What is post-anarchism?
The first thing I'd like to say is the post-anarchism
is not in any sense applying some idea of
being after anarchism or that anarchism is
over or finished, post-anarchism is shorthand
for what I call post-structuralist anarchism
and what I mean by that is my theoretical
attempt to renew 19th century anarchist thought
through post-structuralist theory, in other
words through the theories of contemporary
continental figures like Foucault, Derrida,
Lacan, De Leus, but also old 19th century
theorists like Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche.
I think what the, I think the implication
of all of these different thinkers...
is that we can no longer sustain the revolutionary
meta-narrative which is at the heart of anarchist theory.
For a number of reasons actually, power relations
today are much more dispersed, decentralized
than they were in the 19th century, so there
is a symbolic target list, a central authority anymore.
Secondly because I think the subject of freedom,
the individual, the notion of man who liberates
himself from power is no longer really thinkable
today, what we find today is a kind of a plurality
of different struggles over a whole variety
of different issues and so on.
So there's no way in which in which we can
sustain this narrative of kind of one single
revolutionary event, so the way I think about
post-anarchism today and the way which I think
it appeals to a number of different struggles
is to think about much more pluralistic politics
which kind of coalesces around different struggles,
for instance ecological struggles, struggles
on behalf of the rights of so-called illegal
migrants for instance, struggles against austerity,
I think for instance the Occupy movement is
a very interesting example of a kind of contemporary
anarchistic form of politics, so the way I
would define post-anarchism or post-anarchist
politics today is a form of, is a way of thinking
about anarchism which starts rather than finishes
with anarchy and what I mean by this is that
it starts with a certain kind of I suppose
ethical assumption that power or rather domination
is never entirely justified, right?
So therefore relations of domination should
always be challenged and resisted, I don't
think it can it be any longer determined or
over-determined by some notion of a sort of
a universal revolutionary event which is going
to transform social relations in their entirety,
I think it's much more interesting to look
at a series of localized struggles which are
actually quite different from one another,
which may intersect at certain points, but
which are no longer, which can no longer be
seen as part of some kind of great Universal
revolutionary struggle.
