of agency from an anarchist point of view. The latter part of this chapter will suggest that we can start to rethink agency beyond its anarchist (and Marxist) horizons by drawing on the work of thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
Agency normally refers to an entity’s capacity for action in its environment. Agency in the sociological sense is a term usually located alongside that of structure. Structure refers to those social arrangements that constrain or enable our opportunities and actions. Agency pertains to the capacity individuals have for free choice and autonomous action. Agency in the political sense may be used in at least two senses, both specifically connected to the idea of freedom. First, we may be said to have agency to the extent that we are not subjected to external forms of coercion. Second, we are free to the extent that we can exercise our capacities; thus, political agency is concerned with self-determination.
Let us begin with a minimal statement of the anarchist view of agency. First, anarchists tend to consider agency as intimately connected to a radical idea of freedom as self-determination. Human freedom and arbitrary power cannot be reconciled. For classical anarchists, the structure of the state form is the mechanism for the exercise of arbitrary power par excellence. In short, human freedom – hence, the exercise of agency – is not possible where state rule is hegemonic.
Second, most anarchists understand self-determination in a radically social sense. The anarchists discussed in this chapter were all “fanatics of freedom” – yet most considered that the free exercise of human agency had necessary social determinants. In short, the classical anarchist idea of agency is a positive one.
Third, and consequently, this understanding of radical social freedom is but an application of a theory of political agency, one grounded in the social dimension. Many classical anarchists were concerned not simply to criticise arbitrary state power, but also to locate the group best situated to bring about the overthrow of such power. Agency in the political sense is to this extent not a peripheral concept; rather, it is a necessary condition for freedom.
The focus of this chapter will be to unpack key anarchist arguments pertaining to the third theme, as they emerged in the context of the historical debate between anarchism and Marxism. My reasons for this focus are not arbitrary. The historical conflict between anarchism and Marxism can be regarded as the means by which anarchism is constituted as the complex series of ideologies to which I have referred.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin were contemporaries and associates of Karl Marx, yet both came to detect in Marx’s work an authoritarianism of philosophy and of personality.
Marx eventually characterised his work as a “science” of history and of political economy. Such a move troubled Proudhon. Indeed, Proudhon (1846) wrote to Marx pleading with him not to seek to impose a new ideological dogma, a new theology of communism on the revolutionary movement. Marx, unsurprisingly, did not respond; however, he later referred with derision to the so-called dialectical “sophistication” of Proudhon’s work (Marx 1865). Indeed, from then on, he started a polemic against Proudhon – whose 1846 work, The Philosophy of Poverty, Marx critiqued in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). In it, Marx wrote of Proudhon that “He wants to be the synthesis – he is a composite error” and that “He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism.”
On a simple level, we might remark that Marx seemed to assume that Proudhon was an undereducated fool, a man not versed adequately in the finer points of German philosophy. Proudhon in turn considered Marx an incurable elitist who pretended to wish for the emancipation of the working classes, but in reality would prefer nothing other than becoming a philosopher king.
More relevant to our argument are some key political and philosophical issues. Marx is critical of what he considers Proudhon’s inadequate understanding of dialectics. From Marx’s (1847) perspective, Proudhon’s “dialectic” was one of simple compromise, in which “[t]he problem to be solved” is “to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad.” Proudhon’s approach led him to advocate a synthesis of small-scale property with human labour. For Marx, however, this was little more than a derisory “petty-bourgeois” class location.
Yet Proudhon’s position is more sophisticated than Marx’s polemical characterisation suggests. Proudhon had a more positive view of the middle classes than one would find in Marxian discourse. Key aspects of the middle classes are regarded by Proudhon as the “labouring bourgeoisie,” as “entrepreneurs, masters of principals of an enterprise [patrons], shopkeepers, manufacturers of fabricators [fabricants], farmers or agriculturalists [cultivateurs], scholars, artists, etc…” (quoted in Knowles 2013, 70, original emphasis). Where for Marx such “petty bourgeois” class locations would embody a living contradiction, for Proudhon their positive aspects meant that they would provide important elements of any future synthesis of property and labour.
In a letter to Marx, Proudhon (1846, original emphasis) wrote of a wish
to bring about the return to society, by an economic combination, of the wealth which was withdrawn from society by another economic combination. In other words, through Political Economy to turn the theory of Property against Property in such a way as to engender what you German socialists call community and what I will limit myself for the moment to calling liberty or equality.
Turning “Property against Property” implied – as Proudhon would state in correspondence of 1850 – “the conciliation of classes, symbol of the synthesis of doctrines” (quoted in Knowles 2013, 70). Calling up the spirit of Rousseau, Proudhon expanded the horizon of his discourse beyond the middle classes as such to “the people.” For Proudhon, the people were the “organic union of wills that are individually free, that can and should voluntarily work together, but abdicate never. Such a union must be sought in the harmony of their interests, not in an artificial centralisation, which, far from expressing the collective will, expresses only the antagonisms of individual wills …” (quoted in Knowles 2013, 70).1 Therefore, we can see that Proudhon addresses questions of agency through engaging with issues of class, but that the conclusions he reached are quite different to those of Marx.
If you turn to Proudhon’s work looking for an intersectional account of political agency, you will be sorely disappointed. Indeed, you will be disgusted, for Proudhon has some quite appalling views. We might be tempted to use contextual arguments as a form of apology for Proudhon’s views. However, to do so is itself to be guilty of racism and sexism. Proudhon’s “synthesis” is also premised on some violent exclusions. Proudhon was anti-Semitic. For example, in an excerpt from his private Notebooks, Proudhon (1847) wrote: “The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. By steel or by fire or by expulsion the Jew must disappear.” So too, Proudhon’s view towards women was abhorrent. Just as Marxists must address openly Marx’s deeply problematic personal views and practices, so must the anarchist tradition account for the words of Proudhon (and Bakunin, et al.) which fit less well with the progressive narrative.2
If the so-called synthesis in Proudhon’s dialectic was indeed a compromise, in Bakunin’s dialectic there is no synthesis – only negation and destruction. Interestingly, however, Bakunin stares into the void and finds himself at home. His anarchist “politics” is a politics of negation, in which “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!” (Bakunin 1842). How does this understanding of dialectics inform Bakunin’s understanding of the relationship between class and political agency? Where Proudhon sought transformative agency in key sectors of the middle classes, Bakunin finds it among the “lumpenproletariat.” Although Bakunin’s views do shift in accordance with the polemical context, he attempts to distinguish his account of revolutionary class agency from that of Marx. In “On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx,” Bakunin’s more extreme understanding of negation leads him to embrace the “lumpenproletariat” as the “flower” of the proletariat (Bakunin 1990 [1872], 48).
Three years earlier – in a series of articles in L’Égalité in 1869 (a publication of the Romance Federation of the International) – he had adopted a type of illocutionary force which seems more “proletarian” in orientation. In an article of August 7, for instance, Bakunin (1869) wrote: “Do you understand that there is an irreconcilable antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie which is the necessary consequence of their respective economic positions?” Yet Bakunin’s 1872 position is foreshadowed here, because in same article, he also wrote: “Until now [with the founding of the International] there has never been a true politics of the people, and by the ‘people’ we mean the lowly classes, the ‘rabble,’ the poorest workers whose toil sustains the world.”
The discursive choice made by Bakunin is interesting. The “people” come to be equated with the poorest sections of the workers – not the unemployed “rabble” of which Marx was so critical, but rather the most precariously located (those closest to the threat of unemployment). Freeden (1996) has maintained that so-called “orthodox Marxism” adopts a restricted view of the proletariat which can be contrasted to the wider understanding of the working class found in anarchism. Freeden is correct to a point. However, the difference between Marx’s and Bakunin’s ideas of the proletariat is one of focus. For Marx, the most “advanced” workers were also the most exploited, yielding the greatest amount of surplus value. This was the fundamental basis of their revolutionary location.
For Bakunin, the poorest workers – the lumpenproletariat – were people who could not be “bought” in the way that privileged industrial workers could. They were not interested in bargaining up their wage levels to a position of relative comfort. Far removed from the labour aristocracy, they had nothing in common with the finance aristocracy! Bakunin did not merely ground his argument in rhetoric. He also thought his position could be justified through social and historical analysis. For Marx, the advanced revolutionary classes were in Britain and Germany, and the lumpenproletariat were little more than counter-revolutionary “scum” (Marx and Engels 2015[1848], 254; Cowling 2002). Bakunin (1873) believed that the “extremely poor” workers (e.g., those in Italy) would instead be the key agents of the “coming social revolution.”
Is there not a “third way” between Bakunin’s and Marx’s views on class and agency? In exploring this issue, we need to provide a richer and intersectional account of transformative political agency. To achieve this would be beyond the scope of this chapter. However, we can suggest an opening for this account in the space where anarchism and Marxism come together – specifically, though not exclusively, in the work of Hardt and Negri. I will – somewhat controversially – characterise their work as close enough to post-anarchism to refer to it as such. There is undoubtedly a significant degree of overlap between anarchism and autonomist Marxism. Elsewhere, I have speculated on why Hardt and Negri refuse the label “anarchism,” which is a result of the role played by Leninism in Italian revolutionary politics and of the discursive – and real – violence that Leninism has demonstrated to anarchism.
Indeed, the critical tone Lenin adopted towards anarchism has an illocutionary force similar to that of the polemical tone adopted by Marx. Discursively, in characterising himself as a Marxist, Lenin gained resources that could be mobilised to attack his anarchist opponents, along with their fellow travellers. For example, in a 1905 essay, Lenin accused Russian anarchists of acting in ways that discredited the proletarian struggle. Consequently, he argued, “we shall therefore resort to every means of ideological struggle to keep the influence of the anarchists over the Russian workers just as negligible as it has been so far” (Lenin 1905; see also Lenin 1901).
Of specific Russian anarchists, we might note Lenin’s remarks about Leo Tolstoy. Anarchists usually consider Tolstoy’s value to be his non-violent pacifism (Christoyannopoulos 2010). For Lenin (1908), Tolstoy’s value was that his work embodied the class contradictions inherent in Russian society at the time; yet, Tolstoy’s views amounted to little more than a philosophy of “peasant revolt.” In short, Tolstoy failed to adopt the class position of the revolutionary proletariat. Lenin provides little in the way of evidence for such claims. It is hardly surprising that his account of Tolstoy is a polemical one, given that Tolstoy’s politics were quite different from Lenin’s own. It should also be no surprise that it is often challenging to find a positive account of political agency in Tolstoy’s work. If anything, we tend to find displayed there a view that the wealthy should take a paternalistic attitude to the poor – a view which sits rather at odds with his anarchism.
In an 1899 text, “What is to be Done?” – appearing three years before Lenin’s 1902 text of that name – we see Tolstoy’s worries about the growth of class conflict in Russia. Tolstoy (1899, 262) wrote: “The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.” In such texts as The Kingdom of God is Within You, Tolstoy (1893) argued for a pacifist conception of Christian morality. This was a conception which it could be argued undermined revolutionary political agency and activity. Imagine that anarchists should take Christ’s Sermon on the Mount – where we are asked to “turn the other cheek” – as the watchword of morality. Are the poor really to turn the other cheek, and allow their oppressors to carry on with business as usual? Tolstoy is not clear. Indeed, Tolstoy, who opposed all forms of violent political action, challenged the idea that anarchists should seek revolutionary transformation of the status quo.
The Russian anarchist Kropotkin also had an interesting relationship with Lenin. Initially, Lenin held Kropotkin in great respect. Kropotkin hoped to be of use to the revolution when he returned from exile in 1919, going first to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow. Yet after a tense meeting with Lenin, it became clear that the views of the two men differed substantially. Kropotkin was disgusted by Lenin’s apparent contempt for human rights and freedom (Bonc-Brujevic 1919; Kropotkin 1920).3
In some ways, there is a close proximity between Marxist accounts of political agency and those of Kropotkin. That is, Kropotkin was keen to draw attention to issues of class contradiction in a way that one does not see in Tolstoy. Kropotkin (1880) departs from any simple idea of a class polarisation thesis; instead, there is an interesting focus on the multiplicity of class conflict. Kropotkin (1886) also presents a narrative of proletarian class struggle:
The worker perceives that he has been disinherited, and that disinherited he will remain, unless he has recourse to strikes or revolts to tear from his masters the smallest part of riches built up by his own efforts; that is to say, in order to get that little, he already must impose on himself the pangs of hunger and face imprisonment, if not exposure to Imperial, Royal, or Republican fusillades.
Elsewhere – and this is the essence of Kropotkin’s critique of Leninism – Kropotkin (1920) cautions directly against an authoritarian statist alternative to capitalist relations of production; although in his early work, there are suggestions that he regarded the peasantry as a sacrificial object for revolutionary goals (Kropotkin 1993, 67), a level of instrumentality which he was later to criticise Lenin for.
If Kropotkin’s anarchism was a particular response to the immediate politics of Lenin’s Leninism, then Hardt and Negri’s post-anarchism is in part a response to the wider politics of Leninism – particularly as it functioned in Italy from the 1970s onwards.
I want in this section to address the issue of agency through engaging with post-anarchism. Post-anarchism is a label typically associated with contemporary thinkers such as Todd May (1994) and Saul Newman (2010). It aims to bring together the insights of anarchist thinking with recent developments in post-structuralism. To this extent, post-anarchists do for classical anarchism what post-Marxists (such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) did for classical Marxism.
In this chapter, I characterise the work of Hardt and Negri as post-anarchist. Like other post-anarchist thinkers, Hardt and Negri use post-structuralist modes of thinking, explicitly critique hegemonic and statist forms of thinking, and focus on intersectionality when understanding political agency. My characterisation of Hardt and Negri’s thought as post-anarchist (Bates 2012) is controversial, though, not least because they reject the label: “No, we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 350, emphasis deleted). I have speculated (Bates 2012) that Hardt and Negri refuse the anarchist label because of the importance of Leninism in Italian revolutionary politics, yet they integrate the themes of anarchism into their work in subversive ways.
Indeed, it can be suggested that Hardt and Negri are post-modern Bakuninists – that is, they integrate many of the explicit themes of Bakunin’s work into a post-modern or post-structuralist ontology. Bakunin had rejected the Marxist idea of dialectics; and I would contend that a dialectics without synthesis is no dialectics at all. Lenin (1914–16), it should be pointed out, had articulated a form of dialectics that explicitly referred to Hegel’s Logic, the most “dialectical” text imaginable.
Post-anarchist thinkers such as Newman and May are influenced by a range of post-structuralist thinkers that we would typically regard as anti-dialectical (e.g., Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Deleuze). Significantly, Hardt and Negri’s own rejection of dialectical thinking is undoubtedly influenced by Deleuze. As they put it, “Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 131). History is not moving towards a teleological unity; rather, history is nothing but the production of difference, of multiplicity.
It can also be maintained that Bakunin’s politics involves an implicit refusal of strategy, a theme that continues into the work of post-anarchists such as May and Newman. This refusal of strategy is adopted by Hardt and Negri as well. Indeed, Leninists and post-Marxists alike (Callinicos 2001; Laclau 2004, 24) have criticised Hardt and Negri for being anti-strategic, and hence anti-hegemonic, thinkers.
To return to the issue of political agency, we might note the following. First, Hardt and Negri do not adopt a type of “conciliatory” dialectics, which we find in the work of Proudhon. Hardt and Negri’s anti-dialectics grounds a politics of refusal (Bates 2011) which leads them to the lumpenproletariat – the poor – as the group best situated to refuse the rule of capital (Hardt and Negri 2005, 130). For Hardt and Negri, “the poor” can be genuinely revolutionary; as they (2005, 129) put it: “the poor are not merely victims but powerful agents … they are part of the circuits of social and biopolitical production.” The “lumpenproletariat” are not a reactionary “other” to the proletariat, but rather a constituent element of it. This theoretical move clearly situates Hardt and Negri closer to the anarchism of Bakunin than to the classical Marxist position (or the Leninist approach).
It is possible to question the relative cogency of this argument. It could be maintained that Hardt and Negri’s account – as with Bakunin and other anarchists before them – loses sight of the fact that the poor frequently come to embody forms of politics that are less than progressive (Žižek 2011). The politics of the poor can often appear as blind destruction with little in the way of creativity (Bates 2011). But the openness brought into play by the category of “the poor” and the “multitude” creates the space for a discussion of intersectionality not present in classical anarchist views of agency.
Second, for Hardt and Negri, exploitation in late capitalism is an expression of bio-power – a term which they appropriate from Foucault. Power – in the form of “Empire” – is increasingly all encompassing, if not totalising. Hardt and Negri (2000, xii) write that Empire “is a decentred and de-territorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.” Classical anarchist thinking – so the argument goes – had typically held to a mono-vocal conception of power. The power of the state was the “evil” to be refused. Foucault, as is well known, argued that, because power was all encompassing and multi-vocal, we had reached the point whereby we must “cut the head off the sovereign.” In a similar fashion, invoking Deleuze and Félix Guattari, May (1994, 71) writes: “The picture here is of a network of forces of power that interact to yield the world (especially the political world) in which we live – or more accurately, which we are.”
May, as well as Hardt and Negri, addresses the way in which contemporary neo-liberal capitalism exploits our emotional and affective lives, along with our materially productive ones. May focuses on the exploitation of desire, and indeed, on how we come to desire our own subjugation. Hardt and Negri are concerned with a broader political economy of exploitation; that is, with how the rule of measure comes to subjugate all aspects of our lives, and therefore to close down – though only partially – sites of refusal. Hardt and Negri understand exploitation as the rule of measure that extends beyond the “factory” to the “social factory.” Society itself becomes the site of exploitation. As exploitation is everywhere, it is simultaneously nowhere. Power, so this argument goes, must be understood as multiplicity. Power is constitutive, but it can be constituted in new directions. A tactical politics therefore needs to refuse power and exploitation in all its manifestations as Empire. We must refuse how we are commanded to think, to act, and to feel. A tactical politics must refuse the machine, refuse government, and refuse “service with a smile.” Accordingly, this expansion of exploitation simultaneously opens up key loci of “bio-political” refusal.
Third, Hardt and Negri come to replace the idea of the working class with the idea of the multitude. They (Hardt and Negri 2005, 107) insist that “the multitude gives the concept of the proletariat its fullest definition as all those who labour and produce under the rule of capital.” Accordingly, the multitude embodies those who perform affective, linguistic, and material forms of labour. The multitude are all those who are subject to the rule of capital. The multitude here is also viewed as a category of becoming. As Hardt and Negri (2005, 105) write: “The question to ask … is not ‘What is the multitude?’ but rather ‘What can the multitude become?’”
This focus on irreducible multiplicity is a decentring that comprises a crucial challenge to modernist ideas of agency and intentionality typical of classical Marxism and anarchism. Collective agency in these traditions is a process of unity of individuals and groups as a result of their realisation of objective economic interests. The common recognition of collective interests is, after all, the basis of Kropotkin’s “mutual aid.”
Writers such as Newman consider all so-called political interests as discursive constructs – a line of argument they share with Laclau and Mouffe. Hardt and Negri, in contrast, have taken an “immanentist” view. Post-anarchists such as Newman (2010, 123–124) have been critical of the “immanentism” and “essentialism” of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude. Accordingly, I do not want to over-stress the similarities between the work of Newman and May on the one hand, and Hardt and Negri on the other. However, I do consider that these differences do not negate the family resemblances of these approaches. Moreover, Newman overstates the essentialism of this approach – and hence overstates the differences of his work with that of Hardt and Negri. For the multitude’s existence in a process of “becoming” is a networked “existence”; it is “rhizomatic.”
If refusal is constitutive, still it does not have direction in a strategic sense. This raises another important issue. Whereas most Marxists consider social scientific knowledge as a necessary condition for the exercise of political agency, it is difficult to see the role that such knowledge could play in the performance of a rhizomatic bio-politics. Rhizomatic politics is driven not so much by a rationally underpinned agency, but by an affective politics of desire.
The concept of the multitude also poses another fundamental challenge to the key assumptions of classical anarchism and Marxism. We might note that a common concern that sets classical Marxists and anarchists against post-Marxists and post-anarchists is a concern with intersectionality. Newman and May are undoubtedly influenced by feminist and post-colonialist theory and practice, and so, acutely aware of the issues of intersectionality. Such influences are explicit in the work of Hardt and Negri.
Hardt and Negri draw on Judith Butler’s theory of “performativity” in order to challenge essentialised relations of sex and gender. Hardt and Negri (2005) write:
The natural conception of sex or the social and political body of “woman” … subordinates the differences among women in terms of race and sexuality. In particular, the natural conception of sex brings with it heteronormativity, subordinating the position of the homosexual. Sex is not natural and neither is the sexed body of “woman” …
(199–200)
The analysis of “affective labour” – so central to Hardt and Negri’s thought – is influenced by feminist discussions of the exploitation of love, labour and “desire” (a concept which plays a crucial role in May’s post-structuralist anarchism). Hardt and Negri tackle directly in their work the differential exploitation of women in the labour process and at home (Del Rae 2000). Indeed, Hardt and Negri (2005, 111) characterise “affective labour” as the production and reproduction of life, itself embedded directly in capitalist, patriarchal, and racialised relationships. Accordingly, working class women – for example – have a substantially different experience of exploitation than working class men; black women a different experience of exploitation than white women, lesbian women than straight women, etc. Such forms of exploitation reproduce themselves across public and private spheres. Hardt and Negri, for example, address the way in which the “private” domain of the “family” is an important site of repression, exploitation and subjugation.
It is also important to note that Hardt and Negri’s work provides a detailed discussion of so-called service-sector occupations, occupations with precise gendered and racialised configurations of exploitation. (To an extent, the acute awareness of the political economies of such relations distinguishes and differentiates their work from that of Newman and May – despite numerous commonalities.)
Hardt and Negri address the way in which a multiplicity of experiences leads to a more open view of politics. They write:
the members of the multitude do not have to become the same or renounce their creativity in order to communicate and cooperate with each other. They remain different in terms of race, sex, sexuality and so forth. What we need to understand, then, is the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and cooperation of such varied multiplicity.
(Hardt and Negri 2005, 92, emphasis deleted)
The post-colonial shift in Hardt and Negri’s work also leads them to address the global aspects of exploitation – that is how the exploitation of the so-called developing world comes to function in the context of Empire. How debt relations serve to subjugate the global poor. How the global poor is itself a racialised category.
Of course, the fact of intersectionality presents key theoretical and practical problems for Marxists and anarchists alike. This is acutely the case with the central concern of this chapter – political agency. How, for example, can a common struggle against capitalist exploitation come about if political agency is not unified and hegemonic? What are the possibilities of different ethnic groups, genders, sexualities, etc. coming together with the aim of overthrowing neo-liberal capitalism? Hardt and Negri have maintained that Empire is totalising (though not total) – but what then of the biopolitics of resistance to this Empire? Interestingly, post-structuralists and post-anarchists have displaced “macro politics” with “micro politics.” “Grand narratives” are dead – as is the industrial working class as an agent charged with overthrowing capitalism. Radical politics therefore can at best comprise a series of disruptions and subversions of hegemonic narratives. May (1994, 95) has written that post-anarchist politics struggles on many diffuse levels “not because multiple struggles will create a society without the centralisation of power, but because power is not centralised, because across the surface of those levels are the sites at which power arises.”
Accordingly, disruption is only ever partial or temporary. What is interesting is that disruption in this context can take many new and unexpected forms. For Hardt and Negri, the politics of trade unionism may be on the wane, but the politics of “cross dressing” may comprise a direct assault on traditional gender relations. Indeed, if Empire is to be effectively refused, Hardt and Negri (2000) write:
The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command. It needs a body that is incapable of adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of traditional sex life, and so forth. (If you find your body refusing these “normal” modes of life, don’t despair – realize your gift.)
(216)
I started this chapter with three points pertaining to most anarchist understandings of agency: First, anarchists regard freedom as self-determination, but self-determination is not possible where the state form is hegemonic. Second, self-determination has social preconditions. Third, self-determination necessitates radical political transformation. Consequently, the realisation of self-determination is premised on ideas concerning political agency. Anarchists – like Marxists – have been concerned to locate those individuals, groups and classes who might be best situated to contribute to bringing about such transformation. For Marxists, agency has a definite class location – the industrial proletariat were the group who could best usher in the future society. By contrast, it is difficult to discern one anarchist view regarding transformative agency.
Classical anarchists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy, and Kropotkin have quite different views regarding who are the agents best situated to bring about significant social transformation – from the lumpenproletariat in Bakunin, the labouring middle classes in Proudhon, the peasantry in Tolstoy, and the multiple class subject in Kropotkin. Classical anarchists tend to view such agency through a particular class lens, which gives little account of important forms of intersectionality (an exclusion they share with classical Marxists). None of these authors gives an adequate account of the relationship of gender and ethnicity to radical social transformation (though it should be noted Bakunin was an anti-German Pan-Slavist). Indeed, classical anarchists such as Proudhon and Bakunin were racist and sexist men who were not only blind, but also hostile, to such inclusions. Anarchist contemporaries of Kropotkin (and Lenin), such as Emma Goldman, did address questions of gender in their work, though a full re-appreciation of this fact is beyond the scope of this chapter.
The post-anarchist thought of Hardt and Negri comprises a way of looking at contemporary questions of political agency which brings together some of the best aspects of post-anarchist and Marxist thinking. In so doing, Hardt and Negri take us beyond a view of “agency” grounded in a pre-constituted essential subject. The “multitude” is “open,” decentred, a network of becoming, an interplay of differences of gender, race, and class. This said, Hardt and Negri’s arguments remain problematic. Perhaps in the end they present us not with answers, but with further questions. The non-hierarchical journey of answering these questions will undoubtedly enable us to problematise political agency anew, and to rethink radical politics beyond anarchism (and Marxism).
1 For a discussion of the influences of Rousseau’s work on the writings of Proudhon, see Noland 1967.
2 The conflict between Marx and Bakunin was every bit as brutal as that between Marx and Proudhon. (And Bakunin was not fearful of deploying anti-Semitic tropes in this confrontation! Marx’s communism was considered by Bakunin to be part of a world Jewish conspiracy, headed up by the Rothschilds!) Politically and philosophically, Bakunin adopted a quite distinct view of dialectics to that evident in Marx’s work. Importantly for the concerns of this chapter, there is an interesting comparison we might make between Proudhon’s dialectics and Bakunin’s.
3 Lenin supposedly said: “How old he has become … Now he is living in a country that is bursting with revolution, where everything has been completely turned upside down, and he cannot think of anything else but to talk about the cooperative movement … But of course he is very old and we must surround him with care and help him with everything he needs as far as possible, but that needs to be dealt with very delicately and very carefully. He is very useful and precious for us because of his whole terrific past and because of everything he has done” (quoted in Bonc-Brujevic 1919). Of Lenin, Kropotkin wrote: “Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin), your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold. Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is – a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? … If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages” (Kropotkin 1920).
Bakunin, Mikhail. 1842. The Reaction in Germany. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1842/reaction-germany.htm.
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