Manuel CastellsManuel Castells is one of the leading intellectuals of our time. His work has had a significant impact on sociology, urban studies, communication, and many other fields. Anarchists may be especially interested in his writings on social movements and the city (particularly The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements) and also his comprehensive and inspiring trilogy, The Information Age. Anyone looking for a general introduction to his ideas will benefit from watching this interview with him.

In addition to being an extremely productive scholar, he is also a public figure who comments on trends and developments in world affairs. He is best known in Spain and Latin America, where he regularly contributes columns to daily newspapers. What follows is a translation of an essay that he published in Catalonia’s La Vanguardia on May 21, 2005.

Neo-anarchism

By Manuel Castells

Anarchism’s new vitality, an ideology for the 21st
century with the support of technology

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We do not live in an era of the end of ideologies but the rebirth of those that resonate in the present. This is the case with anarchism, which was long taken for dead by its many gravediggers and yet today, expressing itself in new ways, seems to enjoy excellent health in the social movements that sprout everywhere from the depths of the resistance to our increasingly destructive global social order.

It is enough to follow the debates in the movement against capitalist globalization, online or otherwise, to note the prevalence of anarchist principles, such as self-organization and the rejection of the state in any form (”que se vayan todos!”).

And while old left intellectuals, especially in Latin America, still regurgitate the mediatic catchphrases of the movement, popular sympathies lean toward loosely organized and largely self-managed patterns of mobilization and discourse, as evidenced at the most recent World Social Forum in Porto Alegre.

Likewise, the autonomist perspective, which is so closely linked to anarchism, has a very strong presence on the theoretical and political terrains. Michael Hardt and Toni Negri articulate this view, as does the Multitudes magazine group, which is a direct heir of France’s May ‘68. (Hardt and Negri’s most recent book–also named Multitudes–has a very high ranking on the sales list at Amazon.com.)

Though organized anarchists are few in number-–for example, Spain’s CNT newspaper has approximately 6000 subscribers and there are roughly one hundred thousand members of the CGT, a union which I place in the libertarian tradition–the principles of anti-statism, international solidarity, individual liberty, and free association are common to otherwise very diverse movements (from Barcelona’s squatters, to the Ecuador’s “outlaws,” to Argentina’s piqueteros, to Italy’s autonomists). All these share a commitment to an emancipation accomplished without delegating power to professional political intermediaries.

What is the source of anarchism’s new robustness, which seems like an ideology for the 21st century while Marxism appears confined to the one that just ended? The strength of ideologies (whose myths are ahistorical) depends on the historical context. And it is my hypothesis—in contrast to popular opinion– that anarchism was ahead of its time.

A pervasive ideology in the early days of the workers’ moment (the First International), from Andalusia and Catalonia to Tsarist Russia, the French Charte d’Amiens, and Chicago, the birthplace of May Day, organized anarchism did not survive the repression it suffered under both capitalism and communism. Its vulnerability was above all a consequence of the fact that it identified the nation-state as the cardinal enemy at the very moment that the state was becoming the center and principle of social organization. After all, the twentieth century was the century of the nation-state.

Classical anarchism encompassed a broad ideological spectrum, from Stirner’s irreducible individualism to Proudhon’s social cooperativism, to Bakunin and Kropotkin’s libertarian communism. It inspired social struggles in contexts as distinct as Makhno’s peasant revolution in Russia, urban social movements in Mexico in the 1920s, and the embryonic social revolution that Spanish and Catalan anarchists attempted during the first phase of the Civil War.

In this varied ideological current, which millions fought for and embraced, there is a central idea: the complete liberation from the ultimate source of oppression, the state. This, just when the Nazi-fascist, Stalinist, and liberal-democratic war machines were arming themselves to exterminate one another and using the state to take control of as many people as they could.

And yet the state’s victory, under whatever flag, led to a crisis a half-century later. Communist governments were unable to absorb precisely that which Marx had intended them to absorb: the development of the productive forces. This is because the informational, technological revolution could not take place without a society that is informed–that is, autonomous from the state. And capitalism, in its expansive dynamic, globalized itself and thereby undermined the foundation of the nation-state, upon which it rested politically. The economy became global, the state remained national, and society–between the two, orphaned by the state and at the mercy of global fluctuations—became increasingly entrenched in the local. Or, it transformed itself into a collection of individuals, each with his or her own preoccupations and plans. As a result, many people, particularly the youth, who have yet to write their ideological page, have stopped believing in politicians, although not in politics as such, not in another politics. So, while the great powers position themselves in the complex relation between globalization and the nation-state, survival and resistance emerges from the individual and the local: in other words, from the material with which anarchist ideology is constructed.

Anarchism’s great difficulty has always been reconciling personal and local autonomy with the complexities of daily life and production in an industrialized world on an interdependent planet. And here technology turns out to be anarchism’s ally more so than Marxism’s. Instead of large factories and gigantic bureaucracies (socialism’s material base), the economy increasingly operates through networks (the material foundation of organizational autonomy). And instead of the nation-state controlling territory, we have city-states managing the interchange between territories. All this is based on the Internet, mobile phones, satellites, and informational networks that allow local-global communication and transport at a planetary scale. This is not only my interpretation; it is also explicit in the discourse of the social movements, as Jeffrey Juris’s recent book on the topic splendidly documents. There too we see a call for the dissolution of the state and the construction of an autonomous social organization based on individuals and affinity groups, debating, voting and acting through an interactive network of communication. Is this utopia? No, it is ideology. Consider the distinction: utopia prefigures a desired world. Ideology configures practice. With utopia one dreams. With ideology one struggles. Anarchism is an ideology. And neo-anarchism is an instrument of struggle that appears commensurate with the needs of the twenty-first century social revolt.

Well, one of the two instruments: while anarchism cries out “no God, no master!” as it always has, its chief competitor in the rebellion against global capitalism proclaims: “God is my only master!” In the face of an out-of-control global capitalism, and a socialism settling into retirement, resistance arises from the contradictory opposition between fundamentalism and neo-anarchism.

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Translated to English by Chuck Morse.

Translated and published here with the kind permission of La Vanguardia.