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Do you want deep theory?
Theres some stuff that isn’t explicitly anarchist but anarchists often use to think with, like Marx’s Capital, D&G’s 1000 Plateaus, Patricia Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, and other academic philosophy.
Then there’s the stuff written by anarchists but without the label like Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, Generation 5’s Towards Transformative Justice(big old TW for SV against kids), and Harroway’s Staying with the Trouble.
Finally, theres the explicitly anarchist stuff like Graeber’s Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, Gelderloos’ The Failure of Non Violence, Serafinsky’s Blessed is the Flame
I think that the anti violence movement’s work, stuff like the INCITE! Anthology or abolitionist work like Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work or Mariane Kaba’s work can be understood as part of the anarchist Canon through Malatesta’s formulation of anarchism as an anti violent movement but not a non violent one.
yes how does anarchism argue beyond the established ML positions? do you reject the epistemes or is there critique that works in those trends. i guess with like bookchin and stuff where its pretty much like “yeah MLs are right about everything but we need muh moar democracy”. hit me up
I think there are some pretty direct challenges from a few different angles. Anarchists dont have a central body of theory the same way that Marxists do, so they’ll contradict each other.
But here’s a few peices that I think directly challenge ML assumptions and create an irreconcilable gap between anarchism and Marxism. They don’t go deep into their starting points, you have to sus out what they are, which is why I think so many anarchists go to non anarchists like D&G, Foucault, Agemben, Collins, and others for their starting points.
That said, here’s a short list of anarchist challenges to ML.
Malatesta’s anarchy and violence doesn’t go deep but is a really useful illustration of the differences. He see anarchism as primarily an anti violence movement, and while he is a revolutionary, he argues for limiting violence as much as is possible, while still acknowledging a need for self defense against structural violence (y’know, revolution)
Then theres the challenges to Marxism’s historical model of feudalism -> capitalism -> capitalism under a DoTP -> communism -> higher communism.
A lot of anarchists borrow the native american critique of this model, arguing that it’s based on misrepresentations of the world outside Europe, and that many societies, like the Iroquois were already communist before capitalism, and without colonialism could have developed into industrial communist societies without ever becoming capitalist. Multiple indigenous scholars have made this argument, but I think this YouTube video is the best example.
In a similar vein Federici attacked this historicization by arguing that capitalism wasn’t a progression past feudalism but a counterrevolution against the 13th century workers’ movements. In other words, communism was a possibility immediately after the black plague destabilized feudalism. She argues this in caliban and the witch
European anarchists meanwhile have challenged the view that revolution is a historical process. Bonanno characterized it as a trans historical tension between the desire for and the impossibility of anarchy in the Anarchist Tension.
Meanwhile, Bakunin and the nihilists argued that you dont rebell for the revolution but because it’s a virtue to hit back when you’re being hit. The best representation of this is Serafinsky’s Blessed is the Flame.
Finally, there’s the argument that if you structure your revolution along heirarchal lines, then you’ll end up reproducing heirarchies after the revolution. These anarchists generally agree with Leninism, except that they take issue with democratic centralism, Trotsky’s ending of officer elections, Lenin ending democracy in the Soviets, Stalin disarming the peasantry. These guys are basically trots with a punk aesthetic IMO.
good post. what you offered mostly is challenged to those ml positions, but when i say “go beyond” i meant theory derived from those epistemes, so you dont see there being much of that except those “trots with punk aesthetics”? this stuff isnt going to compell be to abandon materialism and structuralism and swap out our revolutionary heritage. we’re firmly grounded, so this isnt having any political repercussions. i guess ill take a well needed critique of the ridiculous pseudohistory of marx’ historical modes of production
Oh, and its worth noting that Bookchin was an ML who started to question a lot of his beliefs after enging with the feminist and ecological movements in Vermont in the '70s and called himself an anarchist because that was just sort of the other camp. The man wasn’t really an anarchist though, wrote an incredibly sectarian diatribe against the green left, and then made up his own thing called Libertarian Municioalism which was pretty much a strategy for realizing radlib.
That’s why his work is pretty much just ML but with added feminism, ecology and democracy.
