Anarchist Geographies PDF

Anarchist*Geographies*
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Edited*by**
Simon*Springer,*Anthony*Ince,**
Jenny*Pickerill,*Gavin*Brown,**
&*Adam*J.*Barker*
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Antipode:*A*Radical*Journal*of*Geography*
44*(5):*1579L1754*
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Foreword
Looking Backward/Acting Forward
Myrna Margulies Breitbart

School of Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA;
mmbSS@hampshire.edu
This special issue of Antipode on anarchist geography is a welcome and long

overdue effort to demonstrate the centrality of anarchist thought and practice to
twenty-first century geography. The essays are rich with theoretical insight and
present many important examples of transformative social practice. I am delighted
that the Editorial Collective took up the challenge of establishing the currency of
an anarchist perspective and am deeply honored to be asked to write this brief
foreword.
First Encounters with Kropotkin and Anarchist

Geography
When I first stumbled upon the geographical writings of Kropotkin and Reclus as a
graduate student I wondered why we had been fed so much Christaller and Von
Thunen without ever encountering the work of these astonishingly prescient activist
geographers. As students immersed in anti-Vietnam war protests and anti-poverty
struggles, we began to question the role of our institutions of higher education
in social change and we initiated many conversations about how best to bring
relevance to our discipline. With classes such as Capital, Volume One and The
Geography of American Poverty, we felt well schooled in critiques of capitalism
and thought we understood the geographic dimensions of inequality. What many
of us hungered for was more attention to how spatial relationships and alternative
uses of space might become vehicles for radical social change.
The editors of this special issue rightly underscore how social transformation
is . . . necessarily a spatial project (Springer et al 2012: Introduction). The desire to
explore this potential is what captured our imaginations as students in the 1970s. As
young geographers we were especially interested in finding new ways to think about
space beyond its constraints, and to examine its potential as a partner in struggle.
We searched for theories, or rather, practices, that would move us closer to the
kind of society we envisionedchanges that did not necessarily depend on mass
movements and yet could ignite often incremental, yet important, transformations
of everyday work and living environments. These activities eventually led to the birth
of Antipode.
My personal interest in the connection between geographic theory and social
change was reflected in an early essay entitled Impressions of an anarchist
Antipode Vol. 44 No. 5 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 15791590 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01037.x

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1580 Antipode
landscape (Breitbart 1975). In this short initial effort, I used Kropotkins and
Proudhons writings to extract some of the spatial implications of anarchist ideology
and developed very preliminary thoughts on what I thought of then as a peoples
location theory (Kropotkin 1927 [1905], 1974).1 Eventually my graduate research
focused on the Spanish Anarchist movement, where the role of space in radical
transformation was quite explicit (see Breitbart 1978). My dissertation began as
an exploration of the practices of workers control and community-based forms
of decentralized planning in the USA. A turning point occurred in 1974 when a
member of the Black Rose collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts informed me of
an upcoming lecture by Sam Dolgoff2 on Spanish anarchism, a movement about
which I knew nothing. I decided to go to this lecture with Maria Dolores Garcia-
Ramon, a post-doctoral colleague at Clark. Dolores had grown up in Barcelona when
Franco was still alive. Due to the suppression of information under the dictatorship,
she too knew little about the anarchist social revolution that accompanied the civil
war from 1936 to 1939.
Dolgoff shared inspiring examples of urban and rural collectivization at this talk,
and provided us with the names of Spanish anarchists who were still alive in exile in
southern France. He also spoke at length about the direct influence of geographers
Kropotkin and Reclus on the Spanish anarchist social revolution (Dolgoff 1974).
This naturally piqued my interest, and before long I found myself sitting in the
Institute of Social History in Amsterdam reading through documents that had been
transported out of Spain before Francos fascist army had the chance to destroy
them. I remember sitting at a desk and reading the 1936 Decree of Collectivization,
which, in spite of its title, was actually a counter-revolutionary effort on the part of
the coalition Republican government of Catalonia to bring worker collectivization
under control. Before long I felt someone tap on my shoulder. In imperfect English
this very large older gentlemen smiled and pointed to the signature on the bottom of
the Decree. The comrade, Josep Tarradellas, then pointed to himself with great pride.
I wrote my dissertation on this movement following many extraordinary interviews
with such anarchists as Jose Peirats [a member of the Young Libertarians, editor
of Solidaridad Obrera, a member of the Durruti Column, and an active participant
in the CNT (Confederacion National de Trabajo)]; Federica Montseny (the Emma
Goldman of Spain, who was a poet, novelist and anarcha-feminist, and who made
a controversial decision to become Minister of Health for the coalition government
during the Civil War); Frank Mintz (a scholar of the Spanish anarchist collectives
active the French anarcho-syndicalist movement); Federico Arcos (another Spanish
anarchist who moved to Windsor, Ontario after the Civil War and compiled perhaps
the largest library of anarchist literature and art in the world); and Pura Perez
(Federicos companera, who was also in the anarchist youth movement in Spain
and a lifelong anarcha-feminist involved in Mujeres Libres). A key lesson from their
rich teachings is to maintain the ideal of and hope for change even in the face of
unspeakable obstacles or total defeat. Jose Peirats and Federico Arcos captured this
best as they reflected, near the end of the twentieth century, on the conclusion of
the Spanish Revolution following the Civil War:
Two things have to be distinguished in a revolution: the constructive work of changing
peoples minds and economic circumstances, which is the result of an incorruptible
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Foreword 1581
integrity; and the historical outcome of the revolution itself. It is not always possible to
control the fate of a political revolution, which has its own laws of rise and decline. But
we can see to it that when the revolution is over there remain concrete, constructive
achievements. Perhaps this residue of permanent achievement is the only real and useful
revolution. Pity the revolution that devours itself in order to obtain victory. Pity the
revolution that waits for a final triumph to put its ideals into practice (Peirats 1990:189).
One of the things that Emma Goldman said that I remember well is that Life without an
ideal is a spiritual death. When you cannot dream any longer, you die. We are idealists;
we have an ideal and this is our life (Arcos interview in Pacific Street Films 2010).
Spending time with these individuals provided an education that far exceeded what
I was able to absorb from the historical literature. What struck me then, and has
remained with me since, is the seamless way in which their anarchism became their
very being, infusing every aspect of their lives. Anarchism was not a philosophy
or a theory to these individuals, though it could surely be theorized and written
about. It was a way of life that influenced how you conduct your relationships
with others, and how you work to expand arenas of freedom in collaboration with
others during your lifetime. Nearly all of the social anarchists I met as a geography
graduate student had a day job that was profoundly different from the larger task
to which they committed their lives as agents of radical social change. Sam Dolgoff,
translator of Bakunin into English, and the author of many books, including The
Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (Dolgoff 1976), was a house painter by trade.
Federico Arcos worked for years in the Canadian offices of Ford Motor Company
while creating networks of communication among anarchists worldwide. The point
is that their essential identity and lifes work was not formed through their paid
occupation; it was molded by their lifelong activism and continuing promotion of
an anarchist social agenda.
I returned to Clark inspired by the character and generosity of the many anarchists
I had met and whose stories I wanted to share. With the support of Richard Peet, I
began to compile essays for the first issue of Antipode on anarchist geography and
decentralism.
Where has Anarchist Geography Traveled Since?

Since the early issue of Antipode on Anarchism and Environment3 there have
been sporadic essays and books published that deal explicitly with the topic of
anarchist geography, including several written by non-geographers (eg Clark and
Martin 2004; Dunbar 1978; Fleming 1979; Miller 1976; Ward 1974). The editors of
this special issue make a point, however, of referring to the quiet that followed
these early forays (Introduction). They discuss how Marxist, feminist, and post-
structuralist critiques have dominated, while the more recent worldwide financial
crisis and Occupy movements, once again, emphasize the relevance and insight
of anarchist approaches to human geography in struggles for social change. While
I surely concur with this latter point, I think the notion that anarchist geography
lay dormant between the late 1970s and the present, or was overshadowed by
other radical perspectives, requires more discussion that I will only allude to briefly
here. From my perspective, anarchist geography did move forward both outside
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and inside the discipline of geography and the academy post 1980. It is important
to examine the where and how of this forward movement if, in fact, the ideas and
actions that are its products are to be given primacy over disciplinary affiliations or
over the publications that disseminated them.
One place to begin is with a large international gathering of anarchists that took
place in Venice, Italy in September 1984. This event was significant for many reasons,
not the least of which was its drawing of attention to the spatial dimensions of both
oppression and liberation. The event was sparked by the anniversary of George
Orwells 1984, and its goal was to bring together a diverse array of activists to reflect
upon the present and future of anarchism. The week-long event, held in numerous
outdoor public spaces of the city (including a large circus tent erected on a main
square), attracted hundreds of people and provided an extraordinary opportunity to
engage in dialogue with syndicalists and anarcho-communists, older veterans of the
Spanish Civil War, feminists, young punk anti-nuclear activists, municipalists, and
social ecologists. Geography was prominent at this event. Environmental justice,
nuclear proliferation, housing needs, and inequities in resource distribution were
central to discussions, as was the role of insurgent place-making, occupations of
public space, and the role of visible transformations of the built environment in
resistance, community organizing, and experimentation in sustainable land use and
planning. Local school children were brought to some of these events to learn
about anarchism. Videographers and graphic artists produced amazing visual art in
the streets, and everyone was fed from makeshift kitchens. It was here, at a picnic
table in the middle of a small square, that I first met Colin and Harriet Ward. Writing
about the event for The Guardian, Ward described the gathering as an opportunity
to seek new directions for constructive anarchism, with the emphasis on building
the new in the shell of the old.
My personal memory of the event is two-fold. On the one hand, I recall the
enormous disagreements that emerged in discussions about strategies for change.
On the other hand, the sharing of so many diverse perspectives, informed as they
were by differences of culture, race, age, and gender, also contributed to the
development of a more complex and richer base of knowledge that all participants
could draw upon to envision alternatives and further their critique of the existing
state of the world. While I attended this event with the lens of a geographer and an
academic, I left with a broader vision of who could contribute to the development of
anarchist geography from outside as well as inside the discipline. This partly explains
why I am reluctant to agree with the editors of this special issue that geography lay
dormant after the late 1970s.4
Anarchists always look for the interstices and marginal spaces where there is the
possibility of doing things differently. This is another reason why I do not believe
that anarchism ever went into remission in geography. Rather, it seems that those
influenced by its tenets were drawn into various occupations and forms of direct
action both within and outside the university. Some activist scholars left the academy
altogether to pursue their activism or to move into spatial-related fields with a more
hands-on dimension such as planning, design, environmental education, or even
community organizing. Some, like myself, did find a home in academia where it
was possible to continue work towards radical social change both through teaching
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Foreword 1583
and through community-based work. In my own case, this was made easier by the
fact that my home institution, Hampshire College, was birthed in the 1960s as a
deliberately constructed undergraduate alternative to traditional hierarchical forms
of higher education.5
Many activists and scholars from outside the discipline of geography have
sought to demonstrate the underlying role of social domination and hierarchy in
environmental destruction. Notable here are Ynestra King (1982, 1989), Gwyn Kirk
(1983, 1989, 1997, 1998) and Murray Bookchin (2005). Several of these individuals
participated in major occupations (eg the anti-cruise missile Womens Peace Camps
at Greenham Common and the surrounding of the Pentagon of the 1980s). They
published not only in feminist journals but also in popular zines and pamphlets,
much as Kropotkin and Reclus did in their effort to reach a larger audience in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the introduction to the first Antipode
issue on Anarchism and Environment, I tried to make the point that anarchism
and feminism converge in many important areas, whether it is in attacks on all forms
of hierarchy and domination or in seeing the personal as political. I still believe
that it is important not to draw clear demarcations between feminist and anarchist
contributions to geography, but rather look at their intersections. Similarly, while
there are some very clear distinctions to be made between anarchism and Marxism
in geography, the lines separating radical perspectives sometimes blur. This point is
implicit in the essay that Richard White and Colin Williams (2012) have written for
this special issue where they discuss the extensive work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and
the ongoing Community Economies project.6 This important body of work focuses
on developing a theory and practice of a post-neoliberal economic future using
extensive examples of already existing and viable cooperative economic and social
practices. Many facets of this work converge with the aims of anarchist geography.
Other spatial practitioners, such as architect and educator, Colin Ward,
emphasized the importance of liberatory education as the core of anarchisms
revolutionary project, and then worked to significantly alter secondary school and
college level art and geography curricula. Ward (1978), numerous public scholars
concerned with environmental activism and youth empowerment (eg Cahill 2006;
Chawla 2002; Hart 1997; Hart, Selim and Beeton 2006), and geographers (eg
Breitbart, 1995, 1997; Breitbart and Kepes 2007) worked to challenge traditional
in-classroom approaches to learning. Like Ward, they establish imagination and
critical inquiry through the study of the built environment as the very foundation
for meaningful citizenship. From my perspective, this project carries Kropotkins
ideas set out in the essay What geography ought be (Kropotkin 1885) forward
by pioneering hands-on participatory research that builds on young peoples
innate curiosity and familiarity with their immediate surroundings. Such approaches
establish a crucial role for geography in social justice activism at a local level by
building the research and critical inquiry skills of local residents of all ages, and
by developing the capacity of local neighborhoods to articulate needs and desires
while claiming space for alternative approaches to housing, cultural production, and
economic development.
Colin Ward and several of the practitioners named above did not generally publish
in academic journals, preferring to write for a more general audience. In Wards case
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this included classroom teachers with whom he founded the Bulletin of Environmental
Education as a vehicle to present examples of radical teaching practice. Ward also
helped to start several Urban Studies Centres in the UK, where new ideas and
creative practices could be collected for use. Many geographers post 1970 have
continued to challenge educational hierarchies and sought to break down the
borders between the academy and the community, as Farhang Rouhani (2012)
describes in this special issue. Continuing the work of the Venice gathering, they
challenge restrictions to imaginative and fruitful critical inquiries that are erected
through the maintenance of strict disciplinary boundaries.
I realize that I may be accused here of favoring the work of those who identify
with social anarchism as a practice or way of life, viewing geography as a helpful
means to a radical end, over others who maintain more of an academic interest in
anarchism and a strong loyalty to promoting the discipline. In either case, we have
evolved to the point where interdisciplinarity is no longer a luxury but a necessity
if we are to fuel struggles for social justice and better understand global change
and the exercise of power. As geographers, we have a lot to contribute to this
epistemological mix.
Multiple Agendas for the Future of Anarchist

Geography
The simple point that anarchist geography continues to develop our understanding
of human/environment relationships, and exerts influence on theories and practices
of social change from outside as well as inside the discipline says little about where
it might go in the future. The authors in this special issue lay a basis for building an
agenda that could reanimate radical geography through the application of social
anarchist principles. I want to underscore the importance of adopting this agenda
and also highlight a few areas where we could devote considerably more attention:
(1) radical pedagogy; (2) use of space for resistance and the incubation of alternative
social structures; and (3) dissemination of new ideas and spatial/social practices.
Radicalizing Pedagogy
The first of these areas was touched upon above and is addressed by several
contributors to this special issue, as they point to the importance of denying any
false dichotomy between the academy as space of knowledge production and the
community as a site of struggle. We must not leave our own institutional structures
outside critique or beyond an agenda for change as we theorize and participate in
various autonomous movements for social justice outside the academy. This means
challenging tenure, research and teaching practices within the academy that restrict
definitions and sources of knowledge production, and that penalize or fail to value
research that is collaboratively generated or actively involves the community outside
the university. Challenging standard research practice and routes to tenure involves
questioning restrictions on what we write, where we publish, and who we partner
with in our writing. With respect to in-classroom teaching we must bring our own
approaches to the classroom into line with anarchist teaching methods that value
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Foreword 1585
the innate curiosity of students and their different ways of learning and approaches
to knowledge. We must, in short, do what Simon Springer (2012) suggests in this
special issue, and explore the untapped potential of anarchist praxis. This requires a
broadening of the possibilities for more cross-disciplinary teaching, the restructuring
of in-classroom learning using non-hierarchical methods, and support for what is
now called engaged learning outside the classroom.
With respect to the latter, many colleges now promote community internships
as co-curricular forms of learning. Few, however, give real academic credit for
such experiences or require the kind of reflection that enables students to truly
integrate their out-of-classroom learning with their in-classroom work. Fewer, still,
allow community members outside the university to drive the research agenda;
nor do colleges generally prepare students and faculty to address community-
defined agendas in ways that benefit the community directly in their everyday
survival struggles. Community organizations challenge unequal and exploitative
community/college relationships and seek reciprocity as they assume a role in the
engaged learning of our students. Those of us who promote engaged learning
need to give serious consideration to how we might forge more effective local and
global partnerships that support struggles for social justice while also addressing the
educational needs of our students.
To answer this challenge, we can continue to extend the legacy of Colin Ward and
others who believe that the immediate neighborhood environments that we inhabit
provide fertile ground for critical learning and active engagement. At the same
time, we must require our institutions to become responsible citizens as opposed
to predatory land grabbers. We must also find ways to make the work we do,
and the resources our institutions have, more accessible and more relevant to the
needs of the larger surrounding community (everything from providing meeting
space; the opportunity to take or teach classes; access to computers and on-
campus events; community product purchasing agreements, etc. to encouraging
a greater community influence over our curricula and access to free consultancy
services).7
Another imperative is to recast rather traditional practices, such as academic
conferences, to better serve the needs of the larger community. Several years ago
the radical Planners Network, directed then by Ken Reardon, asked my institution to
host their next conference. Our response was to approach a number of community-
based partner organizations in Holyoke, Massachusetts to ask if they would co-
sponsor the event with us. In the end, they set the whole agenda for the conference
around their own interests, which were to elicit ideas from planners on how to
overcome political and social obstacles to addressing the needs of lower income
Latino residents, and to create an environment in which the city could be defined not
by its deficiencies and the historical obsolescence, but by the innovative community-
building initiatives underway. The title they chose to represent these goals was
Bridging divides and building futures in historic cities. Community partners
went on to organize entire sessions, host participants on city tours of designated
community-based projects, and arrange a dinner catered by local restaurants that
included dance performances by local youth and a night of salsa. Only the first
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welcoming session was held in the auditorium of the college; the remainder was
held in the city of Holyoke (15 miles from campus), focusing on the work of
community-based organizations, who directly challenged attendees to help them
address key planning dilemmas.
Like so many of my colleagues, I share the experience of living in a liminal space,
one foot inside and the other outside the college. None of this personal history or
a call for exploding the schoolColin Wards and Anthony Fysons (1973) term
for valuing and seeking knowledge outside the traditional classroomis meant
to suggest that geography as a discipline would not benefit from a more active
engagement with anarchist spatial theory, particularly one as open to variety and
methodological interpretation as this special issue. It is to suggest, rather, that this
larger project expand to include more extensive and deliberate application of critical
pedagogical practices and outcomes to teaching and engaged research.
Creating Spaces for Resistance and the Incubation of Alternative

Structures
We know that space is key to enforcing inequality, oppression and the exercise of
power in all of its many forms. Using the landscape and built environment to reveal
and educate on the issue of social injustice is central to building a movement for
change, as the first WTO protests in Seattle and the current Occupations illustrate.
As geographers, we need to do much more, however, to develop and document
decentralist alternatives.
In a short pamphlet entitled The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society,
Sam Dolgoff (1989 [1970]) argued that the increased complexity of society made
anarchism more rather than less relevant. The focus was not to be on some distant
future utopia but rather on the stimulation of those forces propelling society in
an anarchist direction through the practical application of anarchist principles to
the realities of social living. Errico Malatesta (1965) said essentially the same thing
when he argued strongly for the importance of generating concrete examples of
how to live differently and collectively. Social anarchists are not in the business of
prescribing blueprints for a new society or the landscape that would support it.
They believe that social and spatial alternatives must emerge from specific historical
circumstances as well as local needs and desires. That said, there is a lot to be
done and more that can be documented in the pages of journals like Antipode
to bring attention to grassroots mobilizations that successfully subvert planning
agendas promoted by private developers or the state, and that create new spaces
for resistance and experimentation with alternative social, economic and cultural
formations.
The editors of this special issue point out that anarchism is a philosophy of
everyday life and at times a tool for survival, well-being, and social change
(Introduction). We need to identify and examine examples that illustrate this value
more closely, evaluate the elements that present obstacles or contribute to their
success, and theorize from this analysis. Drawing attention to positive examples of
even small spaces within which cooperative and heterodox forms of production,
distribution or consumption take place can expand our notions of efficiency.
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Examining the intricacies of new networks and federations established to aid

resistance movements, anchor a new economic base, or enable living arrangements
and cultural exchange that is more responsive to peoples needs and desires expands
the range of mechanisms available to promote freedom and achieve greater social
justice. Aided by technology, even small-scale examples can suggest new avenues for
labor and political organizing across borders. They can also promote the dismantling
of overly ordered landscapes that restrict the use of public space and exercise social
control.
The emphasis of anarchist geography on decentering knowledge has led to many
critiques of spatial planning. In the effort to demonstrate the efficacy of alternatives,
we should be documenting and evaluating more examples of participatory planning
and design processes, especially those that build on local assets and provide a means
for residents to better articulate their needs and desires. Anarchist geography must
continue to develop arguments against the practice of state-centered planning while
simultaneously demanding access to resources that enable the decentralization of
decision-making and support the reclamation by residents of public space. New
models of regional exchange, and new designs for flexible space that allows for
multiple and changing uses are also key.
Given the growing number of transnational communities in cities that are
characterized by heterogeneous cultural geographies, how might we identify those
structures and places where difference in the very conduct of daily life is effectively
negotiated without the intervention of the state? As more people choose or are
forced to move across borders, how can spaces emerge to best accommodate their
needs, and how do new attachments to place evolve or fail to evolve in the context
of neoliberal agendas? I am clearly not alone in identifying these topics as relevant
to the future of anarchist geography (see, for example, Chatterton 2006; Pickerill
and Chatterton 2006, among many others).
Dissemination of New Ideas and Spatial/Social Practices

Anarchists who were so successful in generating a movement for widespread change
in Spain prior to and in the midst of the Civil War pursued many different strategies
to share and build upon their ideas. They recognized that real and lasting change
had to start with the individual and move people on an emotional as well as factual
level. This is why it was not uncommon for so many inspirational activists of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to combine journalistic and scholarly
writing with more artistic forms of expression. Federica Montsenys family, for
example, started an important literary journal, La Revista, which published fictional
stories of people that illustrated both their imperfections and their potential. Such
writing inspired the imagination and provided a canvas upon which concrete
examples of non-hierarchical relationships, mutual aid, and the types of built
environments that could support these alternatives could be introduced. Kropotkin
functioned as a traditional academic geographer writing essays and books, and
delivering papers at professional conferences until his arrest while reading a paper
on the orography of mountain ranges in Europe. While in prison, he began to
write short pamphlets that could be more widely distributed and draw in a larger
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audience. These provided compelling examples of effective forms of collaboration

in work and social life that he observed in his travels among the Jura watchmakers
of Switzerland and the peasant communities of Siberia. The future of anarchist
geography still depends on where and how the ideas it generates are distributed.
Seeking a home for new ideas in academic publications is important but how
can we work to radicalize the process of getting ideas into print? Writing can be a
very solitary and lonely act. This is one reason why I often co-author my writing.
Like co-teaching, a collaborative writing process affords an opportunity to push
oneself beyond a narrow sphere and consider different perspectives. For those of
us who work in the academy and are also involved in struggles within the larger
local or global community, co-writing can help to bridge the divide. For me, this
is not about giving others a voice. It is about opening ourselves up to a more
complex understanding of issues by incorporating experiences and knowledge that
literally emerge from a different place. Colin Ward occasionally co-wrote pieces and
also started an entirely new journal, Bulletin of Environmental Education, in order to
incorporate the ideas and practices of teachers working to introduce more freedom
of exploration into their curricula. This brought spatially oriented academics together
with on-the-ground educators in the invention of a new environmental practice.
There are now whole movements in academia to legitimize public scholarship,
as exemplified by the work of Imagining America in promoting knowledge making
about, for, and with diverse publics and communities.8 As practitioners of engaged
learning, this organization directly challenges elitist ideas about publication and
introduces new forms of critical pedagogy that attack the heart of hierarchical
university structures.
As geographers we have an obvious affinity already for representing the world in
visual format through maps. The folks who produce An Atlas of Radical Cartography
(Mogel and Bhagat 2008) have found an especially effective way of bridging
activism and geography through art and design. They employ visual formats to
challenge our perceptions of the world through new representations of relationships
of power and their effects.9 These visual documents provoke debate and suggest
the potential of alternative forms of decentralized organization (eg networks and
federations). Taken together with other creative forms of idea dissemination, they
challenge us to think more about the important role of art, culture, and creative
interventions in social change. They encourage us to consider new venues from
which we might interrogate and disseminate the ideas and practices that emerge
from this special issue of Antipode as well as from any future efforts to promote the
further development of anarchist geography.
Endnotes
1
The search for relevance also led us to many out-of-classroom involvements. In the Pioneer
Valley of western Massachusetts, we formed an anarchist affinity group with an eclectic array
of colleagues that included Murray Bookchin and many notable anarchist feminists such as
Ynestra King and Martha Ackelsberg, among many others.
2
Sam Dolgoff was an anarcho-syndicalist and member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the
World) who translated Bakunins writings and material about the anarchist social revolution
in Spain into English. He also wrote several books, including one on the role of anarchists in
the Cuban revolution.
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3
See volume 10, issue 3 and volume 11, issue 1 of Antipode.
4
I am also reminded of the 1976 Swiss film by director Alain Tanner, For Jonah Who Will Be
25 in the Year 2000. The action takes place in Europe in the aftermath of the 1968 student
protest movements and other forms of radical resistance. The characters, who are in their 20s
and 30s, go about their lives while trying to keep elements of this radical period alive in very
personal and individual ways. The characters who come quickly to mind are a high-school
teacher who shares his theories of class struggle and inequality with his young students by
removing a long sausage from his briefcase and slicing it up to illustrate divisions of wealth;
and a young checkout clerk at a grocery who gives unauthorized Robin Hood-like discounts
to customers she believes deserve a little break. The film poses the question of what happens
to ideals that are soundly dismissed and suppressed by the powers that be. Jonah, the young
son of one of the protagonists, represents the hope that radical ideals can be kept alive and
furthered in small ways even when the status quo seems to be winning. Jonahs message, like
the later writing of de Certeau (1984), acknowledges the potential for resistance and change
in modest everyday moments.
5
Hampshire gives no grades, only narrative evaluation of portfolios of work, has no tenure,
employs an equity salary model, and allows faculty to teach or co-teach whatever they want
with whomever they want. Students assume a great deal of responsibility for their own
educations and faculty become learners as well as teachers. Interdisciplinarity is the norm,
and so once I arrived in 1977, I was no longer a geographer; I reside in the School of Social
Science (recently renamed by faculty as the School of Critical Social Inquiry).
6
See http://www.communityeconomies.org/home
7
One example is an office recently established at the Syracuse University that provides
free GIS mapping and community design services to any non-profit community-based
organization.
8
See http://www.imaginingamerica.com
9
See http://www.an-atlas.com/contents.html
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!
Reanimating Anarchist Geographies:
A New Burst of Colour
Simon Springer
Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada;
simonspringer@gmail.com
Anthony Ince
School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Jenny Pickerill, Gavin Brown and Adam J. Barker

Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Abstract: The late nineteenth century saw a burgeoning of geographical writings from
influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. Yet despite the vigorous
intellectual debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths
anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not until the 1970s that anarchism was
once again given serious consideration by academic geographers who, in laying the
groundwork for what is today known as radical geography, attempted to reintroduce
anarchism as a legitimate political philosophy. Unfortunately, quiet followed once more,
and although numerous contemporary radical geographers employ a sense of theory and
practice that shares many affinities with anarchism, direct engagement with anarchist ideas
among academic geographers have been limited. As contemporary global challenges push
anarchist theory and practice back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to
this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives might
yet contribute to the discipline.
Keywords: anarchism, anarchist geographies, direct action, everyday life, mutual aid,
radical geography
In the late 1970s Antipode published issues on the environment and anarchism which, in
retrospect, were the last bursts of colour in the fall of its 1960s-style radicalism (Richard
Peet and Nigel Thrift 1989:6).
The relationship between anarchism and the academic discipline of geography has
a long and disjointed history. The late nineteenth century saw a burgeoning of
geographical writings from influential anarchist thinkers like Peter Kropotkin (Morris
2003) and Elisee Reclus (Fleming 1996). Yet in spite of the vigorous intellectual
debate sparked by the works of these two individuals, following their deaths in
the early twentieth century, anarchist ideas within geography faded. It was not
until the 1970s that anarchism was once again given serious consideration by
academic geographers who, in laying the groundwork for what is today known as
radical geography, attempted to reintroduce anarchism as a legitimate political
philosophy. Unfortunately, quiet followed once more, and although numerous
contemporary radical geographers employ a sense of theory and practice that shares

C 2012 The Authors. Antipode !
1592 Antipode
many affinities with anarchism, direct engagement with anarchist ideas among
geographers have been limited and largely overshadowed by the popularity of
Marxist, feminist, and more recently poststructuralist critiques. This special issue
proceeds from the perspective that as contemporary global challengessuch as
the most recent financial crisis and the ensuing Occupy Movementpush anarchist
theory and practice back into widespread currency, geographers need to rise to
this occasion and begin (re)mapping the possibilities of what anarchist perspectives
might yet contribute to the discipline. In this light, we have sought to develop
an exploratory volume, where explicitly and unashamedly anarchist approaches
to human geography can be allowed to blossom in all their wonderful plurality.
Accommodating a diversity of positionalities demands an unconstrained and eclectic
embrace, and accordingly we understand the potentialities of anarchist praxis as
protean and manifold. Through the unfolding and variegated approach that this
special issue maintains, we seek to expose readers to a variety of epistemological,
ontological, and methodological interpretations of anarchism, unencumbered by
the strict disciplining frameworks that characterize other political philosophies, and
purposefully open to contradiction and critique.
The world we inhabit has changed significantly since 1978 when the last Antipode
special issue on anarchism was published (see Breitbart 1978b). To suggest that
human societies have undergone intense social, economic, cultural, and political
transformations in the interim is a profound understatement. The emergence of
neoliberal ideology and its consolidation as the dominant economic system has
radically reshaped the globe, intensifying already existing uneven geographies
and resulting in a new level of complexity as established political structures,
modes of governmentality, identity categories, economic matrixes, subjectivities,
institutional frameworks, juridical processes, and epistemological positions are all
being remade. The apparent victory of laissez-faire neoliberalism and the fall of the
Soviet Union in the early 1990s shattered the assumed centrality of the state in
the practice of political economy and governance, yet it also gave succor to new
and sometimes terrifying modes of state control. Likewise, whereas the cheerleaders
of capitalisms apparent victory over so-called communism initially declared the
end of history (Fukuyama 1992), we have instead seen capitalism morph and flex
over the years, creating new and unforeseen constellations of exploitation and
struggle. Despite such acute political economic and sociocultural transformations,
the possibilities that anarchist geographies might hold for geographical scholarship
and broader strategies of political action are, to us, as relevant and potent as
ever. The selective memories of humanitys past, the impoverished dialogues of the
present, and the static visions of a supposedly predetermined future that pervade
both academic and popular discourses are a testament to the paucity of the
political imagination in the current conjuncture. While neoliberal apostles of
the post-political consensus imagine that our world is best served by the
achievement of an integrated global village (M. Friedman 2002 [1962]; T.
Friedman 1999; Hayek 2001 [1944]), and geographers have responded with a
variety of critiques (Brenner and Theodore 2003; Castree et al 2010; England
and Ward 2007; Gibson-Graham 1996; Hart 2008; Harvey 2005; Peck 2010;
Smith, Stenning and Willis 2008; Springer 2010; Swyngedouw 2011), we are
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Reanimating Anarchist Geographies 1593
left with a sense of disappointment that our discipline, as of late, has not been
even more radical in its response. While it is true that most critical geographers
are willing to go further than simply repackaging neoliberalism with a smiling
face, much of the socialist left appears bereft of ideas beyond a state-regulated
capitalism.
Social transformation is, of course, necessarily a spatial project, and a spatial
dimension to the effective critique of existing structures is an important element of
imagining and forging spaces for new ones. Accordingly, we remain deeply cynical
of those ostensibly radical views that leave the prescriptions and authority of the
state firmly intact. Without appreciating the infinite possibilities that actually exist
if we only had the collective courage and freedom to explore them, we are left
with an all too limited vision of the geographical horizons of human organization.
We must similarly remain attentive to the idea that adaptations and abuses of state
power are intrinsic not only to neoliberalism and capitalism more generally (Peck
2001), but also to Marxism in its traditional sense. In the face of the sheer enormity
of the bloodshed that came with communist projects in the former Soviet Union,
Maoist China, and Pol Pots Cambodia, and the conflict, othering, and violence that
is facilitated by a Westphalian system of sovereign rule, we long for and are actively
committed to procuring alternative socio-spatial arrangements wherein people are
liberated from all forms of domination and are free to collectively make of themselves
what they will. While we are keen to critique Marxist-Leninism in all its various guises,
we acknowledge that there are heterodox Marxists working with more autonomist
and libertarian ideas that share similar concerns and are far less antithetical to
anarchist approaches. At the same time, we recognize that it is incorrect to suggest
as post-left anarchists like Fredy Perlman (1983) have arguedthat if we simply
choose to act differently then society will magically transform into a post-capitalist,
post-statist world. Anarchist thinkers have long interrogated complex matrices of
control and surveillance, highlighting the ways in which the agents of state and
capital converge to produce powerful regimes of containment or straightforward
obliteration of their political opponents (Graham 2005, 2009; Guerin 2005; Marshall
1992; Woodcock 2004). Indeed, Daniel Guerins (2010 [1936]) careful tracing of the
synergies between the rise of European fascism in the 1930s and the organizational
and disciplinary logic of the capitalist state can be read as a powerful warning from
history in the current context of recession, unrest, and the re-emergence of the far
right.
Thus, anarchist approaches to understanding and acting in society operate in
a tension between an assertion of peoples agency to collectively self-manage
their affairs on the one hand, and the everyday matrices of power that constrain
autonomy, solidarity and equality on the other. However, anarchism is also a
philosophy that is healthily sceptical of analysis for its own sake, and combines
its powerful critique of capital and authority with a creative and decentralized
mode of praxis. So while we recognize the importance of utopian thought, we
are not content to dwell exclusively in the realm of ideas, and advocate for the
importance of direct action in changing for the better the material conditions of
our own lives as well as the lives of others (Graeber 2009). Notwithstanding the
now-cliched refrain that anarchists were at the creative centre of the movements
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1594 Antipode
against neoliberal globalisation around the turn of the twenty-first century, anarchist
thought and action has profoundly influenced contemporary society in a much
more long-term and subcutaneous sense. The proliferation of wikis, peer-to-peer
file-sharing and open-source software; the continued popularity of the co-operative
movement, tenants associations and trade and credit unions; and a host of small-
scale mutual aid groups, networks and initiativesthese have, all to varying extents,
been pioneered, inspired or run by anarchists. Our perception of anarchisms role in
the world is, however, in direct proportion to our understanding of what anarchism is
and where (or how) it takes place. Although at times it may appear that anarchism is
chiefly (or solely) manifested in occasional spectacular riots on the streets of Athens,
Prague, London and Seattle, papers in this special issue indicate that anarchism is
a philosophy of everyday life, ingrained in its practitioners as a tool for survival,
wellbeing and social change. It is worth noting that, perhaps precisely due to the
legacy of Reclus and Kropotkin, anarchist geographers have tended to shy away
from engaging with the more insurrectionary approaches to anarchism, where
instead anarchism has been understood as a living breathing process that is acutely
implicated in our shared histories, our present circumstances, and our collective
futures. In this special issue, a broad understanding of anarchism is deployed to
demonstrate how itmuch like other political philosophiesis a multi-vocal and
developing terrain, contested both from within and without.
We draw two particular exceptions to our conceptualization of anarchism precisely
because they rest upon confusions of ideology. First, we reject the crude rhetoric that
failed states are somehow representative of anarchy. Anarchism is not synonymous
with chaos and collapse, but is instead about enacting horizontal networks
instead of top-down structures like states, parties, or corporations; networks based
on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy (Graeber
2002:70). The failed state as anarchy narrative is particularly misleading when
we consider James Sidaways (2003) contention that the failure of certain states
may be regarded as arising not from an absence of sovereign authority, but rather
as an excess of this exact logic. Second, we also reject the efforts of so-called
anarcho-capitalists and right-libertarians to appropriate anarchism, since the
political system that they propose, while calling for a reduction in or removal
of the workings of the state, is nonetheless premised upon a twisted neo-Social
Darwinism that promotes an atomistic survival of the fittest approach to social
life. Free market anarchism is an ideology entrenched in the very system of
dominance and exploitation that anarchists have been fighting to overturn; it
is capitalism in its most quintessential form, and thus, if we are to appreciate
the historical trajectory and philosophical basis of anarchism as a variant of
socialist thought, anarcho-capitalism is a misnomer that represents the exact
opposite of what anarchism is all about. Instead, we understand anarchism as a
branch of political thought and action that promotes the collective, egalitarian,
and democratic self-management of everyday life. For anarchists, this necessarily
requires the dismantling of unequal power relations in all their forms, and is
manifested through practices of voluntary cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and
mutual aid.
!
A Whirlwind Tour of Anarchist Geographies

Given the implicit geographical framework laid down for anarchism by early
anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (2008 [1840]) and Mikhail Bakunin (1990
[1873]) with their respective critiques of property and the state, it is perhaps
somewhat unsurprising that two of anarchisms most celebrated thinkers, Elisee
Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, were also geographers. Recluss (18761894) primary
contribution was his emancipatory vision outlined in The Earth and its Inhabitants:
The Universal Geography where he imagined a merger between humanity and the
Earth itself. In seeking to assist humanity to discover deeper emotional meaning
by recognizing itself as but one historical being in the flowering of a greater
planetary consciousness, he bravely sought to abolish all forms of domination,
which were to be replaced with practices of engaged love and active compassion
among all animals, both human and non-human (Clark and Martin 2004). Although
he considered Reclus as a mentor, Kropotkin (2008 [1902]) is today the more
famous of the two classical anarchist geographers, having published the highly
influential Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, which is regarded as a landmark in
the development of anarchisms political philosophy. Kropotkins views were at
least partially a response to the Social Darwinism of his time, where he sought to
provide a scientific basis to the idea that a more harmonious way of life rooted in
cooperation as opposed to competition was not only possible, but that this was in
fact the natural order of things. His ideas were explicitly geographical, and differed
greatly from the industrial imagination of Marxists, as Kropotkin placed his emphasis
on decentralized organization, rural life, agriculture, and local production, which he
maintained would remove any need for a central government and would allow for
self-sufficiency.
While anarchism remained a vibrant philosophical vehicle for radical politics into
the twentieth century, its intersections with geographical thought became less
overt. Emma Goldman (1969 [1917]), while not a geographer, nonetheless brought
anarchist geographies in a new direction, focusing on institutional structures of
domination beyond the state itself by injecting an embodied focus into her
critique in advocating free love, criticizing marriage, and admonishing homophobia.
Throughout the 1960s, having been strongly influenced by the ethical naturalism
of Reclus, Murray Bookchin (2004 [1971]) popularized his ecological and libertarian
ideas among the New Left and counterculture movements through a series of
innovative essays that were later compiled in Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Colin Ward
(1982 [1973]) was also increasingly active around this time, publishing a number
of books that once again brought anarchism into conversation with geography,
including his well known book Anarchy in Action. Most of Wards work focused
on issues of housing and planning laws, where the solutions he proposed were
clearly influenced by Kropotkin, including recommendations to rescind authoritarian
methods of socio-spatial organization in favour of non-hierarchical forms of solidarity
(White and Wilbert 2011).
By the early 1970s some geographers had begun to notice the wider anarchist
currents happening outside of academic geography. Richard Peet (1975) is not
only responsible for getting this very journal off the ground, he also used its pages
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1596 Antipode
to argue that the newly emerging radical geography should take Kropotkins
version of anarchism as its new beginning. Myrna Brietbart (1975) similarly looked
to Kropotkin, while also drawing on Proudhon, to contend that the organization
of human landscapes should be based upon principles that benefit everyone living
upon them and not just a privileged few. A year later, Bob Galois (1976) did much
the same, invoking anarchism to make a claim for deeper radicalization in geography
by rethinking its past and particularly the influence of Kropotkin. He argued that
the linear and cumulative stories that had been passed down right through to the
positivist revolution were but one single account in a multitude of possibilities,
and that by restricting our view of geographys history we limited contemporary
methods of enquiry and predetermined what questions were even worthwhile
asking. Radicalizing geography thus meant digging deeper into our collective past
and interrogating our inherited beliefs and traditions without prejudice, so that
something altogether new and emancipatory might evolve.
Encouraged by these exhortations, Breitbart (1978b) brought anarchist geogra-
phies centre stage within the pages of Antipode, organizing a series of papers
that cumulatively illustrated the enduring contribution that anarchist thought and
practice had on geography, and vice versa. The issue lived up to Galoiss (1976)
call for the exploration of our shared geo-histories, and included commentaries
on collectivization among workers and the disruptive spatial practices of the
Spanish Revolution circa the 1930s (Amsden 1978; Breitbart 1978a; Garcia-Ramon
1978), the profundity of Elisee Reclus and his geographically inspired version of
anarchism (Dunbar 1978), the inner workings of an anarchist community within
Paterson, New Jersey around 1900 (Carey 1978), the implications of Kropotkins
anarchist ideas on the spatial possibilities of cities (Horner 1978), libertarianism
within contemporary Spanish politics (Golden 1978), and a brilliant piece by Peet
(1978) on the geography of human liberation, which once again unpacked the
creativity and ethics of Kropotkins anarcho-geography in staking a claim for the
socio-spatiality of decentralization as a means to achieve freedom. Bookchins (1978
[1965]) essay Ecology and revolutionary thought and Kropotkins (1978 [1885])
What geography ought to be were also reprinted as part of this special issue
to demonstrate Antipodes commitment to a radical tradition and the continuing
significance of these two thinkers on the radical geographical thought that was
emerging at the time.
The early promise of the Kropotkin-inspired anarcho-communism of the 1970s
gave way to a decade that saw only one publication on anarchism in the pages of
Antipode. Jim Mac Laughlin (1986) critiqued the state-centricity of both geographers
and the social sciences more generally, lamenting the influence that ethnocentrism
had on the discipline of geography and its enduring prevalence thanks to the
influential writings of leading historical figures such as Halford Mackinder, Ellen
Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, Thomas Holdich, and Isaiah Bowman. In
once again invoking Kropotkin and Reclus, Mac Laughlin called upon geographers
to abandon the nationalistic historiography and statist imaginations that they had
inherited to explore antithetical alternatives. Within these pages the 1990s similarly
represented a dry spell with regard to anarchist geographies. Only a single paper by
Peter Taylor (1991:214215) gives any sustained attention to anarchism, where he
!
suggests that while he is broadly sympathetic to the anarchist political position,

he is careful to indicate that his inquiry was not another attempt to justify and
hence revive some variant of anarchism, but instead sought to locate anarchism
within a broader radical critique.
Into the 2000s, we have a very brief intervention from a direct action media
collective called SchNEWS (2000), who outline some of their activities in relation
to geographical concerns. A few papers followed in the early 2000s, with Paul
Chattertons (2002) exploration of squatting, Pierpaolo Mudus (2004) account of
Italian social centres in resisting neoliberalism, Jill Fentons (2004) examination
of surrealism and anti-capitalism in Paris, and Jon Andersons (2004) advocation
of environmental direct action. The Free Association (2010) has critiqued Black
Bloc tactics in championing love as a potential exodus from the antagonism of
neoliberalism, while Chris Carlsson and Francesca Manning (2010) also assess the
potential of exodus, in their case with respect to wage labour and the promise of
Nowtopia in reinventing work against the logic of capital. Chatterton (2006, 2010)
has continued to carry the flag of activism and autonomy from a broadly anarchist
perspective, and now serves as an editor of Antipode alongside Nik Heynen (2010;
Heynen and Rhodes forthcoming) who has also explored the radical potential of
activism and civil disobedience in relation to direct action and Black Anarchism
outside of these pages. The assembled guest editors of this special issue have also had
much to say about the productive relationship between geography and anarchism
(see Barker 2010; Brown 2007; Ince 2010; Pickerill and Chatterton 2006; Springer
2011, 2012b), and were motivated by this shared interest to further explore the
ongoing relevance of anarchist approaches within geographical praxis. This brief
genealogy of anarchist geographies brings us up to the present, where in 2011 the
Antipode Editorial Collective (2011:185) re-confirmed their support for political and
intellectual traditions that some scholars might feel uncomfortable using or those
that are relatively infrequently seen in geographical journals, explicitly calling for
more anarchism in the pages of this journal. We are pleased to present this special
issue as a response to this appeal.
Outline of the Issue

Following this introduction, the special issue begins with Simon Springers (2012a)
manifesto for anarchist geographies, which he situates as kaleidoscopic spatialities
that enable non-hierarchical relations of affinity between entities that maintain
autonomous positionalities. Springer exhorts geographers to rise to the challenge
of the contemporary neoliberal moment by exploring the untapped potential of
anarchist praxis. He begins by tracing the historical and contemporary intersections
between geographical scholarship and anarchism, attending to the early promise of
a radical geography with strong anarchistic tendencies and lamenting its eventual
eclipse in favour of both Marxist and feminist approaches. This discussion leads into
a critique of Marxism on the basis of its utilitarianism as well as its tendency to
be framed within nationalist discourses. Drawing an analogy between colonialism
and the state-making projects that Marxist positions have broadly supported, he
positions anarchism as a much more substantively post-colonial imperative. From
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1598 Antipode
here Springer begins to unpack the question of alternatives to the state, but rather
than provide a prescriptive set of guidelines or principles through which the future
should evolve, he purposefully draws back to an anarchist position that envisions
spacetime as a perpetual unfolding to be determined not by the dictates or desires
of a single academic, politician, or otherwise, but through the continuous dialogue
and protean innovations of our shared collective will. Through such a processual
understanding, Springer positions his contribution not as a call for revolution, which
he critiques on the basis of its implicit politics of waiting, but as an appeal that locates
the immediacy of the here and now as the dimension with the most emancipatory
potential precisely because it is the spacetime in which our lives continually unfold.
In the next paper, Richard J. White and Collin Williams (2012) present us with
a reinterpretation of the economic landscapes that are so often claimed as capitalist,
providing a detailed analysis of non-commodified practices of co-operation,
reciprocity, and mutual aid that comprise a significant component of our collective
lived experience. In arguing that non-capitalist economic relations represent a
significant and overlooked component of production, consumption, and exchange,
they demonstrate how anarchistic organization can be understood as a grounded
material practice of the present. While their argument may be met with a certain
degree of cynicism by those who would ask what exactly about their observations of
existing economic practice actually constitute anarchism, parallels can be drawn
to J.K. Gibson-Grahams (1996) productive critique of capitalism, and particularly
the swell of discursive production that perpetuates, reifies, and continually privileges
capitalist relations. To White and Williams such a line of questioning would actually
be welcomed, as their purpose is precisely to show how the everyday, mundane,
and quotidian patterns of human interaction actually intersect significantly with
anarchist philosophies. In this regard, they contend that rather than perpetuating a
capitalist interpretation of the world, an anarchistic heterodoxy can be understood
to have a certain degree of pervasiveness if we care to look again at what we think we
know about existing economic geographies. Such a realization leads them to argue
that a post-neoliberal anarchist future is much more than a utopian dream, and
can instead be appreciated as a viable alternative to the contemporary orthodoxy,
where unfolding spatial patterns of autonomous organization and mutualism may
productively guide the way.
Anthony Ince (2012) offers a new theorization of territoriality by applying an
anarchist approach that critiques the limited spatial imagination of contemporary
geographic inquiry and in particular its failure to interrogate how both capitalism
and authority are replicated, expanded, and reinforced through the space-making
practices of states. Ince aligns his critical appraisal to the anarchist concept of
prefiguration, which attempts to embed in the present the very modes of social
organization that are envisioned as part of a more egalitarian future. Through the
application of anarchist practice and thought, he contends that territory should be
viewed as a signifier for the contested processes of social relations. Drawing from
research conducted with a number of anarchist-inspired groups, Ince attempts to
think through how territorialization and bordering might be re-made in a more
productive and emancipatory sense by deploying the notion of prefigurative politics
as part of a re-imagining of space.
!
Turning our attention to the motivations of anarchists, Nathan Clough (2012)

outlines what he calls affective structures, a term he utilizes to account for the
relations between affect, emotion, and radical politics. In arguing that anarchist
organizing operates through an imagined connection between the affective
capacities of direct action and the emotions of anarchists, Clough draws our
attention to the ways in which sites of affinity, or the convergence spaces suggested
by Routledge (2003), are actually troubled by the state insofar as the same affective
content that makes anarchist organizing and action viable, also renders it penetrable
by police and open to social control. In plugging his argument into geographys
affective turn (Anderson and Harrison 2010), Cloughs interpretation goes beyond
the simple notion that social movements require emotional content to function
effectively. He extends this approach by arguing that social struggle is pursued
through the reciprocating relationship between the emotional organizing principle
of affinity and the energy and capacity of direct action, which actually becomes
the field of contestation itself. The infiltrations made by state operatives attest to
the central importance of emotional space, as creating friction and sowing discord
within this domain is a key tactical method of sabotaging the activities of anarchist
groups. What Clough persuasively suggests then is not only that emotions matter,
but that the affective-emotional linkages that are fostered by social movements
require the attention of geographers precisely because the spatialities of radical
politics and state control function as much in the embodied geographies of the
emotional terrain of the imagination as they do in the material spaces of the
city.
Next up is Jeff Ferrells (2012) theorization of drift, which he considers an
emergent form of epistemology, community, and spatial politics in the face of the
current conjuncture of consumerist economics, urban policing, and constrained
public spaces. To escape the regulatory framework of intensive urban governance,
Ferrell examines how groups seeking greater democratic control and accountability
utilize anarchic tactics and direct action to contravene the prescribed spatial order.
In its capacity to unravel rather than supplant everyday arrangements of power and
control, drift becomes the analytic focus of Ferrells argument, where he considers
it as a trajectory of interplay between anarchism and authority. Drift is at once both
the result of strategies of spatial control and a possibility of disorganization wherein
a new politics might be born. So while the social forces of our current political
economic climate cast people and populations adrift in a sea of alienation, political
expulsion, mass migration, forced removal and marginalization, such disorientation
can be embraced by drifters as a moment for progressive possibilities in remaking
cultures and communities by drifting closer together rather than further apart. It
thus becomes entirely possible to turn the contemporary politics of disarticulation
into a revitalized politics of mutual aid and collective self-help.
Adam J. Barker and Jenny Pickerill (2012) also address issues related to communi-
ties of difference converging. Delving into the complicated, place-based collisions
of anarchist activism and Indigenous resurgence in the United States and Canada,
anarchist and Indigenous geographies are positioned as similarly radical but not
necessarily complementary. While acknowledging the difficulties faced by anarchist
activists seeking to act as allies to Indigenous communities, the burden is here
!
1600 Antipode
placed on anarchists to bridge a longstanding gap in spatial understanding. Barker

and Pickerill note that there is a subtle but vital difference between anti-colonial
action concerned with power and hierarchy, and more fundamental decolonization
inherently linked to place. This distinction is often overlooked, in part because of
common assumptions about place and space that tend to obscure the needs of
Indigenous communities with respect to their lands. As a tool to assist in unpacking
the subtle differences in these conceptual geographical frameworks, anarchists are
urged to adopt an understanding of settler colonialism. Indigenous networks of
place-based relationships are the ongoing focus of settler colonization, a broad
and long-running dynamic of oppression that can sweep up even radical anarchist
movements. To counter this, Barker and Pickerill exhort would-be allies to find
their own roles in efforts to revitalize Indigenous-place networks by striving for
understanding across difference. Activists are asked to compliment rather than
replicate Indigenous relationships to place, and to change their thinking about
the nature of power in place.
In the final paper of the issue, Farhang Rouhani (2012) draws our attention to the
positive implications that anarchist practice and thought could potentially bring
to our pedagogical approaches in human geography. This is an engaging piece
that productively works through the contributions that geography and anarchism
have to make to each other. Anarchism has a long tradition of evoking radical
experimentation with teaching, while geography on the other hand seems
particularly well suited to a critical examination of education. Kropotkin (1978
[1885]) recognized this reciprocating potential over a century ago, and in tracing
his own ongoing attempts to bring anarchism into the spaces of a higher education
liberal arts context in the contemporary United States, Rouhani picks up the
pieces. He urges us to think critically about how anarchism sheds the bondage of
commodified forms of knowledge production by fostering creative and non-coercive
learning opportunities both inside and outside of the classroom. In this respect his
essay sits well alongside recent works by Judith Suissa (2006) and Robert H. Haworth
(2012) in advocating the embrace of an explicitly anarchist ethos in our educational
approach, but Rouhani appropriately highlights how geography might productively
take centre stage in such efforts. Ultimately, we are presented with a powerful lesson
in how a combined anarchist-geographic pedagogical approach can lead to
alternative models of education that think outside of the top-down modalities that
dominate the contemporary education landscape by placing student-led liberation
and learning at the forefront of a critical pedagogy.
The issue you now (perhaps virtually) hold in your hands is the result of an imman-
ently rewarding process and there are many to thank along the way. We are grateful
to The Antipode Editorial Collective for their support, patience, and hard work in
seeing this special issue through to completion. Wendy Larner has applied her
sharp editorial oversight to all of the papers, which has increased the quality of the
manuscripts considerably as she asked tough questions of the assembled authors and
expected well thought out responses. Andrew Kent has slugged it out in the trenches
of administrative duty, keeping this project on time and moving ever forward.
Nik Heynen and Paul Chatterton have been vocal supporters of this initiative, and
while we stop short of holding them accountable for any of the content found
!
herein, their scholarship and activism have been inspiring. James Sidaway has been
a source of encouragement and critical feedback throughout this process, while
the anonymous referees have similarly played a vital role. Uri Gordon (2012) has
graciously agreed to write an afterword to this special issue, and as a contemporary
anarchist theorist whose work has numerous synergies with those working within
the general framework of radical geography, we are excited to bring him into
direct conversation with geographical scholarship and hope that his work will be
more widely read among human geographers as a result. As over 30 years have
passed since Myrna Breitbart (1978b) previously assembled the first special issue on
anarchist geographies in these pages, we are tremendously excited about this issue
seeing the light of day and feel that it is long overdue. We are honoured that Myrna
has written a foreword that reflects on her original foray into anarchist philosophies
and contemplates the challenges and potential that come with exploring anarchist
geographies from within and importantly beyond the academy (Brietbart 2012).
With the torch now passed along to us, our biggest collective hope is that it is not
another 30 years before our call is answered. We are optimistic that this special issue
will motivate other radical geographers to begin exploring the fertile intellectual
soils that anarchist geographies have to offer. While the assembled essays cover
significant breadth in cultivating our understandings of what anarchism might yet
add to geographical theory and vice versa, we recognize our collective contribution
as inherently partial and incomplete. There is a great deal of work to be done and
much more to be said as anarchist geographies continue to evolve in various
contexts, stretching the limits of our geographical imaginations and inspiring a
wealth of innovative spatial practices. Let this special issue serve a mere starting
point in the flourishing of a new bust of colour.
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Anarchism! What Geography Still
Ought To Be
Simon Springer
Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada;
simonspringer@gmail.com
Abstract: This article is a manifesto for anarchist geographies, which are understood
as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean
connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are
voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence,
predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. In its rejection of such
multivariate apparatuses of domination, this article is a proverbial call to non-violent arms
for those geographers and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly
endless series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and
malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for the
end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane version
of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of the state. It
is instead the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to the
disciplines earliest days: anarchism!
Keywords: anarchism, colonialism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postanarchism, radical

geography
Introduction
We, frightful Anarchists as we are, know only one way of establishing peace and
goodwill among women and menthe suppression of privilege and the recognition of
right . . . It pleases us not to live if the enjoyments of life are to be for us alone; we protest
against our good fortune if we may not share it with others; it is sweeter for us to wander
with the wretched and the outcasts than to sit, crowned with roses, at the banquets of
the rich. We are weary of these inequalities which make us the enemies of each other; we
would put an end to the furies which are ever bringing people into hostile collision, and
all of which arise from the bondage of the weak to the strong under the form of slavery,
serfage and service. After so much hatred we long to love each other, and for this reason
are we enemies of private property and despisers of the law (Elisee Reclus 1884:641).
If you wish, like us, that the entire liberty of the individual and, consequently, his [or her]
life be respected, you are necessarily brought to repudiate the government of man by
man [sic], whatever shape it assumes; you are forced to accept the principles of Anarchy
that you have spurned so long. You must then search with us the forms of society that
can best realize that ideal and put an end to all the violence that rouses your indignation
(Peter Kropotkin 2005 [1898]:144).
Anarchism is a maligned political philosophy; of this there can be no doubt. Typically

anarchism is portrayed as a chaotic expression of violence perpetrated against the

1606 Antipode
supposedly peaceable order of the state. Yet such depictions misrepresent the core
of anarchist thought, which is properly understood as the rejection of all forms of
domination, exploitation, and archy (systems of rule), hence the word an-archy
(against systems of rule). Anarchism is a theory and practice that seeks to produce a
society wherein individuals may freely co-operate together as equals in every respect,
not before a law or sovereign guaranteewhich enter new forms of authority,
imposed criteria of belonging, and rigid territorial bindingsbut before themselves
in solidarity and mutual respect. Consequently, anarchism opposes all systems of rule
or forms of archy (ie hierarchy, patriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, anthroparchy etc)
and is instead premised upon co-operative and egalitarian forms of social, political,
and economic organization, where ever-evolving and autonomous spatialities may
flourish. Although it has often been said that there are as many anarchisms as there
are anarchists, my contention is that anarchism should embrace an ethic of non-
violence precisely because violence is recognized as both an act and process of
domination.
Violence has formed the basis of many historical anarchist movements and it
would be disingenuous to simply wish away this constituent as somehow non-
anarchist. Yet before anarchists like Paul Brousse, Johann Most, Errico Malatesta,
and Alexander Berkman popularized revolutionary violence and propaganda of
the deed, earlier anarchists (or proto-anarchists) like William Godwin, Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon, Henry David Thoreau, and Leo Tolstoy rejected violence as a
justifiable means to overthrow the tyranny of the state. From its outset, anarchism
accordingly sympathized with non-violence, which was reflected in The Peaceful
Revolutionist, a weekly paper edited by Josiah Warren in 1833, and the first anarchist
periodical ever produced (Bailie 1906). That anarchism has since become derided
as a direct synonym for violencerather than acknowledged as an ideology that
has at times engaged both violence and non-violencespeaks to the discursive
buttressing of the status quo against alternative socio-spatial and political economic
formations, and to the limited geopolitical imagination or ideological indoctrination
of those who either cannot or simply refuse to conceive of a world without
states. Yet the originary critique of anarchism is that the state is tantamount
to violence, or as Godwin (1976 [1793]:380) put it, Above all we should
not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment
and individual conscience of [hu]mankind. Given the postcolonial purview that
contemporary human geography now espouses, radical geographers would do well
to think more critically about how acceptance of the state actually recapitulates
the violence of colonial modes of thought and practice. In reinvigorating the
potential of anarchist geographies and in realizing the critical praxis anarchism
demands, my feeling is that non-violence should be understood as an ideal for
anarchists to live into. This is the story of anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman (1996
[1923]:253), who in her younger years flirted with violence, but eventually came to
reject it:
The one thing I am convinced of as I have never been in my life is that the gun decides
nothing at all. Even if it accomplishes what it sets out to dowhich it rarely doesit
brings so many evils in its wake as to defeat its original aim.
!
Anarchism! What Geography Still Ought To Be 1607
Thus if anarchism is positioned against the state, and in particular the

monopolization, institutionalization, and codification of violence that such a spatial
organization represents, then it should follow that anarchism offers an alternative
geographical imagination that refuses violent means.
I begin this paper by exploring how geographers have taken up anarchist thought.
Specifically I argue that although anarchism factored heavily into the radicalization of
human geography in the 1970s, this early promise was quickly eclipsed by Marxism,
which has (along with feminism) since become a cornerstone of contemporary
radical geography. The following section problematizes the utilitarianism of Marxian
thought, which is argued to reiterate the colonial precepts Marxism ostensibly seeks
to disrupt. Anarchism is presented as a preferable alternative insofar as it disavows
nationalism and recognizes that there is no fundamental difference between
colonization and state-making other than the scale upon which these parallel
projects operate, meaning that any substantively post-colonial positionality must
also be post-statist or anarchic. Next I seek to provide a partial answer to the
question of alternatives to the state and how new forms of voluntary human
organization might be enabled to blossom. Rather than advancing a revolutionary
imperative, I encourage an embrace of the immediacy of the here and now as
the most emancipatory spatio-temporal dimension, precisely because it is the
location and moment in which we actually live our lives. I also take neoliberalisms
illusion of state dissolution head on at this stage, and remind readers that small
government is still government, so while the rationalities, strategies, technologies,
and techniques of neoliberal governance are new, the disciplinary logic of the state
remains unchanged. In the conclusion I offer some thoughts on the future of radical
geography and in particular where I think anarchist geographies can provoke a more
liberationist framework that potentially breaks from both the discursive formations
of neoliberalism and the limitations of Marxism vis-a-vis contemporary oppositional
struggles.
This paper is accordingly to be read as a manifesto for anarchist geographies,
which are understood as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-
hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein
solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and
free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned
categories of belonging. In its rejection of such multivariate apparatuses of
domination, this article is a proverbial call to non-violent arms for those geographers
and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly endless
series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and
malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for
the end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane
version of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of
the state. It is instead a condemnation of capitalism and the state in whatever
guise they might adopt; an indictment of all manner of exploitation, manipulation,
and domination of humanity; a disavowal of the privations of the majority and the
privileges of the minority that have hitherto and by common consent been called
order; and the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to
!
1608 Antipode
the disciplines earliest days. This is nothing more and nothing less than a renewed
call for anarchism.
For Anarchist Geographies

Many critical scholars probably take some aspects of anarchist thought for granted, but
there has been very little development of the tradition within geography in the last 100
years . . . Yet as many people have questioned the basis of so-called grand theory and
any claims to universal explanatory ideas, we might expect anarchism to come into its
own (Alison Blunt and Jane Wills 2000:38).
In light of Kropotkins and Recluss foundational contributions to the discipline of

geography (Breitbart 1981; Dunbar 1978; Horner 1978), and anarchisms important
role in the emergence of a more radical geographical praxis (Breitbart 1978; Peet
1978), it is surprising that this vibrant intellectual tradition has, until recently,
been largely ignored by geographers since the late 1970s. Writing at the height
of geographys infatuation with colonialism during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, and in stark contrast to contemporaries like David Livingstone,
Halford Mackinder, and Friedrich Ratzel, who spent their days advancing an
imperialist vision for the discipline (Godlewska and Smith 1994; Kearns 2009),
Kropotkin and Reclus each possessed a resolute anti-authoritarian imagination.
Kropotkins theory of the voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources for common
benefit, or mutual aid, was a direct challenge to the social Darwinism found in the
writings of Mackinder, Ratzel, and in particular, biologist Thomas Henry Huxleys
(1888) essay The struggle for existence (Kinna 1992). They came to conceive of
the animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved individuals,
thirsting for one anothers blood, Kropotkin (2008 [1902]:1011) writes in his
magnum opus, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution:
They made modern literature resound with the war cry of woe to the vanquished, as if
it were the last word of modern biology. They raised the pitiless struggle for personal
advantages to the height of a biological principle which [hu]man[s] must submit to
as well, under the menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual
extermination.
In arguing that the reality of mutual aid among non-human animals undermined
the naturalistic arguments for capitalism, war, and imperialism that dominated
geographical thought at the time, like the social Darwinists, but in precisely
the opposite way, Kropotkin sought to find in nature the social form he
wanted to legitimate in society (Kearns 2004). Geography was accordingly to be
conceived not as a program for imperial hubris, but as a means of dissipating
prejudice and realizing co-operation between communities (Kropotkin 1978
[1885]).
Like his friend and ally Kropotkin, the anarchist vision of Reclus was similarly rooted
in geography. Reclus advanced an integral approach wherein every phenomenon,
including humanity, was conceived as inseparable from other living beings and
geographical features of the land itself (Clark 1997). Earth was accordingly
interpreted as a unified whole, where any coherent account of the world required
!
a simultaneous recognition of all the multiple interconnecting factors. For Reclus

(19051908:114115), it is only through an act of pure abstraction that one
can contrive to present a particular aspect of the environment as if it had a
distinct existence, and strive to isolate it from all the others, in order to study
its essential influence (quoted in Clark and Martin 2004:5). Although the focus
here was the natural system, the holism of Recluss work actually demanded
that social phenomena be considered as imbued within and co-constitutive of the
natural universal geography he envisioned (see Reclus 18761894). For Reclus,
the preceding quote had as much relevance to the prevailing ideas of human
organization, whether Marxian or neoclassical, as it did to nature, which hints at the
limitations of these two economic theories. Yet, while Recluss ideas of integrality
inspired the social ecology of Bookchin (1990) and other strands of the radical
environmentalist movement, the political implications of his work with respect to
human organization have been essentially overlooked by geographers for over a
century. His continuing political significance, Clark and Martin (2004) argue, comes
in large part from his egalitarian vision of a globalization from below based on the
integrality he revealed and promoted, which offers a theoretical alternative to the
dominant corporate and statist versions of globalization. In contrast to our present
moment of a world divided into haves and have nots where the geography of
access to capital largely adheres to the peaks and valleys of the Westphalian system,
Reclus (18761894, quoted in Clark and Martin 2004) envisioned a free and stateless
world with its center everywhere, its periphery nowhere.
While contemporary human geography has appropriately moved on from appeals
to science as the sine qua non of truth, retaining Recluss and Kropotkins
skepticism for and challenges to the dominant ideologies of the day has much to
offer contemporary geographical scholarship and its largely unreflexive acceptance
of the civilizational, legal, and capitalist discourses that converge around the state.
The perpetuation of the idea that human spatiality necessitates the formation of
states is writ large in a discipline that has derided the territorial trap on the one
hand (see Agnew 1994; Brenner 1999), yet on the other hand, has confoundingly
refused to take the state-centricity critique in the direction of state dissolution.
Contemporary geographers have accordingly failed to engage the emancipatory
potential of anarchist praxis, largely overlooking contributions from Bey (2003),
Bookchin (1990), and Clastres (2007 [1989]) on the importance of alternative
configurations to the state, favoring instead discussions surrounding alternative
configurations of the state, particularly by way of Marxian theory. In its present
form, such concern focuses on explaining how neoliberalizing processes facilitate
state transformation and endurance (see Agnew 2009; Harvey 2005; Peck 2001),
offering a counterpoint to popular commentaries that globalization is eroding the
state and producing a borderless world that signifies the end of both history and
geography (see Fukuyama 1992; OBrien 1992). In other words, while neoclassical-
cum-neoliberal ideas have been vigorously debated and discredited by geographers
working from broadly Marxian perspectives, contemporary geography has not seen
anarchist critiques of Marxism develop with the same theoretical and empirical force
of its radical rival, an endeavor long overdue.
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1610 Antipode
Although still very much underrepresented in the geographical literature, recent

contributions from Chatterton (2006), Halfacree (1999), Heynen (2010), Ince
(2010), and Springer (2011) offer welcome interventions that point towards the
continuing promise of anarchist ideas in both theory and practice. As welcome as
these engagements are, there is still a great deal of theoretical terrain yet to be
explored by geographers. In particular, I am thinking of the profound contributions
being made by scholars working outside of geography, such as Call (2003), May
(1994), Newman (2010), and Rousselle and Evren (2011) on the possibilities and
potential of postanarchism. While poststructuralist ideas are now commonplace in
the discipline, human geographers havewith few exceptions (see Brown 2007;
Springer forthcoming)failed to explore the potential of postanarchist thought.1
Postanarchism is not a movement beyond anarchism, but a renewal of anarchist
ideas through the infusion of poststructuralist theory, thus allowing us to retain
an emancipatory spirit, while abandoning appeals to science and the essentializing
epistemologies and ontologies that characterize classical anarchist thought. It
is incumbent upon radical geographers to begin examining the contemporary
importance of anarchist action and postanarchist theories in resisting capitalism,
rather than simply recapitulating those state-centric, road to nowhere arguments
that call for more equitable distributions of power within the state. The state after all,
in the classic anarchist critique, is a hierarchical institution premised on deference to
authority. As ostensibly non-anarchist thinkers like Agamben (1998) and Benjamin
(1986 [1921]) have recognized, it is precisely because of the states juridico-
sovereign character that it can never actually be egalitarian. And so geographers
should be keen to ask: where do supposedly liberationist arguments that continue
to embrace the state leave us except with the structures of hierarchy and domination
firmly in place?
While not the sole concern of anarchists, the state nonetheless forms the primary
locus of anarchist thought. Although Marxists have increasingly questioned the logic
of state power, it is beyond the scope of this paper to develop a taxonomy that
situates precisely where the multiple variants of Marxian thought sit with respect
to the state. At the risk of oversimplifying the complexity of the intersections between
the two principle alternatives of socialist thought, it is nonetheless fair to say that
the question of the state is the originary differentiation between Marxism and
anarchism. Indeed, the main division between anarchism and Marxism emerged
from differences in opinion over the degree of autonomy afforded to the workers in
the post-revolutionary conjuncture and the closely related question of the monopoly
of violence. Anarchists rejected any such monopoly on the premise that violence is
first and foremost the primary dimension of state power and accordingly any state,
whether controlled by the bourgeoisie or captured by the workers, will inevitably
come to function as an instrument of class domination. In contrast, Marxists believed
that because a minority class rules most societies prior to socialism, the achievement
of a classless society requires the previously disadvantaged class to seize the state and
acquire a monopoly over violence. Yet the desire to overturn the state and create
a liberated socialist system via despotic power is a contradiction that anarchists
disavowed. The related Marxian notion of withering away the state was similarly
seen as a contradiction. As Bakunin (1953 [1873]:288) observed:
!
If their State is going to be a genuine peoples State, why should it then dissolve
itself? . . . [Marxists] say that this State yokethe dictatorshipis a necessary transitional
means in order to attain the emancipation of the people: Anarchism or freedom, is the
goal, the State or dictatorship is the means. Thus, to free the working masses, it is first
necessary to enslave them.
Such noticeable inconsistency appalled anarchists, and during the First International,
this discrepancy became the fundamental divide between socialists. Whereas
Marxism traditionally represented the statist edge of the socialist political spectrum,
or at the very least accepted the state in utilitarian terms as a means to an end
through a provisional dictatorship of the proletariat, anarchism has always been the
domain of libertarian socialism, rejecting the idea that a realigned state will ever
wither and lead to an emancipated condition.
Colonialism is Dead, Long Live Colonialism?

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while
methods and tactics are another. . . . The means employed become, through individual
habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify
it, and presently the aims and means become identical (Emma Goldman 2003 [1923]:
260261).
I am not enthusiastic about Marxs own enthusiasm for capitalism. Marx and the
classical political economists saw capitalism through a similar celebratory lens; only
Marx tempered his view by suggesting that it was a necessary phase to pass
through on the way to communism, and not a glorious end-state as with the
liberal project of Adam Smith. Writing a century later, Bill Warrenarguably one
of the most controversial writers within the Marxist traditionpicked up on this
tenor of Marxs work. Warren (1980:136) argued that Imperialism was the means
through which the techniques, culture and institutions that had evolved in Western
Europe over several centuriesthe culture of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolutionsowed their revolutionary seeds in
the rest of the world. He correctly interpreted the integral relationship between
capitalism and imperialism, but painted imperialism as a necessary evil on the
path towards some greater good. The banality of Warrens depiction of imperialism
ensured that his detractors were many, but he was really revisiting the Marxism
expressed in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 2002 [1848]), where
although Marx condemned the violence of primitive accumulation, he nonetheless
retained a view of this violent expropriation as necessary for the furthering of
human possibilities (Glassman 2006:610). In spite of finding capitalism morally
repugnant, when compared with the feudal mode of production that preceded
it, Marx (1976 [1867]) recognized capitalism as having a number of virtues,
acknowledging it as amazingly productive, sparking human creativity, igniting
awesome technological change, and ushering in potentially democratic forms of
government. It is this optimistic side of Marx that Warren (1980) followed in arguing
that, at an early stage, capitalisms exploration and inhabitation of new territories
was carried out through the guise of colonialism and imperialism, and that while
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1612 Antipode
this form of capitalism had drawbacks for those territories that were occupied, it
had important benefits as well. Education levels were said to have improved, life
expectancy was thought to have increased, and the form of political control was
considered more democratic than that which existed before colonialism.
If all of this sounds familiar, it is essentially the same set of discursive principles that
presently guide neoliberalization, which Harvey (2003) has appropriately recognized
as a new imperialism. The refrain is that people have been made better off, and
although imperfect in its executionwhich is largely blamed on the continuing
interference of the state in marketseventually the trickle down effect will bear
fruit and the promised utopia will materialize. Rather than wait for the market to sort
things out on its own schedule, the difference with Marx is that he wanted to quicken
the pace at which an egalitarian social contract is arrived upon through revolution.
To be clear, I am not suggesting ideological consonance between Marxism and
neoliberalism here, but instead seek to illuminate how both rest upon the notion
that the state can be used as a means to achieve a liberated end. In contrast,
an anarchist position rejects the interlocking violence of the state, imperialism, and
capitalism outright, and is unimpressed with the utilitarian strain of Marxian thought.
The means of capitalism and its violences do not justify the eventual end-state of
communism, nor does this end justify such means. This particular resonance of
Marxist thought resembles neoliberalism, where although the utopian end-state is
conceptualized differently, the penultimate means to achieving the final product
is virtually the same. While postMarxists appropriately foreground gender, sex,
ethnicity, race, and other ostensibly non-capitalist categories as equally important
lines of differentiation that mark the hierarchies, inequalities, and violences of our
world under neoliberalism (Wright 2006), anarchism goes further by rejecting the
substantive violence that is imbricated within and implicitly accepted by Marxs
linear approach to history based on stages of development. Unease with the
utilitarianism and essentialism of Marxian thought can similarly be regarded as the
genesis of poststructuralism (Peters 2001), which instead focuses on the complexity
and heterogeneity of our present condition, and refuses totalizing theories through
a rejection of absolute truths.
Although poststructuralist critique has quickly become one of the most vibrant
philosophical variants within the discipline, and Foucault, Deleuze, and Lacan have
all cultivated critiques within the fertile ground of anti-state thinking (May 1994;
Newman 2001), contemporary human geography has been slow to engage ideas
that call for Leviathans end. I can only speculate on the reasons for this lacuna,
but it seems that the predominance of Marxist ideas have some role to play.
Traditional Marxism, and its espousal of statist ideology, is well traversed in the
geographical literature, where the influence of Harvey (1973, 1982, 2005, 2009)
looms large. Although occasionally lamented by political geographers critical of the
limited geopolitical vision state-centricity affords (see Johnston 2001; Taylor 1996),
statist forms of organization have nonetheless taken on a certain platitude within
the discipline. The state is typically either implicitly accepted or not subjected to
the type of examination that penetrates its fundamental precepts, even if feminist
geographers have helped to redefine the parameters upon which the state is actually
conceived (see England 2003; Gibson-Graham 1996; Sharp 2007). Nonetheless, a
!
significant swath of contemporary human geography has raised the question of the
state only insofar as to determine how neoliberalism has reconfigured its orientation,
with Marxist geographers calling for renewed and re-imagined versions of social
welfare (Harvey 2005; Peck 2001), and poststructuralist geographers arguing that
governmentality renders the state nearly invisible through self-regulating, auto-
correcting subjects (Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Larner 2000). The potentiality of
the latter to reveal the ongoing force of statist logics and the violence this engenders
through altered disciplinary rationalities and mutated techniques of biopolitical
control is scarcely realized, to say nothing of poststructuralisms coincidence with
anarchist thought (see Newman 2010).
That radical geography retains a decidedly statist focus perhaps also betrays
the colonial origins of the discipline itself and a hesitation in breaking from
old disciplining habits. Yet the contemporary nation-state, following Anderson
(1991) and Billig (1995), must be understood as a smaller-scale replica of the
colonial state. Although differing in their diffusion and distribution across space,
both national and colonial state power express the same violent principles of a
privileged few wielding influence over others, and imposing a singular identity
upon antecedent ways of imagining belonging. Marx was not oblivious to this
critique, yet here again he advanced a utilitarian ideal. As capitalism spread around
the globe, it gave rise to powerful resistance movements by oppressed workers
and peasantsled by vanguardswhich Marx believed would eventually engender
the transcendence of capitalism. In particular instances Marx supported nationalist
struggles, viewing nationalism as another stage in development towards a future
workers internationalism (Lewis 2000). Yet from an anarchist perspective it is hard
to see the emancipatory end when the means are shot through with violence. What
national liberation actually represents is the trading of one set of elites for another,
and thus one form of colonialism for another. While the territorial expression has
been scaled down, the underlying logic remains unchanged. Just as the colonial
state sought and was frequently able to impose a monopoly on violence, the
struggle to create the nation-state is likewise a struggle for the monopoly of violence
(Harris 2004). What is created in both instancesa colonial or national state
is itself a means of violence. In recognizing this congruencynotwithstanding
Harts (2008:680) so-called properly post-colonial frame of understanding that
continues to privilege the stateto be post-colonial in any meaningful sense
is to also be post-statist or anarchic, wherein the hierarchies, order, authority,
and violence upon which these parallel state projects have been built are rejected
outright. Moreover, internationalism by definition can never actually transcend the
state; instead it continues to presuppose and assume nations. By calling for trans-
geographical co-operation between nations, Marxs internationalism fails to move
beyond the notion of the nation-state as the foundational unit of belonging.
Why then has contemporary radical geography not developed an anti-colonial
imagination that rises to the post-statist challenge that Anderson (2005) argues
such a vision actually demands? Reclus and Kropotkin demonstrated long ago
that geography lends itself well to emancipatory ideas, and it was no accident
that two of the major anarchists of the late Nineteenth Century were also
geographers (Ward 2010:209). There exists an extraordinary latent potential within
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1614 Antipode
contemporary radical geography to become even more radical in its critiques, and
thus more liberationist in its focus by embracing an anarchist ethos. Anarchism
is able to recognize capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, neoliberalism, militarism,
nationalism, classism, racism, ethnocentrism, Orientalism, sexism, genderism,
ageism, ableism, speciesism, carnism, homophobia, transphobia, sovereignty
and the state as interlocking systems of domination. The mutually reinforcing
composition of these various dimensions of archy consequently means that
to uncritically exempt one from interrogation, is to perpetuate this omnicidal
conglomeration as a whole. Unlike the circumscriptions of Marxian geography, the
promise of anarchist geographies rests precisely in their ability to think integrally and
therein refuse to assign priority to any one of the multiple dominating apparatuses,
as all are irreducible to one another (Brown 1996). This means that no one struggle
can wait on any other. Its all or nothing, and the a priori privilege of the workers,
the vanguards, or any other class over others is to be rejected on the basis of its
incipient hierarchy.
Imagining Alternatives
There are, in truth, no worse counter-revolutionaries than revolutionaries; because there
are no worse citizens than the envious (Anselme Bellegarrigue 1848:np).
These are not dreams for a distant future, nor a stage to be reached when other stages are
gone through, but processes of life about us everywhere which we may either advance
or hold back (Roger Baldwin 2005:114).
The question of alternatives to the state is foremost in the minds of those skeptical
of anarchism. In this vein Harvey (2009:200) asks, How will the reifications of
this anarchist ideal actually work on the ground in absolute space and time?
Although anarchists have theorized multiple possibilities ranging from collectivist
to individualist, syndicalist to mutualist, and voluntaryist to communist, I advocate
a non-doctrinaire, postanarchist approach and accordingly my response is to begin
by refusing to offer a prescriptive overview of what forms of social organization I
think should be developed. The answer to this question is not to be determined
by a single individual, but rather collectively through continuous dialogue and
ongoing adaptive innovation. In this sense, Harveys (2009) critique of anarchism is
problematic on two counts. First, when have space and time ever been absolute,
other than in the reductionist lens of positivism? This assessment belies Harveys
own recognition for the dialectical influence of space and time, expressed as
spacetime. Second, he attempts to apply the tenets of Marxian thought and its
stage-based thinking to a philosophical position that eschews such predetermined
linearity. Harvey (2009) conceptualizes place-making as an end-state politics, which
incorrectly positions anarchism as an ostensibly completable projectthe shared
ideal of both Marxism and neoliberalismrather than appreciating it as a living,
breathing, and forever protean process (Springer 2011). Some may view my
restrained position as a copout, but I want to remind readers that any attempt
to prescribe a fixed model in isolation from the larger social body recapitulates both
the neoliberal project and an authoritarian disposition, as each argues in favor of
!
one way of doing things. It also reinforces the arrogance/ignorance of the so-called
expert, by presuming to know what is best, without appreciating ones limitations
(Mitchell 2002). Even Haraway, as brilliant a thinker as she is, once exposed her own
limitations in revealing, I have almost lost the imagination of what a world that isnt
capitalist could look like. And that scares me (Harvey and Haraway 1995:519). The
same nascent fear should be similarly evoked when one critically reflects upon the
state and its seemingly all-consuming pervasiveness. We treat this particular form of
hierarchical organization and territorialized dominance as though it is unavoidable,
and in doing so we actively forget that the bulk of the time that humans have existed
on planet Earth has been characterized by non-statist organization. The state is thus
no more inevitable than it is needed.
Neoliberalism is particularly virulent inasmuch as it contributes to a new element
of our collective forgetting by reconfiguring the state in such a way that facilitates a
failure to notice its ongoing deleterious effects (Springer 2010a). The discourse
behind this illusion of dissolution attempts to convince us that neoliberalism
represents our liberation as individuals, emancipating us from the chains of what it
calls big government. Yet the literature has amply demonstrated that the state
continues to matter to neoliberal modalities (see England and Ward 2007; Peck
2001). Likewise, the monopoly of violence the state claims for itself remains just
as forceful and oppressive under the disciplinary logic of a neoliberal state as it
does under any other state configurationfeel good moments of ostensible
democracy (read electoral authoritarianism) notwithstanding (Springer 2011).
What is actually lost through neoliberalisms supposed streamlining of the state
is most obviously the shared social provisions previously afforded to citizens. This
roll-back results in the collapse of social trust, actively anticipating the Hobbesian-
cum-Darwinian myth of all against all where only the strong survive. People are
encouraged not to look to each other for support in their everyday transactions
or even when the going gets tough, but to simply stop being lazy and get to
work. Neoliberal discourse positions the system itself as being beyond reproach, so
any existent anomalies, such as impoverishment or unemployment, are dismissed
as distinctive personal failures. Those who do not succeed at this perverse game
are easily resolved by the punitive neoliberal state through their criminalization.
Incarceration is seen as a more viable solution than addressing the mounting
inequalities and ongoing poverty of the majority (Peck 2003). This disciplinary
stratagem is particularly debilitating because for popular power to be realized,
the conditions for social co-operation must be present, meaning quite simply that
people have to trust each other.
Neoliberalism, in particular, and capitalism more generally, work to destroy trust
by making us compete with one another and profit from each others vulnerability.
Similarly, the state destroys trust by warning us that homo homini lupus will become
the rule in the absence of sovereign power (Cohn 2010). To re-establish trust, it
would seem that smashing capitalism alone is not enough. In convening a post-
neoliberal realitythat is, the realization of a context that completely breaks from
the current zeitgeistsovereignty and the state itself must also be dismantled.
Doing so, at first glance, appears to raise the problematic of getting from here
to there and from now to then. Although positioning the idea of revolution as
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1616 Antipode
having fallen from view, Smith (2010) instead exemplifies the ongoing infatuation
on the Left by suggesting that the recent financial crisis should be the basis upon
which the revolutionary imperative is renewed. But wanting a global revolution
to emerge from the recent economic crisis affords an instrumental role to a single
global economic system, which oddly resurrects the neoliberalism-as-monolithism
argument (see Springer 2010b for a critique). This criticism hints at Smiths implicit
embrace of the utilitarian role Marx afforded capitalism/colonialism, a position
that anarchists find objectionable. While pitying the victims of colonialism, Marx
consoled himself with the thought that its far-reaching abuses would only hasten the
day when the entire world would be consumed by a single crisis, thus inaugurating
the revolutionary swell he so desired. This is an overly passive approach, because if
revolution is to result from a capitalist crisis, then this implies a politics of waiting for
the day when all that is solid melts into air (Marx and Engels 2002 [1848]:223).
The question of lost trust becomes particularly acute at the moment of melting,
because as Proudhon (2005 [1864]:108) warned, there is danger in waiting until
moments of crisis, when passions become unduly inflamed by widespread distress.
In the time that has passed since the crisis first hit in late 2008, sadly it has become
increasingly obvious just how possible it isin the absence of trustfor people
to accept racist, nationalist, and fundamentalist alternatives. Rather than biding
our time in waiting for the levee to break, geographers could instead anarchically
embrace the here and now as the spacetime within which our lives are actually
lived (see Vaneigem 2001 [1983]). Acknowledging the enabling power of this
immediacy is emancipatory in itself as it awakens us to the possibility that we
can instantaneously refuse participating in the consumerist patterns, nationalist
practices, and hierarchical positionings that confer legitimacy on the existing order
and instead engage a do it yourself culture centered on direct action, non-
commodification, and mutual aid (Graeber 2009; Halfacree 2004; Trapese Collective
2007). In aligning to Gibson-Grahams (2008) contention that other worlds are
possible, and to Koopmans (2011) concern for the non-violent counter-hegemonic
struggle of what she calls alter-geopolitics, the power of here and now further
allows us the freedom to imagine and begin establishing the alternative free
institutions and voluntary associations that will smooth the transition towards a truly
post-colonial/post-neoliberal future. Yet the significance of imagining alternatives to
the current order is not to establish a fixed program for all time, but is instead to
provide a point of alterity or exteriority as a way of questioning the limits of this
order (Newman 2010). It is only in the precise space and moment of refusal, which is
the here and now, that individuals are self-empowered to chart their own paths, free
from the coercive guidance of a sovereign authority or the cajoling influence of a
patronizing academic. Where geographers are actually well positioned to contribute,
as feminists thinkers have demonstrated (see Lawson 2009; Nolin 2010), is towards
the issue of building trust, by shattering prejudices and intervening with creative new
energies rooted in the nurturing capacity of emotion and everyday life as the actual
terrains of human interaction. By engaging the affective turn (Thien 2005) in
understanding emotional connectivity and the politics of affinity as the fundamental
basis upon which any lasting transformation might take place, it is to such intimacy
and immediacy that the possibilities of anarchist geographies could be productively
!
dedicated. Rather than prioritizing the particularisms of class as is the Marxian

imperative, or surrendering to the politics of racism as neoliberalism would have us
do (Goldberg 2009), anarchism demands that any process of emancipation must
be infused with non-universalizing, non-hierarchical, and non-coercive relationships
based on mutual aid and shared ethical commitments (Day 2005).
Ultimately, what anarchism has to offer is precisely the opposite of neoliberalism.
While rescinding the inherent elitism and authoritarianism of the state, anarchism
wants to align the collective goods produced through human co-operation
according to need, a process that does not require an administrative framework,
but instead pivots around an ethics of reciprocity. An anarchist perspective further
recognizes that the latent new forms of organization that might evolve beyond the
territorial logic of the state must exist in a continual process of reflexivity and revision
by those practicing them so as to quell any and all potential hierarchies before they
can be allowed to germinate. Anarchist geographies of co-operation are to be born
from outside the existing order, from sites that the state has failed to enclose, and
from the infinite possibilities that statist logics ignore, repel, plunder, and deny. As
Kropotkin (1887:153) eloquently explained:
While all agree that harmony is always desirable, there is no such unanimity about order,
and still less about the order which is supposed to reign on our modern societies; so
that we have no objection whatever to the use of the word anarchy as a negation of
what has been often described as order.
Anarchist geographies are those potential forces that perpetually haunt the state
with the fact that it is merely one socio-spatial possibility among an unlimited
number of others. Yet alternatives to the state do not arise from the order that
they refuse, even if this order is contradictory and oppressive, but from the anarchic
profusion of forces that are alien to this order and from those very possibilities
that this order seeks to dominate and distort (Colson 2001). Radical geographers
accordingly have much to learn from developing deeper connections with those
peopleslike the indigenous tribes of Zomiawho have continually outwitted the
state and mastered what Scott (2009) calls the art of not being governed. What
is at stake here is neither the end of the state, nor the realization of an end-state
politics, but an infinitely demanding struggle of perpetual evasion, contestation,
and solidarity (Critchley 2007). We are not required to view the state as the exclusive
site of socio-political change or as the lone focus of a revolutionary paradigm, as
have all too often been the historical precedents (Holloway 2002). In the spirit of the
quotes that open this paper, we can instead focus our anger and sadness inwards,
where sustained indignation for our own good fortune can lead to a realignment
of our ethical compass, compelling us to stand and refuse alongside others less
fortunate. Empathy is the death of apathy, and it begins not when the state is
streamlined, withered away, or dismembered, but here and now.
Conclusion
[F]reedom as a means breeds more freedom . . . To those who say this condemns
one to political sterility and the Ivory Tower our reply is that realism and their
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1618 Antipode
circumstantialism invariably lead to disaster. We believe . . . that it is more realistic

to . . . influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion (Vernon Richards
1995:214).
The etymology of radical is from the Latin radix, meaning root. Contemporary
radical geographers would do well to explore this originary dimension by
(re)engaging with the contributions of Kropotkin and Reclus, who fearlessly
critiqued colonial domination at a time when mainstream geography marched
hand in hand with the imperialist project. But radical geography today needs
more than the insights of the past, it also requires a future, an injection of
new ideas that encompass the intellectual strides made by poststructuralist and
feminist thought to move beyond what is already known. Within anarchist
studies, the critical edge of this philosophical endeavor is postanarchism, which
does not seek to move past anarchism, but instead rejects the epistemological
foundations of classical anarchist theories and their adherence to the essentialisms
of the scientific method. Postanarchist thought accordingly seeks to reinvigorate
anarchist critique by expanding its conception of domination from the state
and capitalism to encompass the circuitous, overdetermined, and multivariate
networks that characterize contemporary power, and by removing its normative and
naturalist frames in embracing situated and empathetic knowledges. Applying
this philosophical critique to radical geography today requires one to make a
conscious ethical and emotional choice, whether to be allied with the stability
of the victors and rulers, orthe more difficult pathto consider that stability as a
state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete
extinction (Said 1993:26). To choose the latter requires a sustained effort to
shatter the commonsense spell of neoliberal governmentality, as government
is not merely the political structures or management protocols of the state, but the
government of the conduct of individuals and groups, it is to structure the possible
field of action of others, their direction, and their location (Foucault 1982:790).
This is a process many geographers are already engaging through attention
to the entanglements of power (Crampton and Elden 2007; Sharp et al 2000),
to participatory action research (Kindon, Pain and Kesby 2007), and through
non-representational theory (Thrift 2007), but without explicitly connecting them
back to the anarchist critique. Yet if the mercurial horizons of spacetime ensure
that our lived experiences are continual performances that defy the theoretical
divisions of predetermined identities and codified subjectivities, then what is more
realistic than acknowledging the perpetually unfolding means of anarchism?
Anarchist geographies would thus ideally seek to question the spatiality upon which
governance is premised, and argue for an unstructured field of action, where
individuals may voluntarily and/or collectively decide their own direction, free from
the presence and pressures of any higher or ultimate authority. The location of such
liberation from all variants of sovereign power is not rooted in ideas of fixity, as in
the territorial trap of the state, but in the inexorable assertion of freedom through
processual associations of affinity that may be entirely transient or slightly more
permanent (Day 2005). The key potentiality though is that any affiliation is free to
coagulate or dissolve under conditions of free will and individual choice, where no
!
presencesuch as the monopoly of force or independent control of the means of

productionenforces either subjugation or communal continuity.
The political geographies of boundaries and borders would become infinitely
messier, overlapping, and variable, to the point where attempting to map them into
a rigid ordering or grid, as is the epistemological notion behind modern cartography,
would be an exercise in futility. Such mapping, either literally as in an actual
map, or through techniques such as the census and the museum, are constitutive
of state logic to begin with (Anderson 1991), and the purpose of anarchist
geographies should be to dissolve any such categorization and classification schemas
that promote spatio-temporal permanence. This is not to suggest anarchism is
reduced to chaos, but any geographical organization would proceed as an ethics
of empathy as opposed to a politics of difference, as the latter is always carved
out through oppression. Anarchism, spatiality arranged in these terms would allow
us to recognize whole people, rather than attempting to make them as subjects
or citizens that conform to particularized spaces and segmented political goals.
Kropotkin (1979 [1885]) articulated a similar vision when he wrote:
In our time of wars, of national self-conceit, of national jealousies and hatreds ably
nourished by people who pursue their own egotistic, personal or class interests,
geography must be . . . a means of dissipating these prejudices and of creating other
feelings more worthy of humanity.
Anarchist geographies might accordingly be productively characterized by their

integrality, where all attempts to construct false dichotomies of separation are
rejected, and instead humanity is recognized as intimately intertwined within
all the processes and flows of the entire planet (Massey 2005). Such a radical
reconceptualization of the discipline would, in realizing Recluss (18761894) vision,
render it conceptually akin to both the Jewel Net of Indra from Buddhist philosophy
and the Gaia Hypothesis, inasmuch as attempts at separating between political,
economic, social, cultural, environmental, and any other sub-disciplinary variant
would be viewed as fabrications that attempt to tame, order, restrain, partition, and
contain the irreducible whole.
New forms of affinity are already emerging as a relational ethics of struggle
(Routledge 2009), where it is no longer the worker who is conceived as the agent
of historical change, but anti-capitalist protesters who comprise a heterogeneous
group that defies universal subjectivation to the proletariat identity (Notes From
Nowhere 2003). Such recognition could form a point of departure in unsettling the
orthodox position Marxism holds within radical geography today. This emergent
form of struggle is clearly not interested in formulating strategies that replicate
traditional representative structures, signifying a paradigm shift away from effecting
change from within the state by realigning its character, and towards autonomous
movements positioned in opposition to the state (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006).
In this context, Newman (2010:182) identifies a series of new political questions
and challenges: freedom beyond securities, democracy beyond the state, politics
beyond the party, economic organization beyond capitalism, globalization beyond
borders, [and] life beyond biopolitics. Yet these are not just political questions,
each is also profoundly geographical. While geographers are already examining
!
1620 Antipode
these very issues, there has been little attention to the ways in which anarchism
might foster a more rigorous investigation of these emergent geographies.
Consequently, conceptualizing a way forwardbeyond the dominating strictures
of neoliberalism and the enduring animosities of colonialismrequires a deeper
engagement with anarchist philosophies. Committing radical geography to an
anarchist agenda would necessitate a negation of the false dichotomy the discipline
maintains between the academy as a space of knowledge production on the
one hand, and wider society as the domain of social struggle on the other (The
Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010). Accordingly, intensified networks of
solidarity with those involved in direct action on the streets may well be the
future of radical geography. From here, ideas that allow for new geographical
imaginations and materializations that transcend state-based politics may blossom,
more glocalized, ephemeral, and voluntary forms of non-institutional organization
may bloom, and Kropotkins (2008 [1902]) theory of mutual aid along with Recluss
(1871894; Fleming 1988) contributions to the ideals of human freedom may be
treated to the same contemplation that Marx has hitherto received from radical
geographers. Anarchism, as Kropotkin (1978 [1885]) recognized more than a
century ago, is what geography ought to be.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the following individuals for their critical feedback and encouragement on
various parts of this argument and/or earlier drafts: Jeff Ferrell, Anthony Ince, Gavin Brown,
Jenny Pickerill, Adam Barker, Nik Heynen, James Sidaway, Nathan Clough, Renata Blumberg,
Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, Peter Holland, Wendy Larner, and the anonymous referees. Any
mistakes, errors, and omissions are my own.
Endnote
1
Others have explored broadly anarchistic spatialities through a poststructuralist lens (see
Koopman 2011; Routledge 2003), but without plugging such concerns into the emergent
literature that explicitly develops a theory of postanarchism.
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The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox
Economic Spaces at a Time
of Neoliberal Crisis: Towards a
Postneoliberal Anarchist Future
Richard J. White
Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK;
richard.white@shu.ac.uk
Colin C. Williams
School of Management, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;
c.c.williams@sheffield.ac.uk
Abstract: Re-reading the economic landscape of the western world as a largely non-
capitalist landscape composed of economic plurality, this paper demonstrates how
economic relations in contemporary western society are often embedded in non-
commodified practices such as mutual aid, reciprocity, co-operation and inclusion. By
highlighting how the long-overlooked lived practices in the contemporary world of
production, consumption and exchange are heavily grounded in the very types and
essences of non-capitalist economic relations that have long been proposed by anarchistic
visions of employment and organization, this paper displays that such visions are far from
utopian: they are embedded firmly in the present. Through focusing on the pervasive
nature of heterodox economic spaces in the UK in particular, some ideas about how to
develop an anarchist future of work and organization will be proposed. The outcome is to
begin to engage in the demonstrative construction of a future based on mutualism and
autonomous modes of organization and representation.
Keywords: anarchist geographies, heterodox economics, crisis, postneoliberalism
[I]t becomes evident that the economic institutions which control production and
exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are supposed to
guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result. Instead of order they bring forth
chaos; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity; instead of reconciled interests, war;
a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of workers among
themselves. Weary of these wars, weary of the miseries which they cause, society rushes
to seek a new organization (Peter Kropotkin 2002 [1880]:36).
An anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in

existence, like a seed beneath the snow (Colin Ward 1982:14).
Introduction
Once more we find ourselves bearing witness to another crisis of neoliberalism
(Castree 2010; Hart 2010; Wade 2010). It is crisis which, at the very least, signals
that (t)he free-market project is on the ropes (Peck, Theodore and Brenner

1626 Antipode
2010:94) and perhaps even that the global capitalist system is approaching an
apocalyptic zero-point (Zizek 2011:x). Despite this, the thesis of commodification
which asserts that, the market is becoming more powerful, expansive, hegemonic
and totalizing as it penetrates deeper into each and every corner of economic life
(Williams 2005:1) continues to exert a powerful and popular influence in mainstream
economic thought and practice (Cahill 1989; Shiva 2005).
The central argument of this paper is that to move purposefully towards post-
neoliberal (anarchist) futures the blind faith given to the orthodox neoliberal
economic model needs to be radically critiqued. As Fournier (2008:534) observed,
an escape from the economy is at least as much a question of decolonising the
imagination as one of enacting new practices. Strategies for economic change,
to be successful, must simultaneously address both the economic practice and the
economic imagination. To focus on one, but not the other, would be irrational given
their complementary relationship. As Hardt and Negri (2001:386387) argue:
The bizarre naturalness of capitalism is a pure and simple mystification, and we have to
disabuse ourselves of it right away . . . The illusion of the naturalness of capitalism and the
radicality of the limit actually stand in a relationship of complementary. Their complicity
is expressed in an exhausting powerless.
To realise this, this paper identifies itself closely with that body of work in economic
geography and cognate fields, which through an attention to space, place and
difference, rejects the tendencies towards formalism and homogeneity inherent
within orthodox economics(and) has begun to theorise the proliferative nature
of economic life (Leyshon 2005:860). Over the last 20 years, this re-reading
has gained significant influence within geography and other critical approaches
toward the economic by conceptualising, capturing and understanding the rich,
complex, multiple and diverse economic landscapes of contemporary society
(Burns, Williams and Windebank 2004; Leyshon, Lee and Williams 2003; Samers
2005; Williams 2005, 2007, 2011).
One of the most impressive interventions to de-centre capitalism and develop
transformative projects of non-capitalist development has been the work of Gibson-
Graham (1996, 2006a, 2006b). More widely, there have been complementary
(eco)feminist campaigns to recognise the value of unpaid work (for example,
Benston 1969; England 1996; Katz and Monk 1993; McDowell 1983; McMahaon
1996); an unpacking of the nature of monetary exchange to rework the social
nature of the economic (eg Crang 1996; Crewe and Gregson 1998; White 2009);
and attempts to highlight non-traditional neglected sites of consumption such as
alternative retail spaces (Crewe, Gregson and Brooks 2003); garage sales (Soiffer
and Hermann 1987); car boot sales (Gregson and Crewe 2002, 2003); charity
shops (Williams and Paddock 2003); and local currencies (eg Cahn 2000; Lee
1996; North 1996). This radical commitment to re-reading the orthodox neoliberal
approaches to the economic has led to diverse, multiple and heterogenic modes
of economic conceptualisation, representation, meaning and materialisation being
identified and represented. This in turn has resulted in far richer contemporary
economic landscapes emerging, within which the capitalist mode of production in
is seen to be highly uneven and incomplete.
!
Towards a Postneoliberal Anarchist Future 1627
This paper further exposes the misleading representations of the economy

by orthodox (neoliberal) economic interpretations, by critically addressing the
commodification thesis. Drawing on empirical evidence from a selection of western
economies (the heartlands of commodification), it brings a range of vibrant, creative,
heterodox, and non-commodified crypto-economic practices in our contemporary
economic landscapes to the fore. Crucially, it argues that many of these practices
are ideologically orientated toward anarchist-based visions of work and organisation
and discusses the implications of this recognition for anarchist thought and
practice. In doing so the intention is to reconsider future possibilities of work and
organisation.
At a time when anarchist praxis is once again growing in importance as a
socio-political mobilizer both within the academy and beyond, the paper argues
that many non-commodified economic practices that occupy pervasive roles in
production, exchange, and consumption are the very types of non-capitalist
economic relations that have long been proposed by classical anarchistic visions
of work and organisation. One of the important implications for anarchism is to
show that post-neoliberal visions grounded in anarchist thought and praxis are
far from utopian: indeed they are deeply rooted within contemporary society. The
aim for anarchism to build a concrete utopia, and embed future possibilities within
present praxis is crucial, and was certainly central to the work of Peter Kropotkin,
one of the most outstanding and influential anarchists of the last century:
As to the method followed by the anarchist thinker, he (Kropotkin) wrote in 1887, it
is entirely different from that followed by the utopists . . . He studies human society as
it is now and was in the past . . . tries to discover its tendencies, past and present, its
growing needs, intellectual and economic, and in his ideal he merely points out in which
direction evolution goes (Cleaver 1994:120).
The opening section of the paper will focus on the body of critical economic
literature that has sought to map the limits to capitalism and promote a heterodox
reading of the economic. This will then be followed by a discussion of how
the key outcomes emerging from this critical reading of economics resonates with
anarchist-inspired visions of human engagement, work and organisation. Following
this, some empirical evidence will be provided of the plurality of economic practices
evident within western societies. This will be achieved both inter-nationally (using
time-budget studies) and intra-nationally (through a household work practices
survey conducted in an array of UK communities) so as to reveal at the human
scale the current pervasiveness of diversity and difference in livelihood practices
in order to open up the future to alternative neoliberal hegemony. Following an
evaluation of the reasons for the pervasiveness of these non-commodified economic
spaces in the contemporary western world, some provisional proposals of economic
practices and economic imagination about how to develop an anarchist future
of work and organisation will emerge. Importantly the proposals engage with both
economic practices and the economic imagination. The hope is that this will instigate
further discussion and exploration about how best to engage in the demonstrative
construction of a non-commodified anarchist future based on mutualism, pluralism,
autonomous modes of organisation and representation.
!
1628 Antipode
Anarchist Economics and the Pervasiveness

of Heterodox Economic Spaces in Contemporary
Western Society
The Nature and Meaning of Anarchism
Despite its distinct, long and impressive history, anarchism has been the victim of
malicious characterisation and misrepresentation in popular circles (see Amster et al
2009). Emma Goldman (1979:48) for example considered there to be two principal
(and flawed) objections to anarchism:
First, Anarchism is impractical, though a beautiful ideal. Second, Anarchism stands for
violence and destruction; hence it must be repudiated as vile and dangerous. Both the
intelligent man and the ignorant mass judge not from a thorough knowledge of the
subject, but either from hearsay or false interpretation.
However to interpret a true nature and meaning of anarchism is highly

problematic in much the same way as defining and locating an authentic version
of Marxism is. As Castoriadis (1987:9) argued, to speak of Marxism has become
one of the most difficult tasks imaginable . . . Of which Marxism, in fact, should
we be speaking? In order to make some constructive headway, an appeal to
the (pluralistic) natures and meanings of anarchism will be interpreted in the
first instance by engaging with the historical roots of classical anarchism, and
understanding the wider context in which it came to prominence.
The emergence of classical anarchism is closely situated within the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. Viewed in this context, the rise of anarchist thoughts
and ideas were seen as a direct response to the feverish rise and expansion of the
modern state and industrial capitalism (Goodway 1989). Importantly the emerging
contribution and role of anarchism has often been framed with critical reference to
its relationship with Marxism (see Guerin 1989). For example, Carter (1989:177)
argued that:
Anarchism and Marxism have, since the middle of the nineteenth century, strenuously
competed for the minds of the Left. The major strength of anarchist theory has
corresponded with the most obvious weakness of Marxism, namely the prediction
(successful in the cases of anarchism, unsuccessful in the case of Marxism) of the nature
of a post-capitalist society brought into being by a revolutionary party seizing control of
the state.
On many levels, the seeds of the highly contested nature(s) of anarchism and
Marxism can be traced back the difficult relationships that developed between
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (the first to invoke the word an-archy); Michael Bakunin,
and Karl Marx. As Kenafick (1990:10) observed:
Bakunin had many discussions with Marx . . . and though greatly impressed by the
German thinkers real genius, scholarship and revolutionary zeal and energy, was repelled
by his arrogance, egotism and jealously . . . But at this period of the early eighteen forties
their differences had not yet matured and Bakunin no doubt learned a good deal from
Marx of the doctrine of Historical Materialism which is so important an element in both
these great Socialistic thinkers work.
!
The events at the Congress of the International at the Hague in 1872 is frequently
cited as a decisive moment in the acrimonious schism that has inspired often (bitter)
relations between Anarchism and Marxism, for it was here that:
This meeting . . . was packed by the Marxists in a manner which later Communist
tactics have made only too familiar. The equally familiar tactics of character-assassination
were also resorted to by Marx, to his every lasting discredit, and Bakunin and his
closest friends and Collaborator, James Guillaume, were expelled from the International
(Kenafick 1990:14).
The subsequent momentum and development of anarchist thought to thought and

practice is in many ways a testimony to its protean and pluralistic appeal. Thus, as
Marshall (1993:3) argues:
It would be misleading to offer a neat definition of anarchism, since by its very nature
it is anti-dogmatic. It does not offer a fixed body of doctrine based on one particular
world-view. It is a complex and subtle philosophy, embracing many different currents
of thought and strategy. Indeed anarchism is like a river with many currents and eddies,
constantly changing and being refreshed by new surges but always moving toward the
wide ocean of freedom.
McKay (2008:18) makes another crucial and related point when arguing that
anarchism is:
A socio-economic and political theory, but not an ideology. The difference is very
important. Basically, theory means you have ideas; an ideology means ideas have you.
Anarchism is a body of ideas, but they are flexible, in a constant state of evolution and
flux, and open to modification in light of new data. As society changes and develops, so
does anarchism.
It is important that any understanding of anarchism does not overemphasise

the (common) belief that anarchism is simply anti-government. In appealing to its
etymological roots to elicit a definition this imbalance is evident here:
What we are concerned with, in terms of definition, is a cluster of works which in
turn represents a cluster of doctrines and attitudes whose principal uniting feature is
the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary. A double Greek root is
involved: the word archon, meaning a ruler, and the prefix an, indicating without; hence
anarchy means the state of being without a ruler. By derivation, anarchism is the doctrine
which contends that government is the source of most of our social troubles and that
there are viable alternative forms of voluntary organization. And by further definition
the anarchist is the man (sic) who sets out to create a society without government
(Woodcock 1986:11).
A more nuanced and critical understanding of anarchism would properly

recognise that anarchist thought has mobilised not only around opposition to the
state and capitalism, but in opposition to all forms of external authority and thus all
forms of domination. This argument is well represented here by Goodway (1989:2):
Anarchists have traditionally identified the major social, economic, and political
problems as consisting of capitalism, inequality (including the domination of women
by men), sexual repression, militarism, war, authority, and the state. They have
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1630 Antipode
opposed parliamentarianism, that is, liberal or bourgeois democracy, participation in

representative institutionsas any kind of means for rectifying these ills.
Only through acknowledging such diversity and critical intersections can the
richness and diversity of the movements which are anarchistincluding anarchist-
communism, individualist anarchism, collectivist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism,
pacifist anarchism and Christian anarchismbegin to be appreciated. As Ward
(2004:3) argues, this helps account for more recently emerging varieties of
anarchist propaganda, (such as) green anarchism and anarcha-feminism. Like those
who believe that animal liberation is an aspect of human liberation, they claim that
the only ideology consistent with their aims is anarchism.
However, and despite the many advantages in maintaining an inclusive approach
to anarchism, there have been unintendedand unwantedconsequences. For
example by including any form of anti-authoritarianism as overtly anarchist, this
has led to a mis-appropriation of the anarchist ideal, as is evident in the debates
surrounding the oxymoronic notion of anarcho-capitalism for instance (see McKay
2008:section F). Attempts to address any overly inclusive interpretation of anarchism
must be careful not to go too far. Such is the accusation levied against Walt and
Schmidt (2009) who in arguing that class struggle anarchism (syndicalism) is the
only coherent expression of anarchism, consequently excluded such luminary figures
as Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Tucker, and Tolstoy from the anarchist tradition.
To better understand the nature of anarchism, effort must also be made to
ascertain what it stands for, rather than just stands against. Goodway (1989:23),
for example, argues that:
(W)hat anarchists advocate are egalitarianism, co-operation (mutual aid), workers
control (self-management), individualism, freedom, and complete decentralization
(organization from the bottom up). As means, they propose direct action (spontaneity)
and direct democracy (wherever possible, for they are ultra-democrats, supporting
delegation against representation).
Focusing on anarchist economics, Cahill (1989:244) argues that: The economics

of anarchism must be (1) decentralized, (2) equalitarian, (3) self-managing and
empowering, (4) based on local needs, and (5) supported by other autonomous
units in a non-hierarchical fashion.
Finally, McKay (2008:21) rightly draws attention to the fact that anarchism is, and
always has been:
More than just a means of analysis or a vision of a better society. It is also rooted in
struggle, the struggle of the oppressed for their freedom. In other words, it provides a
means of achieving a new system based on the needs of people, not power, and which
puts the planet before profit.
Similarly, Bookchin (1989:274) considered that in its greatest moments, anarchism

was always a peoples movement as well as a body of ideas and visions.
To sum up, when addressing the nature and meaning of anarchism, it is imperative
that anarchism is not reduced:
to the mere use of the word anarchism, but rather might highlight and propose social
relations based on cooperation, self-determination, and negating hierarchical roles. From
!
this perspective, one can find a much richer and more global tradition of social and
political thought and organization that while not raising a black flag in the air is very
useful for expanding the scope of human possibilities in a liberatory direction (Shukaitis
2009:170).
Even if packaged definitions of anarchism are elusive, we can be certain that many
of the findings emerging from a diverse economies approach have much to offer
anarchist-oriented critiques of economy and society. This includes the advocacy of
a move away from capitalocentric economic discourse (Gibson-Graham 2006a);
from thin to thicker readings of economic exchange (White and Williams
2010; Zelizer 1997); emphasising voluntary co-operation and mutualism (Burns,
Williams and Windebank 2004; Williams and Windebank 2001); and engaging
with the complex economic geographies present within the local (White 2009).
Moreover, the desire to explore non-capitalist alternative economic practices within
contemporary society has a great precedence in anarchism, and is certainly evident
in Kropotkins extensive body of work. As Cleaver (1994:122) observes:
(Kropotkins) work fascinates not because it gives us formulae for the future but because
it shows us how to discover tendencies in the present which provide alternative paths
out of the current crisis and out of the capitalist system. As that system has developed
in the years since he wrote, some of the alternatives he saw were absorbed and ceased
to provide ways forward. Others have survived. Others, inevitably, have appeared. Our
problem is to recognize them, to evaluate them and, where we find it appropriate, to
support their development.
Ward (1982:5) similarly asserts that:

Many years of attempting to be an anarchist propagandist have convinced me that
we win over our fellow citizen to anarchist ideas, precisely through drawing upon the
common experience of the informal, transients, self-organising networks of relationships
that in fact make human community possible, rather than through the rejection of
existing society as a whole in favor of some future society where some different kind of
humanity will live in perfect harmony.
It is toward unearthing these informal and self-organising networks of relationships

across the contemporary economic landscape to which the paper now turns.
Before doing so, a contextual point is necessary. The central evidence base
below is focused on the western economies, the so-called heartland of our
commodified world. When analysed from a global economic perspective, this
geographical focus is obviously partial and incomplete. However, such a focus
challenges head on the conventional wisdom of the natural and inevitable trajectory
of economic development. The popular assumption imagines that the economic
landscapes of the advanced economies are highly commodified, and that significant
non-commodified spaces are mostly found in under-developed or transitional
economies of the majority world. This is certainly evident in policy approaches to
global economic development. For example, the International Labour Organization
(ILO 2008, 2010) under the agenda of decent work, has included extensive
research on the informal sector of Latin America (ILO 2002a), Central America (ILO
2002b) and other non-western countries to help enable an economic transition
to formalization (ILO 2007). However, the focus here upon western economies
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1632 Antipode
Monetised
Formal paid Formal paid job Informal Monetised Monetised

job in in in public/third employment community family
private sector exchanges labour
sector
Formal Informal
Formal Formal Off-the- One-to-one Non-
unpaid unpaid radar non- non- exchanged
work in work in monetised monetised labour
private public/third work in exchanges
sector sector organisation
Non-monetised
Figure 1: A typology of work practices
illustrates that non-commodified spaces are still at the core (rather than the margins)
of even the advanced, and commodified economies. The clear implication
is that non-commodified spaces cannot be depicted as the mere vestige of a
disappearing past [or as] transitory or provisional (Latouche 1993:49), located in
the so-called periphery or margins of the global economic landscape, but persist in
the very heartlands of our commodified world.
Economic Typologies
Given the richness and complexity of economic exchange in society, some of
which is memorably captured in Gibson-Grahams (2006b:70) economic iceberg
model, any attempts to conceptualise the relationship(s) between different types
of economic space will be inevitably crude in their execution.1 Recognising this,
economic representations have become increasingly nuanced in the hope of better
capturing the diversity of economic lived practice. One of the most promising of
these is the use of a total social organisation of labour approach (TSOL) designed
to capture the multiplicity of labour practices that exist on a horizontal spectrum,
moving from formal to informal work practices, which are cross-cut by a vertical
spectrum that moves from wholly monetised to wholly non-monetised practices
(see Williams 2011). This representation of different (but inter-linked) spheres of
work (see Figure 1) has been influential.
In an orthodox (neoliberal) reading of economic development, the assumption
is that the world is becoming increasingly commodified (Polanyi 1944; Scott 2001)
with work becoming increasingly concentrated in formal paid jobs in the private
sector. The thesis is that this sphere is expanding at the expense of all other
spheres. However, when evidence is sought to corroborate this grand narrative
of commodification, the most worrying and disturbing finding . . . is that hardly
any evidence is ever brought to the fore by its adherents either to show that a
process of commodification is taking place or even to display the extent, pace or
unevenness of its penetration (Williams 2005:23). Instead, quite the opposite has
been found.
!
Table 1: Allocation of working time in western economies
Time spent on
Paid work Non-exchanged work non-exchanged work
Country (min per day) (min per day) as% of all work
Canada 293 204 41.0

Denmark 283 155 35.3
France 297 246 45.3
Netherlands 265 209 44.1
Norway 265 232 46.7
UK 282 206 42.2
USA 304 231 43.2
Finland 268 216 44.6
20 countries 297 230 43.6
Source: derived from Gershuny (2000:Table 7.1)
Table 2: Unpaid and paid work as a% of total work time across 20 countries, 1960present
19601973 19741984 1985present
Min per % of all Min per % of all Min per % of all

Country day work day work day work
Paid work 309 56.6 285 57.3 293 55.4

Subsistence work 237 43.4 212 42.7 235 44.6
546 100.0 497 100.0 528 100.0
Source: derived from Gershuny (2000:Table 7.1)
The Inter-National Persistence of Non-commodified

Work Practices
At the inter-national level, the results generated by time-budget studies have been
particularly influential (Gershuny 2000). As Table 1 indicates, across 20 countries,
an average of 43.6% of working time is spent engaged in unpaid domestic
work (ie non-exchanged labour), which seriously calls into question the extent of
commodification of the so-called advanced western economies.
Neither is there evidence that there has been a definite transition over time
towards commodified work or even monetised transactions (see Table 2). Indeed
paid work, when taken as a percentage of total working time across the 20 countries,
is decreasing over time.
Evaluating the Intra-national Persistence of Non-commodified

Work Practices
To evaluate the intra-national persistence of non-commodified work practices,
evidence is drawn from 861 face-to-face interviews undertaken across a range
of deprived and affluent urban and rural English localities (see Williams 2011).
The term deprivation, as understood here, is based upon a range of indices
(including income levels, employment, health, education, skills, housing, crime and
the environment) used by the UK government to form their Index of Deprivation to
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1634 Antipode
Table 3: UK localities studied
Locality type Area Number of interviews
Affluent rural Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire 70

Affluent rural Chalford, Gloucestershire 70
Deprived rural Grimethorpe, South Yorkshire 70
Deprived rural Wigston, Cumbria 70
Deprived rural St Blazey, Cornwall 70
Affluent suburb Fulwood, Sheffield 50
Affluent suburb Basset/Chilworth, Southampton 61
Deprived urban Manor, Sheffield 100
Deprived urban Pitsmoor, Sheffield 100
Deprived urban St Marys, Southampton 100
Deprived urban Hightown, Southampton 100
rank Englands wards relative to each other. Although there is no standard definition
of neighbourhood, it is generally viewed as an appropriate scale to help focus
attention on those areas where comparative deprivation/affluence are apparent.
Drawing on data generated by the UK governments Index of Multiple Deprivation
(ODPM 2000), a maximum variation sampling was used to select localities amongst
the highest and lowest ranked in terms of multiple deprivation (see Table 3).
The rural localities studied, for example Grimethorpe, St Blazey and Wigton, have
much higher proportions of low-income households, unemployment and lower
educational attainment levels than Fulbourn and Chalford.
The interviews undertaken in these localities were semi-structured. Having
gathered necessary socio-demographic background data (age, gender, household
income, employment status, work history), the interview then focused on the type
of labour that a household had called upon to undertake up to 44 domestic tasks.2
For each task, the respondent was asked whether the task had been undertaken; if
so who had carried out the work (and why), and whether or not it was done on a
paid or unpaid basis (and why). Then the same tasks were addressed but this time
asking the respondent if they (or other members of their household) had done work
for other households and, if so, under what basis.
The finding is that participation rates in monetised labour are not extensive (see
Table 4). In lived practice, less than a fifth of respondents in deprived localities
had participated in paid formal labour over the previous 12 months. In affluent
localities, this figure was higher but still accounted for less than 50% of the
respondents. Moreover, when these findings are taken in conjunction with non-
exchanged labour and non-monetised informal community exchanges then what
emerges is an economic reality in which private sector formal labour is marginal,
and is of significance only to a small minority of the population.
When focusing on the labour practices employed by households to complete the
tasks investigated, Table 5 again suggests only a shallow and uneven penetration
of formal market labour. Hence, only a limited commodification has taken place in
these English localities. Indeed, just 16% of tasks when last undertaken had used
formal market labour.
!
Table 4: Participation rates in different labour practices
% Respondents in last 12 Deprived Affluent Deprived Affluent

months participating in: urban urban rural rural
Monetised labour
Formal paid job in private 16 48 19 49
sector
Formal paid job in public and 20 27 18 25
third sector
Informal employment 5 7 6 8
Monetised community 60 21 63 30
exchange
Monetised family labour 3 6 2 4
Non-monetised labour
Formal unpaid work in 1 2 1 2
private sector
Formal unpaid work in public 19 28 21 30
and third sector
Off the radar/non-monetised 2 0 2 1
work in organisations
One-to-one non-monetised 52 70 54 73
exchanges
Non-exchanged labour 99 100 100 100
Source : Colin Williamss own English localities survey
Table 5: Type of labour practices used to conduct 44 domestic tasks by locality type
% Tasks last conducted Deprived Affluent Deprived Affluent All

using: urban urban rural rural areas
Monetised labour
Formal paid job in private 12 15 18 22 16
sector
Formal paid job in public and 2 2 2 2 2
third sector
Informal employment 2 8 <1 4 2
Monetised community 3 1 4 1 3
exchange
Monetised family labour 1 <1 1 1 1
Non-monetised labour
Formal unpaid work in <1 0 <1 <1 <1
private sector
Formal unpaid work in public <1 0 <1 0 <1
and third sector
Off the radar/non-monetised <1 0 <1 0 0
work in organisations
One-to-one non monetised 4 2 8 7 6
exchanges
Non-exchanged labour 76 72 67 63 70
Total 100 100 100 100 100
2 102.89 29.87 89.76 28.88
Note: 2 >12.838 in all cases, leading us to reject H o within a 99.5% confidence interval that there are
no spatial variations in the sources of labour used to complete the 44 household services.
Source: Colin Williamss own English localities survey
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1636 Antipode
The results also indicate the uneven permeation of formal market labour and
the existence of contrasting work cultures across populations. For example, lower-
income populations are less monetised than higher-income ones. The household
work practices of higher-income populations are also less reliant upon community
exchange between close social relations (monetised and non-monetised). Self-help
(self-provisioning) is still very dominant, with little work being sourced within the
market realm.
When the multifarious labour practices are taken into account alongside the
evidence generated though time budget surveys, the empirical case to support
the commodification thesis is weak. This understandingthat the commodification
thesis is a popular mythis one which should give much inspiration to those
anticipating and advocating a post-neoliberal economic future. The implications
are considerable and transformative. To paraphrase the Community Collective
(2001:34):
If we no longer understand capitalism as necessarily expansive and naturally dominant,
we retain the imaginative space for alternatives and the rationale for their enactment. In
reconconceptualizing the economy differently we can then enact a different economy.
More specifically, in de-naturalizing capitalist dominance we represent noncapitalist
forms of economy (including ones we might value and desire) as both existing and
emerging, and as possible to create.
If this discussion encourages anything, it is one which will re-appraise the

conventional readings of the economy from an anarchist perspective. The economic
landscape of the western world should be more properly understood as a largely
non-capitalist landscape composed of economic plurality, wherein relations are
often embedded in non-commodified practices such as mutual aid, reciprocity,
co-operation and inclusion.
This raises an important question:Why are non-commodified spaces so
pervasive? And it is this question that (classical) anarchist readings concerning the
nature of humans, and their relationship with others, are particularly well equipped
to answer. The slim volume of research that has explored this question explicitly
cites several key reasons for its persistence. For example, Williams and Windebank
(2001) found that the main motivations for conducting non-commodified practices
are economic necessity, ease, choice and pleasure.
When contrasting higher and lower income neighbourhoods in a UK study
of Sheffield and Southampton, Burns, Williams and Windebank (2004:chapter 3)
found that economic necessity was the primary reason why lower-income urban
neighbourhoods engaged in this form of activity, cited by 44% of the respondents.
For higher-income households this accounted for just 10% of non-commodified
tasks with other non-economic rationales such as ease, choice and pleasure coming
to the fore instead. Thirty seven percent of higher-income neighbourhoods, and
18% of lower income neighbourhoods used non-commodified practices because
this was easier than contacting and employing formal labour in the private sector.
Elsewhere, households preferred to use non-commodified practices because the
tasks would be completed to a higher standard and/or would be more individualised
than if commodified labour was used. This preference was closely linked to engaging
!
in non-commodified practices because it was a pleasurable experience (the rationale

for 32% of non-commodified tasks in affluent neighbourhoods and 14% in deprived
neighbourhoods) (Burns, Williams and Windebank 2004:5758). To engage in do-it-
yourself projects (like decorating or other home improvement tasks) was something
particularly worthwhile and rewarding. Of course this simple pleasure in undertaking
the non-routine tasks, in direct contrast to formal work, has been highlighted in
many anarchist writings. As Ward (1982:95) noted:
(A man or women) enjoys going home and digging in his garden because he is free from
foremen, managers and bosses. He is free from the monotony and slavery of doing the
same thing day in day out, and is in control of the whole job from start to finish. He is
free to decide for himself how and when to set about it. He is responsible to himself and
not to somebody else. He is working because he wants to and not because he has to. He
is doing his own thing. He is his own man.
This spirit of this argument is also captured by Berkmann (1986 [1929]:336):

The need of activity is one of the most fundamental urges of man. Watch the child and
see how strong is his instinct for action, for movement, for doing something. Strong
and continuous. It is the same with the healthy man. His energy and vitality demand
expression. Permit him to do the work of his choice, the thing he loves, and his application
will know neither weariness nor shirking. You can observe this in the factory when he is
lucky enough to own a garden or patch of ground to raise some flowers or vegetables on.
Given this body of evidence, what can be meaningfully and constructively taken
forward to help inform discussions and debate that are concerned with harnessing
a post-neoliberal anarchist future?
Towards a Post-neoliberal Anarchist Future

Suppose our future in fact lies, not with a handful of technocrats pushing buttons to
support the rest of us, but with a multitude of small activities, whether by individual or
groups, doing their own thing? Suppose the only plausible economic recovery consists
in people picking themselves up off the industrial scrapheap, or rejecting their slot in
the micro-technology system, and making their own niche in the world of ordinary
needs and their satisfaction. Wouldnt that be something to do with anarchism? (Ward
1982:13).
The above analysis has re-asserted the centrality of non-commodified spaces in an

age of neoliberal economic crisis. Many alternative forms of social co-operation and
ways of being not only persist in the contemporary world, but occupy a central place
in many household and community livelihood practices. Moreover, many of these
practices are empowering and desirable in that they are harnessed through choice,
and not economic necessity. It is hoped that this will encourage anarchist-based
visions of post-neoliberal futures to assert themselves confidently from within
these current economic landscapes, and help a secure bridge to be established
between the contemporary world and that of a future (post-neoliberal) world.
This bridging between what is and what could be is of critical importance for
many reasons, but particularly given that: The problem of transcending capitalism
is the search for the future in the present, the identification of already existing
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1638 Antipode
activities which embody new, alternative forms of social co-operation and ways of
being (Cleaver 1994:129).
This brings us to an important consideration: What . . . will it be like to live in
a world dominated more and more by household and hidden economies and less
by the formal economy? (Ward 1982:13) What possible new or alternative crypto-
economic-anarchist spaces, might emerge from different modes of engagement,
exchange and participation? It is to this consideration that we now turn.
Enabling Crypto-Economic Spaces to Emerge and

Thrive
By seeking to unpack economic plurality, this paper has begun to critically
undermine the commodification thesis. There exist large swathes of non-
commodified spaces of production, exchange and consumption in both higher and
lower income communities. This opens up alternative economic routes for moving
purposefully toward a post-capitalist society.
Crucially, however, attempts to sketch what crypto-economic spaces are possible,
or desirable, must consciously avoid the temptation of unnecessarily imposing an
overly narrow, singular, or best interpretation of what that economic future should
be. Indeed plurality, diversity, and heterodox approaches to the future should be
positively encouraged and embraced. As Baldelli (1972:82) argues:
In an anarchist society there will be positive freedom, freedom as power, but only in
association with others, not over or against them. There is only one way to avoid making
the individual powerless against society, and that is a plurality of societies within society,
and a plurality of powers within or in accompaniment to each society. This double
plurality should provide ample room for each individual to choose from a fair variety of
possible destinies.
To this end, and situated firmly in the anarchist tradition, we would like to outline
a two-pronged complementary approach that will enable crypto-economic spaces
to emerge and thrive. The first concerns the role of education, and the second
focuses on the social and structural barriers to participation in non-commodified
practices.
Liberating Education
From William Godwins (1986 [1793]) polemic about the evils of national education
to the present day, anarchists and other dissident thinkers, notably Friere (1972)
and Illich (1971), have invested a great deal of attention toward the role of (state-
controlled) schools and education. As Ward (1982:79) argues: Ultimately the social
function of education is to perpetuate society: it is the social function. Society
guarantees its future by rearing its children in its own image. At a fundamental level,
encouraging the recognition and development of crypt-economic spaces depends
on the ability of contemporary society to unshackle itself from the current straitjacket
of neoliberal economic thought and discourse, and instead be inspired to envisage
multiple possibilities of a post-neoliberal future. Education thusas it always has
becomes a critical key, not only in inspiring greater critical thought and engagement
!
through engaging with heterodox economics, but also with re-inserting this in
broader political frameworks. Undoubtedly educationboth compulsory and at
higher levelsmust give serious consideration as to how best to incorporate these
broader economic and political frameworks of reference and understanding.
We would argue strongly that a core element of geography must (at all levels) turn
towards its anarchist roots once more, dedicate resources not only to de-mystifying
the anarchist tradition, but where relevant and possible, engaging directly with
the (new) challenges and critiques that anarchism extols as a political and social
ideology. Anarchist studies must strive to be, in the words of Shukaitis (2009:169),
more than the study of anarchism and anarchists by anarchists, weaving a strange
web of self-referentiality and endless rehashing of the deeds and ideas of bearded
nineteenth-century European males.
Pepper (1988:339340) suggests two ways to introduce the subject of anarchism
into the geography classroom:
First pupils could be informed of some of the principles underlying various forms
of anarchism (e.g., decentralism, self-reliance, anti-specialism, anti-urban/ pro-rural,
egalitarianism), and asked to speculate on what changes would occur in Britains
geography if these principles were applied.
Indeed the crisis of both neoliberal economics and the state demands that the need
to radicalise and re-think approaches to these domains is taken up, and the current
vogue for the business as usual model, or the oxymoronic call for sustainable
capitalism is firmly critiqued, exposed and rejected. As Pepper (1988:350) argues,
getting children to critically consider the contemporary (economic, social, political)
landscapes should:
Wean pupils away from a-historicism: that is, the distressing tendency to see the
future as inevitablei.e., over-conditioned by the presentand only imaginable in
terms of extrapolation from present assumptions (of gigantism, capitalism, technological
determinism, etc.).
Importantly, with respect to the economic the evidence base presented here
which constructively builds upon the critical interventions and interpretations arising
from other dissident/heterodox economistsacts as another excellent point of
discussion and departure from conventional neoliberal economic dogma.
Barriers to Participation in Non-commodified Practices

In addition to influencing hearts and minds through pedagogic intervention as a
strategy to ensure possibilities for crypto-economic spaces to emerge and thrive,
close attention must also be placed to addressing the structural and social barriers
to participation in non-commodified work practices.
If a post-capitalist world is to be constructed, then a greater awareness of the
structural and social barriers that prevent greater participation in non-commodified
practices is required. Put broadly, and again drawing on previous research in the
UK (Burns, Williams and Windebank 2004; White, 2009; Williams and Windebank,
2001) the nature of these barriers are uneven, and not only reflect (a combination)
of a households lack of money, time, skills, and social networks, but also several
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1640 Antipode
social taboos that include being a burden to others; false expectations, being
taken advantage of and being unable to say no to others. More understanding
through empirical research is thus required regarding how individuals can exist
better outside the capitalist money economy. A nuanced bottom-up approach to
understanding these barriers from the household and community level is desirable
if they are to be successfully addressed.
There must certainly be a holistic and sensitive, reflective approach in place,
one which is committed to recognising the critical intersections that operate in
society. Without doubt the anarchist gaze should continue to focus on the sites
of production and re-production at the human scale (Sale 1980), including those
dominant spaces of education, housing, employment and the family in particular.
With respect to the family, any intervention may take on new and unpredictable
forms. As Ward (1982:129) argues:
Family life, based on the original community, has disappeared. A new family, based on
community of aspirations, will take its place. In this family people will be obliged to know
one another, to aid one another and to lean on one another moral support on every
occasion.
It is also important to put the local, the community and the individual, at the heart
of change, a point made by Norberg-Hodge (1992:181) in her study of Ladakh
society:
The fabric of industrial society is to a great extent determined by the interaction of
science, technology, and a narrow economic paradigmand interaction that is leading
to ever-greater centralization and specialization. Since the Industrial revolution, the
perspective of the individual has become more limited while political and economic
units have grown larger. I have become convinced that we need to de-centralize our
political and economic structures and broaden our approach to knowledge if we are to
find our way to a more balanced and sane society. In Ladakh, I have seen how human-
scale structures nurture intimate bonds with the earth and an active and participatory
democracy, while supporting strong and vital communities, healthy families, and a
greater balance between male and female. These structures in turn provide the security
needed for individual well-being and, paradoxically, for a sense of freedom.
A Final Thought
The anarchist sees the question of change as an immediate one, not something to be
postponed until practical pressing matters are dealt with in an effective, but amoral, way
(Cahill 1989:235).
That many seemingly entrenched obstacles can be overcome by direct actionby

ordinary people taking responsibility for changing their own situationcan be
witnessed on many levels, and in many places. Indeed there has been a great
deal of evidence of good (anarchist-based) practice arising via the work that
(radical) geographers have undertaken, particularly those focused on engaging with
autonomous communities (eg Pickerill and Chatterton 2006). There is no doubt
that many new and exciting strategies of resistance have yet to be explored, or
properly understood, and not least from within the western world. This was a point
!
of considered reflection by Chatterton (2010:898) while working with the Zapatista

autonomous municipality of Morelia:
I began to think about the inspiring struggles and people I had met back home in
the UK over the last few years. People ripping up genetically modified crops, breaking
into warehouses to hold raves or military bases to dismantle jet fighters, blocking road
developments or holding parties in the middle of motorways. The silent army of people
organising free language classes for migrants or solidarity events against the poll tax,
developing open source software, hacklabs and alternative news media. Under the bright
inspiring lights of the Zapatista struggle, I had begun to forget just how many people
continue to resist neoliberalism, the deadlock of consumer-led market fundamentalism
and the patronising deadhand of representative democracy in a wealth of untold ways;
often putting their own liberty on the line to struggle for a better, more equal society
where everyone has a say in how it is built.
Critical academics and activists alike should take great heart and inspiration
that we can perceive clear (anarchist) spaces and methods of social and
economic organisation that are being continually produced and re-produced in the
contemporary world. Given this, it would seem rational that any approaches which
look to pursue post neoliberal economic futures should try wherever possible to
locate non-commodified practices at the heart of these new worlds. As Burns,
Williams and Windebank (2004:28) observe: Community self help should not be
seen as an off-the-wall radical philosophy. It is for the most part what we do already.
And this is where the rub lies for anarchists must begin to construct the world as
anarchists want it to be, but do it in the world-as-it-is (Cahill 1989:243).
Anarchist visions aside, it is also important to reflect and consider what strategies
and tactics can be used to successfully promote anarchist-inspired praxis. This
may prove the greater challenge. As Goldman (1979:48) noted, as the most
revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must meet needs with the
combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct. One significant
step forward would be the wider re-integration of a re-vitalised and re-energised
anarchism within the contemporary theory and praxis of human and economic
geography. It is disappointing to reflect on the fact that direct engagement with
anarchist ideas and practice within geography have been neglected, or overlooked
in favour of other radical geographies (Marxist and feminist critiques for example),
for much of the twentieth century. As Blunt and Willis (2000:2) note: Anarchist
ideas have inspired enormous change within the discipline, but as yet, they have
spawned only the outlines of a tradition of geographical scholarship and there is
plenty of scope for further elaboration. If this paper has contributed in some small
way toward a (re)turn to anarchist geography, opened up some new opportunities
and possibilities to unleash our economic imaginations, helped suggest ways to
move beyond authoritarian methods of social organisation, and move purposefully
toward a post-neoliberal future, then it will have achieved its purpose.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the four anonymous referees for their constructive insights
and valuable suggestions that have helped strengthen the original version of the paper
significantly.
!
1642 Antipode
Endnotes
1
On a related point, an important gap in heterodox economics literature concerns the lack
of a poststructuralist anarchism intervention. This would be another potential exciting and
worthwhile endeavour, and one that has begun to be of influence elsewhere (eg Jeppesen
2011; Koch 2011; May 1994 2011; Mueller 2011; Newman 2011).
2
The tasks included aspects of house maintenance (outdoor painting, indoor painting,
wallpapering, plastering, mending a broken window and maintenance of appliances), home
improvement (putting in double glazing, plumbing, electrical work, house insulation, putting
in a bathroom suite, building a garage, building an extension, putting in central heating
and carpentry), housework (routine housework, cleaning windows outdoors, spring cleaning,
cleaning windows indoors, doing the shopping, washing clothes and sheets, ironing, cooking
meals, washing dishes, hairdressing, household administration), making and repairing goods
(making clothes, repairing clothes, knitting, making or repairing furniture, making or repairing
garden equipment, making curtains), car maintenance (washing car, repairing car and car
maintenance), gardening (care of indoor plants, outdoor borders, outdoor vegetables, lawn
mowing) and caring activities (daytime baby-sitting, night-time baby sitting, educational
activities, pet care).
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!
In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist
Geographies of Territorialisation
Anthony Ince
School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK;
anthony.ince@glasgow.ac.uk
Abstract: This paper applies an anarchist approach to ongoing debates on the politics,
nature and function of territory. Recent work in geography has problematised dominant
modes of territory, but has stopped short of a systematic critique of how statist spatial
imaginations and practices reproduce and perpetuate the dominance of both capitalism
and authority in society. In this paper, I deploy anarchist thought and practice to argue
that territory must be viewed as a processual and contested product of social relations.
This is linked to the notion of prefiguration; a distinctive concept in anarchist thought and
practice embedding envisioned future modes of social organisation into the present. Using
examples from fieldwork with anarchist-inspired groups, I explore anarchist prefigurative
politics as a means to re-imagine how practices of territorialisation and bordering might
be deployed as part of a broader project of social transformation.
Keywords: anarchism, territory, bordering, relations, prefiguration
It is plausible to suggest that the minor but notable resurgence of anarchism in

radical geography in the 1970s was, in part, a response to impoverished binary
discourses between the globalising market-capitalist states of the West and the
socialist bureaucratic-capitalist states of the Soviet Bloc. Geographers of a radical
persuasion recognised that neither option offered a genuinely liberatory political
project; instead, scholars writing in Antipode (eg Antipode 1978) explored the
possibilities of anarchism as a socialism that offered both liberty and equality.
Although anarchism offered a radically different political imagination in the Cold
War years, it also offered an alternative spatial imagination, constituted by a careful
unpacking of the capitalist and authoritarian organisation of society.
If political geography in the 1990s, the decade following the fall of the USSR,
was characterised in part by an excited exploration of all things borderless,
deterritorialised and global (see Brenner 2003), then the 2000s have been
driven partly by a reaction against this laissez-faire triumphalism, asserting the
enduring importance of bureaucratic and politico-institutional territories such
as states (eg Gritsch 2005). There now exist tensions between globalised and
transnational flows of bodies, culture and economy, and the lines on the map
that regulate these flows. Much like the dilemma faced by radical geographers in
the 1970s, we are thus offered a choice: either we draw from the borderlessness
hypothesisasserting the triumph of global capitalism over territoryor we
emphasise the enduring centrality of the stateimplying that state-led regulatory
governance is the only other territorial category next to a deterritorialising global free
market. Given this impoverished binaryeven if we accept that both approaches
contain an element of truth and are not so clear cutit is not surprising that debate

1646 Antipode
over the nature and function of territory as a geographical phenomenon has re-
emerged in recent years.
Whatever our misgivings about the borderlessness hypothesis, the increasingly
connected world has certainly destabilised the certainty of territory, both among
elite policy-makers and business, and within popular discourses (Reid-Henry 2010).
Neoliberalisation and the opening up of global markets, as well as intensifying
the modes and level of exploitation that take place through capital accumulation,
has been a major driving force in the disruption of territory as a factor in political
economy, culture and identity (Flint 2002). The enduring importance of supra-
national institutions, such as the European Union, likewise continue to disrupt
(ostensibly state-oriented) treatments of territory as an exclusive, sovereign spatial
unit (Leitner 1997). Although these supra-national bodies are co-ordinated and
populated by state actors, growing reactions from the political right against their
powers demonstrate the strain that they can place on national identity (Koefoed
and Simonsen 2007).
At the same time, however, the forms of regulation and discipline within and
between states and territories have also intensified, with the increasingly aggressive
protection of state borders in the face of a sense of growing vulnerability of their
territorial integrity (eg Gill 2010). Increasingly sophisticated state disciplinary and
surveillance mechanisms also ensure that everyday life remains highly structured by
territorial parameters and technologies. The enduring presence of territorial state
apparatus and the ongoing march of globalisation thus demand of us a nuanced
treatment of territory that pays close attention to the intersections of, and tensions
between, a range of territorial dynamics.
This paper discusses how an anarchist treatment of territory might help us to
re-cast territory as a tool of political praxis produced and contested chiefly through
relations. The idea of territory, imbued as it is with undertones of statism and
authoritarian control, is anathema to most anarchists, and it is likely that the
participants in the empirical sections would be wary of using such terms. However,
rather than eschewing the concept altogether, I contend that not only is territory
compatible with an anarchist framework but it also provides opportunities for
political action. By mobilising an anarchist critique of the interlinked system of
capital and authority, and proposing a prefigurative understanding of territory,
we have opportunities to theorise territory, and related processes of territorialisation
and bordering, in a way that opens up our spatial and political imaginations to
radical alternatives.
The rest of the paper is divided into five sections. The next section considers
some key academic theorisations of, and debates over, territory. Developments in
geography noting the processual notions of territorialisation and bordering are useful
in unpacking the dynamics of territory in practice. The following section introduces
anarchist theory and spatial imaginations, and I draw out the implications of
autonomous and prefigurative anarchist principles for our understanding of territory.
After a short introduction to the case studies and methodology, the final substantive
section explores the territorial practices of three anarchist-inspired groups in the UK.
I argue that these support an anarchistic approach to territory that is processual;
contested and produced through the prefigurative reconstitution of social relations.
!
In the Shell of the Old 1647
They are indicative of an understanding of territory that need not be static, defensive
or reactive. In the concluding section, I argue that these insights have significance
not only for academic debates but also for practical action for social change that
refuses the false binary between bureaucratic state regulation and global capitalist
deregulation.
Geographical Engagements with Territory

Territory: An Elusive Term
In his classic work on territory, Gottman (1973: ix) lamented that although much
speech, ink, and blood have been spilled over territorial disputes, there was
amazingly little academic interest in territory. However, since the emergence of
globalisation studies, there has been a growing literature on the nature and politics
of territorial practices and institutions. In one recent overview, Antonsich (2009)
identifies three primary ways in which social scientists have sought to engage with
territory. Two approaches understand territory as a biological or anthropological
concept, both of which underpin an essence of territory that is naturalised into social
interactions. These have tended to identify territory as a spatial phenomenon imbued
with unequal power dynamics through an (often imposed) territorial imagination
of authenticity and belonging.
The third approach discussed by Antonsich concerns territory conceived as a
politico-institutional space, which is arguably the most established conception of
territory in contemporary geography. This refers to territory as a spatial concept
linked to bounded systems of governance, through which a governing body and its
various bureaucratic and coercive apparatuses regulate and control those settled in,
or passing through, a defined geographical region. This approach to territory has
been the one most readily identified by scholars as a target for deconstruction on the
basis of the growing anxieties and complexities of territory in a globalised world,
with multiple spatialities that transcend or disrupt politico-institutional territories
such as the state (eg Agnew 1994; Debrix 1998; Massey 1994).
In light of the exploration of new conceptions of territory through neo-
Foucauldian and Deleuzian poststructuralisms (eg Dewsbury 2011) the notion
in political geography, following Gottman (1973), that territory is a functional
partition of space into containers for the ease of governance and administration
has undergone profound scrutiny. Although it is accepted in poststructuralist-
influenced work that [t]he frame is what establishes territory (Grosz 2008:11),
these approaches indicate that territory as a concept and practice is contestable,
historically contingent and in flux. Indeed, Deleuzes thought on territorialisation
suggests that it is actually a form of stagnation within fluid processes of assemblage
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Legg 2011).
Neo-Foucauldian work on governmentality has sought to explore the ways in
which technologies of control enacted through politico-bureaucratic structures also
operate through the shaping of attitudes, knowledges and relationships in territories,
rather than simple coercion (eg Flint 2003; Murdoch 1997). In rendering territories
governable from a distance in a way that is enacted by both institutional structures
!
1648 Antipode
and social practices, it is possible to imagine territory as not so easily divisible

between social and institutional spheres. Although poststructuralist scholars have
progressed our understanding of the contested spaces of governance, the area
currently lacks an emphasis on empirical political-economic work concerning the
state and capital, as well as non-state actors (Rose-Redwood 2006).
Following scholars of governmentality, I consider territory in a way that seeks
to avoid divisions between social and institutional imaginaries, preferring to follow
Painter (2010) in conceiving of territory as a unitary effect of social interaction based
on (aspirations to) contiguity, continuity and boundedness. Division of territory into
separate spheres risks positioning social life as separate or independent from the
institutions that seek to govern it. Instead, it is productive to think about these
social and institutional elements of territory as interrelated, co-constitutive currents
that run through multiple processes of territorialisation.
Organisation studies literatures have repeatedly warned against perceiving
institutions as external to social relations and practices, emphasising the fragile and
contested reality of outwardly stable institutions (eg Doolin 2003; Oswick, Keenoy
and Grant 2000). If we understand institution not simply as a static, bureaucratic
structure but as operating through an everyday pattern of human relations
(Neilson and Rossiter 2006:397), then institutional and social spheres of territory
become rather blurred. Indeed, geographers have made similar observations about
the state, noting how we must contemplate the social relations within which the
nation-state is enacted (Mountz 2003:624; cf Painter 2006). The institution thus
operates through a structure of social relations, activities and processes. This subject
is explored in more depth in the empirical sections of the paper.
Beyond Statism: Territory as Diverse and Processual

The overriding conception of territory has hitherto engaged with the state as a
sovereign territorial space. This emphasis on the state has arguably reproduced
broader state-centric spatial imaginaries and knowledge production paradigms:
The role of states as significant centres of symbolic power in modern societies is not
without consequences. One of these is that much social scientific knowledge is still
discursively related to the state . . . Among the statist discursive limits [is] the conception
of society as a territorially confined unit defined by the national state (Hakli 2001:417).
Agnew (1994), similarly, argued that an enduring assumption of international

relations scholars and some geographersthe so-called territorial trapwas the
conflation of the state and territory. The historical context provided by scholars
such as Hakli (2001) demonstrates the powerful nexus of state and scholarship in
the constitution of our understandings, in this case, of territory. Emphasising the
historically contingent nature of territory and its uses, Elden (2010:757) likewise
argues that territory must be conceived as a historically and geographically specific
form of political organisation and political thought. For Elden, although he only
engages with Western philosophy, the concept of territory pre-dates the state as we
know it, and thus nascent states in fact appropriated and re-cast the concept for
their mode of governance.
!
As such, it is important to note how territory is produced, reproduced and

contested over time by competing political and spatial imaginaries. One key means
through which scholars have sought to position territory as generated out of
such processes is through various notions of territorialisation. Early scholarship on
globalisation often referred to the deterritorialisation of society as the process of
removing territorial demarcations such as borders and state regulatory functions
to the movement of goods, capital and services around the globe (Taylor 1995),
along with the enmeshing (O Tuathail 1998:85) of states into supra-national
institutions. In turn, scholars of globalisation have identified the deterritorialisation
of phenomena such as identity and belonging (eg Papastergiadis 2000; Roy
2004). Geographers have investigated a range of phenomena that have at least
in part developed alongside or out of this perceived deterritorialisation, including
transnational communities, outsourcing, migration, unstable electoral patterns and
a range of geopolitical dynamics (Behr 2008; Brun 2001; Hudson 2000; O Tuathail
1998).
The social and cultural anxieties produced by this fragmenting process of
deterritorialisation have often been articulated, politically, through spatial practices
that can be understood as efforts to reterritorialise. Alongside state efforts to
reterritorialise through the re-scaling of governance (Brenner 1999), the rise of
the far right in Europe, for example, can be seen as a search by some, in the
face of perceived ethnic and social fragmentation, for the re-establishment of
a lost sense of homogeneous and territorially bounded, authentic community
(Ince 2011). However, the articulation of reterritorialising politics is not necessarily
reactionary, and more progressive forms of place-based politics that engage with
global processes may also enact or propose reterritorialisations (eg DeFilippis 2001).
The binary of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, however, is problematic.
Rising levels of defensive and reactionary assertions of place-based politics teach us to
be wary of fetishising place and local territories as containing unproblematic sources
of alternatives to globalised capitalism (eg Laurie and Bonnett 2002; Bonefeld 2004).
A deeper concern with the de/reterritorialisation binary is that it arguably closes
down the myriad processes of territorialisation into two distinct directions. In
doing so, scholars may fail to grasp the ways in which territory is made and re-
made through practice. As O Tuathail (1999:143) argues: [i]t is not simply that
there is no de-territorialisation without re-territorialisation, but that both are parts
of ongoing generalised processes of territorialisation. In this sense, it is worth
noting scholarship of complex geopolitical regions such as PalestineIsrael (Yiftachel
2006) and Tibet (McConnell 2010) that emphasises the contested nature not only of
territory as a disputed area of land but also as something that is imbued with political,
cultural or symbolic meanings, contested through practices and relationships that
are not necessarily located within the territory in question. Allen and Cochrane
(2007:1171) have argued that territory is not always bounded in a conscious or
deliberate manner, with even powerful actors being lodged within territories
or regions in ways that are not of their choosing. Thus we must understand
territorialisations as ongoing, uneven and contested processes associated with a
range of powerful forces that are not solely or necessarily linked to the dissolution
(deterritorialisation) or assertion (reterritorialisation) of territory itself. Instead, we
!
1650 Antipode
must view territorialisation as a process constituted by diverse territorial practices

that are not easily identifiable as good or bad, but are infused with multiple
political, cultural, economic and social trajectories and intersections (cf Marston
2000; Valentine 2007).
Much like this processual, contested notion of territorialisation, other categories
related to territory have also been increasingly viewed as a process. Bordering
has become an increasingly standard term, denoting the spatial strategic
representation of the making and claiming of difference (Berg and Van
Houtum 2003:2). Not only, however, does bordering assert difference, much like
territorialisation, it is a powerful mechanism through which groups solidify, define
and defend (various perceptions of) sameness or common purpose. For example,
a number of geographers have demonstrated how state border regimes have
been increasingly tightened and immigration discourses have become increasingly
important as discursive and regulatory controls in the constitution of a sense of
national identity (eg Gill 2010; McDowell 2009). Sociologists, likewise, consider
the ways in which practices of ethnic identity negotiation are simultaneously
produced through assertions of diversity within the nation and adversity towards
those beyond its borders (eg Fortier 2008). In these examples, bordering is
undertaken not only through technologies of physical separation but also through
internal mechanisms of identity formation as a mode of social control within state
territories.
However, it is simplistic to suggest that all borders are negative in all contexts.
As some have noted, certain kinds of borders can act as facilitators as well as
preventers (eg Newman and Paasi 1998; Timothy 1995). Even among anarchists,
whose politics reject the legitimacy of state borders, there is a tacit recognition
that bordering practicesof group membership, for examplecan be useful and
sometimes necessary, echoing the suggestion that there is nothing ipso facto
regressive about bounded spaces (Antonsich 2009:796; cf Castree 2004). As partly
a tool of territorialisation, bordering offers an important means of understanding
how territorialising processes take place through everyday practice.
While there is a growing body of work concerning the bordering practices of
cultures and identities (Madsen and Van Naerssen 2003; Van Houtum, Kramsch
and Zierhofer 2005; Vila 1999), there is far less that discusses the role of bordering
in the constitution and mobilisation of political subjectivities. Those works that do
engage with this subject are instructive, and emphasise how bordering practices
need not always take place at the border itself (eg Bigo and Guild 2005). Bordering
provides us with a possible means of interrogating the ways in which groups
developconsciously or otherwisetheir particularity and identity, territorially,
such as through citizenship (cf Fuller, Kershaw and Pulkingham 2008). Much like the
contested processes of territorialisation, bordering also emphasises the processual,
everyday constitution of subjectivities and identities, located in particular places and
demarcating certain physical or symbolic territories. Although identity is the most
prominent product of bordering practices it can also be a facet of spatial strategy in
political organisation, and literature to date tends not to foreground this issue (cf,
however, Jamoul and Wills 2008). In the remainder of this paper, I sketch an anarchist
approach to territory that foregrounds bordering as a legitimate spatial strategy that
!
refuses and moves beyond a statist-capitalist framework for understanding the role
and nature of territorial practices, and that can produce emancipatory spaces in the
process.
Anarchism, Territory and Social Relations

Territory and the Anarchist Spatial Imagination
I now turn to an explicitly anarchist engagement with territory. First, I undertake
a brief consideration of anarchist theory and strategy, and the spatial imagination
that is produced through it. Anarchist thought is incredibly varied, and in this paper
I focus on arguably the most popular and well known of anarchisms. Anarchist
communism is a strand of communist thought that, although it has origins in
the early nineteenth century (see Marshall 1993), emerged as a distinct school of
thought and action after the 1872 split between the anarchists and Marxists in the
First International. Anarchist-communists tend to agree with Marxists in the sense
that society is divided between the vast majorityworkers, unemployed, home-
makers, etcand a tiny minority who govern our lives and live off the proceeds
of our activity (eg Berkman 1942 [1929]). However, anarchism has developed a
distinctive political philosophy that has profound implications for the way we view
territory. Two key principles guide anarchism: the critique of authority and the idea
of prefiguration.
The critique of authority arguably sets anarchism apart from most other socialist
philosophies. Anarchists note how power structures and relations in society produce
and perpetuate inequality. Inequality, for anarchists, does not simply (or even
primarily) stem from economic inequalities but is often most clearly manifested as
such. Crucially, inequality of opportunity to live a free and fulfilling life is perceived by
classical and contemporary anarchists alike as an entirely separate sphere of injustice
from economic injustices, although they are clearly linked (eg Rocker 2004 [1938];
Sheehan 2003). Thus, the critique of authority is at once an empirical analysis and an
applied moral theory advocating a new sense of right (Rocker 2004 [1938]:80).
Authority is conceived as an asymmetrical power relation which operates through
social relations and institutional structures to produce and perpetuate inequality
(McLaughlin 2007). Classical anarchists referred to the notions of liberty or
freedom as the phenomenon constitutive of society without authority (eg
Malatesta 2001 [1892]). However, contemporary anarchists have developed the
term autonomy from its Italian Marxist origins, which implies more strongly the
positive freedoms and collectivity of anarchism (eg Garland 2010), and distances
itself from the lexicon of the free-market libertarian right.
The state is the central institution of authority, claiming a monopoly of violence
over a certain territory. The state is understood as an apparatus for supporting,
regulating and perpetuating unequal capitalist relations in society, which, in
turn, entrench and strengthen authoritarian institutions such as the state by
disempowering the majority relative to a privileged elite. This does not only link
the bourgeois state to the enduring presence of capitalism, but it also foregrounds
authority as the definitive marker of power in present society. Authority is conceived
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1652 Antipode
by anarchists as an unequal relationship that represents the illegitimate expression

of coercive power relations, through which human freedoms are constrained and
material inequalities perpetuated and intensified (McLaughlin 2007). As such, it is
distinct (at least ontologically) from questions of expertise, knowledge or experience.
Authority stands separate from (but nonetheless necessarily linked to) the class
struggle, as its own distinct sphere of oppression. Although class remains a central
focus of much anarchist literature, theoretically speaking, it matters little whether a
fascist or socialist government is in powerto anarchists, the sovereign state is an
authoritarian structure with its own distinct set of power asymmetries that endure
independently of capitalism (Bakunin 1990 [1873]).
Authoritarian power relations produce complex intersections of oppression that
encompass but cannot be reduced to the individual components of class, gender,
ethnic and other oppressions. The extent to which this is embedded within the social
fabric of everyday life necessitates the dismantling of existing structures of power
as a fundamental element in any revolutionary strategy (Price 2007). However, as
mentioned above, it is not possible to easily differentiate between institutions and
social relations, since the former are entangled in patterns of the latter. As such,
authority is all-pervasive and inescapable without a parallel transformation of the
very relationships through which it operates. This paper does not engage directly
with anarchist critiques of capitalism and authority per se, but the emphasis on
relationships is central to the second key principle of anarchism.
The answer to how anarchists seek to undertake this transformation of
relationships brings us to the second distinctive principle of anarchism. Long before
the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, anarchists had already warned of the dangers of
a political strategy that did not explicitly deploy the principles on which a future
society would be based (eg Bakunin 1990 [1873]:178).
While it would be unfair to say that the experiences of the twentieth century
proved the anarchist perspective to be universally correct, this point is nonetheless
extremely powerful. Such concerns have led anarchists to the development of what
can be called prefigurative politics. Rather than believing that it is possible to use
authoritarian or undemocratic means to create a free and equal society, anarchists
have developed ways of embedding the political principles of an envisioned
anarchist society into the ways they organise in the here-and-now (eg Gordon
2007; Graeber 2009). Early anarchists undertook propaganda by the deed as a
proto-prefigurative deconstruction of statist-capitalist apparatus, often painted as
terrorism due to some participation in targeted acts of political violence. Despite
some broader working class support at certain points (Wellbrook 2009), later
anarchists took inspiration from other prefigurative practices enacted in the era
of classical anarchism such as co-operative cultural and productive enterprises,
libertarian schooling and member-run anarchist unions and tenants groups.
Prefiguration, however, is not purely a strategic or tactical moveprefigurative
praxis involves a fundamental acknowledgement that no revolution is ever
complete. As Rocker (2005 [1956]:111) notes: I am an anarchist not because
I believe in anarchism as a final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final
goal. Freedom will lead us to continually wider and expanding understanding and
to new social forms of life.
!
Although contemporary anarchists recognise the need for moments of upheaval

and rupture, revolutionary change takes place over a long period of time during
which ways of organising and relating are gradually reconstituted. The fundamental
basis of anarchist strategy and philosophy is the recognition that society is constantly
in process, in becoming, and that revolution is likewise an unending process of
development. Utopia is an unattainable goal which will never be achieved, but
in striving to achieve it, we can move towards revolution through the constant
creation and adaptation of revolutionary practices and relations in everyday life.
This acknowledgement radically transforms the spatialities (and temporalities) of
revolutionary praxis, producing political spaces that are processual and in tension
between the present and future; between the actual and the possible. It is in this
tension that anarchism resides.
Towards an Autonomous Conception of Territory

From these points, it is possible to make initial comments concerning an anarchist
treatment of territory. First, current geographical analyses emphasise the contested
and processual nature of territorialisation and bordering. Anarchism offers a
framework for understanding the politics of what work these processes actually
do. Foregrounding the political nature of process itself is central to making sense of
the implications of such geographical approaches. Anarchist prefigurative politics
resides in the contestations and practices of everyday life, producing a revolutionary
imagination that is rooted in process and becoming. If territory is constituted and re-
constituted over time, then there is scope for interventions in the fabric of territorial
processes that might wrench territory from the statist and authoritarian discursive
and power frameworks that have hitherto chiefly characterised it.
Second, the interactions between territory as an institutional space and a social
space can be teased apart through an anarchist analysis of territory as entwined
in social relationships. The contestation and negotiation of territorialities is partly
expressed through bordering practices, which have an ambiguous relationship
to the political philosophy of anarchism. An anarchist approach to territorial and
bordering practices that emphasises the social relations that bond territorial spaces
(eg through institutions) may offer a powerful toolkit for analysing social and
institutional dynamics as part of a broader framework concerning power and
authority in social life.
Third, an anarchist approach affords us tools for conceiving of territorialisation as
a potentially liberating practice. Through an emphasis on the prefigurative, it may
be possible to embed within territorial practices certain organisational functions and
structures that are at once effective in building spaces of struggle and developing
modes of organisation that prefigure future worlds. One central facet of this is the
notion of autonomy, promoting and practicing the collective self-management of
struggles and structures while retaining a critical engagement with broader statist-
capitalist society (Notes from Nowhere 2003).
Anarchist approaches to autonomy have emphasised the unequal power relations
involved in everyday activities and interactions and have sought to develop forms of
self-management that eschew, subvert and challenge mechanisms and institutions
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1654 Antipode
of governance that structure everyday life. As Heckert (2005:np) notes: autonomy,

then, is empowermentthe realisation that power isnt something that other people
have, its something we do together . . . In autonomy power means working together
by listening to each other, caring for each other.
On a more philosophical level, the anarchist view of autonomy is linked to the
anarchist commitment to the immanence of social agency and capacity, in which:
[a]narchist autonomy refers to the forces constitutive of beings, to their capacity
to develop in themselves the totality of resources which they need in order 1) to
affirm their existence and 2) to associate with others, and to thus constitute an ever
more powerful force of life (Colson 2001:4748).
Self and other are directly co-constitutive, and are produced through immanent
relations and practices that develop over time. If we run with this idea of the
immanent co-constitution of self and other, then we can begin to build an idea
of what an anarchist vision of territory might look like by expanding this relational
view to incorporate the way we see territory. Relationality in geography has tended
to refer to the constitution of cities (eg McCann and Ward 2008), economies (eg
Bathelt and Glucker 2005), and so on, in relation to others elsewhere, but the
anarchist notion of relationality originates with the philosophical idea that self and
other are a priori co-constitutive. Although some geographers (eg Amin, Massey
and Thrift 2003:23; cf Jones 2009) have counterpoised territory and relationality,
in this anarchist framework, we see hints of how we might fuse the two in ways
that respect the imminent, self-managed relations forged by practices of autonomy.
Autonomous practice thus incorporates a range of spatial relations of differentiation,
collectivity and negotiation that, since they are not mediated or regulated by
external institutions, make space for the immanent intermingling of these relations
through everyday practice. Autonomous configurations of territory might therefore
focus less on controlling flows through borders and more on nurturing or adapting
the relationships produced in the process of creating and sustaining autonomous
spaces and spatialities.
As Pickerill and Chatterton (2006) note, autonomy nurtures spaces that fuse
creation and refusal through practices of self-management that empower the
individual and collective and provide vantage points to a future society in the
shell of the present. The enactment of a prefigurative project is therefore also a
strategy of social change. The spaces and spatialities produced through autonomous
enactments of prefigurative politics imply a strong sense of boundedness and
territoriality to anarchist praxis, but they also operate through existing spaces of
mainstream society (Katsiaficas, 2006). Thus, perhaps, territorialisation need not
be a practice that connotes exclusivity in the sense that the states territoriality
implies. Following Kropotkins (1972 [1902]) anarchist magnum opus on co-
operative practices within ecosystems, we need only look to nature to see
how territories overlap and intermingle, creating a rich web of simultaneous
territorialisations that co-exist interdependently. In an anarchist conception
of territory, some territorialities may be antagonistic, while others will seek
to forge relational points of connection, collaboration and cross-fertilisation
both geographically disparate and contiguouswhich may produce growing
constellations of self-management.
!
In the remainder of this paper, I briefly discuss examples of anarchist(ic)

territorial practices through ethnographic fieldwork with three anarchist-inspired
groups in London. This empirical material is indicative of a possible anarchist
treatment of territory based along the theoretical sketches outlined in this
section. Autonomous articulations and enactments of territorialisation premised
on relational, prefigurative praxis provide an opportunity for new understandings
of territory to emerge that eschew territorial imaginations rooted in capital and
authority.
Researching Anarchistic Territorialisations

The empirical material is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in 20062008 as an
active participant in three projectstwo community-based squatted social centres
in London and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a small radical labour
union. Although none of the case studies explicitly position themselves as exclusively
anarchist, they are profoundly influenced by anarchist principles and practices and
also have strong historical connections to anarchist politics.
The two social centresthe Ex-Vibe Occupied Social Centre (December 2006April
2007) and the Clapton Social Centre (CSC, FebruaryMay 2008)were both located
in the working class London borough of Hackney. They were relatively typical of
the social centre movement in the UK, which is comprised of squatted, rented or
co-operatively owned buildings organised as radical political, social and cultural
hubs in particular areas. Since the early 2000s,1 anarchists and other left-libertarian
activists in the UK have seen social centres as potentially useful means of building
and sustaining radical political activity in certain communities.
The third group, the IWW, was formed in Chicago in 1905 and seeks to build One
Big Union of all workers as a means of both fighting for immediate workplace
demands and developing possible structures through which capitalism might be
replaced (eg Thompson and Bekken 2005). Although, in the 1920s, it numbered
around 150,000 largely in extractive industries, a combination of its failure to adapt
to economic changes (Hall 2001) and severe state repression (eg Chaplin 1971)
led it to downfall and near non-existence for several decades. The late 1990s and
early 2000s saw a renaissance for the IWW in North America, and since 2005
the union has also had a section in the UK, with around 600 members in 2011
concentrated largely in the public and service sectors. A commitment to avoiding
political factionalism in the union has led the IWW to distance itself from particular
communist or anarchist tendencies. However, the anti-capitalist, prefigurative and
direct-democratic principles on which it is based, alongside a general eschewal of
the state as an effective means of social change, makes the IWW closely related to
anarchism in principle and heavily populated by anarchists in practice (Christiansen
2009).
The fieldwork was conducted through ethnographic fieldwork, supported by 13
semi-structured interviews. Throughout, I emphasised mutual aid and solidarity in
the research practice, in which I sought to build co-operative relationships with the
groups; neither operating as a truly participatory project nor an extractive exercise
of information-gathering. Such an approach was central to building trusting bonds
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1656 Antipode
with often security-conscious group members, as well as gleaning rich empirical

material.
Anarchistic Territorialisations in Practice

Territory and Strategy
In this subsection, I discuss a number of stories from fieldwork to explore some of
the ways in which the IWW and social centres have engaged in territorial practices
in their spatial strategies. IWW strategy is broadly divided between two forms of
unionism. First, the IWW operates as a standalone union like any other, seeking to
build the union within a workplace and gain shop-floor power. Second, partly due to
its small size and membership density in the highly-unionised public sector, the IWW
operates a dual-card strategy, in which members operate as a grassroots network
within larger mainstream unions, advocating a militant and direct-democratic form
of unionism (Freeze ND).
At the Hawkleyan independent cinema in Sheffield, UKinitial efforts were
made by employees to organise in 2008. The majority of the 25 front-of-house
workers joined the IWW, and the union was forced to go public prematurely,
when one activist was fired on dubious grounds linked to his union activity.
Following actions such as mass pickets and a telephone and email blockade
(IWW 2008) which shut down many functions of the cinema for a day, the
union demanded formal recognition. After management flatly refusedoffering
the workers a sweetheart deal with another union, before back-tracking under
pressure from IWW dual-card members in the other unionworkers eschewed the
legal route and instead focused on shop-floor direct actions. Successes from actions
such as short work stoppages and mass meetings included the reinstatement of a
suspended worker for a minor cash mishandling, the sacking of one manager and an
overhaul of hitherto problematic scheduling arrangements. By late 2008, without a
union contract, the IWW was operating as the de facto recognised union at the
workplace. One employee wrote:
[I]t would be wrong to perceive the Hawkley dispute as a failed recognition battle. The
real gains that we made in terms of changes in conditions to the workforce, securing
peoples jobs and getting contracts for bar workers were largely initiated outside of the
recognition struggle and by much more informal action (Anon 2010).
This process of gaining de facto union power via unofficial direct actions produced
an unusual territorial politics, quite distinct to that of dominant union strategies,
which focus on the establishment of discrete territorial bargaining units. Instead,
the workers produced a territoriality that operated through a network of working
relationships, constituting territory not through the drawing of external lines but
through a mass of actors lodging (Allen and Cochrane 2007:1171) in space.
Through workers self-organisation, this strategy was autonomous and flexible, and
produced a territorialisation that management was unable to effectively contain.
Indeed, the changing relationships of the workers from colleagues to comrades
produced profound shifts in the broader institutional context of the cinema. This
strategy, although territorial in terms of seeking workplace control, refused a
!
bounded notion of legal union recognition covering a specific number of workers,

workplace matters and period of time. Instead, it forged an approach that adapted
itself over time and was powerful precisely because of its ungovernability and
externality to the established institutional and jurisdictional frameworks of labour
relations. This story provides an excellent example of how dominant institutional
territorialities are vulnerable to ruptures and alternative claims to power (Painter
2006). The eschewal of external mediating institutions such as arbitration services,
mainstream union officers or legal processes led to a form of action rooted in direct
relations between workers at the cinema, and created a territoriality in their unionism
that was likewise forged through direct co-operative relations with one another, and
antagonistic relations with management.
More physical territorial strategies are present among social centres. The visceral
territoriality of occupying and defending a squatted building was present in security
practices in both the Vibe and the CSC. CSC had been dogged by illegal eviction
attempts and violence from the police and property owner since before its launch
in early 2008, and physical security of the building was at the forefront of the
collectives priorities: The complexity of the [CSC] experience was increased
by . . . the often overwhelming amount of energy that had to be spent maintaining
the physical security of the space and its occupiers (Charlotte, email interview,
April 2009). Occupying a legally precarious space meant that the CSC collective
did not expect or receive protection from the police, and an attempted eviction by
the landlord and his associates2 led to a stand-off between them and the occupiers
soon after the opening of the centre. Strategies to ensure self-defence were decided
collectively and democratically, and included barricading entrances, lookouts with
projectiles, a negotiating team, and a large group remaining off-site to shadow
proceedings. This may have seemed over the top, read my fieldnotes, but it was
necessary to ensure a continued physical occupation of the building. Paraphrasing
a fellow occupiers words, I continued that when the law isnt on your side, you
must expect the worst (fieldnotes, February 2008). Interestingly, not only was
territorial defence necessary for the survival of the project, an earlier attempt at
eviction by the police threatened to target non-British residents of the space for
deportation (McCoy 2008), fusing internal statist territorialities of border control
with the interests of property (cf Gill 2010).
Since CSC operated as a means of practising and promoting prefigurative forms
of organisation, the territorial defence of the building represented the defence
of those political principles and practices. Thus, the process of territorialisation
is an inherently political one; entwining institutional form and social relations in
particular configurations to produce political outcomes. While in this situation
the spatial strategy enacted was superficially one of bordering, securing the CSC
against those who wish to see it destroyed as an organisational entity, its primary
purpose was not simply an assertion of collective identity or difference from an
other (Berg and Van Houtum 2003). It was also, if not primarily, the claiming and
defence of a particular configuration of territorialisation which was embodied in the
CSC. Through this moment of defending borders, the ongoing political process of
prefigurative territorialisation is secured in relation to competing territorialisations.
Crucially, the self-organisation of the collective to enact this defence invoked an
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1658 Antipode
autonomous organisational strategy, rejecting police protection (which, in any case,

would almost certainly not be forthcoming) in favour of a strategy that relied upon
the direct-democratic practices and self-taught skills of the collective. When the
Vibe was faced with eviction by court-sanctioned bailiffs the collective mobilised
effectively through the relationships that they had built during their enactment
of broad-based campaigns in the local area, mobilising around 7080 people to
successfully defend the building from eviction:
[T]hats the one thing that keeps me goingthe fact that we managed to get people who
werent from typical, you know, left-wing, politicised-already cliques . . . [S]ome women
who I met were actually politicised by the whole experience. These working class single
mothers . . . [T]hat specific building, that specific kind of environment and atmosphere,
and the whole engagement with the community, it was so valuable (Harriet, interview,
August 2008).
Notwithstanding the extensive debates in geography concerning community,

a major factor in the mobilisation with community members at the Vibe
was a successful campaign to prevent the Vibe building from being converted
into a Starbucks. This campaign provided a locus for community action, while also
enacting ways of doing politicssuch as non-hierarchical organisation and direct
actionthat embodied anarchist principles in practice. The campaign was framed as
a campaign to protect the neighbourhood as a whole, and was linked to a broader
campaign to retain the space as a community resource whether or not the Vibe
collective endured.
In bringing together diverse groups with different interestssuch as young
creative populations who mobilised against the erosion of independence and
creativity, or the established working class residents who mobilised against further
gentrificationthe Vibe was able to tap into a range of territorial imaginations
concerning the protection of a certain (real and symbolic) territory. In this case,
the social centre, which was crucially not affiliated to any particular group or party,
operated as a hub for a range of social groups who might otherwise have been
unlikely to organise together. In a press release made by the Vibe after their victory,
the collective wrote:
We see this as a victory not only for the social centre [and] the campaign to keep Church
Street free from the further encroachment of corporate chains, but as a positive step
when ordinary people can join together to have an impact on those things that directly
affect us and the way our environment is used . . . We will continue to campaign against
the closure of the social centre and support any self-organised community campaign
that prioritises community need over private greed (Ex-Vibe OSC 2007).
The territorialisation produced through the anti-Starbucks campaign did not

simply stop at the prevention of unwanted businessit provided a space for
the promotion of broader principles of direct democracy and anti-capitalism in
neighbourhood and planning affairs. Crucially, through the Vibes participatory
democratic practices, discussed below, the campaign also demonstrated a means
of enacting precisely this direct-democratic principle in practice, thus claiming
prefigurative space for anti-authoritarian political possibility in the present (Franks
2006).
!
In these examples, two key observations can be made. First, that territorial
practices can be counter-institutional; operating to subvert or confront dominant
modes of social and territorial organisation. In this sense, the prevailing assumption
in geography (and among many anarchists) that territory is an exclusive spatial tool
of elites or the state is incorrect (Hakli 2001). Second, it is important to note how the
territorial practices taking place were operating within the spaces of the dominant
territorial order. While both the Hawkley and the Vibe were bounded spaces of
private property, the territorialisations of the IWW and social centre activists were
independently claiming territorial control through their collective action (cf Rose-
Redwood 2006) and, following Painter (2010), the territory produced was simply
an imminent outcome of organised social action. In the next subsection, I explore
the internal territorial and bordering practices involved in the democratic processes
and identity formation of the groups.
Direct Democracy and Membership: Bordering Autonomous

Space
One factor that cut across all three groups was distinctive enactments of bordering
through internal democratic processes. Both social centres struggled to fight
against the liberal cross-class conception of community politics as promoted in
policy discourses (Holgersen and Haarstad 2009). The tension between broad-
based campaigning and refusing access to business interests, landowners and their
associates was profoundly geographical, as Adam, a Vibe activist, explained:
[R]adical politics [has a] community that is structured in a completely different way to a
local community. On a physical level, that community becomes communal because they
live together, not because they have the same ideas. You know, theres an anarchist
community because its made up of anarchists, not because people live in an anarchist
area . . . So [we at the Vibe decided that] if we want to have a stable activist base, you
know, have a group of people living in one area and doing one project (interview,
November 2008).
Balancing different images of community led to extensive internal debate at CSC

also, with one meeting agreeing that to talk of one local community is a misnomer.
We have to recognise the plurality of the area in order to identify different interests
and concerns if we are to have any meaningful presence (fieldnotes, February
2008). Responses to the internal fractures and power asymmetries within localities
often manifested themselves through bordering practices of the centres, whereby at
the Vibe clear access and participation guidelines were collectively agreed. For-profit
initiatives, police, bailiffs and projects actively opposing the principles of the centre
were barred from involvement. The latter caused the most debate, with a decision-
making structure that required organisers of events and projects essentially pitch
their idea to the collectives weekly open meeting. From the empirical material,
the position of liminal entities such as co-operatives or radical publishers is difficult
to ascertain. Of course, it is by no means assumed that particular groups have the
correct answers to certain problems, but that participants will take lessons elsewhere.
As with other elements of prefigurative political forms, the ways in which exclusions
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1660 Antipode
function are (at least theoretically) intended to be challenged, if not within the same
project then in other times and spaces.
In one instance, an individual invited owners of some local businesses to
a meeting, and was promptly reminded that we dont work with fucking
business . . . [T]hats not a social centre! (Sarah interview, August 2008). In doing
so, the collective territorialised the space in a distinct manner. Business interests,
no matter how small, were not welcome because their presence contradicted the
principles of the centre as a space designed to prefigure a world without bosses.
In this example, it is in the process of territorialisation where differing political
imaginations competed territorially for the right to define our community. The
power of group members to define the borderlines of the group is profoundly
asymmetrical in relation to actors external to the group and, in this case, created
a potentially problematic territorialisation that obfuscated the potential solidarities
between the centre and some elements of the local petit bourgeoisie. Nevertheless,
the decision to bar all for-profit initiatives opened up the centre to a broader
audience that may not have allied comfortably with entrepreneurs, business owners
and property developers. By forging a territorialisation that ran counter to prevailing
territorial understandings of community, the Vibe promoted an alternative, if
sometimes vague, vision.
Membership criteria for the IWW were also challenged from within and without,
as new members were required to sign a declaration to affirm that they are a worker
and not an employer.3 Applicants on the margins of this distinction, such as those
with line management responsibilities, were debated by the local IWW branch for
approval:
We had a membership application from a woman who was a charity project manager
with two administrative workers below her. When she asked to join, we had to ask her
about her relationship to these workers. What level of unilateral power does she have
over them? What level was she over-all in the organisation? I think she was a bit taken-
aback at all these questions, but after a short conversation there was no reason why she
shouldnt join, and we signed her up (fieldnotes, May 2008).
Thus the borders of membership are flexible and in negotiation, despite the
stark black-and-white categorisation that class membership superficially suggests.
Membership discussions provide an opportunity for IWW and social centre identities,
such as class, to be refined according to variations across time and space, thus
affecting the internal spaces of the organisation and its self-perception potentially
in an uneven manner.
This negotiation also shows how autonomous identity formation is malleable
through everyday experiences of capital and authority. IWW and social centre self-
produced identity is an autonomous, everyday process of bordering (Van Houtum
et al 2005), in which territory is both solidified and challenged. These contested
bordering practices can be understood at once as a prefigurative assertion of
democratic control by the grassroots and a practical tool in renewal and adaptation
over time and across space. Following Rocker (2004 [1938]:80; cf McLaughlin 2007),
this practice of bordering territorialises internal spaces of the groups (eg meeting
spaces) through a union of empirical analysis of society and the development of
!
a new sense of right. Such an approach feeds off the ability of localised actors to
collectively shape central institutional forms and structures (eg the IWW as a whole)
over time and across space almost in an inverted form of governmentality.
Everyday anarchistic bordering practices, far from producing homogeneous
territory (singular), regulate and facilitate permeation and cross-fertilisation between
territorialities (plural), precisely through territorial acts of inclusion and exclusion.
Thus autonomy is partly facilitated by creating such permeable membranes between
spaces, creating a constellation of negotiations, connections and divisions that
reinforce and fuse autonomous territorialities. These bordering practices can be
seen as strongly relating to the forging of particular social relations between
those involved in such negotiations and connections. This decentred process of
territorialisation through bordering practices foregrounds the idea that territory
need not have a central point of control.
Conclusions
[W]e push people to imagine and build these new, these alternatives to what the state
and capital offers. But in the shell of the old; in the shell of what already exists . . . Really its
the relationship that people have with their local resources, and whatever, that matters,
as opposed to just what you call that relationship (Adam, Vibe activist, October 2008).
In this paper, I have made a number of key arguments concerning the

development of an anarchist conception of territory. First, although the examples are
small, the case studies are indicative of an alternative theory and practice of territory
that eschews bounded statist notions of territory in favour of one rooted in the
spatiality of relationships formed within, through, and between territorialisations.
In the face of destabilising globalisation, rather than simply seeking to reactively
and singularly re-territorialise, it is possible to enact a range of territorialisations
(O Tuathail 1998). Scholars have also noted how territory is in flux and can be
manifested in a range of ways that do not always require a central command
point, but an anarchist perspective draws out the possibilities of grassroots territorial
agency in struggles over territorial claims to space.
Second, the territorial workplace and neighbourhood politics of the IWW and
social centres demonstrates that it is possible to engage in territorial practices,
while also confronting dominant territorial regimes and discourses. It is clear that
the notion of borderlessness present in some globalisation studies literatures is
problematic, and the re-scaling of governance has led to a range of new sub-
and supra-national modes of territorial organisation (Brenner 1999). Broadening
territory from politico-bureaucratic questions, I have sought to develop a framework
that interrogates territory from the perspective of processes conceived as already-
political, rather than as dynamics of politics. This offers a new angle on the way we
think about territorialisation as a social process.
Third, the dominant notion of territory seeks a static, sovereign establishment of
calculable space for the purposes of bureaucratic efficiency and control (Elden 2010).
While the anarchist perspective agrees with critiques such as that of Elden, it offers a
more fundamental critique of authoritarian spatial configurations in present society.
!
1662 Antipode
Exclusions enacted in the name of anarchistic projects are sometimes questionable,

but they create distinct territorialisations that confront and subvert territorial claims
made by dominant powers. These exclusions might also open broader questions
concerning the generation or perpetuation of exclusions in research practice and
methods.
Fourth, the anarchist emphasis on prefiguration can offer geographers an
opportunity to rethink the way we relate everyday practice to political organisation
in general. The prefigurative dimension of anarchist thought offers geographers
a powerful toolkit for unpicking the ways in which practices and structures are
imbued with political meaning, and for conceptually drawing together the social
and institutional fields of action. Territorialisation, as we have seen, is partly a process
of forging and maintaining social relations in an institutional pattern across space. It
is clear from the case studies that their self-managed territorialisations are vehicles for
institutionalising modes of organisation and relating that prefigure possible future
anarchistic worlds in the present.
In practice, anarchistic territorialisations are unusualantagonistic towards and
clearly excluding elite or reactionary tendencies, yet contestable from within
and without, and negotiated through participative frameworks of action and
deliberation. Not only is this conception of territory critical of the statist and capitalist
notions of territory found in dominant discourses (Elden 2005; Hakli 2001) but it
also proposes and prefigures relations and structures through which we might move
beyond this territorial trap (Agnew 1995) once and for all.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to three anonymous referees for their insightful comments and to the many
people with whom I worked during the fieldwork. This paper draws from research made
possible by ESRC funding.
Endnotes
1
The history of social centres, however, is much longer than this short period. We could
trace a genealogy of social centres back to the socialist and anarchist workingmens clubs
that became popularised in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.
However, the most recent manifestation of social centres draws its strongest inspiration from
the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which squatted empty buildings to
create autonomous spaces much like contemporary examples (see Katsiaficas 2006; Ruggiero
2000). Autonomous movements around Europe and the Americas in particular (although
with some examples in Asia, eg Instituta 2010) have developed social centres with their own
cultures according to their interpretations of, and disagreements with, the Italian model (see,
for example, Katsiaficas 2006).
2
It transpired that the owner of the property was allegedly involved in organised crime, and
there was a concern that his handling of the situation could have led to serious violence.
3
Most trade unions in the UK allow high-level managerial staff into their membership, and
this declaration is an important means for the IWW to articulate a confrontational working
class agenda.
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Emotion at the Center of Radical
Politics: On the Affective Structures
of Rebellion and Control
Nathan L. Clough
Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN, USA;
clou0062@umn.edu
Abstract: Through an examination of anarchist organizing and policing and security

tactics at the 2008 Republican National Convention, this paper argues that the emotional
connections between radical activists have become the targets of both social movement
strategies for growth and police strategies for social control. As such, the emotions of
activists are a site of intense political contestation. I introduce the concept of affective
structures to develop an account of the relations between affect, emotion, and radical
politics, and present these structures as both the means and the ends of contemporary
anarchist organizing and state strategies for social control.
Keywords: affect, emotion, policing, anarchism, social movements, security culture
On Friday 29 August 2008, at 9:15 pm, several dozen police wearing tactical
gear and wielding drawn firearms used a battering ram to break down the door
of an old theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The building had been rented by a
group ironically named the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee
(RNC Welcoming Committee), an anarchist social movement formed to organize
resistance to the 2008 Republican National Convention (hereafter 2008 RNC),
which was to commence the following Monday. Acting on a no-knock warrant,
and ostensibly looking for bomb-making supplies, the police burst into the space
shouting at activists to get down on the floor and to put their hands behind their
heads. In shocked confusion the 70-odd activists inside, who had just finished dinner
and were sitting down to collectively watch a documentary about the 1999 World
Trade Organization protests in Seattle, were searched, handcuffed with plastic zip
ties, and made to lie on their stomachs with hands behind their backs for up to 3
h as they were interrogated and released one by one. Some cried out in fear and
surprise when the doors were broken down, others sobbed or talked or sang as
they lay there on the floor. The 5-year-old son of an activist cried the entire time,
and a friend who sang to him to calm his fears was told to shut the fuck up by a
riot-gear clad officer brandishing a gun.1
I had just left the convergence space an hour before the raid, having spent the
day cleaning, handing out fliers, and chatting with activists as they arrived at the
space. I was surprised to hear of the raid, but sure that it would result in no serious
charges, as we had been very careful to ensure that no illegal activities took place
in the convergence space. Indeed, activities on site were largely restricted to the
preparation and serving of free food, the manufacture of protest signs and puppets,

1668 Antipode
and the distribution of activist literature and propaganda. Unsurprisingly, no one

was arrested, but the police closed the space due to an alleged fire-code violation,
which was investigated by St Paul fire marshals and found to be without merit the
following day.
The next morning at 7:30 am I was riding my bike the 10 miles to St Paul to
participate in a joint press conference with two other groups organizing resistance
to the RNC, which had been called at late notice to condemn the convergence
space raid. As I neared the appointed site of the press conference I received a
panicked cell phone call from a friend in the RNC Welcoming Committee who
told me that police had just executed coordinated raids on the houses of three
anarchist organizers, breaking down doors, dragging sleeping activists out of bed,
and arresting several members of the group. Stunned, I read a prepared statement
to the press and then beat a hasty retreat to try and find out what was going on,
who had been arrested, and on what grounds. I was terrified, and so were the other
activists I spoke to. Paranoid, we decided to cease all cell-phone communication out
of fear that we had become the targets of wiretaps.
Isolated from each other, and incommunicado, internet and television reports
started to trickle in. Seven members of the RNC WC and one member of
Unconventional Action2 were arrested and held in prison for the duration of the
2008 RNC on charges of Terrorist Conspiracy to Destroy Property and Terrorist
Conspiracy to Riotthe first use of the Minnesota version of the US Patriot Act.
These activists came to be known as the RNC 8.
As the convention started, the number of arrestees rose, eventually surpassing
800. A total of 3500 police, many clad in riot gear, patrolled the streets of
St Paul deploying tasers, rubber bullets, tear gas, and industrial capacity containers
of pepper spray. Protesters, concertgoers, members of the media, and downtown
residents were rounded up and arrested, beaten up and brutalized.
In the months that followed the convention, at community meetings and city
council investigations, activists and residents of the Twin Cities testified at the shock,
horror, and fear that they experienced immediately prior to, and during the 2008
RNC. Yet, even in the face of this fear, activists worked to create affinity, trust,
and new connections between individuals and communities, and to protect those
connections from being broken by the police.
In what follows I examine the emotional politics of anarchist protest and related
state strategies of social control. In so doing I make two interventions. First, I
contribute to the growing literature on anarchist politics, social movements, and
policing and security. Second, I make a theoretical contribution to the burgeoning
field of emotional and affective geographies through my insistence that engagement
with emotion and affect is indispensible for understanding the strategic contests
between radical movements and social control. In particular, I argue that the
affective structure of anarchist organizinga concept I describe belowplaces
the emotions and interconnections between activists at the center of both activist
counter-conducts and police strategies for de-mobilization and suppression.
This paper draws on a year of ethnographic research that I conducted as a member
of the primary anarchist group that organized national resistance to the 2008 RNC,
the RNC Welcoming Committee. Due to the sensitive nature of that research, and
!
Emotion at the Center of Radical Politics 1669
the fact that legal fallout of the 2008 RNC protests is ongoing as I write this paper,
I have restricted my analysis to public and published accounts of the politics of the
protests, and evidence drawn from my personal experience as an organizer. I have
decided not to include statements by other activists due to security concerns.
The structure of the paper is as follows. I first provide a brief review of
emotional and affective geographies, especially in relation to social movements
and contentious politics. I then argue that anarchist political organizing consists of
a particular mode of connecting activist emotions to movement effectiveness in the
anarchist imaginary. I then demonstrate how this relationship between affect and
organizing makes anarchists particular targets for state strategies of social control.
Finally, I argue that security culture, a practice that attempts to preserve affinity and
organizational capacity through developing new cultural practices, is a substantive
model for pushing back against the affective control of the state.
Affect, Emotion, and Contentious Politics

The last several years have seen an explosion of affective theory in geography.
At times affect and emotion are used synonymously, at other times they refer to,
respectively, individual conscious feelings, and precognitive bodily dispositions (Pile
2010). In what follows, when I use the term emotion I am referring to consciously
experienced feelings such as love, hate, fear, exhilaration etc. When I refer to affect
I am employing the term in a Spinozan register that indicates the ontological
relation of bodies coming together and increasing their capacity to act through
interconnection (Negri 1991; Spinoza 2008; Thrift 2004). Affect, then, describes
the actually existing strength of collective action to operate on the world, it is the
power to act amplified through collectivity (Negri 1999). In this usage, then,
affect is clearly something that is built. Organizing among activists, building social
movement connections, developing new strategies and tactics with which to press
radical claims, are all techniques for the construction of more powerful radical
affect.
As has been pointed out by several commentators, work on affect in geography
has tended to privilege the ways that power operates on subjects, producing
them as predisposed to certain positions and proclivities (Barnet 2008; Pile 2010).
In essence, much of this work gains political relevance through the claim that
emotions and affect are worked on and manipulated by capital, the state, or other
systems of power. While these claims are clearly true, such an understanding has
the potential to bias research on emotion and affect toward analyses of what
we might call power-over, or the ability of centers of power to control the
population.
Of course, power-over must be studied if we wish to understand what stands in the
way of more just ways of living. However, as has been increasingly recognized within
geography, studies of domination are insufficient to advance social struggle. As
Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard noted in their 2008 volume, Contesting neoliberalism:
urban frontiers, we had ought to pay at least as much attention to contestations
of hegemonic systems as we do to the logics of those systems. Similar provocations
have been made by a variety of geographers, from Gibson-Graham (2006), to the
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1670 Antipode
psycho-analytic work of Steve Pile (1996) on embodiment and emotion, to the early
work of David Harvey (1972), all of which insist on the necessity of understanding
how actual individuals and movements are resisting domination, exploitation, and
repression.
Relatively few studies in geography, however, have had a substantive focus on
the organization of movements and how the forms of that organization permit
or inhibit movement growth and success, nor on how such forms are influenced
by concerted state action designed to disempower social resistance. As Nichols
(2007) recently argued, most of the geographic focus on oppositional politics has
been structural in nature, focusing on the dynamics of capital and institutions, and
how they have produced oppositional subjects. This has, however, recently been
ameliorated from two fronts. First, the last 10 years have seen a renewed interest in
the geographies of actual situated movements. Miller and Martins (2000) study of
anti-nuclear activism in the Boston area is a particularly insightful example of this
attention to the geographies of social movements in which the authors describe
the roles of space, place, and networks in the operation and growth of particular
social movements. Other geographers such as Paul Routledge have studied how,
for example, the anti-globalization movement operates through the construction
of spaces where activists can meet and build connections horizontally across and
within movements, sites Routledge terms convergence spaces (Routledge 2003).
Additionally, Leitner and Sziarto (2010) demonstrate the centrality of lived spaces,
such as the interior of a bus used by activists on a freedom ride to traverse the
country, on the self-conceptions of movement actors and the bonds that allow
them to form a sustainable and cohesive group.
The second area of study that has contributed to this emerging milieu is the focus
on embodied and emotional geographies, which have, by and large, insisted that
the micro-scale of bodies, perceptions, and feelings is necessary to understanding
larger scale political praxis. Though concern for the role of emotion in radical politics
is hardly new (recall Fanons analysis of the role of impotent rage in the generation
of revolutionary colonial subjects in The Wretched of the Earth), recent literature
on emotion and affect has been supplemented with examinations of how radicals
construct new structures of feeling and emotional bonds intended to accelerate
social struggle. For example, Fernando Boscos work on the madres de plaza de
Mayo movement in Argentina finds that the emotions of activists, in particular,
their emotions around a shared sense of motherhood, are one of the primary
ways that strong interpersonal networks of activists are created and maintained,
allowing movements to grow and persist over space and time (Bosco 2006, 2007).
Additionally, Chatterton (2008) has argued that social change is dependent upon
creating a space for emotional connection in order for activists to achieve the sense
of empowerment that undergirds oppositional action. Hayes-Conroy and Martin
(2010) take a slightly different tack, arguing that emotions are but one aspect of
a visceral scale in which political identity is made and remade . . . and that such
[visceral] relations generate the energy necessary for social movement mobilization
(Hayes-Conroy and Martin 2010). Radical geographic work on the role of emotions
in activism has also recently taken a strategic bent with Chatterton (2008) arguing
that geography can be used to activate young activists through teaching them to
!
reach for emotions of freedom and defiance, while Brown and Pickerill (2009) point
out the necessity of building spaces for emotion and critical reflexivity into activist
practice in order to avoid burn out.
Finally, recent work outside of geography in social movement studies has begun
to move away from rational choice models of collective action, demonstrating the
centrality of emotions to social movement: examining the role of anger in prompting
people into collective action (Sturmer 2009), the mobilization of shame and love in
political suicides (Kim 2002), and the ways that grief acted as a sustaining catalyst
for the AIDS rights group ACT-UP in the United States (Gould 2002).
While the above brief summary barely scratches the surface of these emerging
literatures, what seems clear is that the emotional states of activists are important for
movement growth and recruitment of new members, for the capacity of movements
to sustain collective orientation and action, and for the ability of groups to carry out
oppositional actions. In this manner, emotion is always connected to affect, to the
ability of a movement to organize themselves and become powerful. However, there
is still much that is unknown about how a vast range of differently positioned social
movements construct emotions and affect, and whether and how such constructions
differ across space, place, identity, and political commitments, and to what effect.
This work begs the question how are emotions and affect differently produced by
differently positioned actors? And how does this differential production relate to
state strategies for social control?
Of course, social movements do not exist in a vacuum and the institutional,
political, and cultural systems in which they are enmeshed have significant impacts
on their organization, strategies, tactics, and prospects for success however defined
(Della Porta and Reiter 1998). Movements, then, ought to be considered in relation
to those institutions and groups against or alongside of which they act. Of particular
interest here, scholars of policing and security have pointed out how the state
operates on the emotions of activists in order to deescalate their tactics, inhibit new
member recruitment, and limit the ability of movements to sustain their momentum
or act as effective political agents. For example, Fernandez (2008) argued that police
attempt to deny the anti-globalization movement public support through portraying
them as out of touch and scary radicals, thereby making it more difficult to build
alliances with wary liberal groups. Jules Boykoff (2007a) examined how policing
and security agencies use harassment of activists, surveillance, infiltration of social
movements, and blackmail to create fear and distrust among groups and activists
as diverse as the civil rights movement, Black nationalists, anti-war movements, and
the anti-globalization movement.
However, few examinations of emotion, movements, and policing have looked
at the strategic interplay between movements and police. That is to say, most
examinations of the role of emotions in social movement have tended to focus on
either the internal dynamics of movements, or on police or security strategies for de-
escalation that happen to have emotional aspects. In this article I try to pull these
strands together, exploring how the particular emotional and affective structures
of anarchist political organizing drive and interact with police attempts at social
control, and how these movements are reconstructing their emotional structures in
response to police tactics and pressure.
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Affinity and the Affective Structure of Anarchist

Organizing
In November 1999 the North American anarchist movement burst onto the popular
scene. The blockades and riots at the World Trade Organization ministerial put
anarchism back on the map in the developed world after a nearly 70-year hiatus.
The mechanics, effects, successes, and failures of that seminal protest are well-
worn ground at this point, so I will not rehash the specifics of what occurred
here.
Rather, I focus on the manner in which a part of the anarchist movement
perceived its success, and the way members of the anarchist community understood
movement momentum and recruitment as dependent upon public successes such as
Seattle 99, due in large part to the emotional content of that perceived victory. I am
interested in the ways that anarchist black bloc riots, though they are controversial
even among anarchists, play a major role in the anarchist political imaginary,
providing a central heroic mythology that at once creates new relations between
activists and acts as a form of recruitment propaganda. I argue that the after-action
reports of anarchist riots at major protest events provide an emotional catalyst
for anarchist organizing, energizing participants, and tying activists emotions to
movement growth and capacity to act. In focusing on black bloc riots I do not mean
to suggest that these actions are the best, the only, or even the most common form
of anarchist direct action. Rather, I think that such actions are largely important due
to their visibility, both within and without the anarchist movement, and because
of the ways that they capture the imaginations of both anarchists and the wider
public.
As many readers of this article will be aware, scholarly writings on anarchism have
proliferated in recent years. Much of this work has sought to explain the sociological
characteristics of the contemporary anarchist movement and the theoretical tenants
of the rapidly evolving anarchist critique. This work has also been concerned
with carving out a niche of radical respectability for anarchist perspectives in the
academy, which have largely been dominated by Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial
perspectives. All, however, agree that anarchism has had a growing influence since
the Seattle 1999 World Trade Organization protests, though they may differ as to
why this is the case, or on the implications of such growth (Day 2004; Gordon
2008; Graeber 2002). This new literature has provided a thorough introduction
to anarchist theory, so I will not rehash this ground. Suffice it to say that the
contemporary North American anarchist movement is largely defined through a
commitment to two primary concepts: a politics of direct action in which formal
politics is eschewed in favor of direct interventions, and the practice of affinity as a
guiding logic (Day 2004; Graeber 2002, 2004).
According to anarchist theorist Uri Gordon:
Anarchists understand direct action as a matter of taking social change into ones
own hands, by intervening directly in a situation rather than appealing to an external
agent (typically the government) for its rectification. It is a Do It Yourself approach to
politics based on people-power, mirrored by a total lack of interest in operating through
established political channels (Gordon 2011).
!
Though this commitment is applied across the spectrum of anarchist practices,

from acquiring food through dumpster diving/gleaning (Crane forthcoming), to
the organization of meetings and councils (Fernandez 2008), to their approach
to education and the academy (Graeber 2004), this commitment is most obvious
to non-anarchists through large-scale protest actions typified through the tactics of
blockades and riots.
Affinity is a more complex concept because it refers both to a mode of political
organization and to a particular kind of emotive connection between comrades. As
a form of political connection affinity is often opposed to the concept of hegemony.
As Richard Day (2004) has argued, the new anarchistic social movements that
have largely defined radical politics in North America since the Seattle 1999 WTO
protests have adopted a new political logic based not in taking over the existing
political system, nor in replacing that system with a revolutionary government,
but rather with a conception of egalitarian, non-hierarchical, grassroots, consensus-
based democracy. Affinity as a form of political organization insists on opposition to
all forms of domination and inequality, a praxis in which the means of political
change are identical to the hoped for ends, and an uncompromising ethos of
resistance to Power as the sine qua non of political engagement.
But affinity is also a form of emotional connection. Though the Oxford English
Dictionary defines affinity as a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for
someone or something, a similarity of characteristics suggesting a relationship, esp. a
resemblance in structure between animals, plants, or languages, in anarchist usage
the term varies somewhat from the generic meaning. Anarchist affinity is a feeling
of trust, closeness, respect, and equality upon which alternative politics are based.
It is the emotional foundation for a society of free and equal individuals. To have
affinity with others is to already live the anarchist ideal; it is the basic component
of the prefigurative politics that sets anarchism apart from other Leftist tendencies;
the insistence that the means of social change be identical to the ends.
The quest for affinity, for the feeling of emotional connection and trust that such a
concept comprises, is difficult emotional work. To organize for direct action through
a praxis of affinity means maintaining a posture of critical reflexivity and openness
toward comrades (Brown and Pickeril 2009). This openness, the commitment to
maintain reflexivity and to work honestly for consensus, equality, and the destruction
of hierarchy, is necessary because all activists occupy differentiated positions of
relative power or weakness, authority or subjugation, privilege or abjection within
society. To operate as an anarchist movement of free and equal individuals requires
that these pre-existing and constantly re-inscribed inequalities be repeatedly called
out and challenged, and that activists be ready to acknowledge, confront, and work
on eliminating their complicity in these systems of domination. This gives many
anarchist meetings the feeling of consciousness-raising groups in which participants
work on themselves and their comrades to create a new world in the shell of the
old.3 Anyone who has ever participated in such a group can attest that such work
and openness is emotionally taxing, difficult to maintain, and requires a great deal
of trust because the act of acknowledging complicity is so powerfully fraught.
I think that Raymond Williams concept of a structure of feeling is helpful in
clarifying how affinity operates both as an emotional project and as a utopian, but
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1674 Antipode
nonetheless actually existing, form for the reorganization of society. Structures of

feeling are alternative or resistant assemblages of political imagination that emerge
from the present milieu but reimagine the forms and organization of political
existence (Williams 1978). While Williams uses the term to link cultural production
with material production, it also seems apt to link emotion and political organization.
Both literature and anarchist praxis seek to form subjects that relate in certain ways,
both make possible new ways of seeing and experiencing the world, and both
operate verbally, cognitively, and affectively. Further, structures of feeling exert
palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and action (Williams
1978), which is to say that, structures of feeling such as the commitment to affinity
have material impacts on actual politics.
This impact is particularly visible insofar as affinity is both the goal of, and
the foundation without which, anarchist direct action is possible. Without trust,
comradely connection, and a non-hierarchic organization, anarchist politics cannot
be practiced. Without equality and freedom fomented through critical reflexivity,
no practice can be legitimately said to be anarchist. And yet, affinity by itself is
an insufficient ingredient to grow the anarchist movement. Affinity, to a certain
extent, presupposes trust; it presupposes commitment; it presupposes energy.
And yet, in the anarchist imagination trust, energy, and commitment are often
visualized as emerging from participating in direct action with comrades. Witnessing
or participating in a successful or exhilarating action is imagined to be the
galvanizing experience that allows an activist to more fully feel affinity, to be a real
anarchist.
It is this feedback loop, between affinity as feeling and organization, and the
emotional content of direct action as a galvanizing moment that contributes vitality
to the movement, that I refer to as the affective structure of anarchist politics. Direct
action creates bonds and excitement that cultivate affinity, which in turn draws new
recruits and allows anarchist collectives to operate more powerfully. This affective
structure is served by a certain culture of radical storytelling, sometimes even riot-
braggadocio, that propagates the iconic status of heroic resistance to capital and
the state and provides fuel to the fire of anarchist desire.
As Grindon (2007) writes joy, desire, and mythic moments of potent affect
are central to the global justice movements understanding of itself and its
actions. This self-understanding of emotional highs experienced by individuals
and collectives in rebellion is imagined as a potent source of radicalization and
movement building. As much as anything, the object of anarchist direct actions
is the subjective experience of anarchists themselves. As such, we can understand
anarchist direct action, at least in part, as a technique for activists to work on their
own emotional states and connections with the hoped for effect of increasing their
power to act as a radical collective.
Anarchist pamphlets and zines (self-published magazines popular among
anarchists) continually exhort their readers to take a flying leap and reject
bourgeois norms of behavior and political participation in preference for a
new political subjectivity based in direct participation instead of representation,
immediate action rather than long-term strategizing, and a rejection of authority
and power in all its forms (Schukaitis et al 2007). Anarchists are continually reminded
!
that we are the only thing holding ourselves back! (ONimmity 2008). Taking
action is seen as an important site of affirmation and radicalization in which bonds
between activists are made that are imagined as otherwise un-makable. In what
follows I attempt to make this theorization more concrete through an examination
of the emotional and affective politics of the anarchist mobilization against the 2008
Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Emotions and Affect at the 2008 Republican National

Convention
For nearly 2 years prior to the 2008 RNC, the RNC Welcoming Committee organized
anarchist resistance to the convention at the local and national scales.4 In trying
to drum up enthusiasm for the protests, RNC WC members toured around the
United States, visiting dozens of cities and giving PowerPoint presentations at radical
social centers, infoshops, and other anarchist-friendly spaces. These presentations
laid out a rationale for protesting the convention based on the argument that A
big mobilization can: motivate new people to be part of the movement, provide
opportunities for capacity building, inspire and renew energy within the progressive
and radical community, [and] show collective resistance. The presentation also
noted that the RNC was an excellent opportunity for a large protest because The
RNC protests will be huge regardless [of the participation of anarchists], creating an
opportunity to: push radical critiques into the mainstream, up the level of resistance
by expanding peoples comfort zones and giving protests a more radical direction,
[and] take advantage of police distraction due to huge crowds (RNC Welcoming
Commitee 2008a).
Of greatest importance here is that the justification for organizing the protest was
not primarily to make anarchists voices heard, or to influence policy. Rather, the goal
was to provide a positive and radicalizing experience for the anarchist movement.
Indeed, the explicit goals of the RNC WC, as stated in the same presentation were;
first to Increase our capacity. Second, to Crash the Convention (RNC Welcoming
Commitee 2008a). Protesting the RNC was a means to building anarchist capacity
to effect change through inspiring motivational feelings and, essentially, providing
an opportunity for anarchist groups to gain skills and strengthen social bonds
through concerted radical action. That is to say, the RNC protests were conceived
of by the primary organizers of the protest as a technology for the promotion of
antagonistic emotions, the strengthening of emotional bonds between activists, and
the enhancement of affective capacity through skill building.
Hundreds of anarchists from around the country were apparently inspired enough
by this strategy that they organized local activist collectives known as affinity
groups and actively participated in anti-RNC organizing through two national
meetings held in the Twin Cities in the year prior to the RNC, and eventually
participated in a blockade on the first day of the RNC that was designed to prevent
Republican delegates from reaching the convention center (Heffelfinger and Lugar
2009).
However, such a strategy was not without complications. The connection in the
anarchist imagination between effective shows of power and increased movement
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1676 Antipode
capacity tends to actively promote more and more aggressive forms of social
resistance, including a substantial history of riot and street fighting. In fact,
rioting and property destruction have arguably become central to the anarchist
movements self understanding (ACME Collective 1999). Certainly, riots carried out
in the form of black blocs, an anarchist tactic in which a number of protesters will
dress all in black, covering their faces with masks or bandanas for anonymity in
order to minimize the risk of apprehension while carrying out property destruction
and militant resistance to the police, have been one of the most visible forms of
anarchist resistance in the past decade.
These riots, too, target the emotions of anarchist activists as the object of the
protest, and as such constitute an integral aspect of the anarchist structure of feeling.
The following quotation is an excerpt from a pamphlet distributed approximately 1
month after the 2008 RNC. Its form and tone mimic zines and pamphlets produced
after the 1999 WTO protests that hold an almost iconic place in the anarchist
subculture. The authors, reflecting on their experience of rioting in Saint Paul,
write:
Our joy and malice intertwine as another crowd fuses with us and becomes-rioting.
Desire moves our appendages, and objects are released through the imaginary field
constructed between law and order. Someone runs on top of a moving police car and
exposes that the state too is made of sinew and fiber. In moments a lonely police car is
located, and with force a body stomps a perfect pop through its windshield. Each of
us sheds our polite veneer, and we reveal the social conflict that is the shared experience
of our conditions.
In this zine, desire to rebel and throw off liberal forms of participation is presented
as a means of personal and group liberation from dominating norms. Expressing
violent desire is a means to joy, even ecstasy. The language of shedding our polite
veneers refers to an imagined condition of exposing ones authentic self that is
unrestrained by formal political norms, by the public sphere, or by cares for symbolic
representation. As such, riot is a means to cultivating a new structure of feeling based
in affinity and the militant rejection of liberal bounds.
Further, direct physical violence against the agents of the state and its supporters
is presented as a sort of heroic narrative of oppositional power:
A lone cop, albeit a large one, has the gall to grab one of us. One of them and fifty of us.
After countless experiences of being on the defensive at demonstrations or simply on the
streets of our hometowns, we will take advantage of any opening we find. A hooligan
sneaks up behind the cop catching him with a well-placed kick between the legs and
runs back into the loving arms of the mob. As the cop releases a shower of pepper spray
into the crowd, another person surges forth, body checking the cop with a flying leap.
The pig hits the ground and our comrade is freed. . .
A hammer cracks two windows, and a good citizen dashes from the sidewalk in pursuit.
He grabs the young man with his right hand, a Let Out Soldiers Win! sign in the other.
He wants to be a cop, a hero, but hes made a mistake. This isnt a peace march; this is
the thrashing body of a wrecking machine. The man is rushed from behind, knocking
him off balance just long enough for someone to slide their arms around him. He receives
a swift kick to the side, and his do-gooder momentum is redirected into the pavement,
dropping him like a dead weight . . . (Anonymous 2008).
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Additionally . . .
We stress that no one has felt a comparable pleasure in America in the last five years. No
amount of bodily fluid, missed with syrup, swirled together to the sound of Lil Waynes
A Milli could concentrate the joy felt when stones collapsed bank windows. Ecstasy
was the vandalized cop car. Music was the hissing of tire punctures. Glee was the foot
inserted into the gendarmes paunch. Like we freed our companions from the polices
grip, our collective force will rip words from restrictive reference. From here on, beauty,
decadence, and orgy can only connote immediate destruction . . . (Anonymous 2008).5
These narratives stress the emotional experience of rebellion, and provide an

account of freedom that functions as a form of inwardly focused propagandaas an
auto-technique for anarchists to work on their own subjectivities. The experience of
taking a flying leap, of flinging oneself from the precipice of sanctioned behavior and
into the unknowable abyss of being-otherwise is imagined as a kind of radical trial by
fire, while the anonymity of the black-clad bodies minimizes the risk of unleashing
oppositional power and provides a material symbol of group-belonging. Letting
loose and going on the offensive with a group of comrades creates affinity through
bonding individuals into an emotional and affective unit. The apparent effectivity of
such actions breeds affinity as emotion and affect. Additionally, the insistence on the
pleasure derived from acts of brazen rebellion locates the emotional characteristics
of urban insurrection as one of the prime motivators of such actions. Affect creates
emotion, which facilitates an increase in affective capacity.
What is particularly important here is the conjunction between the emotions
associated with rebellion such as joy and hatred and rebelling bodies coming
together as a force that exceeds liberal bounds of political action. In the discourse
of Becoming-riot, it is the ability of anonymous rebellious bodies to operate as a
bloc, with individuals subsumed into the black-clothed mass, that gives anarchist
direct action its power to defy the police, build the movement, and occasionally,
however briefly, to alter power relations in certain contained spaces of the cityas
when the single cop faced 50 Black Bloc rioters. These small anarchist victories are
significant ecstatic events, which are repeatedly shared with any other radicals who
will listen. These heroic tales of daring resistance become iconic, something that is
idolized and sought after as a seminal anarchist experience that confers legitimacy,
authority, and authenticity to those who participate.
However, as I argue below, the affinity-based structure of anarchist organizing
along with the sub-cultural predilection for heroic tale-telling makes anarchists
particularly vulnerable to state infiltration, and places relations of affinity at the
center of state strategies for social control.
Disrupting Affinity: How the State Targets Affective

Relations to Break Trust and Spread Fear
The ability of the anarchist movement to grow becoming more effective at changing
society is significantly restricted by the need to undertake direct actions in secret.
Many of the actions recounted above constitute felonies. The state, as the guarantor
of law, has a vested interest in trying to stop these types of actions and to apprehend
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1678 Antipode
those responsible. Additionally, police and security agencies appear well aware of
the value placed by the anarchist movement on trusting relations in fomenting and
sustaining radical action and they therefore attempt to intervene in the anarchist
affective structure in order to disrupt anarchist organizing. This is done through
a variety of tools, including infiltration, surveillance, and spreading paranoia and
dissent among such groups (Boykoff 2007; Della Porta and Reiter 1998; Fernandez
2008).
Specifically, police and federal security agencies attempt to suppress the anarchist
movement at the emotional level through disrupting relations of affinity between
activists, and co-opting heroic tales of resistance to aid their efforts at infiltration.
That is to say, security and policing programs targeting anarchist organizing have
attempted to sow distrust among anarchists and anarchist groups and between
anarchists and other protesters, to prevent recruitment of new members and
diminish the affective capacity of existing groups.
As many scholars of social control have pointed out, among the primary goals
of state infiltration of social movements are discouraging and scaring group
members, inhibiting recruitment of new members, and turning movement energy
toward defense of its membership instead of advocating social change (Boykoff
2007; Churchill and Vander Wall 1990; Marx 1988). Indeed as Starr et al (2008)
have demonstrated, police surveillance of social movements has a significant
demobilizing effect through the cultivation of fear and an increased perception
of high participation costs. The anarchist movement is particularly susceptible to
this type of police activity due to its stress on often-illegal direct action and the
necessity of trust for consensus-based decision-making.
The radical posturing and the small affinity group structure of the anarchist
movement permit state agents to effectively create affinity groups in the interest
of betraying the trust on which such groups are based, manipulating revolutionary
rhetoric, and entrapping those who join up. In essence, all that an infiltrator
must do to move to the center of a group of anarchist activists is to adopt their
rhetoric and attend sufficient meetings to be accepted. When recounting tales
of violent resistance is imagined as a powerful instrument for recruitment and
capacity building, and when being a real radical is synonymous with taking
confrontational direct action, the anarchist movement becomes very vulnerable
to agents provocateurs and police entrapment.
In the aftermath of the 2008 RNC the American anarchist movement was reeling
from revelations of the extent of police and FBI infiltration of affinity groups. The
best publicized of these was the case of the nationally prominent anarchist and
FBI informant Brandon Darby, who created an affinity group to protest the RNC
and then entrapped his new comrades in a sting operation. Prior to the 2008
RNC, Brandon Darby had become well known in the national anarchist community
through his work in post-Katrina New Orleans where he was an influential
member of an anarchist collective working to organize those left destitute by the
storm.
In New Orleans Darby was known as a rabble-rouser and proponent of
revolutionary violence (Ridgeway 2009). At some point, when exactly is unclear,
Darby broke with the anarchist movement and started working for the FBI
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(Essex 2009). By February 2008 Darby had formed an affinity group in Austin,
Texas consisting of himself and two young and inexperienced activists named David
McKay and Bradley Crowder, both 23 years old. As they prepared for the 2008 RNC
Darby regaled the younger activists with tales of revolutionary violence, and used
his national reputation as an organizer to push them to commit to more and more
extreme forms of contestation. As is documented in the recently released, award-
winning documentary film Better this World 6 Darby told the young activists that true
revolutionaries could see the necessity of taking up arms against the government,
forming militias, and making fire bombs. McKay and Crowder, unaware of Darbys
role as an agent provocateur, and eager to form bonds of affinity with such a well
known anarchist, appear to have gone along with most of Darbys plans.7
The three arrived in the Twin Cities the week prior to the 2008 RNC with a
trailer full of shields that they had made out of construction barrels that were to
be used in the RNC protests to deflect rubber bullets and tear gas, and to allow
anarchist activists to more forcibly resist police attempts to quell protest actions.
When Darby told police about these shields prior to the protests, officers gained
a warrant to search the home of an activist with connections to the Texas affinity
group. In that house police found eight Molotov Cocktails, firebombs that had been
built by Crowder and McKay. The two were arrested and it quickly became clear
that their apparent friend was at the heart of their prosecution. According to the
testimony of both men, they looked up to Darby as an experienced and respected
radical. They trusted him, were flattered that he wanted to work with them, and
tried to emulate him, while he consistently provoked them to undertake actions of
increasing illegality.
It soon became apparent that this was not the first time that Darby had tried to
incite his ostensible comrades to illegal action. According to a man who had worked
with Darby in New Orleans:
In Darbys revolutionary rhetoric over the years he tried to get numerous people,
including myself, to do the things the two men [Crowder and McKay] were eventually
taken down for. I believe now he tried to set me up in 2006 to firebomb a bookstore
called Brave New Books in Austin. I was NOT interested at all and thought it was stupid.
I tried to talk him out of it (Dykes 2009).
In a sense, Darbys power over the other two men derived from their desire
to be good anarchists. Their desire to liberate themselves from bourgeois political
engagement, and their desire to impress Crowder put them in a position in which
they could be easily manipulated and prosecuted by the state, while Crowders
apparent zeal for revolutionary change disguised his true position as an agent of the
state.
In essence, the very affective structure of anarchist organizing that is imagined
by anarchists as their most powerful tool for building affinity and recruiting new
members is also a significant liability because it makes anarchist activists quite
susceptible to Darby-style entrapment. This entrapment not only impacts those
who are arrested and harassed, it also undermines the very conditions that anarchist
organizing depends upontrusting relations and a shared feeling of being-against.
Police infiltration, then, interrupts the affective structure of anarchist organizing by
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disrupting the emotional connections between anarchists and making the preferred
style of forging those connections more problematic.
There are several other high-profile examples of this same dynamic at work in
recent years, including the case of Anna, an FBI informant who infiltrated, incited,
and was eventually successful in securing the conviction of half a dozen anarchists
on charges ranging from arson to demonstrating a destructive device (Todd 2006).
Anna, a pseudonym provided by the FBI, impersonated an anarchist, joined a
collective where she eventually seduced one of the prominent group members,
provided encouragement and technical support for the group to carry out acts
of direct action and sabotage against environmentally destructive targets, and
eventually provided recordings and testimony that resulted in serious prison terms
for the activists. These examples of infiltration are connected to the FBI operation
termed Backfire, which was instituted in 2004 when then-attorney general Alberto
Gonzalezs justice department elevated eco-activism and anarchist direct action to
the nations highest domestic terrorism threat.
However, anarchist organizers are quite aware of this liability. In fact, awareness
of the possibility of infiltration often borders on outright paranoia that expresses as
a rather extreme security obsession among many American anarchists. In order to
protect from the dangers of infiltration the anarchist community has developed
some defense mechanisms, including most prominently the emotional/affective
technique known as security culture.
Security Culture: Reworking Affective Structures

Stay safe, practice security culture, and only work with people you trust! (RNC Welcoming
Commitee 2008b).
Welcome to Minnesota, friends, enemies and double agents! Were glad youre here.
Well, most of you, anyway. We hope that you enjoy your stay here, and that you dont
get into any trouble you arent looking for. That said, our jail support number is 651
3568635. Write it on your body and know that were here for you, come what may!
Stay safe out there! Keep it smart, keep it strategic, and, if the cops show up, keep your
fucking mouth shut! (Love and Solidarity, Coldsnap Legal Collective8 2008).
Though it sounds like an academic description of post-9/11 society, security

culture is actually a term that has been deployed by anarchists seeking ways to
maintain affinity despite significant legal pressure and police harassment.
A security culture is a set of customs shared by a community to help ensure the safety
of its members, the practice of which minimizes risk and combats a culture of fear and
paranoia. It is especially important for groups whose members may engage in higher-risk
or illegal activities, but it is a practice that should be employed by all organizing groups.
The difference between protocol and culture is that culture becomes unconscious,
instinctive, and thus effortless; once the safest possible behavior has become habitual
for everyone in the circles in which you travel, you can spend less time and energy
emphasizing the need for it, or suffering the consequences of not having it, or worrying
about how much danger youre in, as youll know youre already doing everything you
can to be careful. If youre in the habit of not giving away anything sensitive about
yourself, you can collaborate with strangers without having to agonize about whether
!
or not they are informers; if everyone knows what not to talk about over the telephone,
your enemies can tap the line all they want and it wont get them anywhere (Coldsnap
Legal Collective 2008).
At its most basic, security culture is a technique for cultivating a new affective
structure that eschews the bragging about radical acts that makes it so easy for
police and security agencies to target and convict anarchist activists. It does not
entail giving up confrontational tactics, only giving up the culture of braggadocio
that surrounds such acts. As the language of making security culture instinctive
in the above text demonstrates, security culture is consciously constructed as a set
of practices to alter the affective structure of anarchist organizing. Making such
practices unconscious is presented as a path to preventing paranoia, fear, and
danger, and thereby preserving affinity within groups and allowing a path for direct
action to operate as an enhancer of anarchist effectivity.
Importantly, security culture recognizes the real possibility that the spaces of
anarchist organizing are surveilled and/or infiltrated. RNC Welcoming Committee
meetings almost always started with a reminder from whoever was facilitating that
This is not a safe space. Indeed, we considered it almost a surety that our meetings
were compromised through both infiltration and surveillance. In an attempt to
subvert expected electronic surveillance everyone at RNC Welcoming Committee
meetings was expected to turn off and remove the batteries from their cellular
telephones and other digital devices on the belief that so-doing would disable
any electronic bugs that may have been affixed to such technologies.9 In this,
and other instances, fear of surveillance and infiltration permeated the practices
of the RNC WC, making it difficult to establish the trust that is necessary for
the construction of affinity. Further, considerable group energy was funneled into
devising counter-measures that would allow the group to operate, coping with the
lack of safe space through defensive techniques of the self such as those exemplified
in security culture.
However, care must be taken such that security culture does not in itself break
the affinity on which anarchist organizing depends:
Security culture is a form of etiquette, a way to avoid needless misunderstandings and
potentially disastrous conflicts: Security culture should not be another form of elitism;
just because someone is not wearing the appropriate punk clothing does not mean that
they are a cop (or vice versa). Security concerns should never be an excuse for making
others feel left out or inferior, just as no one should feel they have a right to be in on
anything others prefer to keep to themselves (Coldsnap Legal Collective 2008).
The above quotation also stresses the difficulty of growing a movement that is
grappling with security concerns. Newcomers might feel left out and suspected,
two emotions that make committing to a political cause and a community more
difficult, thereby frustrating the effectiveness of the affective structures of anarchist
organizing. Indeed, this dilemma was openly discussed by members of the RNC
Welcoming Committee on several occasions in relation to three members of the
group who did not fit the normal image of anarchist activists. These apparently
working class activists known to us as Chris, Norma Jean, and Amanda, came
under suspicion of being infiltrators and were the cause of substantial paranoia,
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discord, and discussion. On one occasion several members of the RNC Welcoming
Committee and Unconventional Action were uncomfortable having Chris, Amanda,
and Norma Jean present at meetings where tactical operations were being discussed.
This fear caused a long and uncomfortable meeting held in their absence where the
motivations of the three were discussed at length.
Debate centered on speculation over their motives for joining the anarchist
movement, the lack of knowledge about their lives outside the RNC Welcoming
Committee, and their apparent ignorance of most anarchist principles. The three did
not look like anarchists, nor did they act like anarchists, however they all expressed
a desire to learn more about anarchism and to be involved in organizing against
the RNC. Their desire to act as anarchists seemed to be perfectly in line with the
desire of the group to expand the anarchist movement, but their appearances and
backgrounds made them suspect.
The group discussed the probability that the three were infiltrators and decided
it was a distinct possibility, but also agreed that the principal of openness on which
the group was founded, and the desire that organizing against the RNC be useful
in building movement capacity meant that the three be given the benefit of the
doubt. The RNC Welcoming Committee was forced to grapple with the fact that our
group both desired and feared participation by people whose identities placed them
outside the traditional norms of the anarchist community. It was argued that the
anarchist movement was irrelevant if it could not attract working class adherents,
and it was counter-argued that the movement would likewise be irrelevant if all of
its members were imprisoned due to infiltration.
In the end, the majority of members were unwilling to purge the group of these
three. The desire of the group to remain open, critical, and reflexive eventually won
out over the fear of infiltration and the three were allowed to remain members of
the group. The lone man, Chris, was singled out and confronted by several RNC
WC members who asked him to stay after a meeting and questioned him as to his
objectives in participating in anti-RNC organizing. They asked if he was an informant
at which point he broke into tears, denied that he was working for the police, and
told the anarchists that he did not have many friends and hoped the anarchist
movement would accept him for who he was. He said that he wanted to feel the
connection with the others that he saw between group members. In other words, he
claimed a desire for affinity. This emotional performance convinced most RNC WC
members that Chris was, in fact, what he said he was, an out of work welder angry at
the capitalist system and eager to participate in direct action against the Republicans.
Soon after this controversy Amanda stopped regularly attending RNC Welcoming
Committee meetings, but Norma Jean and Chris maintained their involvement in
the group and seemed to become accepted members of the anti-RNC community.
However, despite this acceptance the unconventional anarchists were unable to
assume prominent positions in the group due to the operation of security culture.
In pursuit of greater security the RNC Welcoming Committee instituted a system
whereby participation in tactically sensitive discussions was restricted to activists
who could be vouched for by at least three known activists who could certify they
had known the vouchee for at least a year and that they were neither an informant
nor a cop.
!
Chris and Norma Jean were unable to find anyone to vouch for them, and
they were therefore prevented from participating in the two national organizing
meetings hosted by the RNC Welcoming Committee, and from joining more
sensitive committees, relegating them to duties such as gathering bikes for out of
town protesters to use, organizing town hall meetings with community members,
and preparing food to share at meetings. This was seen as a way for new members to
prove their commitment and build trust within the movement, while creating some
securitythereby maintaining the function of the affective structure of anarchist
organizing.
As it turns out, the three working class members were all, in fact, working for
the police. Norma Jean was a Ramsey County Sheriffs Department Narcotics
Officer named Marilyn Hedstrom. Amanda was a Ramsey County Corrections
Officer named Rachel Nieting, and Chris Dugger, which turns out to have been
his real name, was a confidential reliable informant for the Ramsey County Sheriffs
Department and was hired as a prison guard soon after the convention. In addition,
another trusted member of the RNC Welcoming Committee known as Pandy,
aka Andrew Darst, also turned out to be an infiltrator. Darst appears to have been
a federal informant who had been infiltrating the anarchist community for at least
3 years, attending national anarchist events and making connections that allowed
him to circumvent the vouching system and gain access to sensitive information
discussed by tactical committees. His testimony was influential in the cases against
Crowder and McKay, and was central to the case against the RNC 8.
Security culture, then, as a technique for protecting anarchist communities against
infiltration, appears to have a mixed record. Although effective at keeping relatively
short-term infiltration at the periphery of the movement, it appears less effective
at preventing long-term infiltrators from gaining the trust of movement members.
This shortcoming is clear to many in the anarchist movement, and activists continue
to refine their security techniques to more adequately deal with emerging threats
from law enforcement.
Conclusion: Anarchism, Affect, and Space

As I have argued above, anarchist organizing in the United States operates through
an imagined connection between the emotional states of anarchists and the affective
capacities of the movement to undertake direct action. I call this the affective
structure of anarchist organizing. However, the heroic retelling of tales of daring-do
that anarchists use to promote feelings of affinity makes these groups vulnerable to
state infiltration, which has the capacity to disrupt the connection between emotion
and affective capacity. Anarchist organizers, however, actively seek to reshape the
affective structures of anarchist organizing through developing new ways of relating
to each other such as security culture.
What is of central importance here is not the rather general claim that emotions
are important for social movement mobilization, policing, and security strategies.
Such a claim contributes little to a scholarly milieu that is quite ready to grant this as
true. Rather, the point is that, in the case of the anarchist groups under study, and I
would argue other similarly positioned groups, the relationship between affinity as
!
1684 Antipode
an emotional and organizational principal and direct action and riot as a technique
for producing movement energy and increasing movement capacity, what I have
referred to as the affective structure of anarchist organizing, becomes the field of
contestation on which social struggle is waged. This suggests not only that, to
put it crudely, emotions matter, but rather that the particular emotional-affective
couplings that social movements create as an aspect of oppositional consciousness
building and mobilization require as much attention as the other organizational and
tactical forms that movements build.
Further, and to bring this all into a geographic context, this work demonstrates
the necessity of augmenting the theorization of the spaces in which contemporary
radical politics take place so as to account for this offensive and defensive struggle
over the links between emotion and affect. The geographies of contentious politics
operate across scales, from the inner worlds of the anarchist imagination to the
urban scale of black bloc riots; from the un-safe spaces of movement meetings
to the carceral spaces of the security state. The above analysis contributes to
geographers understanding that the construction of spaces where affinity can be
built and effective relationships forged, what Routledge (2003) has referred to as
convergence space, is a fraught process that is actively contested by the state, which
seeks to sow discord and sabotage organizing efforts by infiltrating these very spaces
and rendering them sites of possible entrapment. Activists, recognizing the centrality
of these sites for building critically reflexive structures (Brown and Pickeril 2009),
have responded to this threat not through closing off and restricting convergence
space, which would cripple their ability to grow the anarchist movement, but rather
by attempting to create new modes of interaction capable of preserving the affects
and emotions of anarchist organizing, even under intense state pressure. These
strategies are fallible, but they are also continually being revised and redeployed in
the struggle between affinity and social control.
In conclusion, it seems to me that the affective structures of other social
movements, and the spaces in which these structures are promoted, nourished,
and defended ought to be the focus of more geographical investigation. The
affective and emotional turns in geography, alongside the flowering of social
movement studies have well prepared geographers to investigate how contestation
operates across sites and scales, permeating bodies, communities, and the strategies
and tactics of movements and states. Further, it seems to me that study of the
confluence of these flows might contribute significantly to our understanding not
only of relatively marginal groups like anarchists, but also of other movements from
environmental activists, to the Tea Party.
Endnotes
1
This narrative is based on informal discussions in the days following the RNC with activists
who were present at the raid.
2
Unconventional Action was another national anarchist organizing network set up to
facilitate planning for, and mass mobilization against the 2008 RNC.
3
I borrow this language from the preamble to the constitution of the sometimes-anarchistic
Industrial Workers of the World Union.
4
They also tried to organize internationally, in Canada, but were prevented from crossing
the border with propaganda materials.
!
5
Becoming-riot was an anonymously written zine that was published on the internet and
distributed through anarchist social networks in the weeks following the 2008 RNC.
6
The film is available from Bullfrog Films at http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/better.
html
7
This narrative of Darby pushing the other two into radical action was taken from Crowder
and McKays testimony in their eventual trial, in which they claimed entrapment by Darby.
Both eventually dropped the entrapment defense in exchange for a plea bargain.
8
Coldsnap was an anarchist legal collective that worked closely with the National Lawyers
Guild to educate protesters about their rights and state legal tactics to suppress dissent. They
were based in the Twin Cities and had close ties with the RNC Welcoming Committee.
9
There has been some debate within the anarchist movement as to whether this practice is,
in fact, the least bit effective. However, I bring it up here to illustrate the types of precautions
undertaken by a group with a significant fear of being surveilled.
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Anarchy, Geography and Drift
Jeff Ferrell
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA;
j.ferrell@tcu.edu
Abstract: The consumerist economies of the late modern city, in combination with
contemporary models of urban policing, operate to close down the public spaces of social
life. In response, social groups dedicated to democratic urbanism utilize anarchic tactics
of dis-organization and direct action to reopen public space and to revitalize it with
unregulated activity. Complicating and animating these spatial conflicts is the issue of
drift. On the one hand, consumerist economies and contemporary policing strategies
exacerbate urban drift, spawning the very sorts of spatial transgression they seek to
control. On the other hand, many of the progressive movements that battle for open
space and alternative economic arrangements themselves embrace a culture of drift, and
explore drift for its anarchic and progressive potential. In this context drift can usefully
be investigated as an emergent form of epistemology, community, and spatial politics.
Resumo: O consumismo economico nas cidades da modernidade tardia, juntamente
com osmodelos contemporaneos de policiamento urbano, operam no sentido de restringir
os espacos publicos da vida social. Em reacao, grupos sociais dedicados a democracia
urbana utilizam taticas anarquistas de des-organizacao e acao direta e focam sua
acao na reabertura e na revitalizacao do espaco publico atraves de atividades nao
reguladas. Complicando e animando estes conflitos espaciais e o assunto de drift ou a
deslocalizacao e movimento constante do sujeito. De um lado, o consumismo economico
e as estrategias de policiamento contemporaneo exacerbam estas deslocalizacoes urbanas,
contribuindo para a difusao dos tipos de transgressao que procuram controlar. Por
outro lado, muitos movimentos progressistas que lutam pela abertura do espaco e por
alternativas economicas abracam uma cultura de deslocalizacao, explorando seu potencial
anarquico e progressista. Neste contexto, a deslocalizacao pode ser explorada como
formas emergentes de epistemologia, comunidade e polticas espaciais.
Keywords: anarchy, anarchism, Critical Mass, drift, precarity, public space
The open spaces of contemporary social life are, it seems, being suffocated.
Increasingly, urban authorities in the United States, Europe and beyond see fit
to privatize public space, to deed sidewalks and parks to developers, and to
create under the guise of urban authenticity and urban regeneration new sorts
of consumption spaces that reconstitute whole swaths of the existing city as
exclusive, street-level consumer havens (Amster 2008; Ferrell 2001; MacLeod 2002;
Mitchell 2003; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011; Zukin 1997, 2010). Meanwhile, legal
and political authorities argue that, for the sake of safety, civility, and commerce,
both private and public spaces must be subject to ever more elaborate forms
of surveillance and control. Countless CCTV clusters and security cameras track
the routes of pedestrians, the flow of automobiles, and the shopping or sitting
habits of urbanites, in this way gridding social life within intersecting lines of
panoptic observation. In Britain, authorities use anti-social behavior orders, dispersal
orders, and curfews to push undesirables away from consumerist developments.
Throughout the United States, legal and political authorities employ the
principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and related

1688 Antipode
place-based approaches in an effort to build social control into the spatial

environment. Uncomfortable park benches meant to inhibit long-term sitting or
sleeping, prickly bushes planted to block public access, low walls interrupted by
anti-skateboarding abutments, entryways and windows designed for maximum
surveillancethese and other features accumulate into a spatial environment
saturated with contemporary ideologies of containment and exclusion.
In this way the holes and gaps that Peter Marin (in McDonogh 1993:14)
argues are essential to tolerant urban life are plugged, the citys breathing spaces
closed and choked off, its marginal populations banished from public life (Beckett
and Herbert 2009). Where De Certeau (1984:96, 105) saw and celebrated a rich
indetermination, a proliferating illegitimacy amidst the collective movement of
the citys citizensa poetic geography of free spacethere now seems more
a forced march of everyday life, a pre-arranged interplay of people, places, and
products. Echoing De Certeaus (1984:93) notion that urban walkers follow the
thicks and thins of an urban text they write without being able to read it,
Massey (2006:40, 46) has likewise argued that both space and landscape could be
imagined as provisionally intertwined simultaneities of ongoing, unfinished stories.
The contemporary proliferation of privatized urban spaces, surveillance cameras,
and spatial controls suggests an ongoing attempt to negate these very dynamics
to make the text of urban life all too visible and readable, to script the stories of social
space from beginning to end. In this sense the foundations of an anarchist critique
of such measuresthat is, a critique of power and domination in whatever forms
they may takeare already apparent. From an anarchist view, these developments
undermine the viability of urban social life by encoding ever more restrictive controls
in the spatial environment, and by containing the unpredictability and disorder
essential to an emergent, democratic urbanism (Ferrell 2001). Finding the laws
distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize that which should be
modified and developed day to day, Kropotkin (1975:3031) proclaimed in 1886
that in place of the cowardly phrase, Obey the law, our cry is Revolt against all
laws! The enforced immobility of contemporary spatial arrangements suggests, if
not anarchist revolt, then at least a parallel anarchist critique.
A fuller anarchist analysis of these developments, though, requires a good bit
more complexity. To begin with, this contemporary closure of open public space
can be traced to the cultural and political economy of the late modern city. With
the withering of urban industrial production in many American and European
cities, and the global exportation of production to developing countries, these
cities increasingly rely on economies organized around service work, entertainment,
and consumption. Researchers like Markusen and Schrock (2009:345, 353) argue
for this sort of consumption-driven urban development, noting that superior
local consumption-based offerings help to attract skilled workers, managers,
entrepreneurs, and retirees, and emphasizing that economists and geographers
have recently stressed the significance of lifestyle preferences of skilled workers as
an important determinant of economic development. Confirming this economic
trajectory, if less enthusiastically, David Harvey (2008:31) concludes that quality
of urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world where
consumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major
!
Anarchy, Geography and Drift 1689
aspects of the urban political economy. To paraphrase Marx, cities built the first
time on the tragedy of industrial labor are rebuilt on the farce of image and
impression; Monterrey, Californias Cannery Row now offers Steinbeck-themed
shops and a world-class aquarium, and Ft Worth, Texass bloody stockyards and
slaughterhouses now process only the kitsch recollections of cowboy boots and
cattle. In such worlds urban authenticity, like urban quality of life, emerges as
an upscale commodity (Zukin 2010). More to the point, where cities once took
shape around the interests of industrial capitalists, late modern cities are now
reshaped by developers who reconfigure relatively open urban environments into
carefully integrated zones of high-end consumption. And to protect these privatized
zones from those who might trespass on them or their intended meanings vis-a-vis
lifestyle preferences and urban authenticityto protect, that is, the image-based
commodity that is quality of urban lifepolicing in turn comes to focus as much
on perception as on populations. An economic official in the USA argues during an
urban revitalization campaign that panhandling is a problem precisely because its
part of an image issue for the city (Ferrell 2001:45; see Amster 2008). An American
legal scholar agrees, positing that the most serious of the attendant problems of
homelessness is its devastating effect on a citys image (Mitchell 2003:201). As
Aspden (2008:13) concludes in regard to the recent transformation of a decaying
British industrial city into a corporate city of conspicuous consumption: There
seems to be no place in the new Leeds for those who disturb the rhythms of the
consumer-oriented society.
This control of panhandlers, homeless populations and other undesired groups
in turn rests on an ascendant late modern model of risk-based urban policing.
Developed and supported by major insurance companiesand in the case of
programs like Neighborhood Watch, even funded by them (OMalley 2010:26
27)this model emphasizes a rationalized, actuarial approach to crime prevention
through systematic surveillance and the collection of information in order to
make predictions, and the formation of preventative interventions based on these
(OMalley 2010:31). By this models logicthe military and neo-liberal logic
of security, as Shukaitis (2009:157) calls itsurveillance cameras and tightly
controlled public spaces function to prevent crime in the present, and to provide the
sorts of calculable data on people and their movements that can be used to curtail
crime in the future. By the same logic, the unregulated and the unpredictablethe
citys holes and gaps and rich indeterminationstand not as markers of urban
vitality, but as open invitations to criminality and the breakdown of crime control. For
conservative criminologists like Wilson and Kelling (1982) the presence of homeless
panhandlers or the public paintings of graffiti writers are likewise defined only as
signs of social disorderas metaphorical broken windowsthat serve to dispirit
citizens and to invite more violent forms of criminality. What some might see as
hallmarks of a democratically anarchic urbanismopen public space, unregulated
occupation of it and interaction within it, unfettered movement through ita new
generation of politicians and police officials sees as unacceptable components of
urban risk. Risk-based policing and consumer-based urban economies coalesce
around a central consequence: intolerance toward open urban space and those
who would occupy or traverse it inappropriately.
!
1690 Antipode
Significantly, a variety of contemporary social groups and social movements are

equally determined to keep urban spatial arrangements open, and to breathe
life back into those spaces, those holes and gaps, that have been closed. While
orbiting around various social and political issues, such groups see open public
space as essential to a democratic societythat is, as the primary forum in which
directly democratic processes and collective cultures can be invented and negotiated
(Springer 2011). The conceptual link that I operate from is trying to preserve spaces
that are historically dedicated to the public, says anarchist activist and scholar
Randall Amster, because its my belief that without public spaces, any kind of talk
about democracy basically goes out the window (in Ferrell 2001:52). Likewise,
they conceptualize public space as an ongoing cultural accomplishment, and so an
important public venue of contested symbolism and cultural progress (Amin 2008).
Linking these concerns with issues of environmental sustainability and social justice,
groups like Critical Mass and Reclaim the Streets engage particular public space
issuesroad building, automotive domination, spatial exclusion of the homeless,
urban privatizationwithin a broader ethos of spatial justice. Chris Carlsson, one
of the founders of Critical Massan anarchic, take-back-the-streets urban bicycling
movementargues for example that collectively abandoning the automobile to
embrace public bicycling is not only an act of spatial democratization, but an act of
desertion from an entire web of exploitative and demeaning activities, behaviors that
impoverish the human experience and degrade planetary ecology itself (Carlsson
2002:82; see Carlsson and Manning 2010). Pushing back against the closure and
containment of social space, then, are a host of groups and movements that valorize
the sorts of direct, everyday democracy that can flourish in such spaceand that
employ DIY (do-it-yourself) activism, direct action, and other anarchist strategies
both to liberate this space and to re-animate it with just such democratic activity.
Over the past decade or so I and others have documented in some detail the
distinctly anarchic ideologies and strategies of these groups and movements
the ways, for example, in which they utilize non-hierarchical social networks to
dis-organize on-the-fly collective bicycle rides, road blockages, street carnivals,
and sidewalk sit-inswith these ephemeral public events meant to unravel the
legal and spatial controls of city life (Amster 2008; Carlsson 2002; Ferrell 2001;
McKay 1998; Shantz 2011; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011). These are indeed
classic confrontations between order and authority on the one hand and anarchist
politics on the otherconfrontations that have defined many contemporary spatial
conflicts, and that continue to do so. As already seen, economic and political
authorities increasingly strive to keep public space under tight surveillance and
control in the interest of risk management and late modern consumption, and work
to encode ordered predictability into such space; anti-authoritarian activists in turn
fight to keep such space open to fluid spatial relations, to preserve the spatial rights
of the homeless and other marginalized groups, and to make room for spontaneity
and creative urban disorder.
The notion of dis-organizing and dis-organization exemplifies this anarchic
orientation. As with Kropotkin, these groups see the immobility of rule and
regulation as inhibiting human freedom and human progresseven if the rules
and regulations are their own. As a result, they emphasize dis-organizationthat
!
is, just enough coordination to propel social activism forward, but not so much
as to become a static end in itself. In this sense they seek not only to reintroduce
indetermination and uncertainty into the spaces of urban life, but to do so by
means that are themselves indeterminate and uncertain. Chris Carlsson has for
example noted his pleasure at overhearing Critical Mass participants explaining the
essential meaning of a Critical Mass ride, especially when their explanations differ
from his own and those of others; the anonymous punk/anarchist author of Evasion,
a chronicle of squatting and street living, has likewise written that, I always secretly
looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasnt limited by my own
imagination. That way anything can, and always did, happen (in Ferrell 2001:107;
Anonymous 2003:12). More pointedly, Reclaim the Streets, which describes itself as
as direct action network seeking the rediscovery and liberation of the city streets,
felt compelled at one point to issue a press release, On Disorganization, in response
to media attempts to report on Reclaim the Streets leaders. Reclaim the Streets,
they announced, is a non-hierarchical, leaderless, openly organized public group.
No individual plans or masterminds its actions and events. RTS activities are the
result of voluntary, unpaid, co-operative efforts from numerous self-directed people
attempting to work equally together. A recent public event, they added, was put
together in this way in part previously, in part spontaneously on the day itself
(Reclaim the Streets 2000). As the Situationists, one of the precursors of Reclaim the
Streets, said back in 1963: We will only organize the detonation. The free explosion
must escape us and any other control forever (in Marcus 1989:179180).
Here a seemingly simple dualismactivist groups battling legal and economic
authorities for control of urban spacecan be seen to harbor a more subtle dynamic.
To the extent that these groups found their spatial activism in anarchic traditions,
their goal is not so much to retake control of urban space as it is to obliterate
spatial domination and control itself in the interest of spontaneity and emergence.
Recalling the old anarchist cry, the goal is not to seize power but to destroy it; as
Ward (1973:3839) says, the belief is in the revolutionary potential of leaderless
groups to unravel, not replace, everyday arrangements of power and control. In
this context, a too-sharply drawn duality between spatial control and resistance to
it also omits from our observation and analysis a complementary trajectory, and a
variety of groups and situations carried along by it. This trajectory, it seems to me,
can deepen our understanding of contemporary urban space and conflicts over it,
and our understanding of the interplay between anarchism and authority in the
spatial realm. We can refer to this trajectory as drift, and those caught up in it as
drifters, and we can anticipate two central ironies in this regard. The first involves the
ways in which contemporary economic and legal developments promote the very
sort of drift that contemporary spatial controls seek to contain. The second involves
the ways in which activist and marginalized groups sometimes embrace drift for its
dis-organizational possibilities.
Drift and Its Discontents

The contemporary social forces that cast people and populations adrift
that dislocate them and leave them without firm spatial orientation or
!
1692 Antipode
destinationpervade contemporary political and economic developments. Broadly,

these include widespread political expulsion on the part of repressive governmental
regimes, mass migration forced by economic or political marginalization, and
the creation of swelling refugee populations as the consequence of civil and
transnational warfare. In more domestic domains, the ongoing destruction of low-
cost housing as part of urban redevelopment schemes, the corporate criminality of
the mortgage/foreclosure crisis of recent years, and the proliferation of part-time
and low-wage service work all conspire to preclude for millions any certainty as to
home or shelter. Moving from one temporary housing arrangement to another,
sleeping in cars, haunting homeless shelters and wandering the streets when such
shelters are closed, those cut loose from home or job find little in the way of
spatial stability. Nor is this dislocation confined to any one region or country. While
impoverished Central Americans hitch rides through Mexico atop US-bound freight
trains and itinerant gutter punks hop US freight trains from city to city, rural
migrants flood arrival cities (Saunders 2011) outside Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai,
and Africans in search of work or political asylum crowd rickety boats to cross
the Mediterranean toward the cities of southern Europe. Meanwhile, in southern
Europe itself, a native-born generation finds that today, even advanced degrees
leave them lost between dead-end jobs and unemploymentnot unlike the young
in Japan, left to piece together irregular jobs amidst a collapsing career structure,
or the North American workers who discover that the current economic recovery
is predicated mostly on temp work and day labor. Suggesting the scope of this
contemporary drift, Bauman (2002:343) notes that refugees are perhaps the most
rapidly swelling of all the categories of world population today, and Saunders
(2010:1) estimates current worldwide rural-to-urban migration as involving two or
three billion humans, perhaps a third of the worlds population.
As these contemporary constellations of the dislocated drift amidst the predations
of the late modern crisis, they are all but sure to catch the attention of security
cameras, to trespass on newly privatized spaces, and to encamp in curfewed
parks and closed off public squaresperhaps not with the same transgressive
intentionality as anarchist spatial justice activists, but with their own desperate
momentum nonetheless. Camping in the flood drains beneath the streets of Las
Vegas, sleeping rough around Londons Westminster Cathedral, moving in and
out of abandoned air-defense tunnels underneath Beijing, they are all but sure
to reintroduce De Certeaus indetermination and illegitimacy into the spaces
of urban life, and so to transgress, both spatially and normatively, the ever more
enforced boundaries of the contemporary social order (Butler 2011; Lichtblau 2009;
Wong 2011). As a consequence, they seem certain to be caught up, increasingly,
in contemporary conflicts over public space and social justice, and to become a
focus of concern for those interested in spatial security. Writing about the dynamics
of liquid modernity, and more particularly the increase in those who imagine
that they are being stalked by strangers, Zygmunt Bauman (2000:93, emphasis in
original) has noted that, as opposed to other historical forms of paranoia, what is
truly novel is that it is the stalkers (in company with prowlers and other loiterers,
characters from outside the place through which they move) who carry the blame
!
now . . . Yet as Bauman goes on to note, this paranoia resides not only in the mind,
but in the spatial politics of contemporary societyin the fact that public money
has already been set aside in quantities that rise year after year for the purpose of
tracing and chasing the stalkers, the prowlers and other updated editions of that
modern scare, the mobile vulgusthe inferior kind of people on the move, dribbling
or gushing into places where only the right kind of people should have the right
to be . . . . For public officials, private developers, and affluent citizens invested in
regulated urban space, drifters of all sorts constitute a ready target for paranoia and
moral panic. As above, it is not only that homeless drifters are alleged to create
image issues for contemporary urban economies; it is that they are, in the words
of a Seattle economic official, feral, and in the language of two Phoenix/Tempe
economic officials, all on some kind of substance . . . all kind of extreme, and
horrific . . . human carnage (in Beckett and Herbert 2009:181; Ferrell 2001:
49, 54).
Ironically, all of the individuals just quoted are directly involved in promoting the
contemporary trend toward consumption-driven urban development a form
of economic development that spawns the very sorts of drifters they condemn.
Invoking the ghosts of those displaced by Haussmanns sweeping reconfiguration
of nineteenth century Paris, and by the brutal modernism that Robert Moses
applied to twentieth century New York City, David Harvey (2008:28, 34) emphasizes
that this sort of contemporary urban development is likewise predicated on the
capture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there for
years. For Harvey, this dispossession constitutes a sort of spatial imperialism, and
an abrogation of the right to the cityand this is certainly so. Yet complementing
this are the ongoing spatial consequences for those dispossessedput bluntly, the
likelihood that many of them will remain cut loose and cast adrift in ways that they
were not before. Noticing a high-end condominium complex where once there
was an historic working-class neighborhood, we see the physical evidence of the
revanchist city (Smith 1997); less easily seen, less in focus, are the neighborhoods
former residents, many now scattered throughout the city, moving perhaps between
one short-term abode and another. The boutique hotel put up in place of the old
SRO flop stands still for observation; the SROs one time residents, now homeless on
the streets, do not. As Thrush (in Beckett and Herbert 2009:27) says of Seattles sharp
decline in SRO housing due to high-end development, As the [SROs] closed, the
people who remained downtown tended to be poorer, sicker, more often homeless
and unemployed, and less likely to be white.
Just as the development of a late modern consumerist economy promotes drift,
so does the risk-based policing model that accompanies it. CPTED programs that
undertake to reduce crime by building social control into the spatial environment
and so to discourage the presence of transient populations by, for example, installing
uncomfortable public benches or closing public toiletsmay succeed in forcing
such populations from parks or town squares, but in doing so they undermine
the fragile spatial communities that emerge there, and put these populations back
on the move in search of even minimal comfort or convenience (Ferrell 2001).
Likewise, the proliferation of banishment orders and exclusion zones in New York,
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Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and other US cities is such that homeless individuals
are often forced into perpetual movement between them; as one homeless Seattle
resident complained, No, you know I dont understand these zones . . . theyre
everywhere. They try to tell you that you cant walk around, cant be in them,
but where can I go, Im homeless, I got no place to go. Theyre everywhere
(in Beckett and Herbert 2009:130). Similarly, the contemporary criminal justice
emphasis on the broken windows policing model and place-based crime
prevention produces approaches like that utilized in Santa Ana, California, where
according to an officials memo, the policy is that vagrants are no longer welcome
in the city of Santa Ana . . . the mission of this program is to move all vagrants
and their paraphernalia out . . . by continually removing them from the places that
they are frequenting in the City (in Mitchell 2003:197). Programs like the Los
Angeles Safer Cities Initiative (SCI) institutionalize this approach further. This place-
based policing intervention deploys police officers who move through Skid Row
areas with entrenched homeless populations, breaking up homeless encampments,
issuing citations, and making arrests for violations of the law (Berk and McDonald
2010:813, 817) for the purpose of dispersal. As Culhane (2010:853) notes, such
initiatives are not designed to address the root problems of homelessness, but only
the (alleged) problem of spatial concentration among the homelesswith such
initiatives to be complemented by the dispersal of homeless facilities and support
services throughout urban areas as well. Vitale (2010:868, 870) argues that, due
to aggressive fines and arrests, such initiatives only further entrap those targeted in
homelessness; to this we can add that such initiatives also force the homeless into
ever more dislocated ways of living. Interestingly, Vitale wonders also if the primary
goal of the SCI [is] really to reduce crime and homelessness or instead to remove a
large concentration of poor people forcibly from Skid Row in hope of encouraging
the subsequent gentrification of the area . . . . A major effort to gentrify Skid Row has
been underway for years . . .1
If one meaning of drift is to be carried along by forces outside ones control, these
then are the forces today: the predatory political economy of global capitalism and
the exclusionary urban economies of consumption, the revanchist spatial politics
of urban environments and the policing strategies that support them, and the
privatization and privations of urban space that result. In all of this the iatrogenic
effects of law and economythe ironies of social control (Marx 1981) by which
the doctor can be seen to create the diseaseare evident. The spatial controls meant
to contain urban space, to protect it from the feared dribble and gush of transitory
populations, only serve to make such populations more transient; put simply, the
closure of urban space to drifters exacerbates urban drift. Likewise, the reconstitution
of urban economies around managed meaning and conspicuous consumption
casts adrift the very sorts of citizens whose peripatetic presence threatens those
preferred patterns of meaning and consumption. And speaking of ironies and
contradictions, there is one more: various social groups and social movements
that battle these forcesthat fight for open public space and alternative urban
economiessometimes engender drift themselves, and explore it for its subversive
potential.
!
Precarity, Dis-organization and Drift

As already noted, any number of groups battling for open urban space draw
on anarchist and anti-authoritarian orientations in developing a politics of direct
action and creative disruption. Confronting an Arizona plan to privatize public
sidewalks and criminalize the public presence of the homeless, for example, Randall
Amster and the Project S.I.T. movement that he helped (dis)organize called on
traditions of anarchist direct action, the I.W.W . . . . the civil rights movement . . . the
philosophies of Gandhi and King . . . passive resistance, civil disobedience . . . [and]
the burgeoning WTO, World Bank anti-globalization movement to stage sidewalk
sit-ins and create a kind of space for spontaneity and resistance (in Ferrell
2001:5152; see Amster 2008). Over the past couple of decades, Reclaim the
Streets activists in the United States and Europe have likewise blocked urban
automotive traffic, held illegal street parties, and otherwise launched ephemeral
festivals of resistanceall while referencing and reinventing the Paris Communes
1871 festival of the oppressed, the Situationist interventions of Paris 1968,
and other moments in anti-authoritarian history (Jordan 1998:139). During the
1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicagoitself preceded by homeless
roundups and the destruction of low-income housingthe anarchist group Active
Resistance (AR) likewise highlighted the significance of the spatial dimensions of
conflict and the territoriality of social struggle by ignoring designated protest
areas and staging an illegal festival of the oppressed in the streets around the
convention (Shantz 2011:70). In New York City, Bike Lane Liberation Clowns
attempt to bridge the space between the joy of riding free and possibilities
for public-space environmental activism by playfully ticketing drivers parked in
bicycle lanes (Shepard and Smithsimon 2011:188). And in New York City, Madrid,
and other cities around the world, Jordan Seiler and members of the Public Ad
Campaign undermine the commodification of public space by illicitly removing
corporate advertising from public areas and replacing it with independent art, in
this way striving to help communities regain control of the spaces they occupy
(www.publicadcampaign.com). In this sense these and other groups work to uproot
the conventional signposts that define and delimit urban spacelegal statutes
and police lines, automotive traffic, corporate advertisingand to institute instead
spontaneously self-made encounters within public venues.
Two groups in particular embrace the progressive possibilities of drift,
disorientation, and disruption even more overtlythe first directly in the realm
of public space, the second in the broader realm of cultural and political economy.
Critical Massthe anarchic bicycling movement whose participants now ride in
cities around the worlddisavows traditional models of leadership and organization
in favor of the sort of decentered, dis-organized dynamics that operate through
direct action, do-it-yourself media, and loose affiliations among riders. This approach
defines the preparation for a collective ride, with participants encouraged to create
and distribute their own fliers promoting the ride. It also defines the ride itself. The
route the ride will take is left open to discussion, or simply allowed to emerge in
transit; if a map materializes, it is considered provisional, or designated as leading
to wherever (in Ferrell 2001:106). During the course of the ridesopen-ended,
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1696 Antipode
leaderless and democratic free-for-alls, as Shepard and Smithsimon (2011:171)

describe themthe bicycles collective flow trumps the rigidity of traffic laws. As
riders approach an intersection, a few will break off to temporarily cork the
intersectionto block it from cross-traffic as the ride progresses through it, whether
or not stop signs are present or traffic lights green or redand then rejoin the ride; at
the next intersection, other riders will voluntarily take on the corking (Ferrell 2011a).
Unlike other forms of urban traffichurried, hyper-regulated, anxiousCritical Mass
rides are meant to drift through urban space as organic, on-the-move collectivities.
In their drifting uncertainty, they are in turn meant to embody the dis-organization
that produced them, and to demonstrate that such fluid direct action can effectively
replace the usual policing of public space. As Graeber (2007:378) argues, anarchist
activists dedicated to direct action have understood mass mobilizations not only as
opportunities to expose the illegitimate, undemocratic nature of existing institutions,
but as ways to do so in a form that itself demonstrated why such institutions were
unnecessary, by providing a living example of genuine, direct democracy.
Critical Mass participants emphasize that this approach is not a form of protest,
but rather a playful, celebratory enactment of alternative spatial community and
reclaiming of public space (Ferrell 2001:105121). Not surprisingly, this direct,
collective liberation of urban space from automotive traffic and traffic law has led
to countless encounters with city officials and police, innumerable arrests, and a
number of violent incidents with motorists, including a recent Brazilian case in which
an angry driver accelerated into a Critical Mass ride, injuring some 30 riders (Domit
and Goodman 2011:A5). Among these, two cases in particular highlight the ways in
which Critical Masss drifting uncertainty challenges conventional spatial controls.
In 1997, with San Francisco Critical Mass rides drawing thousands of participants,
then San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and his administration undertook to control
the rides by negotiating designated routes and police escortsbut could find no
Critical Mass leaders with whom to negotiate. As a result, San Francisco police were
ordered to stop the next Critical Mass ride and arrest participants, and while many
were arrested, the majority simply scattered and escaped along various spur-of-
the-moment routes. It was not possible for the mayor to engineer what would
happen with Critical Mass, said Jennifer Granick, an attorney for some who were
arrested. How was he going to stop the ride? There just wasnt any way. Theres
no leadership . . . And what were they going to do, arrest everybody? Theres just
too many people to arrest everybody . . . And I think the bicyclists realized that (in
Ferrell 2001:108109). A few years later in New York City, it did seem they were
going to arrest everybody, and for similar reasons. Following numerous arrests of
Critical Mass riders during the Republican National Convention, the New York City
police department demanded (unsuccessfully) that Critical Mass obtain a permit for
its rides, posting fliers claiming that it was dangerous and illegal to ride a bicycle
in a procession without a permit (in Shepard and Smithsimon 2011:174).
A second progressive group especially attuned to the collective politics of drift
and disruption is southern Europes emerging precarity movement. Variously
understood as chainworkers (www.chainworkers.org) or members of the new
precariat, those engaged with this movement argue that the global economy of
the late capitalist city leaves them with little but aborted careers, part-time service
!
work, unpredictable flex scheduling at the jobs they do findand so a life defined
by precarious prospects and constant uncertainty. Moreover, with the infiltration of
models of non-standard employment from low-wage service sectors into middle-
class and creative occupations, a multi-class precariat may now span conventional
class divisions and so be emerging as the post-Fordist successor to the proletariat
(Ross 2008:3435). As Braverman (1974) has documented, the degradation of work
in the twentieth century resulted from the systematic deskilling of physical labor
and imposition of Taylorist models of scientifically managed efficiency; such is the
degradation of work in the twenty-first century that immaterial labor is now also
subject to measurement and regulation, without even the small compensations
of Fordist security and social welfare that accompanied this earlier process
(De Angelis and Harvie 2009). As a result, a new generation confronts a present and a
future cut loose from the social contracta present and future without conventional
anchors of education, career, and identity. In this way the consumer-driven cultural
economy of the contemporary capitalist city not only dislocates impoverished urban
residents and closes public spaces; it also spawns a young, peripatetic army of low-
wage service and retail workers who drift between part-time jobs and temporary
housing, negotiate irregular work schedules, and find little hope for spatial or social
permanence (Seligson 2011).
In developing a critique of precaritys economic and historical origins, those
associated with the movement have also begun to explore its cultural and political
possibilities. Christina Morini (in Galetto et al 2007:106), for example, argues that
while precarity suggests the negativity of instability,
it is at the same time also connected with the idea of re-questioning, of becoming, of
the future, of possibility, concepts which together contribute to creating the idea of the
nomadic subject without fixed roots . . . . The precarious subject has no fixed points and
does not want any. He/she is always forced to seek a new sense of direction, to construct
new narratives and not to take anything for granted.
The new narratives of the precariat do indeed explore alternative ways of collective
living and beingand the potential for turning precariousness back on those whose
economic and political policies promote it. Many of these alternatives also point
beyond traditional labor unions and political parties and towards forms of cultural
activism that use visual tools and images extensively and employ theatre, cinema,
music and stunts to effect political change (Gill and Pratt 2008:10), as developed
from an understanding that cultural production is not an adjunct or addition
to the real work of capitalist production but increasingly . . . is the work that is
a key component of it (Shukaitis 2009:170, emphasis in original). Members of
the Italian Chainworkers movement, for example, have invented San Precariothe
transgendered patron saint of disenfranchised workers and companion saint to Santa
Graziella of the Milan Critical Massand have paraded San Precario though the
sorts of retail spaces that employ such workers. Subsequently, they have used their
digital and media skills to promote the imaginary fashion designer Serpica Naro (an
anagram of San Precario), and used her to infiltrate a fashion show at Milan Fashion
Week 2005. In the course of the show, it was announced that Serpica Naro does
not exist, [and] the whole prank was revealed to the media, which duly reported
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1698 Antipode
the entire story, thus highlighting the issues of casualized work behind the glitter of
Milan fashion week (Tari and Vanni 2005; see Shukaitis 2009:172174).2
For Critical Mass riders as for members of the new precariat, then, drift is not simply
the consequence of economic and political arrangements; it is also the foundation
for what we might call an anarchic culture of drift, and for new styles of spatial
activism and cultural resistance to those arrangements. These new styles are as fluid,
ambivalent, and dis-organized as are the lives of those who create them. They drift
across spaces, situations, and social categories as readily as do the young people
whose lives they reflect, and draw on the sorts of portable skills that they carry
with them from job to jobwhen a job is to be had. All the while, such approaches
confront the spaces of law and commerce not head-on, but glancingly, subversively,
playfullymuch as drifters themselves move though urban space. Because of this,
these approaches also hint at alternative orientations for knowing the world, for
moving through it, and for living collectively in itorientations that echo, at least,
with anarchic possibility.
Drift, Space, and Anarchy: A Speculation

A number of scholars concerned with the precarious dynamics of contemporary
occupational and social life have argued that such precariousness is not an
aberration; rather, it was the period of Fordismwith its regulatory controls, relative
stability, and social welfare statethat was the exception within capitalisms long
and chaotic history (Fantone 2007; Neilson and Rossiter 2008; Shukaitis 2009:165
166, 179180). From this view, a syndrome of itinerant laborers, unstable work
opportunities, and enforced drift is not simply a symptom of late capitalism
or late modernity, but as much so a return to the sort of endemic predatory
uncertainty that was interrupted, briefly and partially, by the decades of Fordism in
the United States and Europe. Widening this view, it might be argued that modernity
itself, while at times producing bureaucratic stability and enduring regimes of
power, has consistently produced profound and ongoing dislocation, and with
it an endless stream of migrants, refugees, and wanderers. Taking this analysis
further still, we might wonder whether the nature of human existence is not itself
deeply precarious, beset at some fundamental level by longing, rootlessness, and
wanderlust. Certainly there is plentiful, if sometimes contradictory, evidence for
all these viewsfrom small nomadic groups to waves of global immigrants, from
Depression-era dustbowl drifters and Beat Generation roadtrips in the United States
to lost populations shuttled between post-World War II Displaced Persons camps in
Europe. But whatever the casewhether our analytic focus is economic, historical,
or existentialit does seem that the spatial politics of drift exists before and beyond
any one episode or group.
In this light the project undertaken by Critical Mass riders and precarity
activists can be widened as well: exploring the possibilities of drift as collective
experience and collective political action. Put another way, we can consider how
the contemporary trends already seenthe increasing closure and control of urban
space, the dynamics by which new urban economies and the spatial policing that
protects them spawn drift, and the uses of drift by anarchic groups in confrontation
!
with emerging economic and spatial arrangementsmight intertwine as they

continue to emerge. Shukaitis (2009:166168) notes that, among progressive
groups in 1970s Italy, the phrase precario bellobeautiful precaritywas regularly
used to denote opposition to, and withdrawal from, the all too stable world of
routinized industrial production. Now, he argues, an inversion and transformation
has occurred whereby capitalism largely imposes precarity and flexibility as the
conditions for new sorts of degraded labor. Building from the work of Critical Mass
riders, precariat activists, and others, I speculate in what follows on the possibility
that this contemporary, imposed precarity might be remade into, or at least infused
with, precario belloand so with some new sort of critical or progressive politics. If
more and more people are forced adrift by emerging economic and spatial forces,
might we find in this any hope of a deriva bella as well?
At the outset, let me be clear: The experience of drift for many, perhaps for
mostthe political refugee, the impoverished migrant, the homeless familyis
undoubtedly suffused not with political possibility, but with sorrow, anger, and
a sense of irretrievable loss. In such cases alienation from home, career, or cultural
history produces a degree of existential disempowerment and emotional pain that
defines drift as anything but a beautiful adventure. Moreover, those who drift amidst
precarious circumstances are fractured along lines of social capital, privilege, and
intentionality; a poor family displaced by urban development or a homeless woman
rousted by an LA police officer drifts differently than does a Critical Mass rider
or wandering artist (see Cresswell 1997). Among all these groups, there is also
the matter of present state versus preferred state. As Saunders (2011) has shown,
many rural migrants who drift toward urban areasor as commonly, drift back
and forth repeatedly between rural village and urban areado so driven by the
firm hope of eventual and permanent settlement in the city. These closing remarks,
then, are neither a comprehensive catalogue of drifts experiential dimensions nor
a celebration of drift as such, but rather a speculation on the complex politics of
drift.
Within that complexity, there are some commonalities. The more insecure jobs
are still and above all carried out by women (Galetto et al 2007:106), for example,
and youth, women and immigrants are disproportionately represented in . . . the
precariat (Ross 2008:41; see Aubenas 2011). Moreover, these commonalities often
intersect within particular groups or spatial situationsas in a recent illegal street
blockade by Australian taxi drivers, many of whom were also international university
students on limited visas. The question thus arises, write Neilson and Rossitor
(2008:66), as to whether the blockade should be read as taxi driver politics, migrant
politics or student politics. We would suggest that one reason for the effectiveness of
the strike . . . is the fact that it [was] all three of these at the same time. Broadening
this view, Ross (2008) and others wonder whether common cause can be found
between relatively high-end creative class workers and lower class service workers,
even with the shared precariousness of their work and lives. Perhaps not, in many
cases; yet as the Serpico Naro episode shows, creativity and dislocation can at
times come together to form powerful alliances across differences of occupation or
status. One precariat manifesto suggests something of this, and reflects as well the
profound uncertainty that now links many young peoples lives from Europe and
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1700 Antipode
the United States to North Africa and the Middle East: We are all migrants looking
for a better life (in Tari and Vanni 2005).
Among todays late modern migrants, then, a social and cultural geography of
drift might include also hobos, wanderers, and nomads traversing North America,
Europe and beyond (Daniels 2008; Grant 2003); Gypsy Travelers moving across
and against governmental boundaries (Shubin 2011; Ward 2000); economic
and political refugees on the move from country to country in search of work,
safety, or political renewal; migrant workers, regularly victimized by state and
economic authorities, but also carrying with them the potential to evade state
scrutiny and capitalist discipline (Ross 2008:37); those operating outside traditional
work routines by way of urban scrounging and trash picking (Ferrell 2006), or
homeworking, piecework, and freelancing (Gill and Pratt 2008:3); sex workers
and migratory prostitutes who remain dislocated both from their home communities
and their current communities of residence (ONeill 2001; Oude Breuil 2009);
and unknown others whose day-to-day lives are shaped by spatial and ontological
uncertainty. Across this heterogeneity of people and approaches, various dynamics
would suggest at least the potential for commonalities of experience. The first is the
great likelihood that such groups will continue to breach increasingly rigid spatial
and legal boundaries as they drift across cities, countries, and occupations. As already
seen, this spatio-legal transgression is all but assured not only by the movement of
drifters themselves, but by the contemporary reconfiguration of public space as a
series of closures, boundaries, and obstacles designed to criminalize free movement.
Because of this, the experience of drift will include, in many cases, the sequenced
experience of exclusion and alienation. In these cases the drifter exists as an ongoing
outsideroutside the boundaries of home country, conventional labour market,
designated space, or legal citizenship. To the extent that this drifting continues,
the exclusions accumulate, and in so doing reinforce the drifters identity as one
outside the frame many times over. Here is the sorrow, loss and alienation of drift,
the emptiness of dislocation as wellbut here also is the impetus for living and
learning outside the usual bounds of the social order. A serial transgressor by law
or by choice, the drifter may acquiremay be forced to acquirea sense of self
and society unavailable to the sedentary. On the back of the card . . . it says when
you sign this card . . . you trespassed from all these places on the back of the card,
says a homeless urbanite caught up in a banishment/exclusion zone order. Thats
everywhere! You cant go to Sorrys, you cant go to Feathers, you cant go to Rainier
Beach, you cant go to Bank of America, you cant go to the Moore place, you cant
go the Safeway, you cant go nowhere! (in Beckett and Herbert 2009:131).
Richard Grants (2003:263) summary of his years wandering the United States
with itinerant rodeo cowboys, freight train hobos, and peripatetic neo-hippies
is similarly instructive. They have a quintessentially nomadic attitude toward
sedentary society, he concludes.
They dont pay taxes, they dont vote, and they dont consider themselves bound by
the social contract. And thanks to vagrancy laws, begging laws, laws against sleeping
in parks, laws against hitchhiking and riding freight trainslaws, in short, that make it
illegal to be poor and nomadicthey are locked into conflict with the sedentary state
and its coercive power.
!
Grants notion of a nomadic attitude hints at a second dynamic, this one

perceptualthe dynamic by which drifting can create commonalities of alternative
knowledge and perception for those caught up in it. Geographers have noted this
tendency, both in their own studies of spatial mobility and attitude (Prince 1973),
and in their invocation of the flaneur (Keith 1997). For cultural geographers as
for literary scholars, the flaneur embodies a distinctive model of urban citizenship,
not only by the flaneurs ongoing and uncertain movement through the city, but
by the particular sorts of knowledge that such movement produces. As an urban
dawdler and drifter the flaneur builds a holistic, comparative understanding of the
citys spaces that has the potential to undermine the more settled understandings
of the sedentary. Keith (1997:145) argues that, spatially, the order of things is
never more clearly revealed than through disruption, the striking juxtapositions of
the street walk . . . De Certeau (1984:101) agrees: The long poem of walking
manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be, he says.
It creates shadows and ambiguities within them.
Perhaps the most provocative possibility in this regard is the Situationist practice
of the derivea fluid drifting through urban space, a rapid passage through varied
ambiances, in order to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself (Debord
1958). Graeber (2009:258, see 526528; 2007:394) notes that the situationist
legacy is probably the single most important theoretical influence on contemporary
anarchism is America, and indeed the Situationist notion of creating a revolution
of everyday life from moments that disrupt and reverse dominant arrangements
can be seen in the performative spatial politics of Critical Mass, Reclaim the Streets,
Project S.I.T., and other anarchist groups (Ferrell 2001). Essential to this sort of
spontaneous, subversive politics is the derive as Vaneigem (2001 [1967]:195) wrote,
the nature of the derive is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that
I exist, I realize myself . . . . The traveler who is always thinking about the length of
the road before him tires more easily than his companion who lets his imagination
wander as he goes along. Here we see a direct and intentional intertwining of
anarchist politics, drift, and space, in the hope that drifting through spatial structures
can create the sort of comparative, critical experiences necessary for individual and
social liberation. Significantly, precariat activists have recently undertaken to link this
politics of the derive with the lives of those for whom drift has been not a choice but
an imposition. Seeking to highlight the overrepresentation of women in precarious
work, the feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva has employed the derive to drift
through the circuits and spaces of feminized labor that constituted their everyday
lives. Drifting through the spaces of female domestic workers, telemarketers, food
service workers, and others, the members of Precarias a la Deriva have been able
to find points for commonality and alliance, and to find ways to turn mobility
and uncertainty into strategic points of intervention through the defamiliarization
of taken-for-granted environments, collective gatherings, workshops, and other
contagious techniques (Shukaitis 2009:152156; see Makeworlds 2003).3
All of this implies that drifting often produces a kind of critical, comparative
exteriority by which drifters are ableor are forcedto see beyond the certainty
of any one situation. Here perhaps the pain and potential of drift intertwine.
The sorrows of a global migrants endless journey, the outrage of a homeless
!
1702 Antipode
person caught between endless urban exclusion orders, the fluid insights derived
from the long walking poem of the derive or the flaneureach is profoundly
different, yet each is built from the recurring experience of radical dislocation. In
each case the experience of drift seems to produce an emerging intentionality,
and with it a sense of the self as somehow separated from the more sedentary
social order. Whether this ongoing normative and spatial alienation is imposed
by contemporary arrangements or embraced for its liberatory possibilities, it does
seem to create at least the potential for a progressive critique of the existing
order of things. Given the complex experience of drift, this critique would seem
to embody something of the sociologists critical eye for social arrangements, the
anthropologists keen eye for comparison, and the geographers cartographic eye
for spatialities of power (Ferrell 2011b). Further, the recurring, radical exteriority of
drift would seem to promote the sort of anarchist epistemology that Feyerabend
(1975) has outlinedan epistemology attuned to noticing the dimensions of
power and authority embedded in otherwise taken-for-granted understandings and
perceptions. Then again, for the desperate temp worker or the banished street
person, all such insights may be overwhelmed by the task of simply surviving ever
more exclusionary spatial, legal, and economic regimes. For them, some sense of a
self-made deriva bella may or may not emerge amidst the inequities of contemporary
drift.
If the many contemporary trajectories that spawn drift continue, we will certainly
be afforded the chance to find out. As with Precarias a la Deriva, Critical Mass,
and others, the key to realizing drifts progressive potential may well lie in the
parallel potential for creating shared cultures and communities of drift. The work
of Precarias a la Deriva suggests that drifters may be particularly well placedor
displacedto discover the spaces of other drifters. If so, perhaps the pervasiveness
of contemporary drift will lead to new sorts of communitiesuncertain, unsettled,
and anarchic in nature, yet provisionally connected by the common experiences and
perceptions of drift. Perhaps drift will become a preferred form of dis-organization,
a form that by its own dynamics guarantees loose alliances and evolving lines of
direct action. Perhaps, in classic anarchist terms, drift carries the potential for new
dynamics of mutual aid, for new fluidities of collective self-help (Kropotkin 1902). In
the face of contemporary trajectories, perhaps the question is not whether we will
drift, but only whether we will drift together or drift apart.
Endnotes
1
Ward (2000:4957) notes similarly the contradiction by which English travelers are
instructed to settle in one place and then denied the right to do so.
2
The recent Spanish Yomango movementits name a play on a Spanish chain store and
the Spanish slang for I stealsimilarly embraced shoplifting from corporate retailers as an
act of episodic civil disobedience and economic survival amidst the uncertainty of part-time,
minimum wage retail work (see Ferrell, Hayward and Young 2008:110112).
3
With their notion of the nomad and nomadology, Deleuze and Guattari (1987:380) likewise
propose that the life of the nomad is in the intermezzothat is, that the nomads
knowledge of the world becomes smooth, uncontained, and comparative as it forms
between and beyond particular places.
!
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Radicalizing Relationships To and
Through Shared Geographies: Why
Anarchists Need to Understand
Indigenous Connections to Land
and Place
Adam J. Barker and Jenny Pickerill
Department of Geography, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK;
ajb123@le.ac.uk
Abstract: Indigenous activists and anarchist Settler people are articulating common
ground in opposition to imperialism and colonialism. However, many anarchists have
faced difficulties in Indigenous solidarity work through unintentional (often unwitting)
transgressions and appropriations. Through the introduction of settler colonialism as
a complicating power dynamic, we observe that anarchists bring unconscious spatial
perceptions into their solidarity work. Further, Indigenous activists often perceive
anarchists as Settler people first and foremost, which carries another set of spatial
implications. We examine a number of examples of anarchist and Indigenous activism,
at times empowering and at times conflictual, in order to reveal some general trends.
Through an intensive synthesis of Indigenous peoples theories and articulations of place-
based relationships, we suggest that deeper understandings of these relationships can be
of great importance in approaching solidarity work in place and with respect.
Keywords: anarchism, indigeneity, relationships, place, settler colonialism
Introduction
We are all life forms. If nature goes down, we go down with it, because we are only one
part of that life form. But we have been given the responsibility at the beginning of the
world to be grateful for what we have, and for the earth. We have the understanding
and we have the attitude, but its hard to practise the way we live today. We cannot go
to the river to drink from it anymore; therefore, our relationship with the river is now
changed. Our relationship to everything in the world is now changed. And we have to
teach our children to invent new ways of looking at things.
Swamp (2010:20)
Anarchists and Indigenous peoples movements have been, and are increasingly
coming into, contact in Canada and the United States. Primarily through the
dynamics of radical politics, Indigenous activists and anarchist Settler people
are articulating common ground in opposition to imperialism and colonialism.
However, many anarchists have faced difficulties in Indigenous solidarity work
through unintentional (often unwitting) transgressions and appropriations. Many
more simply lack the experience of working in solidarity in place with Indigenous
peoples, required to understand Indigenous politics and governance, heterogeneity

1706 Antipode
and aspirations, or perceptions of settler colonialism and decolonization. In this

paper, we complicate assumed-affinities between anarchist and Indigenous politics
and political movements. Through the introduction of settler colonialism as
a complicating power dynamic, we observe that anarchists bring unconscious
spatial perceptions into their activism. Further, Indigenous activists often perceive
anarchists as settler colonisers first and foremost. We examine a number of examples
of anarchist and Indigenous activism, at times empowering and at times conflictual,
in order to reveal some general trends. Deeper understandings of Indigenous
peoples place-based relationships can be of great importance in approaching
solidarity work in place and with respect. Although prescriptive conclusions would
be inappropriate, we close with our own thoughts on important techniques and
approaches for building solidarity across colonial differences.
As Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) political theorist Taiaiake Alfred presciently observes,
the anarcho-indigenous ethic of cooperative alliance and principled movement has
yet to develop into a coherent philosophy (Alfred 2005:46). Yet, there is reason
to believe that anarchism and Indigenism are discourses increasingly occurring in
the same or similar spaces, at times in conflict with each other, but with enough
resonance to suggest the need for continued, deepened engagement. In academic
spaces, these discourses have begun to be textually combined: a recent special
edition of the journal Affinities focused on anarchism and Indigenism (Day 2011); an
article in the journal Signs examined solidarity across difference between anarchists
and Indigenous activists in Montreal (Lagalisse 2011); and Alfred and anarchist
sociologist Richard Day wrote popular and contentious complementary works
(Alfred 2005; Day 2005) that articulated resonances between anarchist activism
and Indigenous resurgence. Meanwhile, in spaces of activism and social change,
anarchist and Indigenous discourses have been interacting for many years, often
invisible outside of direct personal involvement.
Anarchist and Indigenous peoples movements do have a great deal in common.
They share the goal of creating decolonized societies, defined by the mutual
sharing of place, maintenance of social-spatial organizations commensurate with
their respective cultures, and mediated through respectful protocols designed to
maintain alliances across, rather than in spite of, difference. However, these lofty
and commonly held goals (Ferguson 2011:103106) are frequently sabotaged by
taken-for-granted spatial perceptions with major impacts on the practices and
processes of pursuing decolonization. For as much as it is commonly understood
that decolonization is a place-based process, an attempt to counter centuries of
settler colonial usurpation of Indigenous lands, there remains a lack of engagement
with colonization as a highly spatial process.
The starting point of this process is an explicit recognition that Indigenous
conceptions of place are important. Accepting this place-based ethics enables a
clear recognition of the settler colonial societys dependence on the continued
dispossession of Indigenous land and place. Failing to recognize this can lead to
potentially transformative social movements actually reproducing the very structures
of colonial domination they are often seeking to oppose. Moreover, Indigenous
knowledge, practised in relation to land and place, offers a necessary challenge to
settler colonial values by espousing mutual care, obligation and reciprocal relations
!
Radicalizing Relationships To and Through Shared Geographies 1707
of responsibility between human and non-human life, which are arguably necessary
to sustain our future. Much existing work that explores how coalitions that form
across difference (such as Rose 2000) exclude consideration of Indigenous peoples
space and place. Moreover there is an absence of work from Indigenous perspectives
about the challenges of working with anarchists. This paper explores why there are
not better alliances between these groups and what needs to be doneparticularly
by non-Indigenous or Settler activiststo enable more collaborative and supportive
processes of working together.
Given the heterogeneity of both Indigenous and anarchist groups, and our
insistence on geographic understanding and specificity, it is impossible to search for
answers that will apply everywhere equally. This paper concerns itself with conditions
in the northern bloc of settler colonialism, roughly the area (at present) claimed by
the Canadian and American states. This space is the stage for intertwined discourses
of settler colonialism, social Settler identity development, Indigenous resistance
to colonization, and radical politics. At different scales these discourses interact in
a variety of ways, but with the general effect of creating a territorial assemblage
(Anderson and McFarlane 2011) of practices of power and traditions of resistance.
Further, some Indigenous peoples have articulated practices in place and through
spaces in generally common ways across the northern bloc (see for example Deloria
2003; Jojola 2004; Little Bear 2004). So, while remaining cognoscente of the
importance of specific Indigenous peoples relations to place (see below), we begin
by establishing this space as the geographical limit of our discussion.
As activist-academics influenced by anarchist thought, who have been fortunate
to work with Indigenous communities as part of decolonising struggles, we are
connected to this work. In our own experiences, we have been party to many
anecdotes and stories over the years that have indicated the potentialbut also
the ongoing problemsof Indigenous-anarchist alliance building. As such, parts of
this article are based on our interactions with a variety of activist communities; it
is impossible to separate the academic and the personal in this research. We also
recognize that we ourselves are not homogenous; we identify ourselves differently.
As a white, male, Settler Canadian who identifies as an anarchist, and whose
experiences of Indigenous solidarity work are situated in Haudenosaunee and
Coast Salish territories spanning the CanadianUSA border (author 1), and a white,
English woman who identifies with autonomous activism and has had the privilege
of engaging with Indigenous Aboriginal Australians (author 2), our experiences
of anarchism, indigeneity and place are varied. Yet, in our discussions we have
repeatedly discovered deep commonalities and resonances between our experiences
and the understandings that have resulted from them, indicating the possibility for
us to (carefully) generalize on these experiences and understandings.
We do not (neither could nor would) speak for all anarchists, and do not intend
to speak for any Indigenous peoples; rather we intend to speak as geographers
and social activists to a broad cross-section of geographically informed activists
concerned with the way that relationships to place and space can enhance or
frustrate diverse struggles for freedom. We speak from an informed anarchist
perspective and seek to combine academic concerns with those of the activist
practitioner (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010).
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1708 Antipode
We begin by defining the key categories dealt with in this articleanarchist

and Indigenousin the context of settler colonialism. The different understandings
of space and place used by these groups are then explored in order to outline
what a shared geography might entail. Using examples of existing attempts at
alliances and acts of solidarity we illustrate the diverse and problematic spatial
practices of anarchist activists so far and conclude by suggesting some ways in
which anarchists could overcome these difficulties by paying greater respect to
Indigenous understandings of land and place.
Defining Difference
Relationships to land and place cut across anarchist and Indigenous identities
in spaces of activism through the identities of Settler and Indigenous. These act
as a non-discrete non-binary dual (Waters 2004) that exerts continued effects upon
solidarity across difference. Anarchists in the northern bloc often cannot escape
the identification and corresponding social privileges of being a Settler person,
even as they seek to dismantle colonial structures of privilege. Similarly, Indigenous
peoples reasserting Indigenous identities are confronted by continuously colonising,
invasive, heterogeneous Settler societies; while some Settler people may radically
confront colonial power, the majority legitimate and benefit from it. This raises
complicated questions for activists pursuing solidarity across difference.
Anarchist Activists
Throughout this article, we make reference to anarchist scholars and activists;
this is not meant to restrictively reference only those who explicitly identify as
anarchists. Following Gordons (2007:1214) observation that many individuals and
communities inspired by anarchist thought reject labelsincluding anarchist
for principled and ethical reasons, and Days (2005) articulation of anarchistic
social movements which deploy anarchist analyses and methods of organization
and action, our use of the term should be considered as broadly as possible. We do
draw several distinctions: not included are anarchist capitalists in the American
tradition, or other right-wing rugged individualist traditions that claim anarchist
genealogy. These do not rely on critiques of hierarchy that bring other anarchists
into opposition to imperialism and colonialism, nor do they respect collective and
community will, essential to alliances with Indigenous peoples.
We construct anarchism as a complex mixture of tactics and ideology, wherein
there is no such thing as pure anarchism. Much of the practiced anarchism
discussed here can be aligned with autonomous activism. Autonomous activism
includes those who believe in a questioning of the laws and social norms of
society and a creative desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics,
identity, and citizenship (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006:1). Within this broad,
autonomous field, we do recognize that anarchists must enact multiple identities,
often creating paradoxical or invisible clashes between identities (see below on
settler colonialism).
!
Indigenous Peoples
Indigenous remains a contested term, in no small part because it is the imposition
of colonial domination and dispossession that renders an Indigenous collectivity
or commonality across diverse places visible. We draw on Alfred and Corntassels
(2005:597) articulation of Indigenous identity as founded on an oppositional,
place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against
the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples. Niezen
(2003), among others, has argued that commonalities generally exist between
diverse Indigenous traditions. Among these are intimate relationships to the
places anchoring Indigenous identities, expressed through imperatives of respectful
coexistence with the elements of place (further, see Holms peoplehood concept
in: Holm, Pearson and Chavis 2003; Corntassel 2003).
To attempt definition of Indigenous creates a tangle of ambiguities (Johnson
and Murton 2007:127) and produces a result both problematic and partial. This
ambiguous bind is Often applied to those with connections to pre-colonial
lands who were then subsumed and dispossessed by colonising powers, [and] its
definitional boundaries are contested and fluid (Pickerill 2009:67). We accept that
there is interdependence, a mutual responsibility that flows in all directions from
Indigenous/non-Indigenous interactions which upsets the colonial stereotype and
acknowledges the agency and power of Indigenous peoples (Pickerill 2009:67).
Indeed this paper is based on this sense of responsibility.
Settler Colonialism
The growing understanding of the dynamics of colonial power in settler societies
impacts anarchists concerned with anti-imperial, anti-colonial politics, and
Indigenous peoples concerned with questions of freedom and cultural survival.
Alfred describes the northern bloc settler colonial context as a spiritual and
psychological war of genocide and survival and poses this important question:
If we contrast this current turn of empire, represented by spiritual and cultural annihilation
and the denial of authenticity, with the classic imperial strategy of brutal physical
dispersion and dispossession, which often left the spiritual and cultural core of the
surviving imperial subjects intact, could we with any certainty say which form of
imperialism is more evil or effective in killing off nations in the long term? (Alfred
2005:128).
Here also is the bind for Settler activists in the northern bloc: as much as anarchist
Settler people occupy different conceptual spaces from non-radicalized Settler
people, the dualistic divide between Settler and Indigenous identities remains. Well
meaning anarchist Settler people may transgress in Indigenous conceptual space,
ignorant of the dynamics of personal terror that invariably infuses these relations
(Scott 1990:xi).
Colonization, most especially settler colonization, has not and does not rely
simply on the crude swapping of one people for another in place1 ; rather, entire
ways of being in place, of perceiving spaces, underlie the colonial project. Were
settler colonization simply about occupation, decolonization would involve primarily
!
1710 Antipode
the reversal of colonial settlement: the removal of Settler societies and the re-
placement of Indigenous societies in their homelands. Such a course of action is
not only simplistic; it is also unlikely to succeed. Further, it clashes with anarchistic
ethics of autonomous geographies (Pickerill and Chatterton 2006) and Indigenous
traditions of alliance and generosity (Sherman 2010:114115). So, what does
decolonization of a settler colonial society look like? How does a decolonized Settler
identity relate to Indigenous peoples places? Answering these questions should be
a primary goal of anarchist Settlers pursuing Indigenous solidarity; however, the
pursuit is not so simple.
While the heterogeneous makeup of anarchists involves an array of other
discoursesrace, class; tactics, ethicsin this discussion, anarchists in Settler
societies remain largely, however ambiguously, connected to dynamics of settler
colonialism. Anarchist methods often involve the formation of collectives that
assert a differential autonomous capacity against centres of power involving
the state and capital. However, this method is symmetrical with the historical
settler colonization of the northern bloc, characterised by a pattern of self-
constituting local jurisdictions contesting the established claims of seaboard centres
of power (Veracini 2010:62). Veracini locates conceptual separation at the
origin of the settler project, the moment when a collective body moves out in
order to bring into effect an autonomous political will (63). For anarchists, this
separation is political rather than physical, but the colonial dynamic remains the
same.
This common foundational basis opens the possibility of well-meaning Settler
anarchists appropriating Indigenous thought, symbolism and language of
resistance into settler colonial discourses through modernist affinity and
post-modern quotation (Haig-Brown 2010:930). This constitutes a kind of
narrative transfer wherein a radical discontinuity within the settler body
politic is emphasised, and references to its postcolonial status are made
(Veracini 2010:42). This type of narrative transfer can support denials of
responsibility (I cannot be colonial because I fight the state!), or the collapse
of indigenous autonomy into a multicultural or other fair social arrangement
(43).
Given the persistence of the first discoursethe discourse of Settler peoples
and the difficulty and complexity of learning (without appropriating) Indigenous
discourses (Haig-Brown 2010:932935), it is no surprise that settler colonial
dynamics continue to subtly inform even anarchist and other radically democratic
(Veracini 2010:63) settler collectives. The multiple institutions of privilege operating
in Settler society often confer, without consent, colonial privilege on Settler
people (including anarchists) unattainable by Indigenous peoples. For example,
whiteness has been shown to operate in Canadian multicultural society in ways
that continue to privilege whiteness above all racialized identities, Indigeneity
included (OConnell 2010; Shaw 2006). Meanwhile, institutions of patriarchy and
intolerant secularism can be shown to be at work even inside anarchist organizations
engaging with Indigenous peoples (Lagalisse 2011), demonstrating that anarchist
analysis alone is not protection against participation in dominating power
dynamics.
!
Space, Place and Shared Geographies

Given these complex dynamics of settler colonialism, understanding colonial space
and place is crucial for envisioning decolonising alliances. As such, it is necessary
to disentangle the various perceptions of place and space interacting within, and
across, settler colonial dynamics.
Colonial Impacts on Perceptions of Place

Indigenous understandings of place have generated criticism of many aspects of
society in the northern bloc: Christian theologys influence on political and economic
colonial practice (Deloria 2003); the concept of sovereignty and the state
system (Alfred 2006); constitutionalism as a method of governmental organization
(Tully 1995; 2000); capitalism and relationships under a capitalist system (Adams
1989:17); language and culture (Basso 1996) and many other understandings of
place, space, nature, and human relationships. Indigenous relationships to place
fundamentally challenge colonial spatial concepts, from the ways that we move
from place to place and through spaces (Pandya 1990) to how we move through
time (Jojola 2004). Indeed Coulthard (2010:79) asserts that for Indigenous people
place is central to understandings of life, whereas most Western societies . . . derive
meaning from the world in historical/developmental terms, thereby placing time as
the narrative of central importance.
Historically, EuroAmerican cultures conceived of human relations to the
environment in one of two ways, which John Rennie Short labels the classical
and romantic (Short 1991:6): either natural places are improved through
development and human spatial creation and use (with wilderness as a
frightening, exterior other), or despoiled through human contact and change
(with the natural environment as a pristine and perfect spatial concept, and the
suggestion that human identity must be bounded within it). Both conceptually
marginalize or fully erase Indigenous presence in place.
Contra this erasure, Indigenous peoples understandings of place have become
important to the understanding of colonial geographies and the efforts of
anti-colonial activists.2 Indigenous peoples have traditionally related to place
through spatially stretched and dynamic networks of relationships (Cajete 2004;
Johnson and Murton 2007). These networks bear some resemblance to Sarah
Whatmores concept of hybrid geography, which recognizes agency as a relational
achievement, involving the creative presence of organic beings, technological
devices and discursive codes, as well as people, in the fabrics of everyday living
(Whatmore 1999:26). Through these, Indigenous peoples have challenged the
classical/romantic dichotomy that continues to haunt some aspects of anarchist
spatial perceptions. For Indigenous peoples, place holistically encapsulates networks
of relations between humans, features of the land, non-human animals, and living
beings perceived as spirits or non-physical entities. All of thesehumans included
are understood to have autonomy and will, but also obligation and responsibility
to all of the other elements to which they are related and among whom they are
situated. As such, we acknowledge that land and place are different to each other but
seek to use the way they are interrelated throughout this article. Although land can
!
1712 Antipode
be considered as material, its meaning is constantly interwoven into the relationality

of place so that land is often taken to have multiple meanings beyond its simple
materialityas a resource, as identity and as relationship (Coulthard 2010).
Indigenous peoples assaulted by settler colonization have and continue to face
concerted attempts to break Indigenous connections to place. Religious conversion,
for example, has had a massive impact on the ways that Indigenous peoples
perceive the spaces occupied by spirit and otherwise metaphysical beings. Though
no longer considered tantamount to a complete transformation of cultural identity
(Axtell 1981:42), conversion to and participation in hierarchical-organized, spatially
dislocated, and temporally defined Judeo-Christian religions (Deloria 2003:6277)
encouraged Indigenous peoples to see the spiritual as something above (literally)
and beyond the direct contact of the human world.
The general result is displacement and dislocation. Indigenous peoples are
displaced from their relational networks by introduced relationships that increasingly
reorient Indigenous social organization towards colonial authority. Indigenous
places are dislocated in the sense that the knowledge of and relationship to them,
essential for generating spatial meaning in Indigenous contexts, is marginalized or
over-written. This creates observable cultural blanks (Little Bear 2000) among
Indigenous youth; Settler peoples, conversely, fill corresponding blanks that result
from traditions that fit incompletely with changed/changing geographies (Harris
2004) with myths of peaceful expansion, cultural superiority, and frontier valour
(Regan 2010).
Chris Gibson (1999), in discussing Australian settler colonialism, warns against
over-focusing on cultural colonization; it is important to note that the economics
of settler colonization also depend on displacement and dislocation. While some
Indigenous peoples benefitted from trade relations with colonial agents, the
networks of capitalist dominance and exploitation intensified through settler
colonization eventually forced many Indigenous individuals to choose between a
waged economy that denied opportunities to connect to place and fulfil communal
responsibilities, or poverty in the circumscribed spaces of the reserve (Harris
2002:285289). Many Indigenous scholars, activists, and community members have
recognized that dislocation from place and disconnection from spatial networks of
relations undermine Indigenous identities (Alfred 2009:28; Little Bear 2004); this has
led to calls for Indigenous peoples to reassert connections to place and reinvigorate
relational networks. As Holm et al note, even Indigenous peoples dislocated from
their traditional homelands can and do rely on relational networks and stories of lost
sacred lands to maintain their identities and community cohesion (Holm, Pearson
and Chavis 2003:14). Settler colonization continues to target these connections
and by extension Indigenous being in the sense described by Alfred and Corntassel
for erasure.
Anarchist Concepts of Place and Space

Anarchist analyses have significantly impacted methods of understanding and
perceiving place and space; anarchist analyses of hierarchy and power have broadly
influenced the ways that academics articulate ties between social organization and
!
the potential for horizontalist, egalitarian communities. However, not all anarchist
thought has escaped the problematic basis of spatial perception that enables
colonial imposition. Consider Shorts dichotomy (see above); to some extent,
anarchist analyses have historically followed these classical/romantic distinctions.
Witness the (now somewhat nave) technological positivism of Kropotkin (1972:41
42), or the critical pessimism of anarcho-primitivists (Antliff 2005:272282).3
However, anarchist praxis have also led to a reimagination of possibilities for social
organization and, consequently, opened avenues to create forms of social and
political organization designed to defy domination.
One possibility that must be discussed here is broadly encompassed under
the rubric of autonomous zones. For anarchist Settlers, the identification and
construction of these spaces is a particular challenge; the spatialities of settler
colonialism depend on the erasure of Indigenous peoples and spatial networks from
place, making a decolonized autonomous zone difficult to realize. Decolonization
can confound anarchist spatial practices because it is a process that requires
particular de/construction; Indigenous spaces may be invisible to or impossible to
construct by those lacking Indigenous knowledge of place, a problematic we will
return to.
Spatial Practices of Solidarity, Responsibility

and Decolonization
Anarchist spatial practices tend to approach alliances with Indigenous groups much
as they do alliances with other groups and communitiesincluding other anarchist
individuals and collectivesthrough the creation of solidarity networks, affinity
groups and the support of anti-racist, anti-capitalist politics generally. This, sadly,
has the potential to further reinforce the perception of anarchism as a one size fits
all solution. We explore some examples of attempts at alliances below.
Problematic Support for Indigenous Causes

Indigenous peoples, meanwhile, experience frustrations with respect to anarchist
and other Settler activists. After the anti-G20 protests in Toronto, Ontario (17
27 June 2010), we heard anecdotal expressions of frustration from Indigenous
activists (Taillefer 6 July 2010, among others) who felt that their struggles,
foundational to the existence of unequal and oppressive Settler states, were being
subsumed under sexier issues popular among alter-globalization movements
(neoliberalism and poverty; surveillance and criminalization of dissent; opposition
to war and military adventurism). They resented that Indigenous deprivation was
conceptualized as another form of poverty resulting from neoliberal capitalism,
with little understanding of the complexities of settler colonialism and loss of land
that predate and, in many cases, enable capitalist exploitations. There were similar
frustrations that activists of many kinds were incensed at the brutal mass arrest
and detention of Settler and non-Indigenous activists, given decades of paramilitary
abuse of Indigenous peoples (Smith 2009), vast overrepresentation of Indigenous
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1714 Antipode
people in prisons (Gordon 2006), and relative silences on the disappearance and/or
murder of Indigenous women (Schatz 2010: 1213).
These frustrations are connected to a history of subtle but highly affective
misinterpretations of Indigenous ways of knowing and being among activists of
various affiliations; for example, the deployment of the trope of the historical
ecological Indian by activists who do not give equal attention to the struggles
for freedom being undertaken by real, living Indigenous peoples. Erica Michelle
Lagalisse has identified deep-seated issues among anarchist collectives in Montreal
that prevented effective IndigenousSettler alliance building. Lagalisse has observed
two dynamics of note:
A secular worldview compromises anarchist activists ability to engage in horizontal
solidarity across difference. The same tale also serves to illustrate another aspect of
anarchist activist praxis . . . anarchists lack of engagement with gendered power within
activist collectives and the gendered aspect of neoliberal political economy (Lagalisse
2011:653).
In the same way that women of colour have challenged the precepts of feminism
(for an important crossover between this and Indigenous activism, see Trask 1996),
Indigenous communities often feel that they must fight well intentioned activists
who they see as having a one size fits all solution to ongoing colonial oppression.
Indigenous peoples have been badly let down by radical activists in the past,
especially by environmental groups who, while willing to fight corporate resource
extraction, either refused or were unable to differentiate between these practices
and Indigenous use of resources in their own lands (Pickerill 2009:7475).4
Difference and Respectful Engagement

Clearly, issues of who speaks, who hears, and how speaking and listening are
conducted remain significant barriers. Anarchist activists have at times had difficulty
connecting to Indigenous communities (especially those outside of urban centres, a
spatial division we will return to) which seem to rely on unfamiliar social and cultural
vernaculars; it is very easy to give offense, violate protocols, or misinterpret cultural
signifiers. At times, the fear of conflicts causes problems in itself, with hesitation
breeding inappropriate levels of deference. Perhaps these vernaculars can never be
understood by Settlers, anarchist or not. However, difference itself is important to
understanding the significance and implications of who is speaking and who is
listening which has the potential to and does effect real harm for indigenous
people, their ancestors, and descendants (Haig-Brown 2010:931). The practical
complication for many anarchists is an inability to know how to respectfully engage
with Indigenous activists or communities. Conceptual divides are exacerbated by
physical divides; Indigenous and settler spaces are often circumscribed (Dean 2010;
Harris 2004; Schatz 2010), and many anarchist activists do not have the opportunity
to interact with Indigenous people in place prior to seeking or claiming solidarity.
The dislocation of Indigenous peoples from placewhich is to say the rupturing
of relational networks in particular places and prevention of new relational networks
from being generatedcan be seen as being at the root of many conflicts within
!
Indigenous communities. This impacts directly on the efforts of anarchist activists

seeking to ally with Indigenous peoples. Anarchists must not only contend with their
own preconceived spaces, they must be aware that in entering Indigenous spaces
and attempting to understand Indigenous relationships to place, there is the very
real potential of failure to find common ground, or worse, to do harm.
Relational Moments
Despite conflicts and problems, Indigenous communities have not rejected
anarchistic alliances wholesale or refused to cooperate with activists employing
anarchist tactics. On the contrary, recent publications based on experiences of
solidarity organising across difference have called for further engagement between
Indigenous communities and anarchist activists (Alfred 2005; Goodyear-Kaopua
2011, Lasky 2011). Lagalisse asserts that Anarchoindigenism may carry within it
the potential for a critically engaged conversation across difference but only if the
universalisms of anarchism and indigenism are constantly reformulated through
dialogue (Lagalisse 2011:674). The potential for Indigenousanarchist alliances in
the northern bloc only dissipates when dialogues between anarchist Settler people
and Indigenous activists cease.
There are particular cases and scenarios in which Indigenous and anarchist
activists have participated with each other in productive, anarcho-indigenous
ways. Though not free from conflict, these relational moments are telling. Noelani
Goodyear-Kaopua relates two types of shared actions between Indigenous and
Settler activists in Hawaii centred around Hawaiian concepts kuleana (authority
and obligation based in interdependence and community) and lahui (peoplehood)
(Goodyear-Kaopua 2011:131), and based in the experiences of a joint coalition
for Hawaiian independence called called Hui Pu (to join together), which shed
light on the tensions around indigeneity and Hawaiianness in contemporary activist
and academic discourse (136). The coalition led to many promising, important
shifts in activist dynamics in Hawaii, including a rejection of state-based politics
of demand, and the understanding that denial of Hawaiian sovereignty under
US occupation has not been equally detrimental to all descendants of Hawaiian
Kingdom subjects, which included people of various ethnicities (142). Indigenous
and Settler Hawaiians participated together in a ceremony designed to foreground
the importance of and connection to place that is core to Hawaiian culture (145).
This joint participation shows some effect in confronting settler colonial privilege
and revealing potential in Indigenousanarchist cooperative actions.
Increasingly, discourses like this are becoming more visible as they are worked
out in public spaces, such as the Hawaiian Hoa Akoakoa action (145), but also
the highly visible and contentious Six Nations land reclamation (Day and Haberle
2006).
Sharing Methods and Approaches

Anarchist and Indigenous peoples also demonstrate some resonances between
their methods and approaches. Anarchist organization is most often identified by
!
1716 Antipode
insistence upon preconfiguration and, by extension, cooperative and horizontal

decision-making processes (Gordon 2007:1417). Indigenous peoples resistance
to colonization has, similarly, often been predicated on collective organization;
Indigenous societies generally articulate and are seen as collective entities upon
their land. Of course, Indigenous peoples forms of collective occupation of place
and anarchist anti-capitalism and socialism do not necessarily imply symmetry
between respective political structures and social spaces. Indigenous societies are
not anarchist per se.
Indigenous relationships to place are often articulated in terms of nationhood
with specific governmental forms (Alfred 1995; Goodyear-Kaopua 2011), which
many anarchists may find problematic given anarchist opposition to nationalism
and state structure. However, Indigenous legal and governance structures are
remarkably different from those of the European states that anarchists have long
opposed (Alfred 2006). The lack of coercive power in traditional Indigenous political
structures circumvents many anarchist objections to government and nationhood.
For Lasky (referencing Ward Churchill), the political affinity between indigenous
and anarchist activists is not surprising, because indigenism is an ancestor to
anarchism and the contemporary alliances being forged reflect anarchist elements
in indigenous struggles for over 500 years (Lasky 2011:13).
Autonomous Spaces
As discussed, anarchists have pursued alliances and cooperative relationships with
Indigenous peoples and communities in a variety of ways; anarchists are often
among the first to seek and declare solidarity with particular, situated Indigenous
struggles, resulting in highly particularized political engagements, as well as more
general expressions of solidarity. Large protest marches and summit gatherings
often visibly feature Indigenous symbols carried by members of local and distant
Indigenous communities alongside commonly recognized anarchistic symbology
and action (Doxtater (Horn-Miller) 2010:9798). One common spatial methods
of pursuing cooperative relationships is through the creation of autonomous zones.
Inspired by the autonomist Marxist Italian social centres and the creative, temporary
possibilities apparent in large protests such as Seattle, when constructed in reference
to Indigenous allies or imperial opponents, these spaces are imbued with explicit
anti-colonial intents.
At the same time, it is extremely important to remember that at present
many anarchists misunderstand Indigenous concerns through the equation of
egalitarian and stateless (Lagalisse 2011:674). Indigenous peoples are not
anarchists and anarchist practices do not necessarily lead to the creation of
decolonized social relations. For example, autonomous zones generally are defined
and bounded by difference vis-a-vis mainstream society. However, these differences
are often articulated as differences between the ways the people in these spaces
relate to each other: non-dominating, horizontalist, anti-capitalist, and so on. From
the perspective of decolonization, they do not specifically counter the defining
features of colonizationespecially settler colonizationin that they do not depend
on networks of relationships to place for meaning, imply obligations for occupants
!
with respect to the non-human world or restore Indigenous presence on and

enhance relationships to the land. Equally they do not address the fact that, like
colonial spaces of exploitation, Settler people can and do benefit disproportionately
from occupying autonomous spaces. These spaces, whether bookstores or ad hoc
meetings and rallies during mass protests, are often autonomous with respect to
dominating state- and capital-bounded societies, while they are not necessarily
responsible to underlying and pre-existing relational networks in place.
Moreover, there is a dissonance between the urban location of many of these
autonomous zones and the rural location of many Indigenous communities. Despite
ongoing efforts to assert Indigenous connection to urban land, many Indigenous
people have had more success at reinvigorating relational networks to rural places.
Thus there is a disjuncture in assumptions made by anarchists about urban spaces
potentially offering more transformative possibilities, and the need to work with
those who are located elsewhere, often in non-urban spaces.
Are these spaces better (less immersed in and contributing to networks of
colonial power) than the openly colonial spaces of prisons, reserves, or strip mines?
They often are, and one would suppose they should be; many anarchist spaces are
used effectively to bring together diverse individuals and communities, and incubate
or launch fruitful and powerful oppositional strikes against aspects of colonial society
and for this they should be lauded. However, while many function as a tool for
opposing colonization (as part of the hierarchical structuring of settler colonial
societies), they are not by definition a means of establishing or implementing
decolonizationa subtle but important difference. It is important here to keep clearly
in mind a traditional distinction in colonial theory:
Between colonialism, as exercised over colonised peoples, and colonisation, as
exercised over a colonised land, for example . . . a long-lasting and recurring feature of
settler colonial representations, and a trait that contributes significantly to remove settler
colonialism from view. While this differentiation is premised on the systematic disavowal
of any indigenous presence, recurrently representing colonialism as something done
by someone else and colonisation as an act that is exercised exclusively over the land
sustains fantasies of pristine wilderness and innocent pioneering endeavour (Veracini
2010:14).
For an effort to be truly decolonizing, the effort must seek to simultaneously

address the dominating power being exercised over Indigenous individuals and
communities, and also the power historically and currently directed to structure
territory in such a way that Indigenous peoples are not able to tap into traditional
relational networks. That can become a very wide ranging project: as Jake Swamps
introductory remarks imply, changing the relationship to one element of place
a riverchanges the relationships between all the elements of place, including
Indigenous peoples.
Most attempts to create shared spaces of activism have not had the inspirational
success of Goodyear-Kaopuas (2011) experiences. In fact, these and other
productive alliances between Indigenous peoples often share a common feature:
Settler allies joined an already-vibrant tradition of Indigenous resurgence with a clear
connection to and specific concerns about place. Conflicts often arise in movements
that, regardless of anti-colonial or anti-imperial rhetoric, have been generated
!
1718 Antipode
primarily by and for Settler societies, often without clear spatial understandings
of histories of place and colonial dispossession. Conflicts have abounded primarily
concerned not with activists means and ends, but rather with basic attitudes and
understandings of colonization and Indigeneity.
Being in Place Together

To overcome these barriers, anarchist activists need to alter their basic practices of
solidarity and affinity with respect to Indigenous communities. It is often necessary to
begin by pursuing deep understandings of place-based relationships, connections to
governance and nationhood, as well as impacts of settler colonization on relational
networks and implications for decolonization. Olson suggests that, with respect to
communities of black Americans, anarchists must focus less on magazines, rallies and
social centres, and more on movement building, engaging directly with community
members (Olson 2009). With respect to Indigenous communities, anarchists must
chart a different course yet again: anarchists must understand that to be truly
decolonizing and effective allies to Indigenous peoples, they must step back from
attempts to draw Indigenous peoples into movements or insert themselves into
Indigenous struggles.
First, anarchists must understand Indigenous peoples roles in, and connections, to
place. Anarchistic spaces such as autonomous zones and social centres can remain
tactically important, but anarchists need to spend time with Indigenous peoples
in place, learning the personality (Deloria and Wildcat 2001) of the place and
the ways that Indigenous peoples perceive and interact with the entire dynamic
community of place. In this way, anarchists can begin to understand the subtle
difference in spatial perception, construction and behaviour that differentiate an
autonomous zone from a decolonized space. This might also involve tackling the
inherent urban-bias in anarchist organising and venturing into more rural spaces.
A decolonized space empowers the complex place-based relational networks
rooted in, and connected to, all the elements of place, which can enable decolonized
Indigenous identities. If an Indigenous identity emanates from place, and requires
therefore the decolonization of place to reach full articulation, then anarchists must
seek to connect to Indigenous peoples struggles through and in place rather than
through community solidarity and affinity-group building. This is the first step to
approaching alliances with Indigenous peoples in a respectful way: on their ground
and in their time, something that so many activists have failed or been unable
to do.
Any attempt to connect to Indigenous peoples through place is fraught with
challenges. Perhaps the most important of these involves appropriation. Anarchist
activist and practicing witch Starhawk has intimate knowledge of the wedges
created between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists amidst accusations of
appropriation of cultural traditions by pagans (Starhawk 2002:201205), and her
accounts paint a complex picture. Indigenous communities are often sensitive to
appropriation and use of cultural practices by non-Indigenous peoples, and with
good reason. Activists attempting to speak for Indigenous peoples or, potentially
worse, with Indigenous voice have participated in the disempowerment and
!
marginalization of Indigenous peoples (Haig-Brown 2010), unwittingly furthering

the goal of elimination of Indigenous peoples under settler colonization.
Activists may feel that accusations of appropriation are too harsh. Indigenous
communities have unequivocally demanded that their ways of knowing and being
be respected; by attempting to internalize Indigenous ways, anarchists often intend
only to show respect for the power and profound utility of those ways. While
that perspective is very attractive and by some logics makes sense, the disconnect
between anarchist respect for and utilization of Indigenous terms, names, concepts,
and protocols, and Indigenous objections on the grounds of appropriation indicate
one of the practical effects of misunderstanding Indigenous connections to place.
In Indigenous networks of place-based relationships, all of the elementswhether
(drawing from Jake Swamps opening statement) a blade of grass, a leaf on a tree,
a river, or a personhave roles that are only fully revealed in their interactions
with each other (through their reciprocity). Anarchists must learn about Indigenous
connections to place not to learn specific Indigenous ways, as these connections
are not appropriate for all humans. Rather, this learning is necessary to see the
dynamics of relationality between Indigenous peoples and their places. What is
appropriate behaviour for Indigenous peoples in place is dependent on their roles in
the larger relational matrix; it does not necessarily apply to others, regardless of their
support for decolonizing efforts. Starhawk illustrates this with a poignant example,
noting that a Hopi clown can ritually mock the ceremony he is part ofbut were
a stranger to jump in and do the same, it would be a hostile and destructive
act (Starhawk 2002:202). Similar dynamics, while less visible, exist throughout
Indigenous practices of relations; imitation should always be approached sceptically.
It is only through the observation of how Indigenous peoples relate to place
(and why they do so using the methods which they do) that anarchists
can come to understand the needs of place. As Indigenous peoples confront
colonization and reassert Indigenous ways of knowing and being, their relational
networks have become fluid and mutable. As Jake Swamp says, Indigenous
peoples are inventing new ways of looking at things (Swamp 2010:20) in
order to establish new relationships with the changed and/or changing elements
of place; the true challenge for anarchists who would be allies is to find
their own new way of looking atand being inplace that compliments but
does not replicate what Indigenous peoples are attempting to do. Replication
of relations, as with appropriation of voice, is an unwelcome and unneeded
imposition.
This ultimately leaves anarchists on what can seem to be very unsteady ground
with respect to Indigenous communities. The establishment of relationships to
Indigenous peoples through rather than in place implies a great deal of observation
(without always understanding precisely what is observed), introspection and
contemplation, and likely a great deal of action that fails to enhance decolonization.
The pursuit of solidarity, affinity, and affective bonds is already one of the most
theorized, debated, difficult aspects of anarchist praxis; this intense and unsettling
process of coming to know and see relationships to and in places, across colonial
differences, adds another layer of complexity to those existing challenges. Is it
asking too much from anarchists to immerse themselves in such networks of
!
1720 Antipode
place-based relations, on Indigenous peoples terms, with no certain revolutionary

outcome?
Not at all; rather, such an approach is a necessary exercise for anarchists.
By localizing anarchist politics not within a city or region or even reserve, but
within the network of relationshipswhich itself can be very spatially stretched
anarchists can powerfully root their politics in the matrix of lives, resources and
spirit that empowers Indigenous ways of being. However, it would be wrong to
consider Indigenous networks of place-based relations as being simply spatially
bounded; rather, they are often diffuse, overlapping and predicated on proximity of
effect rather than spatial proximity. In the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address,
thanks is given to the thunder beings (Alfred 2005:15; Swamp 2010:16
17), spirits who are seen to live far in the west and bring rains and storms;
those beings do not live in a place that might be thought of in contemporary
spatial terms as local. Similarly, Hopi migrations connect very distant places
across stretches of time and space to Hopi homelands, with the relationship
enacted through spiritual rituals and complex mapping process that illustrate
the route of interconnection (Jojola 2004). This change of perceptual scale is
just one that anarchist activists must overcome as part of transcending colonial
difference.
There will be difficulties and failures in these attempts to find the role of
anarchist praxis in these relational networks of place; that is why it is important
to pursue relationships with the ethic of radical experimentation firmly in
mind (Barker 2010:324327). Settler anarchists must in part be willing to
transcend activist spaces and identities, to seek creative alliances, to literally give
up activism (Chatterton 2006:260). There is no perfect way to engage in
solidarity with Indigenous communities, to understand networks of place, or pursue
decolonization, any more than there is a perfect way to be an anarchist, an activist,
or a geographer. Seeking perfection out of fear of failure is colonial retrenchment;
risking comfort and privilege by becoming just one part of a vast network of lives
and existences is decolonizing liberation. Given these stakes, it is important that we
not seek perfect activism (Bobel 2007); our humbling mistakes are too valuable
to miss.
We can never exist in the Indigenous part of place-based networks, but we can
interact through the network as separate, respectful, and vitally inter-dependent
elements. This may seem daunting, but we must remember that:
Spending enough time with others on uncommon ground often reveals shared concerns
and fears, and look at the possibilities that arise, not from activists looking to gain
allies, converting people to causes, or building a broad social movement, but from
taking encounters on uncommon ground as a starting point for a dialogical and
normative . . . politics based upon the need for us all to engage in politics as equals
(Chatterton 2006:260).
Additionally, anarchists must remember that Indigenous peoples, in the shifting

and changing networks of place affected by the imposition of colonial power and
dealing with resulting cultural blanks (Little Bear 2000), are also searching for
new ways of seeing the grass, the leaf, the river that make up Indigenous places. As
!
Secwepemc and Syilx filmmaker Dorothy Christian observes, a large percentage of

my time is taken up figuring out who I am on my own homelands. The paradox:
this quest for identity is also what enables me to reach my full humanity (Christian
and Freeman 2010:377). We may forever occupy different spatial worlds, but that
should be no permanent barrier to us learning how to become humble, respectful
and allied elements of the places that we share.
Conclusions
It is impossible to create a framework or protocol that would ameliorate all
of the barriers and challenges to Indigenousanarchist alliances in the northern
bloc. However, we suggest some particular approaches cognoscente of the
major challenges outlined above. Consider first the contrast between Indigenous
anarchist solidarity in Hawaii, with the challenges and acrimony associated with
Indigenous peoples in Montreal. In the first instance, Settler people participated
in a non-dominating way with Indigenous communities around a common goal
(the protection of land); the Indigenous communities in this case provided clear
articulations of the importance of place and suggested ceremonial framing for action
that imported significance and generated unity. In Montreal, many Settler activists
have only come to grapple with Indigenous presence and colonial power after the
fact; assertions of Indigenous identity within anarchic activist networks has resulted
in racism, dismissal and cross-cultural silencing.
However, it is not the role of Indigenous activists to instruct Settler anarchists in
the dynamics of colonization. It is not up to Indigenous peoples to decolonize Settler
society. Rather, Settler anarchists must make the conceptual leap from a position
of anti-colonial solidarity generally, to decolonising affinities specifically. Our
suggestion here has been to observe (and understand) carefully Indigenous
relationships to place, to consider the role that Settler people might play in
Indigenous relational networks, and from these roles to proactively engage in efforts
and relationships that support Indigenous being. While it is not Indigenous peoples
responsibilities to teach Settler people, it remains the responsibility of the Settler to
learn; decolonization is an act of becoming.
It is also an experimental act; as such, it is not possible to detail what ultimately
this decolonized space will look like. To do so would foreclose the very collective
and creative acts of becoming what we are arguing for. As this decolonized space
needs to be enacted through place-based practices what it will look like, how and
where it could transpire, are as yet uncharted. We are simply proposing that the
best way to begin to create such a necessary space is through this complex, slow
journey of learning.
Anarchists in the Settler societies of the northern bloc must commit to
understanding the relational practices of Indigenous peoples whose lands they
occupy. Further, these relational practices must be understood as deeply informing
governance and social practice; as Lagalisse notes, it is not enough to assume that
stateless is synonymous with egalitarian. This can also have the effect of revealing
assumed (settler; settler colonial) connections to place that anarchists bring with
them into common ground. Settler anarchists must commit to learning about place
!
1722 Antipode
in ways that are challenging, and to using this knowledge to inform their own
generated practices of relating to place that create decolonized rather than simply
anti-colonial spaces. This requires interrogatingwith the assistance of dialogues
with Indigenous peoplestaken-for-granted settler colonial inflections in anarchist
theory and practice. Rejecting any one size fits all solutionbe it secularism
(Lagalisse 2011), the politics of demand (Goodyear-Kaopua 2011), or otherwise
is a start. Engaging experimentally in solidarity across difference remains a vital
practice. Many anarchists already do this, but doing so while learning to be in
a relationship with place rather than assuming a political affinity with Indigenous
peoples is a radical, and necessary, departure.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the three anonymous referees constructive and informative comments, and to
all the anarchist and Indigenous activists we have worked with over the years.
Endnotes
1
Which in no way should be read as a denial of the genocidal efforts of removal and
elimination that underpin the settler colonial project. As Veracini, drawing on anthropologist
Patrick Wolfe, has argued, settler colonizers fundamentally have relied on the physical
and conceptual erasure of indigineity (Veracini 2010:89; 2007) that otherwise continually
exposes the illegitimacy of Settler occupation of Indigenous places.
2
See, for example, the Haudenosaunee two-row Guswentha treaty, an outgrowth of the
Haudenosaunee Confederacys founding event and metaphor of the great tree of peace,
which formed the basis of Confederacy alliances with European powers and, later, Settler
nations. This treaty has had incredible influence on IndigenousSettler relations in Canada
and the USA. For further discussion of these conceptual frames of alliance building, see
Wallace (1994) and Turner (2006:48, 54).
3
Kropotkins positivism extended from his challenging and revolutionary perception of
cooperation as the driving force of the natural world and a necessary social value (Galois
1976). Noting the change of anarchist thought over time should not be taken as a critique
of the core of anarchist thought. Indeed, it is vital we recognize these dynamics in order to
prevent perfectionist thinking in activism.
4
It should be noted that some anarchists have recognized this tendency in leftist political
organizing generally and have made efforts to try and address it (see for example Antliff
2005:216218).
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Practice What You Teach:
Facilitating Anarchism In and Out
of the Classroom
Farhang Rouhani
Department of Geography, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA, USA;
frouhani@umw.edu
Abstract: In recent years, human geographers have criticized the increasing

corporatization, commodification, and objectification of knowledge production, and have
looked to critical pedagogical frameworks that seek to counteract these forces. Anarchism,
as a body of theories and practices, has a long history of engagement with radical
pedagogical experimentation. Anarchism and geography have much to contribute to
one another: anarchism, through its support for creative, non-coercive, practical learning
spaces, and geography, for its critical examination of the spaces of education. In this
paper, I evaluate the prospects for anarchist-geographic pedagogies theoretically, as
well as through my own experiences teaching and learning about anarchism over the
past decade in a liberal arts, higher education US environment. I argue for a combined
critical anarchist-geographic pedagogical approach that appreciates the challenges of
building alternative learning models within existing neoliberalizing institutions, provides
the necessary tools for finding uniquely situated opportunities for educational change, and
emplaces a grounded, liberating, student-led critical pedagogy.
Keywords: critical pedagogy, radical geography, anarchism, education
Critical Pedagogy and Radical Geography

The set of approaches referred to as critical pedagogy have significantly expanded
possibilities for critical thinking by critiquing objectivist accounts of learners and
the world in which they live and questioning the status quo of pedagogic power
relations (Freire 1970; Giroux 1997; hooks 1994). Instead, supporters of critical
pedagogy view education as a political act that can empower all agents involved,
encourage social activism, challenge social problems and repressive ideologies, and
create the conditions for participatory, public democracy (McLaren 1998; Kincheloe
2008). Approaches to critical pedagogy are not uniform, however. McLaren, for
example, argues that they have become tempered and domesticated over the years
and argues for a re-revolutionized critical pedagogy that stresses the continuities
in capitalist exploitation and seeks to create spaces where students can imagine a
different world outside capitalisms law of value and where [they] can learn, and
learn from their learning in individually and socially transformative ways (McLaren
2008:477, 478).
In the past two decades, radical geographers have turned to critical pedagogy,
especially by means of feminist, poststructural, and postcolonial perspectives on
teaching that critique binaries in knowledge production, rethink traditionalist

Practice What You Teach 1727
models in inventive ways, develop new models of learning that do not simply
add new people and places into old ways of learning, and move beyond the
discrete portioning of the world into places and regions. In the process, they have
transformed how we think, teach, and learn in ways that stress the significance
of the classroom as a socially transformative space and assert the urgency of
critical pedagogy under conditions of neoliberalization. While influenced heavily by
critical pedagogy, this work is also configured within the post-1968 radicalization of
geography and the desire among some scholars to integrate teaching, research,
and activism. Rich Heyman, for example, frames his call to geographers for
approaching the classroom as a site for social action within a discussion of the
Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institutes radical pedagogy (Heyman 2007;
also see Merrifield 1995). While providing wider access to knowledge production
was central to the institutes goals, Heyman argues that geographers tend to ignore
this pedagogical aspect in favor of an emphasis on its radical research methods.
This leads him to a wider argument of how radical geography continues to neglect
teaching as a part of a socially transformative praxis, even while critiquing the failures
of traditional pedagogies.
The Autonomous Geographies Collective identifies a connection between this
avoidance and the emergence of a false dichotomy between academics and
wider society (2010). Even in more radical forms of participatory research that
perceive knowledge production and research to be deeply interconnected, scholars
emphasize the need to go beyond the classroom in ways that reify the classroom
and the outside as separate spaces. Such a perspective does not consider the
critical ways in which the classroom itself can be a location of participatory political
action (Heyman 2007). In considering the role of participatory practices in learning
spaces, Kye Askins, for example, concludes that such an approach enables students
to engage with research ethics as social relations and to deconstruct the boundaries
between spaces of learning and spaces of research (Askins 2008). The work of these
scholars seeks to compel radical geographers to take the politically transformative
power of pedagogical spaces seriously.
A connected critique concerns the ivory tower syndrome of identifying the
university and research as separate sets of spaces. This syndrome has curtailed
the development of action-oriented research on the neoliberalizing university and
its related education systems (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010). While
the corporatization, neoliberalization, and clientelization of education spaces have
received some attention, Castree argues that our focus on out there has prevented
us from critically considering what goes on in here (Castree 1999, 2000). Given
the contested, dynamic processes of change within the university, activist teaching
spaces deserve renewed critical attention (Heyman 2000). We need to theorize
a pedagogy capable of counteracting these trends. In this context, Kirsch urges
us to view the university as a site for different kinds of production, while at
the same time remaining a viable, albeit circumscribed, public space open to
heterogeneous educational practices and critical perspectives. (Kirsch 2000:3) John
Kitchens notion of situated pedagogy is useful here (Kitchens 2009). He argues
that current trends in education, especially the persistent demands for universal,
standardized information and knowledge delivery systems, have led to the pervasive
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1728 Antipode
problem of a pedagogy of placelessness. If we define place in human geographic

terms through characteristics that foster senses of attachment, belonging, and
uniqueness in particular, material locations, then these systems can have the effect
of erasing some of those characteristics. Instead, Kitchens looks to the Situationist
International for inspiration in creating a place-based curriculum that connects the
everyday lives of students to modes of self and social transformation. In this way, his
concern is not simply for students and teachers to feel a sense of place again,
but to gain that sense in a politically empowering way. A situated pedagogy
attends to place, not only as the focus of student inquiry or academic study, but
as the spaces for performative action, intervention, and perhaps transformation
(Kitchens 2009:240). Geographers have been talking for decades about how place
matters; now, in this time of neoliberalization and its effects, we specifically need
to appreciate how the places of teaching and learning matter as well.
In sum, radical geography can draw from an extensive, critical toolkit for
understanding the effects of neoliberalization on places of education and how these
effects can be fought. Such a move requires critical attention to the false separation
of teaching and research, bringing an end to the valorization of research as a superior
form of activism to teaching, and a much more extensive engagement with the
classroom as a socially transformative place. While rich in theoretical development,
discussions of pedagogy in geography, with a few exceptions, tend to be abstract,
underdeveloped, and not particularly imaginative when it comes to the practices of
teaching. For insight into the practical, creative, liberatory possibilities, geographers
can draw inspiration from the long history of anarchist perspectives on education.
While much of the work of anarchists, like much of the work in critical pedagogy,
is focused on elementary and secondary education, it can be adapted in the higher
education context.
Anarchism, Pedagogy, and Possibilities

Anarchist pedagogies actively seek out possibilities for new and different ways of
learning and relating to others (Suissa 2010). This initial refusal to settle for existing
institutional arrangements is, in itself, an essential difference that anarchism makes
in education. Armaline identifies three characteristics for an anarchist approach
to pedagogy: an approach to truth and knowledge production that is humble in
nature, the creation of spaces for the deconstruction of oppressive systems, practices,
and ideologies in favor of horizontal ones, and an understanding of everyone as
capable of curiosity, learning, teaching, and creation (Armaline 2009:139). Humility
is essential to enable us to talk openly, honestly, and reflectively about the limitations
of the spaces and roles we occupy, and the complexities inherent in any project
of trying to create a new world in the space of a hierarchically organized, often
oppressive institution. Shannon, for example, states that it does no good to ignore
the fact that careers are sometimes built out of radical politics . . . and so to admit
to our own self-interest and the nature of our work adds possibilities for reflection
and knowledge-building in the classroom (Shannon 2009:185). Second, in relation
to the analysis of power relations, Suissa writes that we must question the very
political framework within which we are operating, ask what kind of society would
!
embody, for us, the optimal vision of the good life, and ask ourselves what kind
(if any) of education system would exist in this society (Suissa 2010:4). There
are ways in which the university classroom is inescapably hierarchical, even in
the most horizontally constructed studentteacher arrangements. But to discuss
authoritarianism in the classroom can lead to both a critique of power relations
in education and other social institutions and an imagining of how to subvert and
transform them. Third, paralleling the work of scholars of critical pedagogy, Armaline
argues for an approach to learning and teaching that assumes, at the outset, that all
people can create and make knowledge and history, and that we need to expand
our understanding of what counts as worthy of knowing and learning (Armaline
2009:142). While there is a great diversity in thinking within anarchist theory, these
three characteristics of humility in approach to knowledge, concern for creating
spaces free from coercion, and a belief in human capabilities, provide a useful
opening for constructing an anarchist pedagogy.
Just as anarchist theory has been marginalized within radical political-economic
theorizing in the academy, so have anarchist perspectives on education been
ignored within the domain of critical pedagogy. This ignorance partly stems
from misconceptions of anarchism itself as violent at worst and as impractically
nave and utopian at best. Suissa argues that the utopianism in anarchism and a
notion of practicality need not be perceived as mutually exclusive, that anarchists
embrace a practical, contextual perspective on human virtues and responsibilities,
and that this embrace has led prominent anarchist thinkers to cultivate systematic
educational interventions in traditional ways of learning as essential to anarchist
social transformation (Suissa 2010:147). Prominent anarchist thinkers such as Emma
Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Paul Goodman, and especially Francisco Ferrer,
founder of the Modern School Movement in Spain in 1901, actively supported
experimental modes of educating children in more creative, non-authoritarian, and
empowering ways and extensively criticized the ways in which existing modes of
education as memorization and repetition reinforced dominant power relations
(Avrich 2005; DeLeon 2006).
Anarchist and critical pedagogies share many of the same concerns for
empowering people as producers of knowledge, politicizing the process of
education, and perceiving teaching and learning as central to social transformation.
Some scholars, though, point out important differences, especially in relation to
anarchist perspectives on institutions of learning specifically and the state more
generally. Richard Kahn, for example, looks to the pedagogy of Ivan Illich to
assert a system of learning and knowing based less on a promethean, progressive
dependence on educational institutions, which he argues as supported by Paolo
Friere and others, and more on a defense of vernacular values and convivial tools
that could meet peoples needs without becoming ends in themselves such as
contemporary public education systems had (Kahn 2009:126; Illich 1973). He
argues that while Frierian critical pedagogy can be highly empowering, it depends
too much on the notion of betterment through existing educational institutions.
In contrast, anarchist pedagogies seek out and affirm a wide range of everyday
spheres of learning. This is a pedagogy that promotes creative learning, sociality,
community, and autonomous interactions with others and with the environment
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1730 Antipode
over established routes of learning. As such, it questions the value of institutionalized

education and expands our understanding of what a good education should do for
us. Related to this is a critique of the role of the state more generally. Logue and
Mayo argue that recent work on the philosophy of education has not taken up a
critique of the state as extensively as work in other disciplines (Logue and Mayo
2009:160). Anarchist visions of a social order without coercive power structures
have important implications on pedagogy that could be productive for imagining
new systems of learning. Despite, or perhaps because of, these differences, DeLeon
argues that a confluence of anarchist and critical perspectives on education can be
a fruitful means for social transformation. In particular, anarchism adds urgency by
linking critical pedagogy to practical, spontaneous, and direct action in the present.
Learning to live cooperatively, sharing resources, teaching ourselves strategies of
resistance, forming reading circles, teaching literacy skills, and finding ways to live
sustainably with our own natural resources are all skills and forms of knowledge that
we can acquire at schools (DeLeon 2006:9).
Anarchist perspectives on education have aided me and my students in
experimenting with the possibilities of decentralizing the classroom in ways that are
anti-heirarchical, non-coercive, autonomous, and cooperative; focusing on practical
forms of radicalism and direct action in discussions of theory and action; and
considering critically what kinds of work and learning are more or less vital, without
a strict definition of what counts as scholarly learning. At the same time, while
anarchist perspectives can lend a significant sense of creativity, practicality, and
urgency to critical pedagogy, they need much further development. Suissa argues
that, despite the emphasis on education, anarchist thinkers have written little about
specific aspects of pedagogy, such as the nature of teacherpupil relationships and
approaches to moral education (Suissa 2010:149). This is, at least in part, the result
of a resistance among anarchists to pin themselves down to a formulaic, singular
approach that could lead to its very anti-anarchist consolidation into a discipline. But,
as Stevphen Shukaitis argues, it is possible to develop an approach to education
based on creating undercommons and enclaves within multiple disciplines and
spaces (Shukaitis 2009:167) By undercommons, he means a collaborative terrain
of resistance and struggle within university institutions that seek to undermine those
same institutions.
Geographers have much to gain from these anarchist pedagogical perspectives.
Anarchism can provide radical geography teachers a more nuanced approach to
understanding power relations, our institutional limitations, and our ability to resist
institutional limits in creative and liberatory ways. This involves taking the space of
the classroom seriously in its activist possibilities, at the same time as expanding
what spaces count as the geography classroom and what kinds of learning count
as geographic knowledge. Anarchists, too, have much to gain from geographers
through a complex understanding of the places of education in both theoretical
and material ways and the need to assert the role that places of education play
in a context where their uniqueness and potential for political empowerment are
being eroded from above. At present, both sets of perspectives suffer from the same
problem of abstractness and a lack of engagement with the specificities of teaching
and learning. A thorough engagement with a combined anarchist-geographic
!
perspective requires attention to the particularities of the places of engagement

with learning. For such an examination, I now delve into my experimentation with
such an approach.
The Multiple Spaces and Places of Teaching

and Learning
An anarchist-geographic pedagogy anchored in a critical, dynamic examination of
the places of education can go far in cultivating a theoretically complex, materially
grounded, student-centered pedagogy. In this section, I examine the problems and
prospects of such an approach through the specificities of my own experiences.
My experiments with teaching about anarchism and teaching anarchically were
entirely student driven in origin. In 2003, in my second year as a faculty member
at Mary Washington College (now University of Mary Washington), a group of
undergraduate students starting a new campus organization called the Anarchist
Social Theory Club (ASTC hereafter) approached me about being their faculty
sponsor. Having never studied anarchism in an academic setting, and having only a
cursory, though sympathetic, knowledge of it, I agreed. As ASTC expanded over the
next 2 years, I suggested the possibility of a reading group on anarchist social theory,
which eventually developed into a seminar of eight students, with me as a participant
and discussion facilitator/teacher. I explain this origin, because I think that my lack
of familiarity with anarchism at the time added to the anti-hierarchical context of
the class and created a space in which we were all learning together. I subsequently
co-organized four more classes/reading groups every spring semester until 2009,
with topics including anarchism and geography, queer theory and anarchism, rights
to the city, and anarcha-feminism. With each experience I found myself more and
more engrossed and enchanted with anarchism as a body of theory, way of life,
and set of approaches to teaching and learning. I was also immediately excited
about combining what I was learning with perspectives from geography, a discipline
which, by contrast, I have been engaged with since the start of my college education.
The approaches began to converge around their critique of existing institutional
hierarchies of teaching and learning, search for practical and creative forms of
radicalism, and creation of a meaningful, transformative relationship with place.
I base my analysis on a combination of end-of-the semester narrative evaluations,
reflection narratives that I requested from students involved in the classes a few years
after they had graduated, and my own notes on the development of the courses
over the years.
But first, I will provide a brief introduction to the Anarchist Social Theory Club and
to our curricular activities. ASTC was created in 2003 as an anarchist affinity group,
to carve out a space for talking about theory and planning action simultaneously.
Aaron, one of the founding members, writes that he saw this:
as a praxis of action and reflection that found its footing in student clubs, workshops,
classes, the Living Wage Coalition, and informal communities . . . These diverse spaces
comprised a university community of youth and professors centered on justice and
critical analysis and founded upon a discursive and physical space that encouraged the
strengthening of our intellectual and organizational/tactical skills.
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1732 Antipode
Establishing an organization in which action and thinking could be mutually

conducted was central to the groups mission. In addition, strong personal
relationships constituted the core of the organization. Another member, Phil,
writes, Miscommunications happen in all human relationships, and those
relationships need to be strong to overcome [them] . . . and figure out routes
to prevent breakdowns in communication from occurring. Some of the major
accomplishments of ASTC included a regular program of guest speakers, workshops,
craft and movie nights, guest-lecturing in an introductory political science class
about anarchism, and attending regional and national protests and conferences;
establishing a free Radical Library on the main floor of Monroe Hall, one of the
busiest academic buildings on campus; and working with the Mary Washington
housekeepers and groundskeepers and other student organizations on a successful
living wage campaign.
Understanding these anarchist pedagogical spaces as placed in their particular
context is essential to understanding how and why they developed. The University of
Mary Washington is a small, arguably conservative public, liberal arts school located
in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a small city known best for its roles in American colonial
and civil war histories and its recent growth as a far suburb of the Washington,
DC metropolitan area. In the US context, it is rare higher education institution in
both being small enough to provide opportunities for greater studentstudent and
studentfaculty interaction, and as a public institution with an especially affordable
tuition rate for Virginia residents. It is a mostly racially white campus, in terms of
students and faculty, and not widely known outside the state of Virginia, but it
draws from a large range of socioeconomic and urban to rural backgrounds. Mary
Washington has a traditionalist curriculum in that all courses are housed within
particular disciplines. As such, all the anarchist-themed courses that I taught, even
if not centrally about geography, were housed in the geography department. All of
our course-related activities were fully accredited, whether as independent studies,
reading groups, or seminars. Given that most of the students were not geography
majors, they received general elective credits for their participation. I gave each
student individually the choice whether to take course for a letter grade or not, and
we agreed that grades would be decided on a one-on-one basis with the student
at the end of the term. This is one way in which, certainly, anarchist principles
of education were compromised in the institutional context, but it was important
for students to have the institutional accreditation that this framework provided. In
some semesters, I was able to include the courses as a part of my existing course
load, such as when I taught it as a seminar, but more often than not, I taught them
as an overload to my existing teaching responsibilities.
Aaron writes, Despite being one of the homogeneous universities in Virginia,
composed almost completely of white middle class suburban young adults, the
University of Mary Washington was a surprisingly easy place to convene and
develop a group of radicals. He attributes this ease to the small, intimate
nature of the student body and social spaces on campus and in downtown
Fredericksburg, which served as useful centers for the publication of anarchist ideas.
Jackie argues that the small scale allowed participants to feel more of a sense of
ownership:
!
I was glad that I hadnt gone to VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University) or some other
large school and just ended up going to Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, Clinic Defense,
etc, because while I thought all these organization were awesome, and that I would learn
a lot by being involved with them, I felt like it [would be] a little too formulaic.
This small scale provided members with the opportunities, autonomy, and
responsibility to imagine and create their own projects and spaces from scratch.
Mike, who moved to Portland, Oregon after graduation, reflects on how
overwhelming it was to relocate to a place where there was already so much
happening. By contrast:
In places like Fredericksburg and Richmond it feels like even relatively small community-
building projectscraft nights and potlucks for instancehave potential to grow
into . . . broader strokes. While a class on Anarchism might not stand out somewhere
like Evergreen State [College, in Olympia, Washington, USA, known for its much more
progressive political environment], at Mary Washington it offered us a chance to discuss
those topics as a part of our curriculum and gave us a space to formulate and share our
own opinions.
The small scale, though, led some to seek to connect to other projects outside the
university. Jackie, in her last 2 years at Mary Washington, realized that putting [her]
energy into trying to get other, mostly white, privileged kids to see the world more
similarly to [her] wasnt really the most effective way to use [her] time. Instead,
she began to focus her energies on volunteering at a local domestic abuse shelter.
Maggie finds that the small scale of the projects and spaces had the tendency to
involve the same small number of people, preventing diverse competing ideas from
emerging. Thus, while the small, intimate nature of campus afforded important
opportunities for creativity, autonomy, action, and thought, it could at times feel
unproductive and insular. For Kayla, though, anarchism became so integrated into
the fabric of her education that she began to think of anarchism and a liberal arts
education as kindred spirits, to the extent that they both seek to provide ways of
asking deep, critical questions that help us understand ourselves and the world. So
there should be no question about whether anarchism is a relevant/useful subject
to discuss in college.
In these ways, our pedagogical experiments helped to create a meaningful
place from which students could think and plan activism. To return to Kitchens
discussion of a place-based pedagogy to counter the placelessness of neoliberalism,
it is important to note the significant ways in which members of ASTC actively
imagined and created a place for pedagogy different from, but in relation to,
their surroundings. Understanding the campus as a unique place with particular
opportunities and limitations enabled different forms and spaces of activism. For
some, the small scale allowed them to be introduced and to introduce other
students to radical thought in an intimate way. It also enabled a sense of autonomy,
in that they were building something from the ground up that was lacking and
needed. In some cases, this autonomy involved responding to the limitations on
campus by searching for activist opportunities elsewhere. In these different ways,
the pedagogy of ASTC centered around engaging with the campus as a place with
specific limitations, opportunities, and needs, and to derive a political project by
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1734 Antipode
way of learning about and engaging with the place. For me, our spatial context
enabled me to lead classes on controversial themes that, at more prominent schools
might have been met with more resistance, but at Mary Washington could be gently
folded into the curriculum.
The courses, seminars, and readings groups I facilitated over a period of 5 years
contributed to the formation of pedagogical spaces in practical, creative, and
reflexive ways. They were structured in an anti-hierarchical format with me as the
professor acting primarily as a participant. I found my simultaneous roles as active
participant, facilitator/moderator, mentor/guide, and leader during conversational
lulls to be challenging, but also very rewarding. I say anti- rather than non-
hierarchical, because while critical of power hierarchies in the classroom, we
nonetheless had to admit their presence. But these hierarchies existed as much
among students who had less or greater knowledge of anarchist theories, as
they did in the studentteacher relationship. There were times, as reflected in
the evaluations, that those with greater knowledge and experience dominated
discussions and others felt scared to speak, but when this knowledge differential
turned more into a reciprocal relationship of exchanging ideas, questions, and
challenges, discussions became critically productive. To return to Deric Shannons
argument in the preceding action, we felt the need to critically address the presence
of hierarchies of different kinds in our institutional pedagogical settings, and these
critiques themselves provided the opportunity to challenge their legitimacy and
imagine other possibilities. Moreover, students perceived the courses as integrated
in ASTC in profound ways. In being asked to reflect on her experiences in my courses,
Jackie writes, At this point I sort of have a hard time differentiating, in any great
deal, the classes you had on anarchism and my overall experience of an alternative
learning environment. I interpret this statement as a reflection of the extent to
which our classes became a part of a pedagogical project that involved a number
of different places, including the classes of other professors and workshops, actions,
and social activities organized by ASTC and other groups. Ultimately, Phil states that,
as a group, We eventually developed a very tight feedback loop whereby theory
and action mutually supported one another.
A point to stress here, in relation to the discussions of anarchist and geographic
pedagogies above, is the importance of recognizing the multiple locations of
teaching and learning, especially in the higher education setting. In the experience
of ASTC members, our classroom space was just one in a set of interrelated
locations. From a combined anarchist-geographic perspective, the critical pedagogy
we developed was constituted through more than the classroom itself, though
the classroom was an essential part of it. This is a vital point, because too often
discussions of pedagogy by radical geographers revolve almost exclusively around
facultystudent interactions. An anarchist sense of humility goes far in understanding
the diverse set of people and places involved in such a pedagogy.
Aaron sets the scene for our very first class on anarchist theory:
I remember the excitement on everyones faces and the energy in the room as we
gathered around a table for the first class. I was thrilled. Simply the establishment of
an accredited class seemed to me an authentic victory. This class provided the structure
!
and discipline that ASTC seemed to lack. We were able to delve into the historical
roots of anarchism in the US and Europe, and see how these tendencies developed into
offshoots in Anarchist Feminism, Queer Theory, and technological freedom. We read
through classical firebrands and philosophers such as Kropotkin, Bakunin, Berkman, and
Goldman, as well as the narrative testimonies ad manifestoes from DIY culture and the
queer radical community. We kept what we liked, discarded others, and began to locate
ourselves within this historical trajectory.
This statement expresses a combination of excitement, legitimization, and

autonomous learning that was as intellectually challenging and liberating for me
as it was for the students. What we created was a system of knowledge production
that uncovered lost histories of a neglected field of study and sought to place
ourselves within them. As much as the classes exposed all of us to a diverse range of
anarchist thinking, the intentional structuring of class according to anarchist ideals
of consensual, anti-hierarchical, participatory democracy also significantly enabled
learning. Maggie writes, I think what I appreciated most about the experience was
the structure of the classes themselves, even more so than the content. Ive always
felt . . . that anarchism is a way of life.
In important ways, this process infused the participants with a sense of confidence.
One of our reading groups was called rights to the city and focused on anarchist
perspectives on the privatization of public space and its effects on social life and
marginalized populations. Half-way through the semester, two members began
strategizing on a plan to transform an unused building in downtown Fredericksburg,
a former African-American Elks Lodge, into a youth-administered progressive
community center. Though the space was designed initially as a homeless shelter,
the students realized it was overly ambitious to develop a space that would require
24 h care for people, and it took shape as a project to create an infoshop, freestore,
and cafe. The project developed as a way to learn about social history and building
codes with practical significance, including mapping out the history and spatiality of
various abandoned buildings in downtown, deciding on the Elks Lodge based on a
number of factors, and researching the buildings history. These actions culminated
in writing letters to the buildings owner, the US ambassador to Ghana, who had
saved it from demolition, and the involvement of over 50 activists, including college
and high-school students, to clean it out and get it ready. Shortly after, the city
condemned the building, the ambassador never wrote back, and the students
moved on to other projects, including a community garden directly across from
the Elks Lodge that is still in full operation. Phil, one of the two students, writes in
reflection:
Never have I met another group of anarchists . . . who can trace their ideological
development from Mary Wollstoncraft to the Reclaim the Streets movement. I think
that the fact that by the last class I had with you, Jason and I were ready to attempt to
take over an abandoned building for social use, is a sign of how ideologically developed
and confident we were. We were ready to take on the city, the university had become
too small.
This is a kind of confidence that could only be developed in an interlinked set

of pedagogical spaces, some providing more autonomy than others, marked by a
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1736 Antipode
critical integration of theory, action, and reflection. This is the difference that a critical
anarchist-geographic pedagogy can make: by creatively eroding the boundaries
between learning and activism, in a materially spatially grounded way, and gaining
knowledge and experience through challenges and successes along the way.
Another course centered on the intersections of anarchism and queer theory.
Even before this course began, members of ASTC had incorporated an application
of queer politics into the group. One of the early discussions in the formation
and organization of the group focused on readings of Queer Nation Manifestoes
(http://www.actupny.org/documents/QueersReadThis.pdf) for inspiration. As Kayla
reflects:
I liked the idea of queerness as an idea that transcends issues of sex and gender to include
all non-normative ways of being. There arent a lot of other modes of thought that allow
us to challenge just about everything (except anarchism . . . which is why anarchism and
queer theory are so similar, or even the same).
The main project of the course was a queer anarchist themed zine, within which
members included articles and art pieces based on critical interpretations of our
readings and other personal observations. Some significant challenges in this
project included meeting deadlines, delegating tasks, different levels of skill and
familiarity with zine publishing, and different political interpretations of the concept
of queer itself. But these contentions led to a project that was collaborative,
practical, tactile, and dynamic in its multiple layers. For example, in the content
of the zine it is clear that some students used queer as an inclusive identity
category, while others, such as Kayla in the quotation above, were much more anti-
identitarian in their application of it. To have these different perspectives in the same
publication gave the zine a dynamic, urgent tone, grounded in the students lives on
campus.
J. K. Gibson-Graham argue that a queer pedagogical approach can allow students
to discover a differentiated economic landscape beyond the capitalist norm.
Queering our pedagogy means making difference visible and calling normative
impulses and forms of social closure into question (Gibson-Graham 1999:83). While
their focus is primarily on the effects of queering on the content of teaching, it is
important to consider the effect that such an approach can have to the dynamics
of the classroom itself. In essence, what does it mean to queer the classroom while
queering the subject matter being taught in the classroom? This is a significant
question that requires attention both to diverse ways of learning and to the
particular dynamics of the classroom as a place. There is a central tension here
between queering the classroom, always destabilizing and unsettling our notions of
the identity of that place, and cultivating a queer classroom, with the dangers of
solidifying an emplaced identity. Our experience lay somewhere in the middle of
this tension between the destabilizing and territorializing tendencies of occupying
the classroom.
In reflecting on their experiences, ASTC participants identified some of the
organizations limitations, notably the lack of skill and knowledge sharing from
year to year and the lack of greater involvement with other students and student
groups. Evan, for example, argues:
!
Radical organizing is really dependent on constant and continuing education about

issues and philosophy . . . a very hard thing to do in a college setting, where students
are only involved in radical organizing for 4 years, and it becomes a lot harder to pass
along and further that knowledge when organizers and activists are constantly cycling
out.
This cycling has resulted in periods of greater and lesser activity, with the past couple
of years constituting a period of downturn in activity. The sentiment expressed here
reflects a wider problem with anarchist activism, particularly in the US context where
there is not the same history of organizational continuity within anarchist groups
as there may be in some other regional contexts. The result is a potential tendency
toward less participation, given the energy required to start a project anew.
On the issue of involvement, Maggie writes that we preached inclusion and
equality but then had a tendency to harshly judge those who werent entirely
dedicated. Phil, too, thinks that actions could have been taken to meet the student
body more, but had mixed feelings about not wanting dilute their message or the
anarcho-punkish aesthetic they had cultivated. But he continues to believe that
because of his involvement in ASTC, he has personally seen the immense power
that even a small group of intelligent revolutionaries can exert to change peoples
lives acting in a nonviolent and consensual way. ASTC, as such, played the most
central, entirely student-driven, role in the development of an anarchist pedagogy
melding action, theory, and reflection through the creation of a variety of spaces
and efforts. Reflecting on their experience has gotten me to see the central role that
student-led campus groups and organizations have in the development of a radical
pedagogy.
While the anti-hierarchical environment led to a pedagogy that was dynamic,
critical, and different from other learning environments, it was also its greatest
limitation. Some students showed enthusiasm and diligence throughout the length
of the courses, but others slacked significantly in their responsibilities of completing
readings and assignments and being prepared for discussions on a regular basis.
Consistently on end-of-the-term evaluations, students remarked how difficult it
was to get themselves to be motivated to do the work in a curricular context
when so many of their other classes were structured around deadlines, grades, and
other punitive measures. In this sense, the attempt to build an anarchist pedagogy
within the context of an otherwise primarily coercive institution shares many of
the same challenges as building an intentional anarchist community in a capitalist
society, though on a smaller and more limited scale. In fact, students tended to
be most productive when we did have deadlines, such as with the queer anarchist
zine.
Another set of limitations concerned the many moments of awkwardness and
silence, especially in the beginning weeks of each term. Jackie thinks that this
occurred because no one in the room was really used to the idea that everyone
in there had the ability to structure the class together, instead it seemed like
we were waiting for cues for what to do. The pedagogical circumstances that
she describes were extremely challenging for everyone involved. Carving out a space
for autonomous critical reflection and pedagogical rebuilding is hard work, and there
were many students that dropped out and gave up in the process. Jackie compares
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1738 Antipode
this context to classes with more defined hierarchies, in which she found herself
feeling less awkward and more communicative in some ways. She argues, Even
though the classroom was a little more hierarchical . . . knowing we were there with
the intention of subverting that student/professor role did make me feel more free
to respond openly to anyone in the room. I take this comment to mean that it may
sometimes be easier for some students to respond in a contentious environment,
especially one that feels familiar and where something is clearly at stake, rather in
the more collaborative environments we were creating, where we had built our own
stakes. At first I felt surprised and disappointed to read this comment, but the more I
think about it, the more I realize how, as activists and scholars, we are often so much
more comfortable in teaching and learning spaces defined by struggle and resistance
than we are in spaces where the goal is building an alternative, positive model of
education dedicated to social change. This is simultaneously the biggest challenge
and possibly the biggest contribution that an anarchist-geographic perspective may
make to critical pedagogy.
Reflections
In this paper, I have argued simultaneously for geographers to take the classroom
seriously as an activist space and to seek out anarchist perspectives on education for
inspiration. Some of the ways in which we can synthesize anarchism, geography, and
critical pedagogy are in creating places of education that counter the placelessness
imposed by neoliberalization, queering the classroom in ways that open up
non-normative possibilities for teaching, learning, and living, and expanding
our pedagogies to include a multiplicity of spaces and realms, without losing
focus on the activist possibilities in the classroom itself. As geographers with an
extensive toolkit of how and why place matters, we can seek out ways to counter
the placelessness created by the standardization of education in ways that have the
potential to transform classrooms into positive, collaborative places with creative
learning and teaching opportunities. In the process, anarchist pedagogies can serve
as a crucial guide to force us to always think about our methods and means of
teaching and learning in relation to the goals of social justice we seek. As students
and scholars, we have to recognize the spaces of learning not just in terms of the
content we convey and discuss but also in how we can organize our classrooms in
ways that approach the enactment of those goals. This is a challenging, difficult,
complex endeavor, as my experience has suggested, but is ultimately rewarding in
its creative, practical, and liberatory possibilities.
The anarchist pedagogies that we enacted at Mary Washington have certainly had
a transformative effect on the participants. The former students all reflect senses of
confidence, dedication, creativity, and desire for collaborative social change that are
at least in part linked to what and how they have learned. For me, our pedagogical
experiments turned me into an anarchist, in ways that have greatly improved my
abilities to teach, learn, live, and act in the world. Unfortunately, the period of the
last 2 years has witnessed a significant downturn in the activities of ASTC. Current
and former students attribute this decline to a combination of factors: the growth
of competing organizations, the sudden loss of key leadership figures with students
!
who were graduating, and the relocation of the Radical Library from Monroe Hall,
which is being renovated, to a less central location. Evan, a current student, thinks
that the growth in popularity of a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter,
focused more on an activism not centered on critical reading and discussion, was
incredibly detrimental to for the radical community at Mary Washington. Without
a [focus] on education and philosophy, SDS was unable to focus on issues in any
real way, and eventually became a largely ineffective group. This decline suggests
to me the crucial pedagogical role of ASTC and its multiple spaces of teaching,
learning, and activism. With recently revived campus radical activity in connection
with the Occupy Wall Street movement, I have high hopes for its return, even if
under a different name.
As I grapple with how to reinvigorate our project at Mary Washington, I find
myself focused on five questions and concerns that I find to be important areas
for all radical geography teachers to take seriously. First, geographers have been
producing important work recently on the problems of activist fatigue and the need
for spaces of emotional support to sustain and renew activism (see, for example,
Brown and Pickerell 2009; Wilkinson 2009). Given the pressures in activist teaching
of constantly feeling different and dealing with bureaucratic pressures, we need to
cultivate the same kinds of spaces of emotional support for teachers and students
engaged in activism in the classroom. We need much more of a development of an
undercommons both across disciplines and between institutions among radical
geography teachers and students. The latter requires radical geographers to take
teaching much more seriously. Second, anarchist pedagogical emphases on creative
teaching and relating differently to others open up all sorts of possibilities for new
forms of effective activist teaching. I find it so inspiring, if also daunting, to consider
some of the ways in which radical geography can be experimentally expanded
beyond the usual lecturing, reading and discussing academic articles, and writing
research papers. New forms of classroom knowledge production can invigorate our
teaching, attract new students to geography, and even impact our research lives.
Third, I am excited when I think about how much I have changed as a result of my
engagement with ASTC at Mary Washington and the possibilities, more generally, in
faculty support of a student-led pedagogy, even at the undergraduate level. I have
learned and transformed so much from this experience that it has really compelled
me to listen to my students, in a way that entails participatory action teaching
not just in the classroom, but in a diverse set of pedagogic spaces that can then
inform course content and methods in the classroom. Fourth, to the extent that
an anarchist-geographic pedagogy can work through the practices of everyday life,
it does not need to occur as a radical transformation all at once. It is much less
daunting and entirely possible to think of it in small changes that can sometimes
occur under the radar and through gaps in the system, wherever opportunities
arise. And finally, for all of those like me who have grown a bit tired of how every
geography paper needs to include a statement about how place matters, thinking
critically about our education systems through the lens of the encroachment of
placelessness adds urgency to radical geographic teaching. The encroachment of
placelessness on our education system matters, and a radical anarchist-geographic
pedagogy can go far it combating it.
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1740 Antipode
Acknowledgements
I am deeply thankful to the members of the Anarchist Social Theory Club at the University
of Mary Washington for their willingness to critically engage with their past and present
education experiences and for their enthusiasm in charting their own pedagogic course. I
also thank Simon Springer for the hard work of assembling this special issue, and William
Armaline and the three anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking, valuable critical
comments.
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Afterword
Anarchist Geographies and
Revolutionary Strategies
Uri Gordon
The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, Kibbutz Ketura, D.N. Hevel Eilot 88840, Israel;
uri@riseup.net
These are certainly fruitful times for anarchist intellectual publishing. Reading
through the articles in this special issue of Antipode, I was impressed by the
diversity and creativity of efforts to apply anti-authoritarian perspectives to the
geographical discipline, whose notorious breadth of application (everything is
spatial) seems to offer unlimited possibilities for new avenues of research. I also
began thinking about two related issues that seem to run across much of what
appears in the preceding pages. The first concerns the anarchademic enterprise
itself, and its possible contribution to the development of anarchist politics. The
second concerns a more specific problematic, which accompanies the integration of
poststructuralist insights into our understanding of anarchism, and the concomitant
celebration of prefigurative politics in the present tense. What connects the two is
the question of revolutionary strategies. Does the postanarchist shift of perspective
require us to abandon strategy as a valid category for our struggles? If not, how
are strategies supposed to emerge as a conscious artefact of such a decentralized
and swarming movement? What is the role of anarchist intellectual labour in such
an emergence? Finally, what considerationshowever preliminary and open to
debatecan be presented as its starting point, and what might a geographical
perspective contribute to their elaboration?
In what follows, I begin with some thoughts on the pitfalls of anarchist intellectual
labour becoming institutionalized in the academy. I then turn to look at the
question of revolutionary strategies, a concept that I fear may have fallen victim
to a careless misunderstanding of postanarchist insights. Finally, I reiterate a few
basic coordinates, which I believe should at least be considered when projecting
ourselves into the future of social struggles.
Death by Peer Review?

The anarchademic enterprise, to use the terms suggested by Anthony Ince (2012)
in this issue, distinctly involves its own process of territorialization. As anarchist
academics squat various compartments of the intellectual establishment, we
demarcate discursive space, marking turf through acts of bordering which separate
ours from other cross-disciplinary perspectivesperhaps most prominently from
Marxism, but also from any explicitly or implicitly statist variations of feminism,
anti-racism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, and so on. This process is almost
always noticeable alongside any substantive discussion of theories and case studies.

Afterword 1743
On the more theoretical end of the enterprise, the postanarchist project has involved
its own explicit act of bordering, this time between itself and the allegedly modernist
and humanist tenets of the anarchist tradition (Newman 2001; but see Jun 2011).
Being reflexive about the power-play we are engaging in within the professional
intellectual establishment should also lead us to more troubling questions about
the point of the exercise as a whole. That intellectual satisfaction is an insufficient
rationale for anarchist intellectual labour seems to me uncontroversial. Is then
the professional intellectual establishment a site of struggle in its own right?
To be sure, most of the people who write for academic journals also have the
opportunity of contact with students, whose critical thinking and openness to
radical perspectives can be encouraged (and encouraging to see). Furthermore,
as Rouhani (2012) argues in this issue, the tradition of anarchist pedagogy has
much to contribute to our efforts to make the classroom experience itself a site
of prefiguration, encouraging modes of learning that are anti-hierarchical, non-
coercive, autonomous and cooperative. Struggles in the academic workplace, in
which many of us are part-time, adjunct or otherwise precarious employees, are
another area in which we can bring our politics to bear, alongside solidarity with
students struggles over tuition fees and campus policing (Cause Commune 2012;
Various 2012). But what of the core of original intellectual labourresearching,
writing, and publishing?
While the flowering of anarchist scholarship may be thought of as an intervention
in the battle of ideas, it also runs the risk of irrelevance to wider political aims.
Consider the process of neutralization-through-academization that western Marxism
succumbed to from the 1970s onward. Is anarchism likely to go through the same
process? To put things sardonically, our best defence against co-optation is the scant
influence that anarchist academics have on the wider movement, making us less of
an attractive target. On the one hand this derives from the nature of the anarchist
intellectual enterprise itself: unlike its Marxist counterpart, it does not espouse claims
to objectivity and scientific validity which inform, as well as divide, the rank and
file. But on the other hand, the cause may also be circumstantial: if we are not
enough of a threat to warrant co-optation, is it simply because nobody is listening?
Much has been written about the practice and ethics of engaged, militant,
or otherwise socially committed research, with the experiences of anarchist
geographers providing some of the most insightful reflections (cf Autonomous
Geographies Collective 2010). The latters emphasis on the need to break down
the dichotomy between intellectual work undertaken inside and outside the
academy certainly deserves to be absorbed by all anarchademics. Yet what happens
on the other side of the process? In their introduction to the latest set of contributions
on the topic, Gillan and Pickerill (2012:137) point to the sad fact that the outputs
of much well intentioned research done with social movements remain physically
inaccessible to the participants, thus blocking the flow of reciprocity. They also note
that even if such publication is freely shared, its language, findings and timeliness
may be of limited use. But even if we make the utmost effort to keep our language
accessible and our findings timely and relevant, we should go back to asking what
exactly we mean by freely shared. In the case of research done with discreet
groups, it may be quite easy to ensure that they actually have the opportunity to
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1744 Antipode
read the outputs. But in the more general sense of producing intellectual labour that
is relevant to activists, the fact that a book or journal issue can be freely accessed
onlinewhether legally or through piracydoes not mean that it will actually be
read. The format itself is prohibitive. To me, there seems to be no alternative to doing
the actual legwork and disseminating our ideas at speaking events, workshops and
facilitated discussions.
The point behind the preceding thoughts, however, is that almost all
anarchademic efforts seem to begin from the standpoint of affinity with a political
community to whose struggles they seek to contribute. Whether this is done by
absorbing and refining the participants own insights, or by attaching them to
conceptual tools and theoretical frameworks with which they may not be familiar,
there seems to be a shared desire to function as agents of reflexivity for wider
anarchist circles.
But what, in turn, is this reflexivity supposed to achieve? Again, with research
involving discrete groups and struggles the dividend may be localized and specific.
But as many of the articles in this special issue indicate, the sought-after audience is
often the anarchist movement as a whole. That such an entity can even be conceived
of as an audience, that is, that it should be thought to have some common and
overarching concerns that intellectual labour can address, brings us closer to the
consideration of the question of strategy.
Yet the term strategy itself requires some further clarification. For example, the
members of the Autonomous Geographies Collective (2010:256) refer to strategic
interventions as a matter of orienting our educational and research agendas in
ways that will decisively help those on the front line of campaigns and struggles.
Yet it is not clear what qualifies such decisive help as specifically strategic. In the
next section, I would like to dedicate closer attention to this term, specifically in the
context of its apparent denigration in the postanarchist vocabulary.
Salvaging Strategy
This section constitutes a preliminary attempt to reinstate strategic thinking as a
component of anarchism following its absorption of poststructuralist insightsalbeit
not in the sense of strategic which the postanarchist framework rejects. To do this,
let me return to the source distinction elaborated by Todd May.
May categorizes political philosophies into three types: formal, strategic, and
tactical. Formal political philosophy cleaves either to the pole of what ought to
be or to the pole of what is at the expense of the tension between the two (May
1994:4). Rawlss A Theory of Justice and Lukacss History and Class Consciousness are
given as examples of either option. Strategic and tactical political philosophies, on
the other hand, inhabit that tension explicitly. May (1994:7) writes that strategic
political philosophy includes an analysis of the concrete historical and social situation
not merely to realize the ethical program but also to determine what concrete
possibilities present themselves for intervention . . . the ethical program is limited and
perhaps partially determined by that situation. This characteristic, May makes clear,
is also true of tactical political philosophy. The difference between them, however, is
that strategic political philosophy also involves a unitary analysis that aims towards
a single goal. It is engaged in a project that it regards as the centre of political
!
Afterword 1745
universe . . . all problems can be reduced to the basic one . . . a central problematic
within the purview of which all injustices can be accounted for. The works of
Lenin and Machiavelli are given as examples for this option, with the economic
base and princely political power respectively occupying the centre. However, for
tactical political philosophy as embodied in the works of poststructuralist writers
including Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard, there is no centre within which power is
to be located . . . There are many different sites from which it arises, and there is an
interplay among these (May 1994:11). While there are crucial intersections around
which power conglomerates, it does not originate in these points.
Such a view clearly demarcates postanarchism from those varieties of class struggle
anarchism that insist on the working class (however conceived) as a privileged agent
of revolutionary transformation. The latter outlook is perhaps best represented by
writers such as Schmidt and van der Walt (2009) or Price (2009: np), who asserts that
the broad anarchist tradition of class struggle anarchism overlaps with libertarian
interpretations of Marx:
The centre of its politics is class-based: supporting and rooting itself in the working class
and also in the peasantry. This has also included support for non-class based struggles
around gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, war, and ecologyall issues which
overlap with and interact with class. But it has seen the working class as having a particular
power, at least potentially, for stopping the machinery of the system and for starting it
up differently.
In contrast to this position, a postanarchist perspective would place class as
one among several intersecting regimes of domination, none of which occupy a
privileged position for intervention. The lack of a conceptual centre, as well as the
rejection of any linchpin target whose elimination could make the entire system
collapse, is what designates postanarchism as tactical.
While I do not disagree with the substance of Mays categorization, I do want
to contest the terminology. By resting the distinction between strategic and
tactical thinking on the presence or absence of belief in a punctum archimedis for
social analysis and intervention, May recasts this distinction in terms that radically
depart from its conventional sense, the one drawn from military affairs. This is the
distinction between short-term planning intended to win a single battle, and long-
term planning, which combines individual tactical choices as well as the building
of force and infrastructures, in order to win a war. Expanding from the strictly
military definition but remaining within its basic logic, we may give examples of
tactical question such as which intersection to block? or which crop to plant this
season?, as opposed to strategic questions such as should summit blockades be a
priority for the movement? or how do we build a sustainable farming operation?.
Now May is of course free to elaborate the distinction on his own terms, but the
problem is that even if he does so very clearly, the conventional meaning continues
to have a residual presence in discourse and is added, willy-nilly, to discussions of
anarchist politics. Thus we may easily be led into the error of presuming that, as a
tactical outlook, anarchism in its poststructuralist reading is expected to eschew,
not only the search for a punctum archimedis and the Enlightenment-humanist
conception of the subject, but also strategy in the conventional sensethe collective
prioritization of certain forms of action and the planned combination of tactical
!
1746 Antipode
choices, given shared empirical judgements about the historical and social situation.
This would leave us with a disjointed, ad-hoc politics that is not only embedded but
trapped in its particularity (cf Pistolero 2012).
Notice that Mays typology does not actually divide political philosophies into
three mutually exclusive categories, but only into two, with a further subdivision
in the second. Both strategic and tactical political philosophies are, in fact,
strategic in the sense of inhabiting the tension between is and ought. By
subsuming the distinction between centred and decentred views of power into
the one between strategic and tactical, May inadvertently opens the way for a
misunderstanding of a tactical philosophy as one that does not reformulate but
instead abandons the question what is to be done?, in all but the most immediate
sense attached to the conventional understanding of tactics.
There is, however, no reason why a postanarchist standpoint must reject, a
priori, strategic thinking in its conventional sense. There is a difference between
arguing that there is a central or foundational locus of domination and the more
modest argument that a decentralized movement can make conscious collective
choices about where to place its energies, based on shared understandings of social
and political conditions, with all the complexity and multidimensionality that a
postanarchist perspective has to offer. I would therefore argue that strategy, in
the conventional sense of the word, also has its place within a so-called tactical
anarchist outlook that has internalized the poststructuralist critique of power.
Nor does speaking of anarchist strategy imply vanguardism. Striving for shared
priorities which pan out into particular forms of action, based on analyses of social
conditions, is a project that canand from a postanarchist standpoint, can only
take place in a decentralized manner with no single directing hand. But the fact
that the movement cannot function cybernetically (Gr: kybernetes, a ships pilot,
the same root as government) does not mean that strategy must either be
abandoned altogether, or else left to develop stochastically. There are forms of
intervention in the movements intermural discourse which, depending on their
visibility and convincing power, can produce large-scale changes in the movements
priorities.
This type of intervention has already been widespread in the movements
tactical repertoire (tactical in the conventional sense). Individuals and groups have
innovated forms of action that have spread, as viral memes, through the networks.
Many tactics, which have become a staple of anarchist practicefrom arm-tubes
and the Clown Army to Indymedia and radical bike cooperativesoriginated from a
conscious and creative starting point. These practices did not trickle down from any
steering committee but caught on based on their novelty, utility, and replicability.
Can a similar dynamic be attached to the proliferation of strategic outlooks?
Trivially, when more and more anarchists begin to express similar understandings
of their overall priorities in view of shared judgments about the present and future
social conditions, a common strategy can be said to be emerging. Such processes
do happen by themselves: the history of the anarchist movement has seen the
ebb and flow of strategies, from insurrectionalism and syndicalism to nonviolent
direct action and prefiguration. Yet for conscious intervention in the movements
strategic course, something more than the power of example is required. Strategies
!
Afterword 1747
are more abstract and verbal than tactics, and thus not immediately available for
ocular demonstration. They are not practices but ideational frames within which
practices make sense.
This means that the only way to generate interventions in strategy is through some
form of intellectual labourwhich of course is by no means limited to the labour of
professional academics. But the attempt to influence anarchist networks strategic
choices does require careful and articulate speaking, writing, and discussing. There
are many examples of contemporary efforts in this vein, from the speaking tours
undertaken by numerous individual anarchist intellectuals of various persuasions
to the efforts of groups such as Team Colors and Crimethinc. in the USA, or the
Dissent! Roadshow and Climate Camp promotional tours in the UK. With their
diverse agendas and priorities, all of these efforts directly engage with activists in
order to argue for certain priorities taking the fore in the movements strategy, and
are sometimes quite successful in convincing large parts of the movement to redirect
their efforts in a particular direction.
Undue Polarities, Inevitable Decay

So much for anarchist revolutionary strategies in regard to their form. In turning
to content, I certainly have no pretence to provide any comprehensive program
or shocking insight. But I do have two things to say. First, I would like to dispel
what I think is a false dichotomy between prefigurative strategies and strategies of
building and intervening in mass movements. Second, I would like to highlight a
consideration that looms large in many current verbal, if not yet many published,
discussions of any future scenario for anarchist social transformation: the protracted,
uneven and irreversible collapse of industrial society.
The false dichotomy in question seems to correspond to the polarization between
the more traditional class-struggle anarchists and the so-called small-a or new
school anarchists (Gordon 2008:2327; Graeber 2002). While the specific terms
on which it is presented change between various articulations, its general form
can be presented as follows: the small-a anarchists focus on prefigurative politics,
which means constructing alternatives to capitalism and the state by themselves
and among themselves. These alternatives seek maximal space for the experimental
realization of anarchist social forms, and are presented to surrounding society as
examples to be emulated on the self-same terms. Such a strategy allegedly aims to
achieve anarchy through a process of osmotic gradualism (Gambone undated)
whereby such alternatives proliferate to the degree that the state and capitalism
become so hollowed out that minimal violence is required to overthrow them.
Class-struggle anarchists, however, seek to mobilize the working class on its
own terms, by building mass organizations that struggle for the interests of the
oppressed. At the same time, their own specific anarchist organizations work to
bring the experience of past struggles into the current struggles, act as a centre
for debate and as a link between militants, and form a pole of attraction for new
militants. Anarchy is achieved as the result of a final and decisive confrontation
between the mass organizations and the state, with the former overseeing the
transition to anarchist communism and evolving into society itself.
!
1748 Antipode
The late Joel Olson (2009:np) has expressed this polarity in a recent and widely
read essay. While its main argument is that in the USA, struggles against racial
oppression have a strategic centrality that other struggles lack, the essay also
criticizes the American anarchist scene (a derogatory term in itself) for abandoning
movement-building for the sake of self-referential activities:
A revolution is an actual historical event whereby one class overthrows another and (in
the anarchist ideal) thereby makes it possible to abolish all forms of oppression. Such
revolutions are the product of mass movements: a large group of people organized
in struggle against the state and/or other institutions of power . . . Yet in much of the
anarchist scene today, building free spaces and/or creating disorder are regarded as the
movement itself rather than components of one. Neither the infoshops nor insurrection
models build movements that can express the organized power of the working class.
Thus, the necessary, difficult, slow, and inspiring process of building movements falls
through the cracks between sabotage and the autonomous zone.
On the other side of the fence, a famous statement by a Crimethinc. contributor

(Nadia C undated) argues:
What should be political? Whether we enjoy what we do to get food and shelter.
Whether we feel like our daily interactions with our friends, neighbours, and co-workers
are fulfilling. Whether we have the opportunity to live each day the way we desire to. And
politics should consist not of merely discussing these questions, but of acting directly
to improve our lives in the immediate present. Acting in a way that is itself entertaining,
exciting, joyousbecause political action that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can
only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives . . . Never again shall we
sacrifice ourselves for the cause. For we ourselves, happiness in our own lives and the
lives of our fellows, must be our cause!
Polarized as these positions may seem in their most polemical expressions, I think
they are in fact anchored more in the desire of two competing cultural identities
within the contemporary (and in particular the American) anarchist movement to
mutually distinguish themselves, than in any actual dichotomy between joy and
effectiveness. On the one hand, consciously anarchist-led alternatives do not have
to be exclusive and isolated. An anarchist infoshop, bicycle workshop, urban farm,
or direct action collective can be very viably embedded within its local community,
making connections and forging coalitions with non-anarchists while influencing
group dynamics in its broader environment in a libertarian direction and seeding
mistrust of the state (cf Heathcott 1999; Morgan 2005; The Free Association 2011).
Even insurrectionary tactics are not necessarily alienating and threatening to non-
anarchists, as recent events up and down the US west coast indicate (Anonymous
2011). However, anarchist participation in broader social movements does not have
to adhere to stale, self-sacrificing models. There is a lot of personal fulfilment to
be gained from interacting with people outside our immediate political milieu,
and such movements may be directly relevant to our own conditions as workers,
students, women, minorities, and so on. The strategic choice is not dichotomous,
but rather involves selecting the best-situated forms of intervention that render
the tension between anarchist values and non-anarchist struggles productive rather
than destructive.
!
Afterword 1749
The second and final issue I want to address here revolves around a matter that
confronts us with something close to the status of an objective fact, all postanarchist
insistences on contingency and specificity notwithstanding. Barring the discovery
of cold fusion or some other miraculous turn of events, there is no doubt at least in
my mind that the combination of peaking oil production, runaway climate change,
and devaluing speculative capital places industrial civilizationand capitalismon
a trajectory of collapseprotracted, uneven, but irreversible. I also have the sense,
though I cannot prove it, that this realization is widely shared among anarchists
today. Within and outside the geographical discipline, our Marxist counterparts were
the ones to systematically frame environmental crisis in terms of limits to capitalist
accumulation (Benton 1996; Harvey 1996; OConnor 1998; Smith 1991). While the
jury is still out on how long capital can continue to displace these contradictions, I
want to draw attention to one possibility which these critics have not emphasized
enough in my opinion, namely, that the decomposition of capitalism may come
under management from above and give rise to more, rather than less, oppressive
social forms. As members of the Emergency Exit Collective (2008) put it:
Another world is not merely possible. It is inevitable. On the one hand . . . such a world
is already in existence in the innumerable circuits of social cooperation and production
in common based on different values than those of profit and accumulation . . . On
the other, a different world is inevitable because capitalisma system based on infinite
material expansionsimply cannot continue forever on a finite world. At some point, if
humanity is to survive at all, we will be living in a system that is not based on infinite
material expansion. That is, something other than capitalism. The problem is there is
no absolute guarantee that something will be any better. Its pretty easy to imagine
other worlds that would be even worse.
As I have argued elsewhere in more detail (Gordon 2009), there are strong
indications that the more forward-thinking sections of the political, military, and
business elites are past the point of denial about this trajectory. On this reading,
current trends from green capitalism to fiscal austerity amount to efforts to prolong
the period of manageable crisis, so as to allow hierarchical institutions to adapt away
from capitalism. While dwindling energy resources will inevitably require a transition
to more local and labour-intensive forms of production, this transition can also be
an elite-driven process. Such a process would aim at the creation of post-capitalist
models of alienated production, which, while appropriate for a declining resource
base, continue to harness human productive power to arrangements of economic
imprisonment. If successful in the long run, such a strategy may usher in new forms
of feudalism in which labour is at least partly de-commodified and replaced by
serfdomwhile armed elites retain privileged access to whatever energy resources
remain.
Crucially, what this means for anarchist revolutionary strategies is that they can
no longer look forward to a revolutionary scenario wherein anarchist social forms
replace hierarchical ones while industrial modernity remains a stable constant.
Instead, strategies should be considered in the context of a struggle, which has
already begun, over the nature of the social and political structures that will arise
amid industrial modernitys decaying ruins. If a protracted, uneven, and irreversible
process of industrial collapse is acknowledged, then the key strategic question
!
1750 Antipode
for anarchists becomes: how do we maximize communities prospects of moving

through this process towards more, rather than less, freedom and equality.
The strategic choices that I, for one, would consider to follow from such an outlook
in the immediate term include: the prioritizing of food and energy production
in efforts to build autonomous and egalitarian alternative spaces within the
shell of capitalist society; abolitionist resistance to genetic modification, nuclear
energy, and geoengineering; concerted opposition to the far right; and active
solidarity with the self-organized movements of the weakest sectors in society. To
be sure, these are only starting points for discussionthe point, however, is that
discussion along these coordinates in anarchist networks should be vibrant and
pervasive.
In closing, I would like to highlight what seems to be another inevitable
consequence of growing energy scarcity: the slowdown, halt, and eventual
reversal of the movement of economic globalization. The terrain of a collapsing
industrial civilization is one that is increasingly fragmented, localized, and uneven.
Perhaps here is where anarchist geographies can make their most valuable
contribution. By charting, characterizing, and even anticipating the dimensions of
such fragmentation, anarchist geographies of collapse may contribute to identifying
new openings for intervention, and possibilities for reconstruction.
References
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!

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Anarchist*Geographies*

Myrna Margulies Breitbart

This special issue of Antipode on anarchist geography is a welcome and long

First Encounters with Kropotkin and Anarchist

Antipode Vol. 44 No. 5 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 15791590 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01037.x

Where has Anarchist Geography Traveled Since?

Multiple Agendas for the Future of Anarchist

Creating Spaces for Resistance and the Incubation of Alternative

Examining the intricacies of new networks and federations established to aid

Dissemination of New Ideas and Spatial/Social Practices

audience. These provided compelling examples of effective forms of collaboration

Jenny Pickerill, Gavin Brown and Adam J. Barker

Antipode Vol. 44 No. 5 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 15911604 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01038.x

A Whirlwind Tour of Anarchist Geographies

suggests that while he is broadly sympathetic to the anarchist political position,

Outline of the Issue

Turning our attention to the motivations of anarchists, Nathan Clough (2012)

placed on anarchists to bridge a longstanding gap in spatial understanding. Barker

Hayek F A (2001 [1944]) The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge

Keywords: anarchism, colonialism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postanarchism, radical

Anarchism is a maligned political philosophy; of this there can be no doubt. Typically

Antipode Vol. 44 No. 5 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 16051624 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01034.x

Thus if anarchism is positioned against the state, and in particular the

For Anarchist Geographies

In light of Kropotkins and Recluss foundational contributions to the discipline of

a simultaneous recognition of all the multiple interconnecting factors. For Reclus

Although still very much underrepresented in the geographical literature, recent

Colonialism is Dead, Long Live Colonialism?

dedicated. Rather than prioritizing the particularisms of class as is the Marxian

circumstantialism invariably lead to disaster. We believe . . . that it is more realistic

presencesuch as the monopoly of force or independent control of the means of

Anarchist geographies might accordingly be productively characterized by their

Mitchell T (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of

Keywords: anarchist geographies, heterodox economics, crisis, postneoliberalism

An anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in

Antipode Vol. 44 No. 5 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 16251644 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01033.x

This paper further exposes the misleading representations of the economy

Anarchist Economics and the Pervasiveness

However to interpret a true nature and meaning of anarchism is highly

The subsequent momentum and development of anarchist thought to thought and

It is important that any understanding of anarchism does not overemphasise

A more nuanced and critical understanding of anarchism would properly

opposed parliamentarianism, that is, liberal or bourgeois democracy, participation in

Focusing on anarchist economics, Cahill (1989:244) argues that: The economics

Similarly, Bookchin (1989:274) considered that in its greatest moments, anarchism

Ward (1982:5) similarly asserts that:

It is toward unearthing these informal and self-organising networks of relationships

Formal paid Formal paid job Informal Monetised Monetised

Figure 1: A typology of work practices

Table 1: Allocation of working time in western economies

Canada 293 204 41.0

Source: derived from Gershuny (2000:Table 7.1)

19601973 19741984 1985present

Min per % of all Min per % of all Min per % of all

Paid work 309 56.6 285 57.3 293 55.4

Source: derived from Gershuny (2000:Table 7.1)

The Inter-National Persistence of Non-commodified

Evaluating the Intra-national Persistence of Non-commodified

Table 3: UK localities studied

Locality type Area Number of interviews

Affluent rural Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire 70

Table 4: Participation rates in different labour practices

% Respondents in last 12 Deprived Affluent Deprived Affluent

AnarchistGeographies