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Do not expect me to provide you with a system. My system is Progress, that is to say the need to work constantly toward discovering the unknown while the past is being exhausted. (Proudhon, letter of December 1851 [1])

‘Anarchism, well, it’s a lovely idea in theory, really, it is, but c’mon, it is a bit utopian, isn’t it? I mean, if someone pulls a knife on you in the street, you are going to call the police, aren’t you?… aren’t you?’

Any elaboration of anarchism usually draws espousals of sympathy which are nearly always immediately tagged with ‘realist’ reflections on the unbridled utopianism of it all. Yet any ‘political’ programme could be charged with the same accusation: to take but one recent example, a report from the Rowntree Foundation has claimed that 14.5 million people in the U.K. are living in poverty. [2] So much for the utopia of liberal democracy. Derrida neatly draws out the glaring gap between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘practice’ in relation to liberalism’s ‘end of history’, where he shows how Fukuyama’s ideal ‘is at once infinite and finite’ (SoM, p.66) – something that Fukuyama celebrates as already having taken place, while at the same time holding it out as an ideal. Hence the charge of utopianism is not one to be indulgently put up with for long. As a consequence, entreaties for anarchism to substantiate its ‘utopianism’ by providing some sort of ‘blueprint’ for the revolution, or for tomorrow’s bus services, should be seen (in the light of my explication of the significance of the to come) as wholly contradictory, and rejected, just as Proudhon rejects the expectation for him to provide a ‘system’.
Nevertheless, the idea of a society organised without authoritarian structures, without the limiting, enforcing apparatus that is the state, seems a long way from where we are today. Or does it? If anarchy can be considered a method, a set of relationships, a movement towards (some) future, but without Proudhon’s ‘system’; if it can be considered ‘an experience of personal goodness and a movement of intention’ which for Derrida is ‘the condition of responsibility’, then perhaps it is not so far off after all. When Ward asks ‘could the workers run industry? Of course they could. They do already’, the sense is, as with Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, that the running of society is something that we already do. [3] There is, as Ward says, ‘no final struggle’, so the task ahead becomes, in Derridean terms, one of ‘defending’ the future against the encroachment of a domineering present that is the inheritance of an atrocious and bloody past. I hope to have shown that a certain spirit of anarchism has always already corresponded to Derrida’s ‘New International’. Indeed, recent protests, such as the ‘leaderless’ fuel tax blockade in Britain, or the world-wide protests against the WTO, would seem to show that there is a New International, one that is:

without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, ‘out of joint,’ without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of the new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution. (SoM, pp.85-86)

So once more unto the barricades? At the very least, deconstruction does not, in this reading, abolish political action or remove the grounds for a political critique. That it has been heralded as such is a reflection of the limitations of the concept of ‘the political’ that its critics enjoy. To the barricades, but in defence of tomorrow. Life, death, today, tomorrow, differing ports of call on the one circular journey. When Derrida looks death in the face, the words of Proudhon come to mind: ‘the contemplation of the infinite that seemed to be leading us toward quietism is precisely what prevented this from happening’. [4] Not quietism, then, but a permanent vigilance against any foreclosing on the future – ‘open, waiting for the event as justice, this hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality’ (SoM, p.168). So like Beckett’s protagonist, then, it seems – after all – that I’ll go on:

you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. [5]

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