Previous:
Abstract and Contents
List of abbreviations used
Introduction
Chapter 1. False Start
Chapter 2. Departures
Chapter 3. The Bridge: Where it Hinges]

Chapter 4.- Journey’s End/New Beginnings

But, for God’s sake, when we have demolished all a priori dogmas, do not let us think of indoctrinating the people in our turn. […] Let us never consider any question exhausted, and when we have used our very last argument, let us begin again, if necessary, with eloquence and irony. (Letter from Proudhon to Marx, 17 May 1846) [1]

In a review of Todd May’s The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism John Moore argues for a history of anarchist thought that can be periodised, in a similar fashion to feminism, into an ‘early phase, conveniently labelled as classical anarchism’ and a ‘second-wave anarchism’, using the Situationists as a ‘convenient marker of the transition point’. Moore commences the review by examining May’s bibliography – ‘one must carefully scrutinise the author’s grounding in anarchism’ – and goes on to somewhat pillory the text for basing its understanding of anarchism exclusively on classical anarchism. [2] Moore’s review easily demands a more thorough consideration than can be provided here, but two comments might still be made. Firstly, the entire argument that Derrida levels against Spivak, Eagleton, and Aijaz Ahmad, concerning their ‘proprietorial’ feelings and their ‘jealous possessiveness’ (M&S, p.222) towards Marx, could be put to Moore with regard to his attempts to disqualify May as someone who can even speak about anarchism. It might naively have been imagined that anarchism would be the one school of thought where the very grounds for such proprietoriality were necessarily absent, but apparently not. Even a cursory glance at the letters page of the north American journal Anarchy is enough to take in the various impassioned pleas for such-and-such a transgressor to be struck off the roll of the ideologically sound. From Bakunin at the First International, to the debates over whether the Unabomber can really be considered an anarchist… plus ça change.
Yet the other point to be made is that Moore’s periodisation is indeed useful, and one to which I would generally subscribe. So in order to bear his bibliographical caveat in mind, I will not attempt to suggest that my use of the term ‘anarchism’ so far in this dissertation has been a bid to encapsulate or represent the totality of every strand of anarchist thought past and present. Moreover, as will undoubtedly become evident during the course of this chapter, the somewhat eclectic range of anarchist texts under consideration could be said, for whatever reasons (although personal predilection would surely be ranked among the first), to adhere loosely to Moore’s category of classical anarchism. For this reason my use of the term ‘anarchism’ would not be intended to represent the thought of latter day trends such as situationism.
Even this small degree of care with the actual word itself, though, still seems beyond the grasp of many commentators. When Eagleton writes that ‘the ideas of system, consensus and organization would themselves become demonized in vaguely anarchistic fashion’ by postmodernism, the only vagueness apparent seems to be that with which he uses the term ‘anarchistic’ – a ‘bad’ word, a linguistic scarecrow to send his readers scurrying for the comfort of whatever new orthodoxy that Eagleton has to offer. [3] In comparable fashion, John Caputo suggests that in Derridean thought ‘pure multiplicity would be anarchistic’ and hence ‘a catastrophe’ (DN, p.119). In both cases it is clear that ‘anarchistic’ is being employed with scant regard for the political tradition to which the term refers, an oversight that becomes the harder to indulge as the anti-authoritarian element of Derrida’s thought emerges. Yet compare this with what Michael Ryan wrote in Marxism and Deconstruction in 1982:

rather than to anarchism as some might contend, this critique leads, I shall argue, to a radical socialism that is more akin to the participatory and egalitarian models of self-government and self-management proposed by democratic socialists, socialist feminists, and autonomists than to the hierarchical and party elitist, central-state, leninist [sic] variety that exists in the East. [4]

Whilst displaying the same, equally lamentable degree of ignorance of the history behind anarchism that the previous two quotations showed, Ryan rejects the term itself and then goes on to provide a definition that would do credit to the most ardent partisan of Bakunin. Indeed it would not be out of place here to recall that the historic schism between anarchism and Marxism has been more a question of means rather than ends. Anarchism has long been heavily indebted to the rather more thoroughgoing economic critique that Marxism offered. For example, the ‘aims and principles’ of the Anarchist Communist Federation (now the Anarchist Federation) contain the quintessentially Marxist statements (if one allows the collapsing of the distinction between the owners of the means of production and the ‘ruling class’) that ‘capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class’ and that ‘it is not possible to abolish Capitalism [sic] without a revolution, which will arise out of class conflict’. [5] At the same time, anarchism has rejected Marxism’s exclusively economic determinism and the capture of state power as the means proposed to achieve social change. [6] So Ryan offers an anarchism, but by any other name. The same observation could be made of Lyotard, whenever he articulates ‘the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the “moves” playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation’. [7] Although Lyotard does not use the term ‘anarchism’, his principle is of a piece with anarchist thought. Indeed eleven years before The Postmodern Condition appeared in English, Colin Ward wrote that ‘the anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency’. [8]
So my aim in this chapter is, to paraphrase Derrida, to articulate a certain spirit of anarchism, and to demonstrate how, in the light of the observations made in chapter two, it might be considered as a politics that is consistent with the concerns of deconstruction. Yet is there any more to this than establishing an exhaustive list of the concordances of words such as ‘local’ and hoping for the best? There are indeed major obstacles in the way of any reconciliation between anarchism and deconstruction, and it is to these that I first turn my attention. Following on from this, I hope to be able to show a concordance of interests – rather than mere vocabulary – between the two discourses.
4.1 THAT REAL THERE!
As might be expected, given its (largely) nineteenth century efflorescence, the first and most profound point of conflict between anarchism and deconstruction is the small matter of the ontological. As George Crowder points out, ‘the anarchists are heirs to the mainstream of advanced eighteenth-century opinion when they look for moral guidance to modern empirical science’. [9] This unproblematic relation to the ontological included, in Todd May’s words, two assumptions: ‘first, that human beings have a nature or essence; and, second, that that essence is good or benign, in the sense that it possess the characteristics that enable one to live justly with others in society’. [10] Yet although there is undoubtedly an acceptance of human essentiality in early anarchist thought, Alan Ritter warns against the caricature of anarchists as ‘naïve believers in benevolence’. [11] The general sense is more of a human nature that has been deformed by the strictures of state and authority, but which, once liberated from these ‘unnatural’ shackles, would tend towards goodness and sociability. This would be a human nature that followed Godwin’s ‘doctrine of perfectibility’, but without ever being able to ‘lay claim to absolute perfection’ – not absolute transcendence of perfection but rather the perpetual play of conflicting forces and desires. [12] Tied closely to this is a belief in the inherent rationality of humans, with the possibility that most conflicts will be resolvable or avoidable given sufficient discussion. Hence Harold Barclay suggests that ‘anarchy appears most successful in situations where participants live in small face-to-face
homogeneous groups’, and considers that cities offer a challenge to anarchism to which few theorists have risen. [13] Against this I would argue that early anarchist writers show demonstrable awareness of the multi-directional nature of human desire, prompting Colin Ward’s elaboration of the notion of ‘harmony through complexity’. [14] Proudhon, for example, wrote that ‘the world, society, and man are made up of insoluble problems, contrary principles, and conflicting forces. Organism means complication, and multiplicity means contradiction, opposition, independence’. [15] Moreover Kropotkin contends that:

harmony would […] result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the State. [16]

Indeed Kropotkin even goes so far as to suggest that anarchism ‘comprises in its midst an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies: it excludes none. It even calls for struggles and contentions’. [17] Therefore the reliance on a concept of human essence can be seen in no way to restrict the illimitable heterogeneity of existence. Nevertheless the whole discussion has had, as Todd May labels them, ‘a priori assumptions’ which from a deconstructive point of view readily equate to an ontological guarantee. [18] How might a deconstructive anarchism attend to this? Is it merely another example of what Derrida called ‘[welding] the political to the ontological’?
Clearly the anarchist conceptions of human nature are a recourse to the hors texte, offering a transcendental signified that would ‘place a reassuring end’ (OG, p.49) to the movement of differance. Hence, from a Derridean position, this sense of human nature would not withstand the critique of the ontological as sketched out in chapter two above. Yet in following the sequence of my double reading of the ontological in that chapter, knowledge of the ontological (‘experience’ etc.) can be considered textual, but what is prior to that, or what remains after or beyond that knowledge (i.e. the undeconstructible, the Lacanian Real, the future) is what gives us the sense of what is irreducible about an individual – their individuality. What I propose, then, is that the concept of what is irreducible about the self, the absolute irreplaceability as conferred by death (and expressed in The Gift of Death) be substituted for anarchism’s recourse to the ontological – an essence, as it were, without essentiality. Instead of the anarchist focus on life, and what it might signify, Derrida’s prescription that ‘everyone must assume his own death’ becomes the new starting point, but with the same ends – ‘therein resides freedom and responsibility’ (GoD, p.44).

4.2 TOMORROW TODAY

So the recognition of the unknowability of ‘life’ (crudely signified here by death) takes the place of the illusion of an ontological guarantee. Despite this foundational change of non-foundations, though, the horizon still opens out onto the relation to the other. So when, as cited above in chapter two, Derrida writes that deconstruction may ‘lead to a reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology’ (FoL, p.19), the move is away from the microscopic attention to the individual and towards the macroscopic problem of this ‘apparatus of boundaries’, the inherited tradition of Western metaphysics. The difficulty here is how to write of a macroscopic level without engaging in a reduction and a homogenising of the microscopic. Critchley identifies this concern in Levinas, the idea that ‘a panoramic vision, not only that of the philosopher but also that of the political theorist, is the greatest danger, because it loses sight of ethical difference – that is, of my particular relation to and obligations towards the Other’ (ED, p.222). The ‘ethics’ of deconstruction, then, oblige a reconsideration of the possibility of macroscopic vision. Yet I would argue that the state of the ‘inheritance’ with which one is faced today, in terms of the conditions of life for the vast majority of the earth’s population, equally obliges a retention of an overview. The point where these two impulses might be said to meet is in conceiving of a shift in the significance of the term ‘whole’ – no longer a homogeneous whole, but rather a composite whole, never more than the sum of its constituent parts. Indeed such a sensibility is perceptible in Derrida’s work when he describes the (appalling) state of the world, of which we must never lose sight, as an ‘obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering’ (SoM, p.85).
To return, then, to the ‘whole apparatus of boundaries’ at a cautiously (composite) macroscopic level, the apparatus with the greatest authority to determine, and indeed impose, boundaries is the state and the various derivations thereof. This is not to suggest that the state is the exclusive apparatus engaged in imposing boundaries – for example, the church immediately springs to mind, that perennial evil twin of the state in classical anarchist thought – but it is the one upon which I would like to focus the discussion, in order to draw out the way that anarchist concerns have indeed foreshadowed those of deconstruction. [19]
The question of boundaries is thus simultaneously a question of structure, and the structure that is the state. Honi Fern Haber suggests that ‘the positing of structure cannot be reconciled with the ineliminable element of play, for the requirement of closure demands the repression of play even as play generates the structure.’ [20] I would suggest that Haber’s view is unnecessarily precipitous in that it assumes a singular nature of structure, i.e. it fails to consider the possibility of varying types of structure. Must ‘structure’ in fact be rigid? Is there not the potential to conceive of a flexible structure? Surely the structure that play generates cannot be ‘closed’, and hence closure is but another passing fiction? This question of flexible structure goes to the heart of anarchism and the nature of social organisation.
The flexibility of structure could be judged on two axes, that of time and that of space. In terms, firstly, of time, a structure that seeks to be flexible must clearly seek to avoid projecting itself into the future, or to foreclose on the radical alterity of the to come. A structure without temporal structurality? Proudhon encapsulated this apparent antimony when he wrote that his ‘theory of Progress [sic][…] excludes all absolute notions and all so-called definitive hypotheses; it must, in my opinion, form the solid but nevertheless fluid basis of the future’. [21] So just as Derrida looks to the future and recognises its unknowability, Proudhon looks to the future and finds no grounds for supposing its knowability. Indeed Proudhon’s writing at times seems eerily prescient of the very language of deconstructive thought:

Progress, I repeat, is an affirmation of universal movement, and thus it is the denial of all forms and formulae of immutability, all doctrines of eternity, irremovability and impeccability, etc., applied to any being whatsoever. It denies the permanence of any order, including that of the universe itself, and the changelessness of any subject or object, be it empirical or transcendental. [22]

The desire to respect the absolute unknowability of the future is a common, perhaps determining, theme in anarchist thought. Hence one finds Bakunin affirming the to come, and using it as the only guiding principle as regards social structure: ‘even the most rational and profound science cannot divine the form social life will take in the future. It can determine only the negative conditions, which follow logically from a rigorous critique of existing society’. Bakunin’s ‘rigorous critique’ then goes on to reject positive and determining ‘hereditary individual property’ and affirms the ‘negative position of collective property as a necessary condition of the future social order’. Likewise, Bakunin’s ‘social and economic science’ rejects statism and takes:

the opposite, or negative, position: anarchy, meaning the free and independent organization of all the units and parts of the community and their voluntary federation from below upward, not by the orders of any authority, even an elected one, and not by the dictates of any scientific theory, but as a result of the natural development of all the varied demands put forth by life itself. [23]

Bakunin is not slow to see the reductive instinct at work within traditional thought, and its incommensurability with the heterogeneity of ‘lived experiences’. Although approaching the question from a different perspective than Derrida, Bakunin labels this reduction as ‘metaphysics’: ‘anyone who takes abstract thought as his starting-point will never make it to life, for there is no road leading from metaphysics to life’. [24] A similar rejection of metaphysical idealism is also evident in the work of the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, when he writes that anarchism ‘is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it’. [25] This rejection of metaphysics informed Bakunin’s acrimonious dispute with Marx, and although he refrains from ‘insulting’ him with the suggestion that Marx believed himself ‘to have scientifically invented something which approaches absolute truth’, Bakunin goes on to maintain that:

from the moment that the absolute does not exist, there cannot be any infallible dogma for the International, nor consequently any official political and economic theory, and our Congress must never claim the rôle of General Church Councils, proclaiming obligatory principles for all adherents and believers. [26]

Moreover, the anarchist reaction against early Marxist ‘metaphysics’ signifies a rejection of temporal determination in both directions. Just as there is a refusal to determine the future from the present, Alexander Berkman argues that there is a refusal to concede that the present is determined by the past: ‘history is the story of what has happened. It can teach a lesson but not impose a task’. [27] In short, though, the radical alterity of the Derridean undeconstructible, the future, provides one of the main springboards for the anarchist rejection of systems of thought (metaphysics) and of structure (statism) that would putatively reduce this. Indeed I would contend that anarchism’s treatment of the future fundamentally coincides with Derrida’s notion of the future disrupting the present, with the future ‘[dislocating] the self-presence of the living present and [installing] thereby the relation to the other’ (SoM, p.154). As Proudhon pithily suggests, ‘the fecundity of the unexpected far outstrips any foresight on the part of the statesman’. [28]

4.3 STRUCTURING TODAY

This ‘apparatus of boundaries’ can be seen, in the first instance, as an apparatus that tries to put a boundary around the future and thus legislate for it. Yet if this is rejected, as suggested above, then what form might be expected to supplant this inherited structure that seeks to ‘future-proof’ itself against alterity? If the state form can be considered as the rigid spatial and temporal structure that for Haber represses play, what might be a non-rigid spatial alternative? These concerns return the discussion to the point raised in the previous chapter regarding the ‘decision of the decision’. In the traditional sense, any ‘decision’ in ‘politics’ is of necessity going to encroach upon the future and attempt to rigidify its own decision making structure. Hence the ‘decision of the decision’ is, in the anarchist context, this clear responsibility to refuse to pre-empt the future. The ramifications of this is that the future of the past, i.e. the present that we are living at the moment, will not have been predetermined by that past, while likewise, the future’s past, our present, will also refuse to predetermine what is to come. The only structure that can be generated out of this is an absence, in the traditional sense, of any ‘structure’. Yet this astructurality should not be confused with structurelessness. This has been a concern for anarchism from its earliest days: more recently, in an essay written as a challenge to the 1970’s ‘women’s movement’ (as she calls it), Jo Freeman inveighed against the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’, arguing that ‘there is no such thing as a “structureless” group’. [29] Hence one of the concepts around which anarchism has historically sought to elaborate its own sense of structurality without ‘structure’ is that of spontaneity. Bakunin, in rebutting metaphysics and those who ‘have created for themselves an ideal social organisation into which, like new Procrustes, they want to force the life of future generations whatever the cost’, writes (with the relish and stirring language typical of this perennial revolutionist) that the focus on life (which in this reading becomes the focus on the undeconstructible) is:

the method of the anarchist social revolution, which arises spontaneously within the people and destroys everything that opposes the broad flow of popular life so as to create new forms of free social organization out of the very depths of the people’s existence. [30]

Proudhon foresees that a ‘state of total liberty or anarchy’ would be one where ‘society’s laws will operate by themselves through universal spontaneity, and they will not have to be ordered or controlled’. [31] This is what gives the sense to Malatesta’s claim that ‘one must consider anarchy above all as a method’. [32] Again, though, it should be emphasised that this spontaneity should not be mistaken for structurelessness. The north American eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin offers an apposite definition of spontaneity on his 1980 text Toward an Ecological Society: ‘spontaneity’, he writes, ‘does not preclude organization and structure. To the contrary, spontaneity ordinarily yields non-hierarchical forms of organization, forms that are truly organic, self-created, and based on voluntarism’. [33] Thus, for Bookchin:

spontaneity is behaviour, feeling and thought that is free of external constraint, of imposed restriction. It is self-controlled, internally controlled, behaviour, feeling, and thought, not an uncontrolled effluvium of passion and action. From the libertarian communist viewpoint, spontaneity implies a capacity in the individual to impose self-discipline and to formulate sound guidelines for social action. [34]

So spontaneity is the guarantor of flexible structure as regards time, and also provides the link to the flexibility of structure in space. Statism is rejected as an imposition from the top down, something that necessarily curtails spontaneous action and that is incapable of respecting the heterogeneity of the individual. Bakunin writes that:

the State is government from above downwards of an immense number of men, very different from the point of view of the degree of their culture, the nature of the countries or localities that they inhabit, the occupation they follow, the interests and the aspirations directing them. [35]

One of the first articulations of how anarchism might respond to the vertical imposition of state authority came in the form of Proudhon’s federalism. For him, ‘the federal system is the very reverse of hierarchy or centralized administration and government’. [36] The anarchist response, then, can be seen not as a rejection of organisation per se. Derrida writes in similar vein that ‘to break with the “party form” or with some form of the State or the International does not mean to give up every form of practical or effective organisation. It is exactly the contrary that matters to us here’ (SoM, p.89, my emphasis). So, in taking up Proudhon’s notion of federalism, Kropotkin argues that the task in hand is to ‘shatter the State and rebuild a new organisation from the very foundations of society – the liberated village commune, federalism, groupings from simple to complex, free working association’. [37] Bakunin makes explicit the link between spontaneity and federalism when he writes that:

liberty must establish itself in the world by the spontaneous organisation of labour and of collective ownership by productive associations freely organised and federalised in districts, and by the equally spontaneous federation of districts, but not by the supreme and tutelary action of the State. [38]

Hence anarchist organisation can be seen not to reject verticality, but to place it as a corollary derived from the horizontal relationship between individuals – ‘from single to complex’ in Kropotkin’s words. What is more, the vertical can only be from the bottom upwards, given the primacy of the horizontal. This, argues, Kropotkin, is what gives anarchy its ‘plasticity of organisation’. [39]
This theory of organisation also informs the central concerns of anarcho-syndicalism. Rudolf Rocker acknowledges the debt to Proudhon in his 1938 text Anarcho-Syndicalism, going on to elaborate a plan of workplace organisation centred on trade unions – from local unions with ‘the entire right of self-determination’ to ‘labour cartels’ to a ‘National Federation of Labour Cartels’. [40] Writing about the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union the CNT, Abraham Guillen highlights its policy of starting ‘from the individual and [proceeding] to the collective, so guaranteeing the individual’s inviolable right to freedom’. [41] In keeping, though, with anarchism’s general rejection of determinism by the economic, Martyn Everett, in his introduction to Rocker’s text, comments that ‘anarcho-syndicalism is not about seizing control of capitalist industry, and managing it better […] but rather [it is] a programme for the destruction of capitalism and the regeneration of human community based on the concept of social self-management’. [42] For Alexander Berkman, such a workplace committee, ‘being on the spot and constantly under the direction and supervision of the workers, wields no power’ and consequently can be changed ‘according to the need of the moment’. [43]
Anarcho-syndicalism’s focus on industrialism, though, along with more traditional left-wing thought, has given rise to a critique of its ‘workerism’. This critique has identified industrialisation as an a priori, where the revolution is thought of as taking place on the factory floor, without actually questioning the nature of, or need for, the factory itself. Such a critique can be seen to derive from a fusion of the ideas of the Situationists with the concerns of the radical ecology movement. The latter-day north American post-situationist Bob Black, for example, in a recent self-published pamphlet, has stretched this critique to the point where he claims that ‘no one should ever work’. He argues for a reconceptualisation of human activity which would mean that whatever productive activity was necessary would be performed without constraint, and hence become ‘play’: ‘what might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced’. His choice of ‘play’ as the new concept obviously resonates with Derridean terminology, yet his critique of the teleology of results imposed by the factory regime begins to resemble deconstruction’s relation to the future, especially given his linking of play with the gift: ‘playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioural and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results’. [44] Michael Ryan echoes this sentiment when he argues that ‘play, with its logic of contingent connection, can replace work, which is shaped by the rhetoric of capitalist efficiency that subordinates needs and desires to the rules of symbolic and material accumulation’. [45]

4.4 MOMENTARY NEEDS

Any discussion of anarchism, though, would surely be incomplete without conjuring the spectre of a black-caped assassin, fleeting across the page, fizzling cherry bomb in hand. Derrida’s undeconstructible may be read as the motivation for anarchism’s rejection of state authority, it may even provide the inspiration for the anarchist refusal to decide, the ‘decision of the decision’, and hence the resultant astructurality of spontaneity. But what of the route to this utopia of ‘harmony through complexity’? How can deconstruction invite the spectral assassin onstage, find a place amongst the shattered glass of burger bar windows, or even find its feet amidst scuffles with Orwellian riot police? What of the violent revolution that the Daily Mail would maintain is indissociable from anarchism?
However much it might go against the grain of the tabloid stereotype, revolution and violence do not sit enshrined upon the altar of anarchist thought. Undoubtedly there are currents of thought within anarchism that embrace and perhaps revel in violence – the Anarchist Communist Federation’s principles go on to state that ‘because the ruling class will not relinquish power without the use of armed force, this revolution will be a time of violence as well as liberation’, while the Class War newspaper, in a parody of The Sun, regularly featured a ‘hospitalised copper’ on its page three. [46] Yet the sense of revolution is not unqualifiedly bloody in anarchism. Indeed whenever Kropotkin wonders ‘how many fiery innovators are mere copyists of bygone revolutions’, there begins to emerge a concept of revolution that is, in keeping with Derrida’s observations cited in the previous chapter, not instantly recognisable. [47] Revolution, in the sense of rupture that Negri used, is disavowed by Proudhon in a passage that again seems uncannily prescient of deconstruction’s disavowal of any attempt to transcend a binary, but rather to unsettle the historical primacy of one pole over the other:

since the two principles, Authority and Liberty, which underlie all forms of organized society, are on the one hand contrary to each other, in a perpetual state of conflict, and on the other can neither eliminate each other nor be resolved, some kind of compromise between the two is necessary. [48]

This notion of the perpetual play between two poles informs Proudhon’s rejection of the Hegelian synthesis. If synthesis is read as plenitude, then Proudhon’s reaction to it is entirely at one with Derridean thought regarding full presence: ‘the two terms of the antimony do not become resolved […] for this would be death’. The task, for Proudhon, is ‘to establish an equilibrium between them – an unstable equilibrium that changes as society develops’. [49] This can be said to be of a piece with Godwin’s concept of perfectibility without ever reaching perfection – as Proudhon writes, ‘we are not moving toward an ideal perfection or final state that we can attain in a single moment, when at death we cross its boundary’. [50]
The place of revolution, then, becomes significantly altered in the light of the anarchist disavowal of some great leap forward. As Alexander Berkman neatly summarises it:

in modern times revolution does not mean barricades any more. These belong to the past. The social revolution is a far different and more essential matter: it involves the reorganization of the entire life of society. You will agree that this is certainly not to be accomplished by mere fighting. [51]

Hence one can understand Proudhon’s denial of involvement in the February Revolution of 1848, claiming in a letter to a friend that what he wanted ‘was slow, measured, rational, philosophical progress’. [52] Indeed, in correspondence with Marx, Proudhon warns against ‘what used to be called a revolution but which is quite simply a jolt’. [53] Bearing all this in mind, it does not seem untenable to argue that, in the same vein as I suggested in the previous chapter, in respect of Derrida’s work, there is a certain current of anarchism that could be considered revolutionary without revolution. Colin Ward offers the epitome of this when he writes that ‘the lutte finale exists only in the words of a song. […] There is no final struggle, only a series of partisan struggles on a variety of fronts’. [54] Farewell the black-caped assassin, then.

4.5 LIVING WITH THE OTHER

Having begun with the anarchist’s positive relation to the ontological, I have tried to show how, in like fashion to deconstruction’s rejection of the hors texte, it still generates an absolute respect for the heterogeneity of ‘life’. The trajectory that this chapter has sought to trace is one of linking Derrida’s undeconstructible to the anarchist refusal to reduce the future to some species of blueprint in the present, along with the rejection of metaphysical idealism; the necessary result that this treatment of time has for the question of structure, Derrida’s ‘apparatus of boundaries’, which is reworked around the concept of spontaneity; and then to the more vexed question of violence and revolution. This trajectory returns the discussion to ‘life’ once again, but now in terms of Derrida’s ‘relation to the other’. This is the point where I feel that anarchism has the most claim to being precisely Readings’ sense of a politics refigured.
The relationship to the other can immediately be seen as central to anarchist theory. Although it can be argued that this relationship is derived from a positive sense of the sovereignty of the self, I would argue that this is simultaneously indivisible from the relationship to the other, and hence what permits an articulation of a deconstructive anarchism. Although Kropotkin adopts a more anthropological approach to rejecting social Darwinism, the relationship to the other could be held to be the motivating principle behind his work Mutual Aid. He argues that despite ‘the mutual-aid tendency [having] so remote an origin’, it is still the mainspring of human (and indeed animal) society:

as soon as we try to ascertain how the millions of human beings live, and begin to study their everyday relations, we are struck with the immense part which the mutual-aid and mutual-support principles play even nowadays in human life. [55]

In Law and Authority, Kropotkin demonstrates how he shares Derrida’s appraisal of the law as an encroachment upon the alterity of the other. Despite the fact that his comments could be primarily read as trying to ground his critique in the myth of origin, I would argue that they are more productively read as similarly positing an ‘undeconstructible’ prior to law:

the hospitality of primitive peoples, respect for human life, the sense of reciprocal obligation, compassion for the weak, courage, extending even to the sacrifice of self for others […] all these qualities are developed in man anterior to all law. [56]

For Malatesta, this becomes the principle of ‘solidarity’ which:

is the harmony of interests and of feelings, the coming together of individuals for the wellbeing of all, and of all for the wellbeing of each […] and results in the freedom of each not being limited by, but complemented - indeed finding the necessary raison d’être in – the freedom of others. [57]

Hence, as Crowder suggests, for anarchism, as opposed to every other political doxa, ‘freedom in this sense need not be restricted on moral grounds, since it already entails obedience to moral rules by definition’. [58] This ‘morality’, this respect for the alterity of the other is simultaneously what would abolish the whole politics of representationality, hence removing the platform from beneath the feet of would-be ‘transformers’ such as Callinicos. Deleuze reflects this sense of morality when he commented that Foucault’s work had taught ‘something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others’. [59]
In his introduction to Statism and Anarchy, Marshall Shatz cites Bakunin’s ‘confession’ to Nicholas I, where Bakunin captured the selflessness, the relation to the other, that is at the heart of most anarchist sentiment:
to look for my happiness in the happiness of others, for my own worth in the worth of all those around me, to be free in the freedom of others – that is my whole faith, the aspiration of my whole life. [60]
This, I would contend, is where anarchism offers the only coherent elaboration of Derrida’s notion of ‘responsibility without limits’ (FoL, p.19). Furthermore, it is for the same reason – the demand of the other - that anarchism precludes any retreat into permanent and solipsistic recalcitrance. Colin Ward cites the German anarchist Gustav Landauer: ‘the state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently’. [61] Derrida wonders, in Specters of Marx, of ‘how to give rise and to give place [donner lieu], still, to render it, this place, to render it habitable, but without killing the future in the name of old frontiers?’ (SoM, p.169). The answer that a certain spirit of anarchism might seek to give is by the dissolution of the ‘political’ to the point where it is coterminous with life, with the ‘social’, where ‘everyday lived experiences’ are an experience of Landauer’s ‘other relationships’, living with the other, living responsibly, the result of which is the guarantee of freedom.

Continued: Conclusion and Bibliography