We share below an interview with Daniel Colson for the French magazine, Ballast (02/02/2015). Recently deceased, Colson’s philosophical readings of the anarchist tradition are among the most significant of the post-May 68 generation.
Daniel Colson: “Anarchism is extremely realistic”
You put forward the idea that anarchism is not a way of life or a state of mind, but a true ontology. What do you mean by that?
To speak of ontology is to speak of what is, of things, of facts — domination, for example, hierarchy, exploitation, oppression, sadness (to stick to negative facts — but it is true that there are many). Contrary to what is often believed (including by some libertarians), anarchism is not an ideal or a utopia, “beautiful ideas” whose unworkability we see every day. Anarchism is extremely realistic. It speaks of things as they are: chaos, accidents, life and death, joy, but also pain and suffering, stress, power relations, chance and the necessity of our existence, as well as of the world and universe that are ours. In short, the “anarchy” of what is. Idealism and utopia are not on the side of anarchism, but on the side of order, appearances and so-called realistic forms, whose main realities are those of constraint and domination. Idealism and utopia are on the side of “laws”, “religions”, “states”, and systems (including scientific ones) that claim to bring order and meaning to chaos, to bend it to their particular logic, at the cost of much suffering, denial, violence, and obligation—even though these laws, religions, these states and these systems, fiercely fighting for the hegemony of their lies and pretensions, are themselves the most visible (but also blinding) sign of what they claim to fight and bend to their particular laws.
Can you give us a concrete example?
Yes. For many years, I have been a member of a libertarian bookshop association called La Gryffe. Like all associations – or “collective beings”, as Proudhon would say – La Gryffe has experienced and continues to experience numerous conflicts throughout its long history: a multitude of small, localised conflicts or tensions on a day-to-day basis; but also more or less dramatic general (or overall) conflicts, in the form of periodic crises around the direction and functioning of the bookshop, the appropriation of the “collective force” (Proudhon) that “results” from any cooperation, group or association. These tensions and crises have often led to deep discouragement among Gryffe members and those who observe them from the outside. How so? Even a libertarian project like Gryffe (and I am not talking about libertarian movements as a whole) cannot avoid friction, leaders and struggles for “power”? What would it be like in a broader context? How can we believe in the anarchist project when even the smallest of its manifestations and attempts fail to function smoothly, without stress, without splits, without departures, without impotence and without clashes (sometimes violent, as the history of Spanish anarchism shows)?
There are obviously reasons to be discouraged. But, from a libertarian point of view, these are not the reasons we think they are. These reasons do not stem from the weakness or utopian nature of an ideal system that clashes with the harsh reality of a world where acting like angels often leads to behaving like animals incapable of escaping their instincts, passions, desires and emotional and irrational behaviour. Far from being surprised or discouraged by this reality, anarchists should, on the contrary, not rejoice, but note how the tensions, conflicts, passions, rivalries and violence observed everywhere are precisely the most telling proof of the ontology they defend: the anarchy of what is, which can be observed everywhere without exception, beneath the veneer of religions, states, politeness and appearances, hypocritical and deceitful attempts at order that are constantly being repeated — while waiting for a new crisis, a new explosion or demonstration of the anarchic and uncontrollable nature of reality. The discouragement of libertarians does not therefore lie in the diagnosis of this anarchic reality, which they affirm elsewhere. Rather, it lies in the difficulty of shaking off the weight of idealistic representations, in the way many anarchists transform the realism of their project into abstract and ideological principles comparable to all other ideologies, whether religious, moral or state-based — and that, like new Sisyphuses, they strive in vain, amid cries and fury, to apply them to reality, with all the more difficulty or impotence because this anarchist project, transformed into a programme and an ideal, does not even have the authoritarian and hierarchical principles and institutions (churches, divine laws, conformism, etc.) that could, as for all others, give it the appearance of reality.
Philosophy occupies a central place in your thinking. And you readily refer to Nietzsche (an “emancipatory” Nietzsche, as you yourself write in Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste[Three Essays on Anarchist Philosophy]), whose hostility towards socialists and anarchists is well known. What do you draw from him? How can he nourish libertarian thought and action?
It would take too long to explain in detail how Nietzsche contributes to thinking about and giving substance to the libertarian project, but we can say a few words about how his thought (and his life) fits into a much broader set of authors and events: Proudhon, Deleuze, Spinoza, Foucault, for example (as far as authors are concerned), but also people who seem very distant from anarchism — such as Gabriel Tarde or Leibniz, for example. Anarchism is not in Nietzsche, but it is Nietzsche, or an important part of Nietzsche, that is in anarchism, in a project, a movement and a way of thinking that took shape (and meaning) in the mid-19th century, drawing with them a large number of people and, above all, practices and “facts” from the present and past that until then (and still, from other points of view) had a completely different meaning or no meaning at all: Spartacus, the peasant revolts of Chinese Taoism, the Sophists and the pre-Socratics, certain aspects of religious mysticism, art, but also the very difficult living conditions of the working classes under industrial capitalism, the guilds, the working-class poets, the monadology of Leibniz and Gabriel Tarde, etc.
The starting point for anarchism’s worldview does not lie in philosophy or in the minds of a few thinkers such as Proudhon or Bakunin. Bakunin “became” an “anarchist” late in life, through contact with others, under the influence of events, and through his sensitive and concrete encounter with the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura, for example. Proudhon’s thinking, initially strongly influenced by his early professional experience (in printing), was mainly shaped by the events of 1848, which profoundly transformed, if not who he was, then at least what he thought and continued to think. For my part (much more modest, of course), I did not start with philosophy, but with events (those of May 1968, this time) that changed my life, as well as long and detailed historical research on the labour movement. I had become an anarchist from within, in the heat of the events of May 1968, but it was through contact with labour history that I suddenly understood the breadth and depth of the libertarian project, its way of holding on to things and to the most immediate and material life, and the breadth and radicalism of the revolution it implies. The miracle (or the good encounter, as Spinoza would say) is that after spending several years in dusty archives and publishing a very historical book, everything I had done came into line with philosophy, or at least with certain philosophers — Deleuze and Proudhon, mainly.
In the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy, one could say that anarchism constitutes a horizon of thought or, more broadly, a “plane of consistency”, as Deleuze would say. Something “takes hold” and begins to associate and proliferate from a large number of more or less heterogeneous entities — practices, theories, techniques, expressions, temperaments, personalities, ways of being, concepts, gestures, ideas, aesthetics, etc. Proudhon proposes a special concept for thinking about this “taking hold” between different facts and forces: that of “homology”, which Spinoza also uses when he explains (roughly) that there are more similarities between a plough horse and an ox than between a plough horse and a racehorse. This is how realities as different as the history of the labour movement, as I understood it, became associated (for me) with Deleuze and Guattari‘s Anti-Oedipus, but also with a whole dimension of Nietzsche’s thought and life, and, with him, a whole world of brothers, sisters and cousins (sometimes very distant): Spinoza, Leibniz, Simondon, Tarde and many others. This is how we can understand Proudhon’s concept of positive anarchy, a “taking form” in body and meaning, not in the sense that concrete “takes” form or solidifies, for example (in the manner of the religious fascism of Islamic fundamentalism), but in the sense of a jazz improvisation, a mode of association between radically different and singular entities that recompose the world without ever ceasing to be different, to possess a reality, a mode of being and a point of view that are radically irreducible to any other: “Bundles of autonomies” (Proudhon), “free associations of free forces” (Bakunin), the “free union […] of individuals” (Stirner and Landauer), modes of association that imply the absolute autonomy of the associated forces.
You spoke of positive anarchy. Can this Proudhonian notion find an echo in your books, in your insistence on the deleterious nature of resentment and negativity, which are too often present in protest movements? How can we fight without hatred, ultimately?
I had not thought about the meaning you give to the word “positive” in “positive anarchy”. It seemed to me that Proudhon used it mainly to distinguish between a kind of primary anarchy, in the traditional and privative sense of “an-archy”, chaos, and a secondary sense, self-organisation within this chaos, the self-organisation of chaos itself, through a whole process of selecting forces, setting them in opposition and balance, etc. But whether linked to Proudhon or not, your question remains entirely valid. Closely associated, at the time of its birth, with the violence of the class struggle in the early days of industrial capitalism, anarchism did not escape the effects of hatred, resentment and revenge that this violence induced. But common to many other movements, this hatred and resentment are not at all what strikes one when studying the history of anarchism, and more particularly of the working-class anarchism that initially served as its cradle and horizon. As indicated by the organisation of the “Knights of Labour”, for example, but also by the content of the speeches of the leaders of the workers’ movements berating their audience and denouncing their attitude of slaves or sheep, working-class anarchism asserts itself as a movement of “masters” — in the sense that Nietzsche gives to this word; the “masters” of the trades where anarchism found many of its activists, the “master” shoemakers of Père Peinard, chasing bosses away with their belts. There is much to be said about the complexity and ambivalence of this attitude of “masters”, both in the professional sphere and within working-class families, through the patriarchal model vigorously defended by Proudhon — where the belt is no longer used only to chase away bosses… This is where we find your second question and what we have seen in the emancipated plans of positive anarchy, as it has historically asserted itself.
How can we associate the revolt, autonomy and “mastery” of workers in factories and on construction sites with the revolt, autonomy, dignity and pride of their female companions in the face of patriarchy and ways of being that have been ingrained in boys for so long? How can we combine all forms of rebellion and autonomy, including and especially when they are contradictory, in relationships where, regardless of our initial identity — woman, man, child, black or white, gay or straight — we are always the slave and master of someone else? I would add one last point so that there is no misunderstanding about the notion of “master”. As I have just pointed out, the defining characteristic of both the anarchist “master” and the Nietzschean “master” is that they have no slaves. Similarly, the anarchist messianism described by Michael Löwy has no messiah, and anarchist monadology implies a radical rejection of God. Regarding this “universal independence” of “masters” in Nietzschean and libertarian thought, there is no need to recall here what Nietzsche and Proudhon think of Hegel and his dialectic of master and slave.
Nietzsche’s and anarchism’s “masters” are pure affirmations in revolt and in the inner forces that authorise this revolt, even when it is as desperate as that of the Sonderkommandos of Birkenau or Treblinka. Hence the ambiguity and ambivalence highlighted above: the worker dominating his family and finding in this domination, among other things and not among the best, additional reasons to revolt in the factory against the authority of the “foremen” [“contre-maîtres“], for example. This also gives us a small idea of how libertarian movements unfold, and the tensions and contradictions necessary for these to unfold. From this point of view, we would need to analyse in even greater detail, for example, the late and aborted (due to the civil war) emergence of the Mujeres Libres within the powerful Spanish workers’ anarchism. In Nietzsche, as in anarchism, we find the same idea of an emancipatory affirmation that escapes all negativity (of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, for example); a generous affirmation that claims to carry everything along with it, to recompose everything, as shown by the idea of an insurrectionary general strike and the “separatism” it implies (“the Community through Withdrawal” referred to by Landauer) and found in old-school working-class anarchism, but also in a large number of contemporary movements (read To Our Friends, the latest book by the Invisible Committee!).
You seem to agree with Foucault’s analysis of power. Can you tell us more about it?
For Foucault, “power” is everywhere: an infinite multitude of small powers or small power relations that come together and produce and sustain larger entities (the “resultants” [“résultantes”] of Proudhon, Bakunin, Reclus, etc.): states, churches, religious laws, capital, God, etc. This is where all these mini power relations seem to emanate from, when in fact they are their cause and the support. It is regrettable that Foucault did not take more account of libertarian thinking on how the multitude of power relations crystallise into larger entities. But we may also regret that the libertarian movement has been able, not in its practices, but in the representations of many of its most ideological organisations and activists, to hypostasise the results of relations of domination; hypostasising the State, Capital and Religions as great enemies; and, in a double error, negatively adopting the way in which these great “resultants” or “consequents” believe themselves to be the source and origin of the relationships of association and power from which they result and without which they are nothing.
Anarchism did not arise from a prior, negative theory of the state that should be destroyed. Much more concretely, anarchism arose from the practice and immediate, minute interactions of the First International, in the way Lorenzo and Robin perceived Marx’s relationships with his disciples, for example. And it was all these small interactions that, as they accumulated and came together, gave meaning to a more general critique of the State, Capital, Religion, Politics and Parties. Significantly, the nascent libertarian movement did not initially define itself as anarchist, but as “anti-authoritarian”. Anarchism was born out of anti-authoritarian practices and perceptions (the militant and combative side of the word “libertarian”), and it is these practices and perceptions that have continued to give meaning and substance to anarchism, both working-class anarchism and contemporary anarchism in its most vibrant, least ideological forms.
But the good fortune of anarchism is that, as a practical movement born of practice, it immediately had, mainly with Bakunin and Proudhon, a theory that corresponded to these practices. A theory of “collective force” as composed of other collective forces and producing “results” that always risk turning against the forces that produced them. A reversal that plays out in the nature of the relationships within the component forces, which are themselves results. I know it’s complicated, especially for minds marked by representations of the dominant order, but it seems to me that anarchists with guts (that second “brain”) or the anarchist drive should make the effort to actually read Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin and many others… Proudhon provides a wealth of extremely rich and illuminating concepts on the nature of power relations: “forces”, “collective forces”, “resultants”, “components” and “compositions”, “absolutes”, “monads”, etc. The great originality of Proudhonian-inspired anarchist theory can be summarised in three points: 1) to give a concrete account of all the powers that crush and dominate us, in the economic sphere (theory of value), the political sphere (the birth and basis of the state), and the ideological and symbolic sphere (the Church, God); 2) to give meaning to the most immediate and minute struggles and interactions as “focal points”, homologous to the blinding visibility of the great dominations, where the war between domination and emancipation is being waged everywhere; 3) to explicitly inscribe these immediate and global issues in what Proudhon calls “a new ontology” that forms the basis of the theoretical, practical and revolutionary power of anarchism.
We would like to ask for your reaction to a statement by Daniel Bensaïd in Éloge de la politique profane[In Praise of Secular Politics]: “Such is the fundamental paradox of anarchism: the rejection of all authority logically extends to the rejection of democratic majority rule in society as well as in social movements. Such a rejection can only lead to a form of substitution even more radical than that sometimes attributed to the notion of the vanguard party: each person draws their own rules from themselves, at the risk of believing themselves to be invested with a mission and touched by grace. The abolition of all principles of representation thus reduces social relations to a game of capricious desires.”
It is a rather surprising text in which Bensaïd seems to discover — in the narrow field of politics — the originality of the anarchist project and ontology, but without grasping the reasons for it, based on a radical misunderstanding or, more precisely, a complete lack of affinity and homology between the libertarian project and what constitutes him (as an activist and at the time of writing). Locked into the modes of representation and the hegemonic but very particular philosophy of the present order, Bensaïd does not perceive the way in which the libertarian project overflows and criticises the exorbitant pretensions of politics, in that it embraces the totality of human realities and, through them, the totality of what is. The anarchist rejection of “democratic majority rule in society as well as in social movements” is neither a “paradox” nor a “logical extension” of the rejection of all authority, but on the contrary one of its multiple sources and “foci of autonomy” — historically, and in the field of social relations and decision-making.
But Bensaïd is right: the enemy of anarchism is indeed “representation”, the way in which symbolic entities (parties, churches, states, but also grammar, language and logic) substitute themselves for the beings they “represent”, appropriating their strengths and realities. The naive and dishonest paradox of Bensaïd (but also of all possible forms of domination) is not only to take “representation” for reality, but, contrary to all logic, to accuse direct action and the effectively radical and immanent autonomy of the collective forces of the “real world” (Bakunin) of being a “substitution”. But a “substitution” for what? Bensaïd does not tell us and cannot tell us. Indeed, it cannot be a substitution for oneself, which would be idiotic. It is indeed a substitution for something else, but something just as difficult to recognise, something mysterious and transcendent, the symbolic reality of symbolic representations: the “party line”, for example, with its obedience and self-criticism, the meaning of history of which we are more or less conscious agents and which the “scholars” explain to us, states of all kinds (which transcend and justify sacrifices, devotion and bloodshed), but also and above all the “divine phantom” of which Bakunin speaks, for which people kill and are killed, God, that keystone or imaginary foundation (but with unfortunately very real effects) of all domination.
Since we are talking about a communist thinker, what do you think of the work of Guérin or Fontenis, for example, which aims to merge the best of Marxist and anarchist traditions in order to overcome their respective shortcomings?
Guérin and Fontenis acted and thought after the collapse of the great libertarian movements of working-class anarchism and before the resurgence of libertarian movements at the end of the 20th century. The appeal to Marxism is linked to this period and is part of the debates initiated by the so-called “Platform” of Archinov in the aftermath of the failure of the Russian Revolution. The libertarian thought and project that had existed before the provisional hegemony of state communism seemed to have failed and lost all credibility: in the aftermath of the Second World War, there were no longer any practical movements that could have given substance and meaning to this thought and project. The most dynamic libertarians had no other effective prospects than to act solely in the political and ideological arena, through small groups and mini-parties — which is what remains when everything else has been lost. Marxism had become “unsurpassable”, as Sartre said, and all that remained, in the political arena alone, was to offer a variant of the programme and implementation of socialism, after the seizure of power, based on the state: a libertarian state, in a manner of speaking. This is why activists such as Guérin were able to try to become the inspirers and advisers of Tito‘s Yugoslavia or the Algerian state. Even in Cuba, it seems to me that there were attempts of this kind…
The concept of self-management arose from this top-down attempt, before expressing a completely different dynamic, undeniably libertarian in nature, from the late 1960s onwards. The idea of self-management gave a name and a banner to a libertarian project that was re-emerging everywhere in practice, but without having the time to reclaim a body of thought and texts that had long been forgotten, difficult to access, and devalued by their form and the still very great prestige of Marxism (Althusser, etc.). A race began between the rediscovery of libertarian thought and the victorious return — socially, politically and ideologically — of capitalism. And it is far from certain that anarchism has won this race, even if a growing number of researchers and academics are taking an interest in it (but this is not necessarily a very good sign, especially when one is familiar with the logic and reality of the academic world).
You criticise the “naive and cynical scientism” of Marxism and praise the ethics specific to anarchism. What is it? That the means, as Camus said, are already ends in themselves? That, as Malatesta declared, to whom you dedicated a book, defeat is better than a victory without principles?
It seems to me that we should clarify what we mean by “principles”. In anarchism, it is not a question of abstract ideas and laws, codified and set in stone, on the idealistic and prescriptive model denounced above. It is a question of a determination and a judgment internal to each situation, however minuscule it may be, an immediate, practical, and largely intuitive judgment or evaluation, untimely, like that of the Spanish militiamen deserting the anarchist columns at the moment of their militarisation. Camus is right. For anarchism, there are only “ends” and no “means”; immediate and countless ends: in short, anarchy, an-arkhe, not the absence of first principles, but an excess of first principles, of “absolutes“, as Proudhon said, associated and federated, capable, through selection, confrontation, imitation, internal logic and dynamics, of reproducing and propagating themselves everywhere and in everything. That’s what should have been explained to Bensaïd! And that’s what should be explained in more detail. Anarchism opposes all instrumental and utilitarian, objective and objectifying logic. Bensaïd is right again: anarchism is indeed a radical subjectivism that embraces everything without exception. For anarchism, there is as much “determination” in the “mode of existence” of a wrench, Simondon would say, as in a group of like-minded individuals deciding to rob a bank.
Everything is a singular force resulting from a composition of equally singular forces, themselves composed of other singular forces. In speaking of “desire,” “whim,” and “desiring subjectivities,” Bensaïd is wrong to reduce anarchism to the traps and disguises of liberalism, to the injunction to consume ever more objects or commodities as diverse as a lawnmower, a new smartphone model, or medically assisted reproduction. For anarchism, “desires” are not those of capitalist consumption and its individual artifices, those “units of covetousness” of which Gilles Châtelet speaks, “pathetic billiard balls” “that every effort to differentiate themselves only further mires in a grand equivalence.” For anarchism, desires are singular material forces that implicate and mobilise, each time, the totality of what exists from a certain point of view, according to a certain arrangement, in a way that is either oppressive or emancipatory. “Desires,” “forces,” “will to power” (but also “conatus”, “entelechies” and many other notions) are all concepts that affirm, each in its own way, the same reality: the material reality of what is. Indeed, to the scientism of Marxism (the “objective situations” decreed and imposed by the Party), anarchism opposes not a morality, moral principles, but an “ethics,” in the sense that Spinoza gives to this word. An ethics that is first and foremost an ethology, a logic of behaviours and affects, a practical sense, grounded in things, events, and situations.
An old quarrel agitates the emancipation movement, broadly speaking: the individual versus the collective—anarchists often being accused of despising the latter and communists of sacrificing the former. How do you resolve this tension?
Historically, anarchism long suffered from a very particular “individualist” current, which (fortunately) has now almost completely disappeared—having become unnecessary insofar as capitalism itself imposed on everyone the “individualisation” of “tastes and preferences” that “anarchist” individualism opposed to both new and old communities (churches, labour unions, trades, nations, families, affinity groups, etc.). This anarchist individualism (which has always been marginal and which can still be found here and there, in the areas of food, procreation, or sexuality, for example) suffers from two prohibitive characteristics, for us now, but also in the past, within the vast deployments of working-class anarchism. We have just seen the first: the inscription of anarchist individualism in the representations and practices or “desires” of capitalist liberalism in the process of imposing its hegemony. The second characteristic stems from this and goes beyond individualism alone—no longer just the representations and practices of capitalist economic and political liberalism and individualism, but the whole set of “modern” representations that have accompanied their hegemony: the dualism of body and mind, of freedom and determinism, of science and “superstitions,” etc.; but also and primarily the exorbitant belief in the primary and self-founding existence of a transcendental “subject”, master of its choices and decisions; an extremely powerful belief and postulate, in practical life (education, employment, law…) as well as in the field of philosophy, from Descartes to Sartre, via Kant, Husserl and many others.
Historically, the “French style” anarchist individualism, which spread widely within the early and extensive libertarian movements, is closely linked to the development of the state-run, secular, and compulsory school system, tasked with instilling in workers the beliefs and basic knowledge necessary for capitalism. It is linked to the republican school system of the Third Republic—where, in Monatte‘s words, by learning to read, workers had unlearned how to “discern“. A brief aside: these deceitful and totalitarian representations of the “individual” and the “subject,” necessary for capitalist development and hegemony—from the school system for the people to democratic rules and the fossilisation/codification of the (so poorly named) “Enlightenment” ideology—are obviously not unique to the defunct “anarchist individualism” (which, fortunately, was not entirely lacking in eccentrics and innovators). These ideas are also found in the narrow minority of anarchist “communists” (Fontenis was a pure product of the republican school system), where “communism” and “individualism” are ultimately the product of a free choice—no longer of a particular washing machine model, but of a program, a mode of organisation, and rules supposedly chosen freely, viewed through the lens or dashboard of a permanent and universal human “subject”.
For the broad movements that gave substance and meaning to working-class anarchism, as well as for the most vibrant movements of contemporary anarchism, the relationship between the individual and the collective is posed in radically different terms and within a radically different horizon of thought and action. In these movements (past and present), the “personal” assertion, as Proudhon would say, has nothing liberal about it and does not refer to the modern fiction of an individual or a transcendent subject, existing outside of things, situations, and events. The vast majority of revolutionary activists, organically linked to mass movements (primarily trade unionism), can be described as “individualists” or strong “personalities”, but an individualism and a personality that only have meaning and existence within collective movements, within collective “subjectivities” of which they are both the product and a component. Like Pelloutier, the secretary of the Federation of Labor Exchanges [Fédération des bourses du travail], whose famous phrase is endlessly repeated.
There have been many “individualists” like Pelloutier in revolutionary libertarian movements of all kinds—but, apart from the (particularly misleading) name—, they bear little relation to what this word generally encompasses in the representations and injunctions of modernity. One last remark, of a theoretical nature, and with which we could have begun: what the practices of libertarian movements allow us to grasp empirically, massively, in practice, is also affirmed by the most radical and effective libertarian thought, with such clarity that it should dispense with the need for constant justification. For anarchism, there is no difference in kind between the “individual” and the “group.” As Proudhon emphasises, “the individual is a group”, a “composite of powers”, themselves composed of other composite powers, ad infinitum. The “individual is a group” and every “group is an individual”, an “individuation”, a “being”, a “subjectivity”, an “absolute” each time singular and astonishing, whose sources and effects, good as well as bad, can only be grasped by a long collective experience, under the dual relationship of domination and emancipation.
You question the relevance of the notions of right and left, seeing them as an “illusion” used to deceive citizens and voters. Do you think that, as Castoriadis suggested, we must move beyond this divide, which he considered ineffective, to understand our era? But some will tell you that this “neither right nor left” is a slogan of the National Front…
The right/left distinction, like “neither right nor left”, is a political and politicians construct; even if, historically, it draws upon and operates from an old, imaginary foundation that extends beyond purely political mechanisms. Anarchism rejects politics as a deadly trap for a revolutionary project that embraces the totality of what exists, that starts from this totality, from all its components. To the “political revolution” (a new state, new leaders, a new constitution), anarchism very early on opposed an economic and social revolution (“the Social Revolution”) that was radically different from the simple, old-fashioned political revolution—a revolution that began with everything, a long-term revolution that involved everything equally, the “universal independence”, the “independence of the world” of the old 19th-century workers’ songs. Thus, in the emancipatory logic of the trade union type, the “revolutionaries” never asked their many comrades in arms whether they were socialists, right-wing, Christian, or Buddhist. The dynamic and logic of emancipation, in the field of work in this instance, but also in every other field (patriarchy, prostitution and sexuality, artistic creation, etc.), were entirely self-sufficient, without ever requiring the ideological commitments specific to parties, churches, and “sects” (which the Charter of Amiens rejected).
We have recently seen in Spain some anarchists displaying extreme hostility and virulence towards a movement like Podemos, and in particular towards its spokesperson Pablo Iglesias: isn’t there a kind of purism and sectarianism within the anarchist movement that condemns it to a sectarian, minority position, speaking far removed from “the masses,” to use a term you don’t much like?
I don’t know the nature of the anarchist criticisms of Podemos and, from experience, I’m somewhat wary of them, but what we discussed earlier helps to understand this criticism. From an anarchist perspective, Podemos presents two closely linked and equally unacceptable characteristics: 1) a political solution, winning elections, seizing state power; 2) to base its action and this (public) victory on numbers, on a “multitude” of individual voters and citizens, no less pathetic than the “billiard-ball consumers” denounced by Gilles Châtelet, expressing themselves only through scarves or hats of the same colour, candles, and torchlight processions; while awaiting the eventual and large-scale “mass” choreographies that sometimes follow and codify the initial mobilisation of the “multitudes.” On the other, libertarian path of the major mobilisations of the last ten years, I would like to refer you to an article published in the journal Réfractions: “Les brèches de l’histoire” (no. 28, Spring 2012).
One question, perhaps the most difficult, to conclude: if you had to give a single, brief definition of anarchism?
It is Deleuze (and Guattari) who, in a seemingly enigmatic way, provides the best definition: Anarchy, “a strange unity that can only be expressed in terms of multiplicity”. I hope that the preceding remarks help to clarify this definition.
Daniel Colson: Reflections on anarchism
We share below an interview with Daniel Colson for the French magazine, Ballast (02/02/2015). Recently deceased, Colson’s philosophical readings of the anarchist tradition are among the most significant of the post-May 68 generation.
Daniel Colson: “Anarchism is extremely realistic”
You put forward the idea that anarchism is not a way of life or a state of mind, but a true ontology. What do you mean by that?
To speak of ontology is to speak of what is, of things, of facts — domination, for example, hierarchy, exploitation, oppression, sadness (to stick to negative facts — but it is true that there are many). Contrary to what is often believed (including by some libertarians), anarchism is not an ideal or a utopia, “beautiful ideas” whose unworkability we see every day. Anarchism is extremely realistic. It speaks of things as they are: chaos, accidents, life and death, joy, but also pain and suffering, stress, power relations, chance and the necessity of our existence, as well as of the world and universe that are ours. In short, the “anarchy” of what is. Idealism and utopia are not on the side of anarchism, but on the side of order, appearances and so-called realistic forms, whose main realities are those of constraint and domination. Idealism and utopia are on the side of “laws”, “religions”, “states”, and systems (including scientific ones) that claim to bring order and meaning to chaos, to bend it to their particular logic, at the cost of much suffering, denial, violence, and obligation—even though these laws, religions, these states and these systems, fiercely fighting for the hegemony of their lies and pretensions, are themselves the most visible (but also blinding) sign of what they claim to fight and bend to their particular laws.
Can you give us a concrete example?
Yes. For many years, I have been a member of a libertarian bookshop association called La Gryffe. Like all associations – or “collective beings”, as Proudhon would say – La Gryffe has experienced and continues to experience numerous conflicts throughout its long history: a multitude of small, localised conflicts or tensions on a day-to-day basis; but also more or less dramatic general (or overall) conflicts, in the form of periodic crises around the direction and functioning of the bookshop, the appropriation of the “collective force” (Proudhon) that “results” from any cooperation, group or association. These tensions and crises have often led to deep discouragement among Gryffe members and those who observe them from the outside. How so? Even a libertarian project like Gryffe (and I am not talking about libertarian movements as a whole) cannot avoid friction, leaders and struggles for “power”? What would it be like in a broader context? How can we believe in the anarchist project when even the smallest of its manifestations and attempts fail to function smoothly, without stress, without splits, without departures, without impotence and without clashes (sometimes violent, as the history of Spanish anarchism shows)?
There are obviously reasons to be discouraged. But, from a libertarian point of view, these are not the reasons we think they are. These reasons do not stem from the weakness or utopian nature of an ideal system that clashes with the harsh reality of a world where acting like angels often leads to behaving like animals incapable of escaping their instincts, passions, desires and emotional and irrational behaviour. Far from being surprised or discouraged by this reality, anarchists should, on the contrary, not rejoice, but note how the tensions, conflicts, passions, rivalries and violence observed everywhere are precisely the most telling proof of the ontology they defend: the anarchy of what is, which can be observed everywhere without exception, beneath the veneer of religions, states, politeness and appearances, hypocritical and deceitful attempts at order that are constantly being repeated — while waiting for a new crisis, a new explosion or demonstration of the anarchic and uncontrollable nature of reality. The discouragement of libertarians does not therefore lie in the diagnosis of this anarchic reality, which they affirm elsewhere. Rather, it lies in the difficulty of shaking off the weight of idealistic representations, in the way many anarchists transform the realism of their project into abstract and ideological principles comparable to all other ideologies, whether religious, moral or state-based — and that, like new Sisyphuses, they strive in vain, amid cries and fury, to apply them to reality, with all the more difficulty or impotence because this anarchist project, transformed into a programme and an ideal, does not even have the authoritarian and hierarchical principles and institutions (churches, divine laws, conformism, etc.) that could, as for all others, give it the appearance of reality.
Philosophy occupies a central place in your thinking. And you readily refer to Nietzsche (an “emancipatory” Nietzsche, as you yourself write in Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste [Three Essays on Anarchist Philosophy]), whose hostility towards socialists and anarchists is well known. What do you draw from him? How can he nourish libertarian thought and action?
It would take too long to explain in detail how Nietzsche contributes to thinking about and giving substance to the libertarian project, but we can say a few words about how his thought (and his life) fits into a much broader set of authors and events: Proudhon, Deleuze, Spinoza, Foucault, for example (as far as authors are concerned), but also people who seem very distant from anarchism — such as Gabriel Tarde or Leibniz, for example. Anarchism is not in Nietzsche, but it is Nietzsche, or an important part of Nietzsche, that is in anarchism, in a project, a movement and a way of thinking that took shape (and meaning) in the mid-19th century, drawing with them a large number of people and, above all, practices and “facts” from the present and past that until then (and still, from other points of view) had a completely different meaning or no meaning at all: Spartacus, the peasant revolts of Chinese Taoism, the Sophists and the pre-Socratics, certain aspects of religious mysticism, art, but also the very difficult living conditions of the working classes under industrial capitalism, the guilds, the working-class poets, the monadology of Leibniz and Gabriel Tarde, etc.
The starting point for anarchism’s worldview does not lie in philosophy or in the minds of a few thinkers such as Proudhon or Bakunin. Bakunin “became” an “anarchist” late in life, through contact with others, under the influence of events, and through his sensitive and concrete encounter with the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura, for example. Proudhon’s thinking, initially strongly influenced by his early professional experience (in printing), was mainly shaped by the events of 1848, which profoundly transformed, if not who he was, then at least what he thought and continued to think. For my part (much more modest, of course), I did not start with philosophy, but with events (those of May 1968, this time) that changed my life, as well as long and detailed historical research on the labour movement. I had become an anarchist from within, in the heat of the events of May 1968, but it was through contact with labour history that I suddenly understood the breadth and depth of the libertarian project, its way of holding on to things and to the most immediate and material life, and the breadth and radicalism of the revolution it implies. The miracle (or the good encounter, as Spinoza would say) is that after spending several years in dusty archives and publishing a very historical book, everything I had done came into line with philosophy, or at least with certain philosophers — Deleuze and Proudhon, mainly.
In the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy, one could say that anarchism constitutes a horizon of thought or, more broadly, a “plane of consistency”, as Deleuze would say. Something “takes hold” and begins to associate and proliferate from a large number of more or less heterogeneous entities — practices, theories, techniques, expressions, temperaments, personalities, ways of being, concepts, gestures, ideas, aesthetics, etc. Proudhon proposes a special concept for thinking about this “taking hold” between different facts and forces: that of “homology”, which Spinoza also uses when he explains (roughly) that there are more similarities between a plough horse and an ox than between a plough horse and a racehorse. This is how realities as different as the history of the labour movement, as I understood it, became associated (for me) with Deleuze and Guattari‘s Anti-Oedipus, but also with a whole dimension of Nietzsche’s thought and life, and, with him, a whole world of brothers, sisters and cousins (sometimes very distant): Spinoza, Leibniz, Simondon, Tarde and many others. This is how we can understand Proudhon’s concept of positive anarchy, a “taking form” in body and meaning, not in the sense that concrete “takes” form or solidifies, for example (in the manner of the religious fascism of Islamic fundamentalism), but in the sense of a jazz improvisation, a mode of association between radically different and singular entities that recompose the world without ever ceasing to be different, to possess a reality, a mode of being and a point of view that are radically irreducible to any other: “Bundles of autonomies” (Proudhon), “free associations of free forces” (Bakunin), the “free union […] of individuals” (Stirner and Landauer), modes of association that imply the absolute autonomy of the associated forces.
You spoke of positive anarchy. Can this Proudhonian notion find an echo in your books, in your insistence on the deleterious nature of resentment and negativity, which are too often present in protest movements? How can we fight without hatred, ultimately?
I had not thought about the meaning you give to the word “positive” in “positive anarchy”. It seemed to me that Proudhon used it mainly to distinguish between a kind of primary anarchy, in the traditional and privative sense of “an-archy”, chaos, and a secondary sense, self-organisation within this chaos, the self-organisation of chaos itself, through a whole process of selecting forces, setting them in opposition and balance, etc. But whether linked to Proudhon or not, your question remains entirely valid. Closely associated, at the time of its birth, with the violence of the class struggle in the early days of industrial capitalism, anarchism did not escape the effects of hatred, resentment and revenge that this violence induced. But common to many other movements, this hatred and resentment are not at all what strikes one when studying the history of anarchism, and more particularly of the working-class anarchism that initially served as its cradle and horizon. As indicated by the organisation of the “Knights of Labour”, for example, but also by the content of the speeches of the leaders of the workers’ movements berating their audience and denouncing their attitude of slaves or sheep, working-class anarchism asserts itself as a movement of “masters” — in the sense that Nietzsche gives to this word; the “masters” of the trades where anarchism found many of its activists, the “master” shoemakers of Père Peinard, chasing bosses away with their belts. There is much to be said about the complexity and ambivalence of this attitude of “masters”, both in the professional sphere and within working-class families, through the patriarchal model vigorously defended by Proudhon — where the belt is no longer used only to chase away bosses… This is where we find your second question and what we have seen in the emancipated plans of positive anarchy, as it has historically asserted itself.
How can we associate the revolt, autonomy and “mastery” of workers in factories and on construction sites with the revolt, autonomy, dignity and pride of their female companions in the face of patriarchy and ways of being that have been ingrained in boys for so long? How can we combine all forms of rebellion and autonomy, including and especially when they are contradictory, in relationships where, regardless of our initial identity — woman, man, child, black or white, gay or straight — we are always the slave and master of someone else? I would add one last point so that there is no misunderstanding about the notion of “master”. As I have just pointed out, the defining characteristic of both the anarchist “master” and the Nietzschean “master” is that they have no slaves. Similarly, the anarchist messianism described by Michael Löwy has no messiah, and anarchist monadology implies a radical rejection of God. Regarding this “universal independence” of “masters” in Nietzschean and libertarian thought, there is no need to recall here what Nietzsche and Proudhon think of Hegel and his dialectic of master and slave.
Nietzsche’s and anarchism’s “masters” are pure affirmations in revolt and in the inner forces that authorise this revolt, even when it is as desperate as that of the Sonderkommandos of Birkenau or Treblinka. Hence the ambiguity and ambivalence highlighted above: the worker dominating his family and finding in this domination, among other things and not among the best, additional reasons to revolt in the factory against the authority of the “foremen” [“contre-maîtres“], for example. This also gives us a small idea of how libertarian movements unfold, and the tensions and contradictions necessary for these to unfold. From this point of view, we would need to analyse in even greater detail, for example, the late and aborted (due to the civil war) emergence of the Mujeres Libres within the powerful Spanish workers’ anarchism. In Nietzsche, as in anarchism, we find the same idea of an emancipatory affirmation that escapes all negativity (of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, for example); a generous affirmation that claims to carry everything along with it, to recompose everything, as shown by the idea of an insurrectionary general strike and the “separatism” it implies (“the Community through Withdrawal” referred to by Landauer) and found in old-school working-class anarchism, but also in a large number of contemporary movements (read To Our Friends, the latest book by the Invisible Committee!).
You seem to agree with Foucault’s analysis of power. Can you tell us more about it?
For Foucault, “power” is everywhere: an infinite multitude of small powers or small power relations that come together and produce and sustain larger entities (the “resultants” [“résultantes”] of Proudhon, Bakunin, Reclus, etc.): states, churches, religious laws, capital, God, etc. This is where all these mini power relations seem to emanate from, when in fact they are their cause and the support. It is regrettable that Foucault did not take more account of libertarian thinking on how the multitude of power relations crystallise into larger entities. But we may also regret that the libertarian movement has been able, not in its practices, but in the representations of many of its most ideological organisations and activists, to hypostasise the results of relations of domination; hypostasising the State, Capital and Religions as great enemies; and, in a double error, negatively adopting the way in which these great “resultants” or “consequents” believe themselves to be the source and origin of the relationships of association and power from which they result and without which they are nothing.
Anarchism did not arise from a prior, negative theory of the state that should be destroyed. Much more concretely, anarchism arose from the practice and immediate, minute interactions of the First International, in the way Lorenzo and Robin perceived Marx’s relationships with his disciples, for example. And it was all these small interactions that, as they accumulated and came together, gave meaning to a more general critique of the State, Capital, Religion, Politics and Parties. Significantly, the nascent libertarian movement did not initially define itself as anarchist, but as “anti-authoritarian”. Anarchism was born out of anti-authoritarian practices and perceptions (the militant and combative side of the word “libertarian”), and it is these practices and perceptions that have continued to give meaning and substance to anarchism, both working-class anarchism and contemporary anarchism in its most vibrant, least ideological forms.
But the good fortune of anarchism is that, as a practical movement born of practice, it immediately had, mainly with Bakunin and Proudhon, a theory that corresponded to these practices. A theory of “collective force” as composed of other collective forces and producing “results” that always risk turning against the forces that produced them. A reversal that plays out in the nature of the relationships within the component forces, which are themselves results. I know it’s complicated, especially for minds marked by representations of the dominant order, but it seems to me that anarchists with guts (that second “brain”) or the anarchist drive should make the effort to actually read Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin and many others… Proudhon provides a wealth of extremely rich and illuminating concepts on the nature of power relations: “forces”, “collective forces”, “resultants”, “components” and “compositions”, “absolutes”, “monads”, etc. The great originality of Proudhonian-inspired anarchist theory can be summarised in three points: 1) to give a concrete account of all the powers that crush and dominate us, in the economic sphere (theory of value), the political sphere (the birth and basis of the state), and the ideological and symbolic sphere (the Church, God); 2) to give meaning to the most immediate and minute struggles and interactions as “focal points”, homologous to the blinding visibility of the great dominations, where the war between domination and emancipation is being waged everywhere; 3) to explicitly inscribe these immediate and global issues in what Proudhon calls “a new ontology” that forms the basis of the theoretical, practical and revolutionary power of anarchism.
We would like to ask for your reaction to a statement by Daniel Bensaïd in Éloge de la politique profane[In Praise of Secular Politics]: “Such is the fundamental paradox of anarchism: the rejection of all authority logically extends to the rejection of democratic majority rule in society as well as in social movements. Such a rejection can only lead to a form of substitution even more radical than that sometimes attributed to the notion of the vanguard party: each person draws their own rules from themselves, at the risk of believing themselves to be invested with a mission and touched by grace. The abolition of all principles of representation thus reduces social relations to a game of capricious desires.”
It is a rather surprising text in which Bensaïd seems to discover — in the narrow field of politics — the originality of the anarchist project and ontology, but without grasping the reasons for it, based on a radical misunderstanding or, more precisely, a complete lack of affinity and homology between the libertarian project and what constitutes him (as an activist and at the time of writing). Locked into the modes of representation and the hegemonic but very particular philosophy of the present order, Bensaïd does not perceive the way in which the libertarian project overflows and criticises the exorbitant pretensions of politics, in that it embraces the totality of human realities and, through them, the totality of what is. The anarchist rejection of “democratic majority rule in society as well as in social movements” is neither a “paradox” nor a “logical extension” of the rejection of all authority, but on the contrary one of its multiple sources and “foci of autonomy” — historically, and in the field of social relations and decision-making.
But Bensaïd is right: the enemy of anarchism is indeed “representation”, the way in which symbolic entities (parties, churches, states, but also grammar, language and logic) substitute themselves for the beings they “represent”, appropriating their strengths and realities. The naive and dishonest paradox of Bensaïd (but also of all possible forms of domination) is not only to take “representation” for reality, but, contrary to all logic, to accuse direct action and the effectively radical and immanent autonomy of the collective forces of the “real world” (Bakunin) of being a “substitution”. But a “substitution” for what? Bensaïd does not tell us and cannot tell us. Indeed, it cannot be a substitution for oneself, which would be idiotic. It is indeed a substitution for something else, but something just as difficult to recognise, something mysterious and transcendent, the symbolic reality of symbolic representations: the “party line”, for example, with its obedience and self-criticism, the meaning of history of which we are more or less conscious agents and which the “scholars” explain to us, states of all kinds (which transcend and justify sacrifices, devotion and bloodshed), but also and above all the “divine phantom” of which Bakunin speaks, for which people kill and are killed, God, that keystone or imaginary foundation (but with unfortunately very real effects) of all domination.
Since we are talking about a communist thinker, what do you think of the work of Guérin or Fontenis, for example, which aims to merge the best of Marxist and anarchist traditions in order to overcome their respective shortcomings?
Guérin and Fontenis acted and thought after the collapse of the great libertarian movements of working-class anarchism and before the resurgence of libertarian movements at the end of the 20th century. The appeal to Marxism is linked to this period and is part of the debates initiated by the so-called “Platform” of Archinov in the aftermath of the failure of the Russian Revolution. The libertarian thought and project that had existed before the provisional hegemony of state communism seemed to have failed and lost all credibility: in the aftermath of the Second World War, there were no longer any practical movements that could have given substance and meaning to this thought and project. The most dynamic libertarians had no other effective prospects than to act solely in the political and ideological arena, through small groups and mini-parties — which is what remains when everything else has been lost. Marxism had become “unsurpassable”, as Sartre said, and all that remained, in the political arena alone, was to offer a variant of the programme and implementation of socialism, after the seizure of power, based on the state: a libertarian state, in a manner of speaking. This is why activists such as Guérin were able to try to become the inspirers and advisers of Tito‘s Yugoslavia or the Algerian state. Even in Cuba, it seems to me that there were attempts of this kind…
The concept of self-management arose from this top-down attempt, before expressing a completely different dynamic, undeniably libertarian in nature, from the late 1960s onwards. The idea of self-management gave a name and a banner to a libertarian project that was re-emerging everywhere in practice, but without having the time to reclaim a body of thought and texts that had long been forgotten, difficult to access, and devalued by their form and the still very great prestige of Marxism (Althusser, etc.). A race began between the rediscovery of libertarian thought and the victorious return — socially, politically and ideologically — of capitalism. And it is far from certain that anarchism has won this race, even if a growing number of researchers and academics are taking an interest in it (but this is not necessarily a very good sign, especially when one is familiar with the logic and reality of the academic world).
You criticise the “naive and cynical scientism” of Marxism and praise the ethics specific to anarchism. What is it? That the means, as Camus said, are already ends in themselves? That, as Malatesta declared, to whom you dedicated a book, defeat is better than a victory without principles?
It seems to me that we should clarify what we mean by “principles”. In anarchism, it is not a question of abstract ideas and laws, codified and set in stone, on the idealistic and prescriptive model denounced above. It is a question of a determination and a judgment internal to each situation, however minuscule it may be, an immediate, practical, and largely intuitive judgment or evaluation, untimely, like that of the Spanish militiamen deserting the anarchist columns at the moment of their militarisation. Camus is right. For anarchism, there are only “ends” and no “means”; immediate and countless ends: in short, anarchy, an-arkhe, not the absence of first principles, but an excess of first principles, of “absolutes“, as Proudhon said, associated and federated, capable, through selection, confrontation, imitation, internal logic and dynamics, of reproducing and propagating themselves everywhere and in everything. That’s what should have been explained to Bensaïd! And that’s what should be explained in more detail. Anarchism opposes all instrumental and utilitarian, objective and objectifying logic. Bensaïd is right again: anarchism is indeed a radical subjectivism that embraces everything without exception. For anarchism, there is as much “determination” in the “mode of existence” of a wrench, Simondon would say, as in a group of like-minded individuals deciding to rob a bank.
Everything is a singular force resulting from a composition of equally singular forces, themselves composed of other singular forces. In speaking of “desire,” “whim,” and “desiring subjectivities,” Bensaïd is wrong to reduce anarchism to the traps and disguises of liberalism, to the injunction to consume ever more objects or commodities as diverse as a lawnmower, a new smartphone model, or medically assisted reproduction. For anarchism, “desires” are not those of capitalist consumption and its individual artifices, those “units of covetousness” of which Gilles Châtelet speaks, “pathetic billiard balls” “that every effort to differentiate themselves only further mires in a grand equivalence.” For anarchism, desires are singular material forces that implicate and mobilise, each time, the totality of what exists from a certain point of view, according to a certain arrangement, in a way that is either oppressive or emancipatory. “Desires,” “forces,” “will to power” (but also “conatus”, “entelechies” and many other notions) are all concepts that affirm, each in its own way, the same reality: the material reality of what is. Indeed, to the scientism of Marxism (the “objective situations” decreed and imposed by the Party), anarchism opposes not a morality, moral principles, but an “ethics,” in the sense that Spinoza gives to this word. An ethics that is first and foremost an ethology, a logic of behaviours and affects, a practical sense, grounded in things, events, and situations.
An old quarrel agitates the emancipation movement, broadly speaking: the individual versus the collective—anarchists often being accused of despising the latter and communists of sacrificing the former. How do you resolve this tension?
Historically, anarchism long suffered from a very particular “individualist” current, which (fortunately) has now almost completely disappeared—having become unnecessary insofar as capitalism itself imposed on everyone the “individualisation” of “tastes and preferences” that “anarchist” individualism opposed to both new and old communities (churches, labour unions, trades, nations, families, affinity groups, etc.). This anarchist individualism (which has always been marginal and which can still be found here and there, in the areas of food, procreation, or sexuality, for example) suffers from two prohibitive characteristics, for us now, but also in the past, within the vast deployments of working-class anarchism. We have just seen the first: the inscription of anarchist individualism in the representations and practices or “desires” of capitalist liberalism in the process of imposing its hegemony. The second characteristic stems from this and goes beyond individualism alone—no longer just the representations and practices of capitalist economic and political liberalism and individualism, but the whole set of “modern” representations that have accompanied their hegemony: the dualism of body and mind, of freedom and determinism, of science and “superstitions,” etc.; but also and primarily the exorbitant belief in the primary and self-founding existence of a transcendental “subject”, master of its choices and decisions; an extremely powerful belief and postulate, in practical life (education, employment, law…) as well as in the field of philosophy, from Descartes to Sartre, via Kant, Husserl and many others.
Historically, the “French style” anarchist individualism, which spread widely within the early and extensive libertarian movements, is closely linked to the development of the state-run, secular, and compulsory school system, tasked with instilling in workers the beliefs and basic knowledge necessary for capitalism. It is linked to the republican school system of the Third Republic—where, in Monatte‘s words, by learning to read, workers had unlearned how to “discern“. A brief aside: these deceitful and totalitarian representations of the “individual” and the “subject,” necessary for capitalist development and hegemony—from the school system for the people to democratic rules and the fossilisation/codification of the (so poorly named) “Enlightenment” ideology—are obviously not unique to the defunct “anarchist individualism” (which, fortunately, was not entirely lacking in eccentrics and innovators). These ideas are also found in the narrow minority of anarchist “communists” (Fontenis was a pure product of the republican school system), where “communism” and “individualism” are ultimately the product of a free choice—no longer of a particular washing machine model, but of a program, a mode of organisation, and rules supposedly chosen freely, viewed through the lens or dashboard of a permanent and universal human “subject”.
For the broad movements that gave substance and meaning to working-class anarchism, as well as for the most vibrant movements of contemporary anarchism, the relationship between the individual and the collective is posed in radically different terms and within a radically different horizon of thought and action. In these movements (past and present), the “personal” assertion, as Proudhon would say, has nothing liberal about it and does not refer to the modern fiction of an individual or a transcendent subject, existing outside of things, situations, and events. The vast majority of revolutionary activists, organically linked to mass movements (primarily trade unionism), can be described as “individualists” or strong “personalities”, but an individualism and a personality that only have meaning and existence within collective movements, within collective “subjectivities” of which they are both the product and a component. Like Pelloutier, the secretary of the Federation of Labor Exchanges [Fédération des bourses du travail], whose famous phrase is endlessly repeated.
There have been many “individualists” like Pelloutier in revolutionary libertarian movements of all kinds—but, apart from the (particularly misleading) name—, they bear little relation to what this word generally encompasses in the representations and injunctions of modernity. One last remark, of a theoretical nature, and with which we could have begun: what the practices of libertarian movements allow us to grasp empirically, massively, in practice, is also affirmed by the most radical and effective libertarian thought, with such clarity that it should dispense with the need for constant justification. For anarchism, there is no difference in kind between the “individual” and the “group.” As Proudhon emphasises, “the individual is a group”, a “composite of powers”, themselves composed of other composite powers, ad infinitum. The “individual is a group” and every “group is an individual”, an “individuation”, a “being”, a “subjectivity”, an “absolute” each time singular and astonishing, whose sources and effects, good as well as bad, can only be grasped by a long collective experience, under the dual relationship of domination and emancipation.
You question the relevance of the notions of right and left, seeing them as an “illusion” used to deceive citizens and voters. Do you think that, as Castoriadis suggested, we must move beyond this divide, which he considered ineffective, to understand our era? But some will tell you that this “neither right nor left” is a slogan of the National Front…
The right/left distinction, like “neither right nor left”, is a political and politicians construct; even if, historically, it draws upon and operates from an old, imaginary foundation that extends beyond purely political mechanisms. Anarchism rejects politics as a deadly trap for a revolutionary project that embraces the totality of what exists, that starts from this totality, from all its components. To the “political revolution” (a new state, new leaders, a new constitution), anarchism very early on opposed an economic and social revolution (“the Social Revolution”) that was radically different from the simple, old-fashioned political revolution—a revolution that began with everything, a long-term revolution that involved everything equally, the “universal independence”, the “independence of the world” of the old 19th-century workers’ songs. Thus, in the emancipatory logic of the trade union type, the “revolutionaries” never asked their many comrades in arms whether they were socialists, right-wing, Christian, or Buddhist. The dynamic and logic of emancipation, in the field of work in this instance, but also in every other field (patriarchy, prostitution and sexuality, artistic creation, etc.), were entirely self-sufficient, without ever requiring the ideological commitments specific to parties, churches, and “sects” (which the Charter of Amiens rejected).
We have recently seen in Spain some anarchists displaying extreme hostility and virulence towards a movement like Podemos, and in particular towards its spokesperson Pablo Iglesias: isn’t there a kind of purism and sectarianism within the anarchist movement that condemns it to a sectarian, minority position, speaking far removed from “the masses,” to use a term you don’t much like?
I don’t know the nature of the anarchist criticisms of Podemos and, from experience, I’m somewhat wary of them, but what we discussed earlier helps to understand this criticism. From an anarchist perspective, Podemos presents two closely linked and equally unacceptable characteristics: 1) a political solution, winning elections, seizing state power; 2) to base its action and this (public) victory on numbers, on a “multitude” of individual voters and citizens, no less pathetic than the “billiard-ball consumers” denounced by Gilles Châtelet, expressing themselves only through scarves or hats of the same colour, candles, and torchlight processions; while awaiting the eventual and large-scale “mass” choreographies that sometimes follow and codify the initial mobilisation of the “multitudes.” On the other, libertarian path of the major mobilisations of the last ten years, I would like to refer you to an article published in the journal Réfractions: “Les brèches de l’histoire” (no. 28, Spring 2012).
One question, perhaps the most difficult, to conclude: if you had to give a single, brief definition of anarchism?
It is Deleuze (and Guattari) who, in a seemingly enigmatic way, provides the best definition: Anarchy, “a strange unity that can only be expressed in terms of multiplicity”. I hope that the preceding remarks help to clarify this definition.