V: Neoanarchism: Utopia Reawakened or the New Spirit of Capitalism?

Guest-Speaker: Blair Taylor

Since the collapse of actually-existing socialism, anarchism has experienced a renaissance within the global left as the historical rival tradition to Marxism. A variety of recent left movements from the Zapatistas, the Spanish indignados, Argentine Piqueteros, to Occupy Wall Street have embraced what some have called neoanarchism, a politics that seeks to “change the world without taking power.” This lecture will offer a critical analysis of contemporary anarchist politics in theory and practice, focusing on three main themes. First, it will examine the content of neoanarchism and how it differs from classical anarchism: its particular political analysis, social critique, and utopian vision. Second, it will trace the major historical moments, movements, and intellectual debates which shaped its emergence and political logic – focusing especially on the experience of the New Left and New Social Movements, the anarchist turn in the 1990s by the radical ecology and alterglobalization movement, its hegemony within Occupy Wall Street. Along the way I will discuss the interplay of movements and ideas as various thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, John Zerzan, and David Graeber sought to reformulate anarchist theory in light of changing social and historical conditions.

The talk concludes with an exploration of neoanarchism’s latent affinities with neoliberalism; as neoanarchism developed primarily in opposition to state-led Fordist capitalism and its Marxist opposition, aspects of its social critique overlap with that of neoliberalism. This makes neoanarchism especially prone to recuperation – the process of incorporating radical ideas and movements into power – an important but overlooked factor contributing to both movement decline and the legitimization of power. Whereas the anti-corporate politics of the alterglobalization movement was recuperated as ethical consumption, the anti-statist communitarian politics of movements like Occupy Wall Street have also been absorbed into the neoliberal discourse of the post-crisis era. Echoed in the Tory Big Society program and the U.S. Tea Party manifesto, their shared emphasis on direct action self-provisioning by non-state actors, critique of “politics,” and emphasis on economic alternatives is increasingly attractive to both left and right. Thus just as New Left critiques of the hierarchical Fordist order lent ethical legitimacy to neoliberalism, neoanarchism offers a potential glimpse of a new spirit of capitalism perfectly adapted to the austerity conditions of “post” or “zombie” neoliberalism. In this light, neoanarchism’s allegedly impractical and utopian politics can also be understood as the vanguard of capitalist development, prefiguring not the new society but the means to modernize and stabilize the old.

This lecture will be in English and is part of a series of lectures organized by Referat politische Bildung:  "NOWhere - Nirgendwo ins Irgendwo. 14 Kommenatre zu utopischem Denken".