Post-Anarchism and Social War Post-Structuralism, and the Revival of an Anarchist Subterranean Dedicated to my friends kidnapped by the State on 15th October, 2007. We are too young, we cannot wait any longer. – Parisian Graffiti NARCHISM REMAINS A LIVING political and cultural tradition which, though largely ignored in A academia, has been radically transforming itself, engaging in extensive self-critique and reinventing its practice since its formal inception in the early 19th Century.1 First theorised by the likes of William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, anarchism developed simultaneously as an ‘organic’ orientation within the early socialist movements, only to be superseded by the Statist varieties – notably Marxism and social democracy – in the early 20th Century. Though eclipsed, anarchism as ‘socialism against the State’ became a more expansive project oriented against the totality of relations of domination, and was crucial in providing the inspiration for the liberatory ruptures across the world in 1968 before rising to prominence again in the ‘anti-globalisation’ movements at the turn of the 21st Century. Those within the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement focussed 1 This essay was written in the completion of an honours year project in sociology at Victoria University of Wellington. Comments are welcome, email
[email protected]. Dated 31st October 2007. much of their energy on targeting and forcing the closure of meetings of the Group of Eight, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, being successful on a number of occasions – in spite of State violence – before the movement’s demise over the last five years (Graeber, 2007).