… let radical geography be just that: radical geography, free of any particular “ism”, nothing more, nothing less.
David Harvey
We have little or no interest in polemics. But differences of perception, thought, forms of life, when they happen or rub against each other, help to clarify and define different ways of being in the world.
The publication of Simon Springer’s essay, “Why a radical geography must be anarchist” engendered a response from David Harvey. We share Harvey’s essay below for the questions that it raises for anarchists and others who seek a radical critique of capitalism. However the essay does fall into excess, and thus we will share also, in a subsequent post, Springer’s response to Harvey.
Again, our interest here is greater understanding.
Harvey’s criticism of Springer and anarchism in general is summarised in the following passage:
There are two broad lines of critique of the conventional anarchist position … Firstly there is the failure to shape and mobilize political power into a sufficiently effective configuration to press home a revolutionary transformation in society as a whole. If, as seems to be the case, the world cannot be changed without taking power then what is the point of a movement that refuses to build and take that power? Secondly, there is an inability to stretch the vision of political activism from local to far broader geographical scales at which the planning of major infrastructures and the management of environmental conditions and long distance trade relations becomes a collective responsibility for millions of people.
Harvey’s concerns here are real. They touch on the question of the means of social change, as well as the issue of how freedom and equality are to be “institutionalised”. What Harvey’s essay however fails to fully consider are the dangers of struggling for and holding State power, whether in the name of social reform and/or revolution, and the alternatives to such power that anarchists have always defended (mutual aid and horizontal federalism).
I will make an added claim, a claim that risks simplification, but which perhaps take us further and deeper. One might say that marxists are theorists of revolution in “time”, that their concern with the need for State driven social transformation stems from the belief that revolution can only be secured through a centralising agency capable of navigating and resisting the currents of time. What is lost here though are the multiplicity of times through which human communities live, because they exist in different spaces; in parallel, coincident or incompatible and conflicting, overlapping, spaces.
One of the characteristics of capitalism, since its very beginning, has been not only the homogenisation of spaces, but the uniformisation of spaces that renders a single, universal time possible. To then advocate the need for State power as an instrument of revolution, so as to be able to domesticate time, is to embrace the time of capitalism. Yet this time remains still an unrealised ideal and a paradoxically self-consuming one, for the universal time of capital flows, of spectacle, in colonising and destroying the plurality of spaces, destroys the very possibility of time. In other words, we live at the end of time, in the sense that we are witness to the destruction of time in an eternal repetition of the same; a nihilism of commodity fetishism.
The radicalness of anarchist geography lies in recognising the intimate connection between the plurality of spaces and the possibilities of radical politics; in recognising the plurality of that same politics, as the different spaces give rise to different times. Prefigurative politics embraces this diversity: from politics of the “indigenous” to the occupation of public city squares, from anti-summit riots to post-gendered relationships, from anti-speciesism and veganism to cooperatives, ZADS, okupied social centres, and so on and so forth. Insurrection is the term that best captures this permanent effusion of resistance and creativity, and it is from it that fluid forms of autonomous, non-statist, self-institution emerge. An anarchist geography resonates this radical life.
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The russian revolution of 1917: Victor Serge
Bolshevik thought takes it for granted that truth is its peculiar possession. To Lenin, to Bukharin, to Trotsky, to Preobrajensky, to many another thinker I could mention, the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels was at one and the same time the law of human thought and the law of the natural development of societies. The party, quite simply, is the custodian of truth; any idea at variance with party doctrine is either pernicious error or backsliding. Here, then, is the source of the party’s intolerance. Because of its unshakable conviction of its exalted mission, it develops astonishing reserves of moral energy—and a theological turn of mind which easily becomes inquisitorial. Lenin’s ‘proletarian Jacobinism’, with its disinterestedness, its discipline in both thought and action, was grafted upon the psychology of cadres whose character had been formed under the old regime—that is to say, in the course of the struggle against despotism. It seems to be unquestionable that Lenin chose as his co-workers men whose temperament was authoritarian. The final triumph of the revolution eased the inferiority-complex of the masses—the always bullied and always downtrodden masses. At the same time, however, it awakened in them a desire for retaliation; and this desire tended to make the new institutions despotic also. I have seen with my own eyes how a man who only yesterday was a worker or sailor gets drunk on the exercise of power—how he delights in reminding others that from now on he’s giving the orders.
Victor Serge
Anarchist, Bolshevik, Trotskyist, Social-democrat: the ideological markers of Victor Serge’s political militancy can serve as a point of criticism, but also as testimony to the vagaries and uncertainties of all revolutionary engagement.
The criticisms of Serge’s political engagements are well known (see, for example, Luiggi Fabri‘s Revolution and Dictatorship, and Daniel Guerin‘s Anarchism), and we will not repeat them here. What we share below, as part of our series of testimonials of the russian revolution of 1917, are his reflections on the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 against Bolshevik rule (from his Memoirs of a Revolutionary), the suppression of which effectively marked the end of the revolution.
“We were advancing towards a classless society, a society of free men; but the party never missed an opportunity to remind people that “the reign of the workers will never end”. Over whom were the workers to reign then? And that word ‘reign’—what does it mean anyhow? Totalitarianism—and within ourselves!”
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