Daniel Colson - Anarquismo, Foucault y Los Posmodernos

7/29/2019 Daniel Colson - Anarquismo, Foucault y Los Posmodernos

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COLSON, Daniel.- Anarchism, Foucault and the Postmoderns

Remarks on Tomas Ibanez article

This article is published in the French anarchist journal Rfractions, May 2008with several other texts about postmodernity, including one by Tomas Ibanez,

to which this article refers.

I will start with the points of agreement with Tomas text they are quite

numerous while including in this commentary the reasons for my final

disagreement on what one might expect from anarchism, its scope and

therefore its importance in the future.

Anarchism today

The first point of agreement is the most immediate. It deals with Tomas

section entitled anarchism today. That section expresses very well, better

than I would do it here, what I have sensed for quite a long time: namely an

increasingly deeper divorce (which does not date from today) between an

official anarchism on the one hand, anarchist organizations, anarchistideology, anarchist identity, and, on the other, those movements without any

precise label, that more radical fringe whom the public powers (who

occasionally happen not to be mistaken) sometimes designate by the fair term

of anarcho-autonomist .

The libertarian renewal that occurred during last centurys end has enabled the

crystallization but also the sedimentation, of a noticeable number of activists

who reclaim an anarchist identity. This often ageing category of activists has

enlivened the traditional organizations (mainly through the CNT, Alternativelibertaire, Organisation Communiste Libertaire, the Anarchist Federation and its

various dissidents), but not necessarily the libertarian logic and dynamic. And

thus while there exist efficient anti-authoritarian movements, often with quite

rich and complex components, practices and world visions, there is side by side

an anarchism which is partly ossified, established (as Tomas emphasizes)

which, at best, duplicates the surviving leftist organizations, and whose sole

consistent practice (apart from running the organization) is often limited to a


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very traditional participation in a bureaucratized trade-union movement,

without any authentic emancipating inspiration, confined in an approach that

tends to reduce the libertarian project to a simple rhetoric, built on stock

answers with no other reality than the words and symbols of a past which has

been translated into more or less sentimental and hollow references [1].

The severity of my judgment does not stem from a far-off viewpoint. It is based

on my participation in the different movements of recent years; movements in

which the anarcho-autonomists and the non[-]specifically organized as they

used to say at La Gryffe bookstore, have played an important part. La Gryffe

happens to maintain relations with the anarcho-autonomists of the city of

Lyons, a city where this current is very active, particularly through the squatter

movement [2]. It also happens that I am a member of the local CNT-Education

(Saint-Etienne), which may be (unfortunately) atypical since, in the setting of

the university, it has always worked closely with the so-called autonomistcurrents; but, to make it clear, it also rejects the bureaucratized union

practices which the anarcho-autonomists (in Saint-Etienne and I hope

elsewhere) are absolutely right to denounce. To illustrate the problem brought

up by Tomas, the choice between a hardly anarchistic anarchism which

relates to the past like a Canada-Dry to alcohol; and a de facto anarchism of

the libertarian project, in which the positions and practices appear I will tell

two stories. One is anecdotal and personal; the other much more crucial in its

real consequences.

A personal anecdote

I participated in a meeting of university activists, some time ago, in connection

with a CNT-Education convention. One of the points discussed, which I consider

as paltry, but quite characteristic of how conventions waste their time (and also

lose all libertarian inspiration) was to know whether student branches were

entitled or not to call themselves FAU (Fdration anarchiste universitaire) and

to sign pamphlets with that logo. As for us, in Saint-Etienne, our pamphlets

(whether CNT or not) are flexible and accommodate many identifications,provided they mention what precise collective is the author (most often a

group of a particular place, but that could also be an ad hoc group of a

particular student body, or even of a particular academic year and field, for

instance the second year female students for a bachelors degree in English).

Half of those in attendance (some twenty activists) shared our viewpoint, and

the discussion became quite heated quite rapidly, the defenders of an

organizational discipline hanging on to their position of authority (decisions


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taken in conventions often appear as emanating from some sort of religious

council) [3]. I suddenly realized how the Spanish CNT could so quickly become

bureaucratic in the Fall of 1936 and remodel itself in a few days as a state

apparatus, this very state which the Spanish anarchist movement denounced a

few days before but which it already bore potentially (as well as many other

things).

Seventy years later such a tiny organization as the French CNT produced in

turn a comparable bureaucratic behavior. Its dwarfish meetings naively applied

that state logic which they pretended to oppose. In contrast with the impotent

ideological sectarianism of some, or the integration within a bureaucratized

union of the others, the practices and stances of the anarcho-autonomists are

appropriate and not only from a libertarian viewpoint. If they are unsuccessful

in reaching the brain of the most formalistic anarchism they ought at least

move its heart. I am not sure that such is the case.

A collective event

My second story relates to a collective event which is certainly of greater

consequence than the decision-making of CNT-Education conventions (I

imagine that activists who claim to belong to the CNT have continued to name

themselves as they still wish [such is our case in Saint-Etienne]; that

contemporary scene has evidently nothing in common with Catalonia in 1937,when the simple fact of reading an anarchist journal which was not authorized

with the imprimatur of the Republican state could send you to labor camp [see

Franois Godicheau, La guerre dEspagne, Rpublique et rvolution en

Catalogne, Odile Jacob, 2004]. This second history concerns the 2003

demonstrations against the G8 organized in Switzerland, in which the

libertarians had come in great number as in the preceding occurrences . It is

probably then that the chasm between a vibrant anarchism and a petrified

anarchism manifested itself most clearly. To use tough words and therefore

oversimplify the situation, one may give the following description.

On the one hand there were thousands of participants, not a crowd or a mass

of atomized individuals, but a multitude of small groups and networks,

familiarized by their practice and previous experience with this type of

meeting, who functioned through affinity , confronting their experiences and

self-organizing; they let the general assemblies and each current or tendency


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address and decide by themselves what was suitable to do, how to articulate

themselves with other choices (violence or non violence for instance) and how

to think of forms of action without any representation or intermediaries. In

brief, on the one hand there were activists who called themselves anarchists or

non anarchists, who were preparing to act, in practice, by carrying out a

libertarian logic, that is to say a federalist logic of action and direct democracy.

On the other hand, there was a cartel of organizations convinced that they

incarnated anarchism. It was very determined to master several months ahead

the staging of international anarchism, to avoid (in the eyes of certain people)

the ill-timed outbursts of former years. Killing two birds with one stone, it

wanted to take advantage of the presence of a large number of expendable

individuals to organize (in the style of May Day demonstrations) a mass parade

clearly identified by its banners and the megaphones of its organizers. And it

would finally be sufficient to flank it on both sides to reach the a-temporal goal,so to say in the air : having ones photo in the news, if possible in color (so as

to distinguish well the black from the red flags) with the banner headline 5000

anarchists march at the G8.

On the one hand there was the logic of an anarchism in action, in effect (in the

sense of direct action and of propaganda by the deed), based on self-

organization, federalism and direct democracy. On the other one could see

very precisely, from the lessons of the Spanish experience, a governmental

anarchism, a statist logic grounded on representation, obedience towatchwords, destruction of any concrete and proximate affinity link in favor of

the naked individual, totally available for what organizations expected of him

or her, a disciplined individual in a position to repeat the expected slogans

planned ahead of time, to go where he would be told to go and behave

decently as the representative of a cartel of organizations had decided for him

or for her. The cartel therefore placed a security crew (this embryo of a police

force) to oversee the execution of the (sometimes misunderstood) decisions

and instructions of the indirect democracy of conventions and preliminary

programs [4].

I will not expand on this, because the second item of Tomas text enables me

to look further at the divorce between these efficient libertarian practices and a

purely ideological anarchism, grounded on appearance and representation,

acting in reverse of what it pretends to draw its authority from.


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The Enlightenment, the question of the subject and universalism

I will not repeat what Tomas Ibanez says, except to stress my total agreement.

As a political current, anarchism is born in a given place at a given time, as all

things, one should add , but anarchism is precisely the only political currentwhich considers the absolute singularity of situations, events and therefore of

beings (a demonstration against the G8, for instance, in Switzerland, on a

sunny Spring day in 2003). The tragedy, as Tomas demonstrates, is that the

singularity of the situation and the context in which anarchism is born, - in

Europe, in the 19th century generated the extraordinary idea that it did not

believe itself to be exceptional (as everybody does and with good reason),

but on the contrary, and in an apparently more modest way, it experienced

itself (subjectively) as universal, thus pretending (humble servants of this

heavy duty) to erase or subsume all the other singularities, before, afterwards

and elsewhere, submitting them to its general law and its supposedenlightenment, before expanding and perceiving these famous lights (the

advance of knowledge! Science!) under the particularly obscure and savage

shape of colonialism, imperialism, industrial war, mass massacres and

totalitarian regimes (red and brown). And this is where one finds again the

divorce between a dead anarchism and efficient libertarian practices, but also

my first disagreement with Tomas.

What holds an interest in a careful reading of anarchist texts is that one

observes how, from Proudhon to Bakunin but particularly among the verynumerous activists engaged thereafter in struggles and effective emancipation

movements, libertarian thinking has never stopped denouncing the foundations

of bourgeois and capitalist modernity: the illusions and lies of law, of

representative democracy and social contract; the pitfalls of communication;

the self-serving lies of proprietary limits (pars extra partes) with the restrictive

freedom that goes with them (My freedom ends where someone elses begins);

the illusions and lies of the fragmented individual, free, reasonable,

calculating and utilitarian, responsible of his actions and choices; in brief the

damaging results of the fiction of the modern Cartesian man, master and

owner of nature. I refer here to the texts of trade-unionists like Pelloutier,

Pouget or Griffuelhes (for France), to Bakunin and his ceaseless attacks against

free will, to the wealth and originality of Proudhons analyses (the individual is

a group, any group is an individual), to Elise Recluss work and thought, to

Kropotkins ethology, to the notion (sometimes so Nietzschean) of Malatestas

will, and of course to the radical subjectivity of the Stirnerians and other

Nietzscheans, those fierce scorners of modern individualism [5].


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Historically, the originality of anarchism rested in its critique and denunciation

of the pitfalls and lies of modernity, but also, of course, in its capacity to think

and adopt social and political practices which broke off severely with such a

modernity; it broke up the schemes and procedures of the social and economic

order that appeared in the last three centuries; and all this stemmed from new

forces, new practices and new subjectivities, with the uncompromising

rejection of all representation, the adoption of direct action, federalism,

association and autonomy of beings struggling for their emancipation [6]. By

way of these astonishing theoretical assets, anarchism had therefore all the

reasons to recognize and think out the spontaneous movements which,

justifying it in return, have produced its reality and strength in the past (in

Spain, in Ukraine, but also in a large number of other less known experiences).

And thus anarchism had and has also every reason to recognize and express

the coming emancipation movements, however new and surprising these might

be, including, of course, to stick to the current events, the various practicescalled anarcho-autonomous, for instance.

But as we have seen and as Tomas Ibanez has pointed out, this is far from

being the case. The originality, the force and novelty of anarchism have largely

been covered up by its adversaries. Established anarchism has abandoned the

breath of emancipation that appeared in the singularity and originality of its

birth for the protective and oppressive shade of the order which it pretended to

abolish. Such is a renunciation which is doubly detrimental to anarchism: 1) by

submitting it to the ways of thought and world visions which serve asfoundations to of modern domination; 2) by enclosing it more particularly in a

most impoverished version of this mendacious and selfish thought, that of the

school (of Jules Ferry in the French case), the school for the people and

battalions of disciplined workers that were requested for the second industrial

revolution, a school in which as Monatte very rightly said, the people while

learning how to read had unlearnt how to discern.

Foucault

Again, Im globally in agreement with what Tomas says. The big question that

Foucault asks the anarchists might be formulated in this way: why does an

author so close to libertarian thought, thanks to whom the question of power

has finally become a central issue, why is such an author the target of a

visceral rejection or at least a complete indifference for most of the anarchists?


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[7] To answer this question one should take into account a great number of

reasons [8]. I will examine two of them.

Foucaults pessimism

The first seems to me to belong to the source or the inspiration of Foucaults

thought. Contrarily to Deleuze, for instance, Foucault is characterized by a

deep pessimism as to the possibility of getting out of power relations or more

precisely of organizing them in an emancipative manner [9]. I refer to one of

his sayings, in the aftermath of his book on the history of sexuality (La volont

de savoir [10]) as he was then getting into a long theoretical crisis: always the

same incapacity to cross the line, pass on the other side, listen and try to let be

heard the language that comes from elsewhere or from down below; always

the same choice, on the side of power, of what it says or sends word of (Lavie des hommes infmes, Les Cahiers du Chemin, 1977, p. 16.) This deep and

primal pessimism is also taken into account by Deleuze when he explains how,

for Foucault: if one must seek life as a power from outside, how do we know if

that outside is not a terrifying emptiness and that this life which seems to

resist is not a simple distribution in the emptiness of partial, progressive and

slow deaths? (Foucault, p. 102).

And it is probably here (and in what is its best part) that anarchism is

effectively tempted to part from Foucault, in the name of an assertion (that onewould be wrong to qualify as nave) according to which it is possible to draw

away from the domination, lies and illusions of power, to see power relations

combine in other ways and transform themselves into emancipating relations.

But even on this issue, assuredly determinant for what it implies as will (in the

Nietzschean or Malatestas sense of the word) does not anarchism, at its best

part or quite simply as genuinely libertarian, does not anarchism also share this

anguish about the beyond of revolution, of another world that would only be a

terrifying hollowness, an unbearable fault and chaos, quickly and inevitably

covered up by even the most unjust and oppressive social order [11]? Even

better, as is shown by the red and black libertarian flags, is not this anguish ofthe beyond a necessary condition of a true desire for a radical transformation?

It would at least circumvent the soap opera proclamations, the hollow and

empty words built in such a high sounding way on the model they denounce,

which are so sectarian, radical and detached from what they mechanically

communicate that we must conclude that those who proclaim them never had

the slightest desire or will to change anything whatever, as too many historical

examples lead one to notice.


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The closeness of anarchism and Foucault

The second reason for the anarchists refusal or indifference to Foucaultsanalyses stems from a paradox: the great proximity between both and more

particularly, as Tomas Ibanez points out, the importance Foucault grants to the

reality of power, its ubiquitous, brutal and insidious character, crossing through

the most harmless interactions, organizing in series (in the sense that

Proudhon gives to this word) and producing structures of domination

(Churches, States, Political parties and the very Individuals) with a capacity of

illusion and oppression that does not rely firstly on their blinding visibility but

on the tight and often imperceptible network of immediate and tiny

dominations of which these structures are but the resultant (Proudhon again).

Without a doubt, with Proudhon (and now Bakunin), anarchists are supposed to

know in what manner these resultants, in the same manner as God or the

State, meet our eyes deceitfully as the illusory cause of what produces and

feeds them [12]. But this illusion, which constitutes a modernity grounded on

the belief of in rational actors, originators and masters of their actions, is

precisely a widely shared illusion (thence therefore its real efficacy), both by

those who assert its evidence and necessity (the greatest number and the

most cynical [13]) but also, alas, by far too many anarchists who, in an

opposite and symmetrical way, satisfy themselves in by adopting the world

views they fight against, and never wondering why they always end up by

obtaining the opposite of what they intend, overdoing it on the contrary, in the

way of the partisans of the so-called Arshinov platform for example [14]. Asevidenced by the secularist ethic this duplicate of the religious moral code

one may be for or against the State, for or against Capital, for or against divine

transcendence, and function in exactly the same way, sharing the same

conceptions and representations, believing that State, Capital and divine

transcendence are really the authors and the (ultimate) causes of our

happiness or our misery.

It seems to me that Foucault, Deleuze and some others constitute a sort of

litmus test for contemporary libertarian thought. The reactions they stir upshow how creeds and patterns of action stemming from the order they

denounce cover every first and spontaneous libertarian movements

inspiration, will and thoughts, while Foucault and Deleuze, like the child of

Andersons tale, reveal the nakedness of a contradictory anarchist tradition. In

other words, and this time in the manner of Poes and Lacans Purloined

letter, the denial of the proximity between Foucault and anarchism is all the


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more significant to the degree that this proximity is more clearly evident. As it

happens, there is a triple proximity.

1 Firstly, an immediate proximity common to everyone. In effect, one needs

neither to have long experience nor to have read Foucault, of course, to findout that power is everywhere, from the world order to the slightest detail of

life, under multiple forms and relations, including (and one could say

particularly) in the collectives or organizations of an anarchist character,

precisely where one is the most prone to believe that power is inevitably

elsewhere, outside, on the part of others. Like shoemakers and doctors who

lack medical care, anarchists think they are justified in walking barefooted in

the cold of winter and that they elude the diseases connected with power since

their raison dtre consists unquestionably in denouncing and challenging such

power. In the anarchist environment (as everywhere else), and particularly

within permanent or long-lasting organizations, everything is power, struggleand confrontation, but is all the more hypocritical and wild or destructive (even

though it is on a small scale) to the degree that one denies the existence of

such power relations. Foucault is evidently correct. Everybody knows that, and

even the most dogmatic anarchist will never fail to recognize it, face to face, in

an intimate way, when the conversation is sincere, when the shield of the

activist and ideological superego is laid down, when one is no longer on duty

(and relaxed, for a change). In this way, and it is dispiriting to notice it, the

anarchists superego and denial, so deprived of a libertarian inspiration, so

contrary to the anarchist idea, is not different, on a small scale, from the

religious and political denials and superegos, from the Inquisition to the Soviet

Secret Police and all the other paradises of lies, repression and hypocrisy. With

two differences, however:

one very negative, pitiful and somewhat ridiculous is the fact that the

anarchism which denies that these power relations are operating in the

slightest of our actions and looks, is precisely expected, by its very nature, to

be the most apt to perceive them and drive them out from cover.

The other, paradoxically more positive, relates to the fact that the vast majority

of libertarians share a (logical and welcome) incapacity to succeed in what the

defenders of order and power achieve; they are incapable of following the rules

of action they claim to enact; in spite of themselves, they cannot but

mirror/mimic anarchism (even under its negative aspect), a movement that

they have so many reasons to take inspiration from and which (luckily) they

would have the greatest difficulty dismissing.


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2 There is a second reason besides this proximity between anarchism and

Foucaults analyses. It relates to what is historically known (on the topic of

power) about libertarian movements and experiments, and first of all, as a case

in point, to how in practical and political matters they refer to the pair

authoritarian/antiauthoritarian. These notions have been both very precise and

very broad in their usage, from the time when the practices and mode of

organization of the Marxist international were denounced until the current and

polyvalent use of the word in a great number of areas, situations and relations

(education, work, family, war, etc. [15]). What Foucault brings to light through

his analyses, the omnipresence of power relations, the libertarian movements

perceive immediately in their moments of effectiveness and consistency. It is

even basically from this very sharp and hard-line perception that they form

their distinctive movements [16]. And this occurs in two ways:

Through a spontaneous and exacerbated sensitivity to immediate and

apparently minuscule and mild forms of authority and power, which their allies

and rivals (mainly the Marxists) consider as peripheral (considering the tasks to

be performed, the historical mission one is the servant of, etc.) [17]

Through an equally epidermal touchiness which it would be mistaken to

stamp out too quickly and thoughtlessly as a supposedly emotionally disturbed

anarchist temperament. It rather ought to be compared with the pride and

susceptibility of the warrior discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille

Plateaux, a hypersensitivity both feminine and masculine in which, without

choosing the easy way out, one might recognize the well-chosen encounter

between the libertarian idea and a trait usually attributed to the Spaniards, but

also to contemporary anarcha-feminists, with their references to Judith Butlers

analyses, for instance, where even the order of sexes and genders gets

confused and may thus reconstruct itself in some other way, one might say

anarchically [18].

Hypersensitivity to all relations of authority, touchiness and extreme pride are

not, however, the sole characteristics of the anti-authoritarian dimension of

anarchism. Without really modifying their nature or immediacy, they broaden

to cover all the libertarian movements practices and modes of action and

association.


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This occurs in two opposite directions: on the one side it links up with a very

specific individualism through which anarchist radical subjectivism asserts

itself, but also, on the other, towards all the social and revolutionary ways of

living and unfolding, which (generally) have the capacity to maintain the

tension between absolute autonomy and association, immediate interactions

and broad power relations. I would not like to lengthen this text beyondmeasure and detail an analysis which I have attempted to develop elsewhere. I

will only call to mind two patterns of those libertarian experiments:

A first characteristic is the originality and radical horizontality of these forms

of association and grouping. They ceaselessly watch out for what is mentioned

by the 19th century revolutionary songs, the conditions for that mysterious

independence from the world or that universal independence, which they

endeavor to ensure to all their elements (from the larger ones to the narrower,

overlapping one another) [19]. Anarchist thought has tried to think about afree association of free forces (Bakunin) through the concept of federalism:

federalism of communes, federalism of groups, squatters and all other possible

collectives, whether long lasting or fugitive, federalism of unions, about which

Pouget writes that federations and association of trade-unions are

autonomous in the Confederation; trade-unions are autonomous in the

federations and associations of unions; members of trade-unions are

autonomous in the unions. (La Confdration Gnrale du Travail, 1910).

Another distinction of libertarian experiments is even more determining: it isequilibrium, in the Proudhonian sense of the word, that is to say a permanent

tension between a multiplicity of forces, positions and diverse courses of life,

often contradictory but perceived, in their relation, as equally necessary for

emancipation; and this may occur between collectives and those other groups

that are individualities, between statutes, statements, formalized agreements,

and the determining influence of informal or hidden networks, from the Spanish

militancia or the secret societies and other intimate Bakuninist circles to the

functioning of the contemporary black-blocs and including all possible forms of

affinity groups (trade, friendship, childhood, ideas) which have been the strong

point and originality of the Spanish CNT at the time of its eminence. One might

also add to these first examples a great number of other necessary tensions

and equilibriums, between revolutionary-syndicalists, men of action,

reformists, pure unionists, revolutionaries, anti-organizational

individualities, autonomous groups, advocates of organization, anarcho-

syndicalists, councilists, ultra-leftists, etc. to which one should also add

the numerous embodiments of anarchism and self-defined anarchist circles

from insurrectionists to educationalist and achiever (a typology dear to


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Gaetano Manfredonia), passing through pacifists, naturists, vegetarians,

vegetalians [20], feminists, as well as attentats [21], pilfering, community life,

esperantism (and its idoist variation [22]), antimilitarism, free communes,

illegalism, alternative schools, anarcho-communism, hoboism, anti alcoholism

and straight-edge, free thought and anticlericalism, libertarian communism,

free love, cooperation, abortion and vasectomy, collectivism, reappropriation,primitivism, individualism, neo-malthusianism, etc. not to mention the even

more fragmented and paradoxical character of a collective culture placed

under the sign of eclecticism and self-education.

3 I will be more concise on the third closeness between Foucault and

libertarian thought, and it will serve as a conclusion, particularly on the

differences I may have about with Tomas Ibanez text. This third proximity

follows from all that has preceded and deals with the eminently theoretical and

philosophical dimension of anarchism, the wealth and power of libertarianthought.

It is evident that I do not want to give the impression of underestimating

Foucaults originality and important contribution. It only seems to me that

anarchism disposes of considerable theoretical resources, most often

unemployed, which do not just echo Foucaults analyses that I have tried to

present, but which also enable one to catch and develop all their implications

which, in return, will develop a greater capacity to express all their

potentialities [23]. And it is here that our attitude vis--vis Foucault, Deleuzeand others too easily qualified as postmodern, implies, within the heart of the

libertarian project, a much broader way of thinking and acting: that it [is] to say

a capacity for anarchism to co-opt, to ceaselessly repeat the totality of past,

present and future human experiences in the double areas of emancipation

and struggle against all forms of domination.

In my opinion, progress, that illusion of modernity, does not exist for anarchism

[24]. Instead of a linear vision of history, everything is reenacted again,

throughout an uninterrupted sequence of emancipating events of variableintensity. This is true for all of us, and as Simondon or Bakunin remind us

(about Stankevitch for the latter), the most obscure life is again reenacted after

ones death. The past is never over. [25]. This discontinuous (but

uninterrupted) sequence of emancipating experiences thus has the possibility

(not always accomplished) of repeating and therefore giving a meaning to what

has been acted elsewhere and previously (and which is never ended). It allows

us to understand and recapture, in the light of the nineteenth century, Western


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anarchism and the beginning of the twentieth, the totality of past and exotic

human experiences, which Elise Reclus endeavored to describe without any

exclusion, in an encyclopedic way, from the Greek democracy very dear to

Eduardo Colombo, to John Clarks Chinese Daoism, passing through Clastres

Indian tribes or the Medieval communes, so special to Landauer this time,

and many more things still. Nineteenth century European anarchism canunceasingly take on new meaning and express some of the infinite possibilities

which it bears (for good as well as bad) in the light of Foucault, Deleuze, May

68 or the squatters and anarcho-autonomists or anarcha-feminist movements;

and Foucault, Deleuze, May 68 or the squatters and anarcho-autonomist or

anarcha-feminist movements can likewise find their full expression and express

the emancipating potentialities which they bear in the light of this past

anarchism which they enlighten and which also enlightens them. They are its

re-enactment, neither quite the same, nor quite someone other as Baudelaire

says about his relation to women.

I will end with the matter of my difference with Tomas Ibanez text. Tomas

explains to us how, in his view, post-anarchism must substitute itself for

classical anarchism while taking over elements of the latters fundamental

impetus . It seems to me that by this formula Tomas shows well where we

differ. Speaking of classical anarchism, which he would distinguish from a

mysterious fundamental impetus, he confuses the shadow with the prey, the

shadow of a very narrow anarchism, backward-looking and identitarian, indeed

submissive to the undesirable influence of the Enlightenment. That age,

which was present since the beginning and homologous to the modern order

and dominations, has very logically survived the defeats of the libertarian

movements, up to the point of causing forgetfulness of the theoretical and

practical power and wealth of a project and a worldview which one must rightly

repeat and update, avoiding if possible following another trap, appearing in the

shape of various post-anarchisms , of which Viven Garcia has shown the

poverty [26].

Daniel COLSON

(Transl. Ronald Creagh, and edited by John P. Clark)

[1] The calamitous experience of the Spanish CNT in exile ought however to

have vaccinated us against the permanent possibility of seeing anarchism


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transform itself into its opposite, an opposite well described in Tomas text.

This anarchist counterexample of the CNT in exile, as well as the extraordinary

celerity of the bureaucratization and cooptation by the state of this very CNT in

1936, have not yet been the object of a satisfying analysis.

[2] This is a very long history which traces its origin in to the renaissance of the

Lyons libertarian movement in the 1970s, before the moment when traditional

organizations flowered again on the rubble and depletion of the social

movements of the preceding years. This history was to be continued in the

beginning of the 1990s with a powerful squatter movement (in the Croix-

Rousse) with which La Gryffe was linked.

[3] The typically modern argument (ignorance of the law is no excuse)

consists in saying that (grassroots) activists only have to get involved in thepreparation and decisions of congresses, read the hundreds of amendments

and proposals, understand and discuss the issues, carefully read and

understand the minutes and decisions of the congress (so as to conform

themselves to these); otherwise the grassroots activist, that is to say the

overwhelming majority of members (indeed!) can only lay off, blame

themselves, and therefore follow, without any discussion, the handful of

activists who have the time and taste for investing themselves in this intense

bureaucratic life (let us say red tape and confrontations) while the members

will eventually satisfy themselves by trying occasionally to go on strike and

fight in their workplace, but being quite careful to conform to the decisions ofthe convention (through the texts and decisions of which professional activists,

more knowledgeable in this kind of exercise, will take care to remind them), for

instance not to sign their pamphlets carelessly at the risk of being excluded.

[4] To see how the Spanish CNT, transformed into a state apparatus, destroyed

the solidarities and practices which were its force of emancipation, one may

refer to Godicheaus work on the republican archive about the Prisoners

Committees (more than 4000 members of the CNT were in the republican

prisons in Catalonia!).

[5] I take the liberty of referring to my text Subjectivits anarchistes et

subjectivit moderne in Collectif, La Culture Libertaire, Lyon: Atelier de

Cration Libertaire, 1997.


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[6] To the reading of anarchist texts one may add, even more appropriately, a

(much more difficult) analysis of the very diversified collection of libertarian

experiments and struggles. On this aspect, and in a very historically and

geographically limited way, may I refer to the book drawn from my thesis,

Anarcho-syndicalisme et communisme, Saint-Etienne (1920-1925), Lyon:

Atelier de Cration Libertaire, 1986.

[7] There is not much sense in pointing out the highbrowism of Foucaults

analyses and, more generally, of opposing intellectuals and non intellectuals.

The massively working-class activists in the libertarian experiments did not

hesitate to read books as difficult as those of Nietzsche, Spencer, Guyau or

Buchner, or historical testimonies quite as difficult as James Guillaumes

LInternationale. My copies of the four original volumes of this last work, which

was published from 1905 to 1910, were all bought and read by Boudoux, a

metal shipwright, better known for his activism and, later, for his physicalconfrontations with the communists. On the opposite side of what is written

here, see the excellent (but already old) synthesis by Salvo Vaccaro, Foucault

et lanarchie, in La culture libertaire, op. cit.

[8] I am not answering here to the arguments developed by Eduardo Colombo

in Les formes politiques du pouvoir ( Rfractions, n 17) nor do I examine a

decisive issue raised long ago by him on power nor therefore on the

positivities that Foucault sees in it.

[9] On Foucaults pessimism, particularly expressed in the concept of

dispositif [device], see Agamben, Quest-ce quun dispositif ? (Payot Rivages,

2007).

[10] Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualit, vol. 1 : La volont de savoir,

(Gallimard, Paris, 1976). Foucaults French subtitle scared American publishers

who entitled it instead An Introduction. Michel Foucault, The History of

Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (Pantheon, NewYork, 1978).

[11] On the intensity of this anguish and its link with the desire for revolution

one might give numerous examples, from Coeurderoys book Hourra !!! ou la


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Rvolution par les Cosaques, to what Garcia Oliver says in his dialogue with

Freddy Gomez (A Contretemps, n 17, juillet 2004).

[12] Universal causality is nothing else than the eternally reproduced

Resultant of an infinity of actions and reactions naturally performed by theinfinite quantity of things that are born, exist and then disappear within it,

Bakounine, uvres, tome III, Stock, 1908, pp. 353-354. To seize the force and

originality of Bakunins (and Proudhons) position, see the contemporary

rediscovery of Pierce, James and Deweys pragmatism (whose inspiration is

so distinctly and explicitly libertarian); for whom nature is not a homogenous

and spatial system [ but] the result or effect of a multiplicity of geneses. New

existences continually spring up and add to the older ones which compose with

them [] a common nature. (D. Debaise , in Vie et exprimentation, Peirce,

James, Dewey, Vrin, 2007). It is not indifferent to notice that a certain number

of anarcho-autonomous invoke and explicitly use this American pragmatism,the return of which is also one of the numerous indications of the actuality of

libertarian project and thought.

[13] As Voltaire says, If God did not exist one would have to invent him.

[14] Before his contribution to the elaboration of the platform and his support

for Bolshevist despotism at his death, Arshinov, in the conclusion of his

beautiful book Le Mouvement makhnoviste, relating a movement in which hehad so intensively participated, offers doubtlessly one of the major

contributions to libertarian thought and projects: Proletarians of all the world,

go down in your own depths, seek truth and create it: you will not find it

elsewhere. Blibaste, 1969, p. 388.

[15] See for instance the witting refusal of the Barcelona working-class militia

militia-members to march in step, even by chance [,] between two soldiers.

[16] It is quite striking to notice how current movements (for instance the

anarcho-autonomous) repeat (in the Deleuzian meaning of the word) the way

the antiauthoritarian International created itself, less from a program or goals

(which authoritarians and antiauthoritarians for a long time considered as

common) than from their immediate practices, from their ways and means to

reach their aims, and all this through an approach in which those immediate


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(antiauthoritarian) means and practices end by absorbing the goals. One may

say that the end ends by being entirely incorporated in the means, when

ends and means are merged, without anything remaining up above or later on

(those two fraudulent places where the paradise of transcendence is located,

whether it is religious or not). One may thus understand what the libertarian

movement understands by revolution. For anarchists, it is not firstly a final end(inevitably transcendent because far away, later on, till the end of time) which

allows every procrastination and, most of all, every dogmatism and all

authoritarian measures grounded on that (ideal) goal. For anarchism, the ideal

of revolution is totally linked to the radicalism of present actions, a radicalism

of which the more or less violent and untimely character is only one aspect.

[17] Among the numerous possible examples, see the way activists as different

as Paul Robin and Anselmo Lorenzo describe, in almost identical terms, the

behavior and relations between Marx and his disciples at the Londonconference in September 1871.

[18] See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble :Feminism and the Subversion of

Identity (New York ; London : Routledge, 1990).

[19] Le chant des ouvriers (Pierre Dupont, 1846), Les canons (unknown author

and date). On the originality and striking character of this type of existence and

the functioning of effective libertarian movements see the surprise of anunprejudiced historian such as Godicheau (op.cit.) discovering, through the

archives, the mode of being of Catalan anarcho-syndicalism.

[20] Vegatalians are vegetarians who also reject all animal products such as

eggs or honey (Translators note)

[21] French authorities and media call attentat any criminalendeavour

undertaken in a political context against an object, a property, a person or a

community .

[22] Ido is a simplified form of Esperanto.


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[23] It seems to me that all relations between thoughts and authors precisely

follow this logic of association (and disassociation) of the most immediate and

most concrete practices of the libertarian movements. It is in this sense that

though theoretical practices have no predominance over the other ones, they

open up a whole picture of anarchism which, for my part, I qualify as

ontological, in the sense of a practical and theoretical vision and relation tothe world that links everything, the totality of what is, that is to say the

multiple, the unceasing change (about which Bakunin talks ), the different and

the generalized singular (if one may say).

[24] In a comment about this sentence, Colson insists that he is presenting his

point of view and does not pretend to speak in the name of anarchism.

(Translators note)

[25] Gilbert Simondon, Lindividuation psychique et collective, Aubier 1989 p.

105.

[26] Vivien Garcia, Lanarchisme aujourdhui, lHarmattan, 2007. It seems to

me that the next discussion could be about this fundamental impetus which

Tomas mentions and its mysterious elements that one should select and

recapture. The analysis of this issue seems to me very accurate. Returning to

the fundamental impulse is always returning to the origin of the multiple

emancipating actions and movements, returning to the origins of theInternational Workingmens Association, the Federation jurassienne, the

Argentinian FORA, for instance. An (eternal?) return and a resurgence (in

another way) that enables a recovery of everything, including and specially the

immense and extraordinary range of anarchism, in this case, this practical and

theoretical force which is exactly capable of recomposing everything.

Daniel Colson - Anarquismo, Foucault y Los Posmodernos

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