Black and red: an historical-philosophical inquiry into their convergence

Chiara Bottici

Alternate title: Black and Red: The Freedom of Equals.

“Oggi lo sviluppo immenso che ha preso la produzione, il crescere di quei bisogni che non possono soddisfarsi se non col concorso di gran numero di uomini di tutti i paesi, i mezzi di comunicazione, l’abitudine dei viaggi, la scienza, la letteratura, i commerci, le guerre stesse, hanno stretto e vanno semper piu stringendo l’umanita in un corpo solo, le cui parti, solidali tra loro, possono solo trovare pienezza e le liberta di sviluppo nella salute delle altre parti e del tutto”

(Malatesta, E. 2001, L’anarchia, p. 24).

In 1967, Italian anarchist Belgrado Pedrini wrote a poem entitled “Slaves.” The image that dominates the poem is that of a galleon, in which everybody works as a slave, deprived of any freedom. Days and nights passes but nothing changes, until someone starts to incite his fellows to the rebellion by pointing out that only by fighting all together can they regain freedom (Pedrini 2001a: 69). In a galleon, you cannot be free on your own, because if you are the only one free you will constantly be threatened by the slavery of the others. There is no intermediate way: we are either all free or all slaves. Hence the need to fight: “Su, schiavi, all’armi, all’armi!/Pugnam col braccioforte;/gridiam, gridiam: giustizia,/e liberta o morteV’

The personal story of Pedrini is similar to that of many anarchists who lived the troubled years of the fight against the Italian fascist regime. Imprisoned for the death of a fascist policeman, he was liberated by the partizans during the “Resistenza,” but then put back to jail after the end of the war as if he had been a normal criminal. Ministry of justice was then the communist Palmiro Togliatti. Pedrini’s vicissitudes are a living testimony of the hostility between anarchists and communists. Not a single communist that had been imprisoned by the fascist regime remained in jail after the liberation. But many anarchists did.[245] Yet, paradoxically, precisely in Pedrini’s poem, we find the symbol of a peculiar view of freedom which, so I will argue, represents the platform for the convergence of Anarchism and Marxism. Pedrini’s metaphors of the galleon tells us two important things: firstly, that we are all on the same boat and, secondly, that the freedom of every individual strictly depends on that of all the others. You cannot be free alone, because freedom can only be realized as “freedom of equals.”

The aim of this paper is to argue that there is a significant convergence between Marxism and Anarchism in that they both conceive of freedom in this way. After exploring the meaning of this conception of freedom (§. 1) and distinguishing it from that of autonomy (§.2), I will argue that today social, economic and political conditions render this view particularly timely and call for an overcoming of the historical divisions between Anarchism and Marxism (§.3, §.4).

§. 1 The freedom of equals.

At the beginning was freedom. It is a commonplace to say that freedom is the crucial issue for anarchism, so much so that some have claimed that this word summarizes the sense of the entire anarchic doctrine and credo (Bottici 2010). Yet, there are good reasons to argue that freedom is also the crucial concern for Marx, who, from his very early writings, comes to be concerned with the problem of the conditions for the emancipation of human beings. Indeed, the entire path of his thought could be described as a reflection on the conditions for freedom, understood first as a more general human emancipation and, later on, as freedom from exploitation in the light of his theory of surplus value.[246] In this section, I will illustrate this view of freedom and distinguish it from that of freedom as autonomy, whilst in the following one I will show that Marxism and Anarchism can provide each other the antidote for their possible degeneration.

But why freedom at the beginning? Max Stirner has a very helpful way to phrase the answer. In his masterpiece, The Ego and its Own, he observes that most theories of the society purse the issue of: “What is the essence of man? What is its nature” (Stirner 1990). Theories either directly begin with such a question or take it as an implicit assumption. Yet, Stirner observes, the question is not what is the human being, but rather who: and the answer is that “I” , in my uniqueness, am the human being (Stirner 1990). In other words, we should not start with an abstract theory about some presumed essence or (which is the same) nature of the human being, but with the simple fact “I” am, here and now, in my uniqueness. Otherwise said, there is no other beginning because “I’ve set my cause on nothing” (Ich hab’mein’Sach’auf nichts gestellt) (Stirner 1990): 41, 351).

It may appear paradoxical to start with a quotation from Stirner, an author that has been very much criticized within both Marxism and anarchism for its strong individualism. Yet, we can here find a radical formulation of a starting point to think about the centrality of freedom: freedom is at the beginning, because at the beginning there is the “I” in its concreteness or, even better, every being that has the capacity to say “I am.” The ego is at the beginning a pure activity, capacity to move and to speak. But if this interpretation is correct, and the being that say “I am” cannot but be a being endowed with language, than it follows that Stirner’s deduction of a radical individualism, which negates the very idea of a society, is ultimately contradictory.

The ability to speak, and thus language, presupposes a plurality of “ego” because no language can ever be learned without a plurality of beings. An asocial being, such as the one that Stirner deduces, would be a speech-less being. So if Stirner is right in identifying this primordial activity of consciousness as the starting point for thinking about freedom, he is nevertheless wrong in deducing from it such a radical egoism. His radical individualism, which he presents as a rigorous logical deduction, may well be the historical egoism of the then emerging European bourgeoisie. As Marx and Engels made clear in their “The German Ideology,” the presumed unique and sole human being divinized by Stirner is the ideological representation of the German bourgeois of the nineteenth century (Marx and Engles 1976, I, III, “Saint Max”). Such representation of the human being as an individual separated from all other individuals is a “Robinsonade” (Marx 1978c: 221), the fantastic representation of a man lost on an island which correspond to the very concrete economic development of the epoch.

There is not such an isolate and unrelated individual as the one presupposed by Stirner, because the mere possibility to speak presupposes a being endowed with language. The human being does not become social at some point and only for some purposes, but it is social from the very beginning. We do not create the society, but are rather created by it. In one of his lectures on anarchy, Bakunin illustrates the point through the following example: take a young human being endowed with the most brilliant and genial faculties (Bakunin 1996: 28). If thrown at a very young age in a desert, such a being will either perish (as it is very likely) or else survive but become a brute deprived of speech. Together with speech, we will also be lacking in the development of proper thinking, because there cannot be any thought without words. Sure, one can also reflect though images and representations, but in order to articulate a thought one needs words, words that can only learn by interacting with other human beings.

This view lies at the heart of Bakunin’s idea that you can be free only if everybody’s else is free (Bakunin 1996, 2000). The view may appears paradoxical, but this is so because we have so much internalized the ideological construction of the human beings as a independent individual, that we have difficulties in representing freedom as a relation rather than as a property of which separate individuals are endowed. Let me illustrate Bakunin’s idea in more details. The major point is that since the human beings are so much dependent on one another, one cannot be free in isolation, but only through a free web of reciprocal interdependence. Although quite refined in its developments, it is not a view very far from common sense: freedom, in Bakunin’s view, consists in “in the right not to obey to anybody else and to determine my acts in conformity with my convictions, mediated through the equally free consciousness of everybody ” (Bakunin 1996:81). So freedom is the capacity to do what I want, to act in conformity with my convictions, but — and here it comes the refinement — in order to know what my own deepest convictions are I need the mediation of the “equally free consciousness of everybody”

We can clearly see how such a view differs from the mainstream liberal view of freedom as self-determination. In Bakunin’s view, there is not such a thing as an isolated self that can determine her/himself independently of the other human beings. It is a point where Marx and Bakunin patently converge (but the list could be extended to many others exponents of both traditions). Social contract theories are wrong not only in supposing that society is not coeval to the human beings themselves, because there cannot be such an original state where the individuals live in a “natural” and not fully “social” way. They are also wrong in that they take the single individual, separated from all the others as their starting point. As we have already pointed out Marx acutely observes that this image of the individual as discrete being is not at the beginning of history, because the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole and vinculated by the innumerable customs and ties of tradition (Marx 1978c: 221). The primitive human beings are far from being the free, independent being depicted by social contract theorist such Rousseau. The freedom that they attribute to the individual in the supposed state of nature is in fact that of the members of the modern civil society, whose emergence they are witnessing.

To the social contract, both Marx and Bakunin oppose the idea that the human beings is determined by his/her position within the society. In a passage that echoes the contemporary theorists of the technologies of the self such a Foucault,[247] Bakunin observes that it is not the individuals who create society, but the society that, so to speak, “individualizes itself in every individual” (Bakunin 2000: 85). Bakunin is well aware that freedom as self-determination remains an empty word if there is not such a thing as a “self’ that can autonomously choose. The crucial point is not simply doing what I want, but to be sure that what I believe is the fruit of my free choice actually is. If I am led by the circumstances of my life to believe that my servitude is either immutable or even desirable, there is no way I can be free. It’s the dilemma of a voluntary servitude and therefore the techniques through which such compliant subjects are created, which has been at the center of reflection of anarchist thinkers for a long time.[248]

In Bakunin’s view, the human beings are completely determined by both material and representational social factors. When still in the womb of their mother, every human being is already determined by a high number of geographical, climatic, and economic factors that constitute the material nature of their social condition (Bakunin 2000: 86). But together with such a series of material factors, which Marx investigated in a far greater details, Bakunin also mentions a series of beliefs, ideas, and representations that are equally, if not more crucial. Again, in an extremely timely passage, Bakunin observes that every generation finds as already made a whole world of ideas, images and sentiments which it inherits from the previous epochs (Bakunin 2000: 87).[249] Yet they do not present themselves to the newborn as a system of ideas, since children would not be able to apprehend it in this form. Rather such a world of ideas imposes itself as world of “personified facts,” made concrete in the persons and the things that surround them, as a world that speaks to their senses through whatever they hears and see since their very early days (Bakunin 2000: 87).[250]

Put in more contemporary words, the individual become such only through a process of socialization that begins immediately, at least since the very first encounters with language and the presence of other human beings. As psychoanalysis has shown, it is through such a process that the individual is led to internalize and assimilates the imaginary significations of that particular society s/he live in (Castoriadis 1987). To put it in Castoriadis’ words, the individuals are at the same time instituting and instituted by the society they live in (Castoriadis 1987).

This is the reason why freedom cannot but be a freedom of equals. One cannot be free in a society where the others are not free. This is so because, as Bakunin puts it, “To be free means for the individual to be recognized, considered and treated as such by another individuals, and by all the individuals that surround him or her” (Bakunin 2000: 92, trans and emphasis mine). But in order to do so you need to have been in touch with the imaginary significations of it. The latter implies recognition, to be recognized and to recognize the other as free.[251] A master who does not recognize the freedom of his slaves is for this reason not free himself because he contributes to perpetrate the image of slavery within the society of which he is part. Slavery will come back to him, in a form or another. and that inevitably influences him. As Malatesta, by quoting Bakunin, puts its, “ I strongly care about what all the other human beings are, because however independent I may appear or believe to be for my social position, be it a Pope, Czar or even Emperor, I am the perpetual product of what the human beings are in their reciprocal relationship: if they are ignorant, miserable, slaves, my existence is determined by their slavery. I — enlightened and clever- will be stupid for their stupidity, I — brave and courageous- will be slave for their enslavement, I — rich — shiver inside for their misery, I — privileged — turn pale with fear in front of their justice. I — who want to be free — cannot be so because all the human beings around me do not yet want to be free, and therefore, become against me instruments of oppression” (Malatesta 2001: 23). It is a radical idea of freedom, but one that, if red in light of more recent developments, is more timely than ever before.

§. 2 Back to freedom, beyond autonomy

In sum, freedom is inevitably freedom of equals, because I cannot be free if everybody else around me is not free, or, which is the same, if I do not have both the material and the cognitive means to realize my freedom. We are imbued with the customs, ideas and images that dominate our society. Human beings are not independent selves that, like billiard balls, kick each other on a green table. They are separate bodies that are instituted by the society in which they live. There are two main consequences that follows from such a view. Let me briefly illustrate them.

The first is that it implies a very concrete idea of how to realize freedom. Bakunin calls it a “materialist conception of freedom” (Bakunin 2000: 91) and opposed it to the idealistic one. If freedom is to be realized not just by a separate self (which does not exist) but through the society itself, it follows that an entire reorganization of society is necessary for its realization. It is well known that in Bakunin’s view this can only be done through a reorganization of society from below, according to the principle of free association and federation (see for instance Bakunin 2000: 96).

But why is it so? Free federalism follows from a view of freedom articulated in three moments. The first, Bakunin says is the positive and social moment and consists in the full development of all the human faculties and potentialities through education and material wellbeing — all things that can only be acquired through the psychical and intellectual work of the whole society (Bakunin 2000: 82). It is a view very close to Marx’ positive conception of freedom, according to which freedom does not consists in the negative capacity to avoid this or that, but in the positive power to develop our potentialities.[252] The basic idea is that abstract civil and political rights are empty words if I do not have the material and the intellectual means to exercise them ( this, incidentally, does not mean that we can negative freedoms are not important, but only that they need positive ones in order to be fulfilled).

The second is more negative and Bakunin calls it “the moment of the revolt” (Bakunin 2000: 82). It is the revolt against every authority, human or divine. God in the first place, because, how he puts is ,“as long as we have a master in the sky, we will not be free on earth” (ibid). Bakunin had a very traditional idea of such a God, but I think we can today extend it to all forms of transcendent authority. If we believe that we owe to such divine authority unconditional obedience, we are necessarily slaves of it, as well as of its intermediary, such as ministers, prophets, or messiahs (ibid). But this must be combined with the revolt against specifically human authority. Here Bakunin introduces a fine distinction between the legal and formal authority of the state and what he calls the “tyranny of the society” ( ibid). The revolt against the first, is easier because the enemy can easily be identified, but the one against the second is much more complicated.

Society, as we have seen, exercises its tyranny through customs, traditions, sentiments, prejudices and habits on both our material and the intellectual life. Part of its influence is natural and we cannot escape it (Bakunin 2000: 84), but part of it is not. Bakunin seems to believe that education and scientific knowledge is sufficient to this end, but I believe that we have more grounds today to be skeptical about it. Knowledge is not enough. Knowledge does not liberate from power because it is itself power. The production of scientific knowledge is no exception to the tyranny of society, because, as Michel Foucault has shown us, it may even be the chief mean for the domestication of revolt and the creation of compliant subjects.[253] Natural and social sciences, such as chemistry, demography, sociology have all proved to be potential means to discipline and domesticate human beings rather than to liberate them.

Where to start from then? Where to get a liberation from the subtle tyranny that the society exercise through its customs, traditions and sentiments? Here, I believe, comes the radical interpretation of federalism. Proudhon’s motto “multiply your associations and be free” can indeed be seen as a multiplication of both the political, but also the social and imaginary ties one is subjected to (Proudhon 2001). By entering into contacts with different social imaginaries and expanding one’s own knowledge to different regimes of truth, it is possible to find a moment of friction where the tyranny of society breaks down. As I will try to show later on, it is here that, particularly today, the possibility of freedom lies.

But before I do so, let me briefly illustrate the second consequence, that is, it being a complex view of freedom which goes well beyond mere autonomy. There are many different definitions of autonomy, but the most important (because the most influential) is that which goes back to its etymology: autonomy literally means “autos”-“nomos,” to give the law to oneself. From this original meaning and through the influence of Rousseau and Kant, the term came to mean selfdetermination more in general, as if every determination would be operated by the subjection to the law (which, I believe, is far from being the case). I cannot enter the details here of the historical path of the concept of autonomy, but let me just briefly mention the deep influence that it has exercised on liberal and democratic thought until very recently.[254]

Yet, the concept of autonomy is not immune from criticism. The most obvious is that it presupposes a “self” that can actually give a law to him/herself. As we have already suggested, this assumption is far from being unquestioned. If it is true that, since our coming into this world, we are determined by a number of social, economic and cultural factors, the assumption of a self separated form the others may result to be completely fallacious. We may believe that the law we have agreed to is one that we have freely chosen, but this choice will in all likelihood be the result of what Bakunin calls the subtle tyranny of society.

Furthermore, the idea of a separate self is an assumption that inevitably leads to what we may call a limitative view of freedom. If we believe that human beings are self-enclosed selves endowed with their own autonomy, the problem necessarily becomes that of limiting it, in order to make space for that of the others: like billiard balls kicking each other on an empty green table their respective freedoms are deemed to conflict with one another. On the contrary, if we assume that we are the product of the society we live in, a completely different perspective emerges: the problem is no longer how to limit freedom, but rather how to enhance it. In other words, don’t limit freedom, create it, because it may not be there yet.

Different authors have tried to address the problem of autonomy. Radical thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis in France and the Workerism in Italy have for instance tried to solve the dilemma by arguing that autonomy is also a collective enterprise. Workerism in Italy argued for the autonomy of the proletariat, showing that agency is immanent to its spontaneous action and does not need the guiding role of the party (Lotringer and Marazzi 2007).[255] On the other side, the French Marxist and psychoanalyst Castoriadis articulated the problem of autonomy in relation to the problem of the imaginary significations within which we all are socialized (Castoriadis 1987). In his view, I am autonomous if I am at the origins of what will be (arche ton esomenon as Aristotle used to say) and I know myself to be so (Castoriadis 1986: 479). Autonomy means that my discourse has to take the place of what is given as the discourse of the others — a view, that like Bakunin’s one, stresses the importance of the cognitive means for the realization of freedom.

These interventions have certainly brought the discussion on the problem of autonomy much further than where modern liberal thinking had left it. Yet, as I will now try to argue, focusing only on autonomy is misleading. Autonomy is an important condition for freedom, but only one part of it. You cannot be free without being autonomous, but being autonomous does not automatically means to be free. This particularly emerges if we consider that the contrary of “autonomy” is “heteronomy,” a condition where one is given the law by somebody else, whereas the opposite of freedom is “oppression,” something that can take place in ways others than simply by being given the law to somebody else.[256] The tyranny of society that we have described above can takes place in many different ways, which go well beyond the law and include even self-oppression and voluntary servitude. In sum, freedom and autonomy are conceptually speaking only partially overlapping. For those who are skeptical of analytic philosophical distinction, just consider common language: I can say that my child is very autonomous, because he can dress himself, eat and walk on his own, but by no means this amount to his freedom. It is very clear: to be autonomous does not yet mean to be free.

But it is not just a terminological. It is a question of conceptual clarity that has crucial consequences on the practice of freedom itself. For instance many autonomist movements gave rise to utopian communities, based on the principle of autonomy thinking that this is the main road for the realization of freedom. Let us admit for the moment that one could still realize such autonomous communities in our globalizing world. The question is: are the people living is such communities really free? My impression is that they are (possibly) autonomous in the sense of being (materially) independent from the outside, but by no means free and perhaps not even self-determined. If you live in a self-imposed ghetto, separated from the rest of the world, you are not free, because you cannot live where you want, but you are not even self-determined because your choice to live in that particular community is imposed by some external factors (read: the rest of the world).

Thinkers like Goodman may be right in saying that autonomy is an necessary step. In his view, the problem with oppressed people lusting for freedom is that, if they manage to break free, then they do not know what to do (Goodman 2009:331). Not having been autonomous, they do not know how to go about it, and before they learn it is usually too late. New managers will have taken over and they may, or may not, be benevolent and imbued with the revolution, but they never will be in a hurry to abdicate. We should therefore agree with him in that autonomy is an important condition for freedom, perhaps even the most important because it amounts to a sort of school for it. Yet, it still remains only one part of it.

To conclude on this point, the critics of the concept of freedom, such as Goodman, who argued that freedom is a cumbersome metaphysical concept are perhaps right. Autonomy is much thinner and apparently easier to realize. But it is a burden that we have to assume if we want to avoid the self-imposed ghetto of autonomy.

§. 3 Black and red: reciprocal antidotes.

In the previous sections I have tried to illustrate why Marxism and anarchism converge in the idea that freedom can only be a freedom of equals. What I want to do in the remaining part is to argue that a connubial between Marxism and anarchism is particularly beneficial in that they can find in each other the reciprocal antidote for their possible degenerations.

Firstly, anarchism needs Marxism in order to prevent both the individualist and the metaphysic degeneration of its absolutisation of freedom. Let me start from the first, the individualist danger. It is a fact that the radical praise of freedom that characterizes anarchism in all of its historical manifestation can be declined in both directions: an individualist, according to which freedom is mainly the freedom of the individual, and a social one, according to which freedom can only be attained collectively (Bottici 2010). I prefer to call it “social” because as such it includes both the anarcho-communism, on the lines of Kropotkin, and the collectivist variant, which, on the lines of Bakunin, leaves some space for the individual enjoyment of property.

The point is not only that, historically speaking, an individualist interpretation of anarchism has proved to be possible. We began this essay with Stirner’s advocacy of a radical egoism, but many other examples can be added. One just have to think of the very influential anarchocapitalism, which, particularly in the US, promotes a radical anarchic evaluation of freedom by combining it with its advocacy of an unrestricted development of the principle of capitalism.[257] One may simply dismiss these positions as fallacious “Robinsonades,” but the point remains that they are still very influential because in line with the prevailing individualist assumptions that underpin at least our western world.

Even more: In the face of the difficulties encountered in promoting the realization of the freedom of equals on a large scale, anarchists may easily fall into the individualist temptation and limit their fight to the realization of spaces of autonomy in limited, self-enclosed communities. This, I believe, is the risk that many autonomists movements in Italy and Germany for instance have run in the past: the creation of autonomous communities may well turn into a form of individualism on a large scale. The creation of such self-enclosed spaces is usually justified on the basis of the argument that they prefigure what a free society may look like, but they risk to prefigure nothing but what the society actually is: individuals, singular or collective, pursuing their own interests in isolation.

For this possible degeneration, Marxism contains a powerful antidote. Marx’s critique of the Robinsonades can be extended at all levels to concretely support the idea that either we are all free or all equally slaves. The reason why Marxism is better equipped than traditional anarchism to make this point (as we have seen Bakunin equally supported the idea of freedom as freedom of equals) is that it more strongly focused on the economic conditions for the realization of such a freedom. No other author has to my knowledge embarked on such an extensive scientific analysis of the concrete economic conditions for the realization of freedom. Marx and Engels’ critique of the utopian socialism and more in generally the idea that it is sufficient to describe an ideal state of things and this will automatically follows just because of its intrinsic intellectual value is a powerful reminder of the dangers of any abstract and unrealistic metaphysic of freedom: by envisaging utopian communities on the basis of the sole fanatical belief in the miraculous effects of ones own social sciences, one risks ending up in a reactionary position unable to keep the pace of the current state of the world.[258]

I cannot enter here a detailed analysis of Marx’ analysis of capitalism and modernity. Sure, there are parts of it that are outdated- in particular for the novelties brought about by post-Fordism and flexible capitalism.[259] Let me just point here out to what I believe are the most timely parts of his work. In the first place, there is analysis of capitalism capacity to overcome all sorts of political barriers. We live in an epoch where there is so much talk about globalization and the crisis of the nation states vis-a-vis the capacity of the economy to go beyond national boundaries, but this is something that nobody had ever predicted more acutely and more precisely than Marx. In many places of his work he talks about the capitalism capacity to go beyond national boundaries, like the following passage from the Manifesto of the Communist Party: “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. [..] In the place of old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Marx and Engels, 1978: 477–8)

In a time when there is so much talk about the novelty of globalization which, so many argues, calls for a new form of cosmopolitanism, it is worth to go back to this passage: here Marx and Engles clearly pointed to the “cosmopolitan character” of both capitalistic production and consumption, to the fact that with the heavy artillery of the “cheap prices of its commodities” capitalism will batter down all Chinese walls (Marx and Engels, 1978: 8), so that in place of the old local and national self-sufficiency, we have “intercourse in every direction” at both the material and cognitive level (Marx and Engles 1978: 477).

Nobody, I believe, could ever deny the timeliness of these remarks. It has become something like a commonplace to say that we live in a globalizing world, where material and cultural boundaries are being challenged from many different sides. And I think that only the historical amnesia of a generation of scholars that, after 1989, have too quickly become not just “post-“ but also militant “ex-“ Marxist can explain how is it possible to talk so much about globalization without ever mentioning the author who most emphatically and accurately predicted it more than a century ago.

But Marx’s economic analysis gave further underpinning to the concept of freedom of equals that we have highlighted above also with his path-breaking analysis of the commodities fetishism (Marx 1980: 103–115). If Bakunin is right in saying that freedom has to be a freedom of equals because from the beginning we are subjected to the tyranny of society which imposes its material and representational significations on our minds and bodies, then it is precisely from the possible commoditisation of such significations that we have to start. Perhaps only the visionary and Situationist Guy Debord has sufficiently underlined this point (Debord 1994)[260] with his idea of a society of spectacle, he rightly pointed out that mass-media were the most relevant fetish of our times. Debord recovers Marx’ fundamental insight about commodity fetishism and brought it to a further level: Marx’s telling begin of The Capital “The world is an immense collection of commodities” become the first thesis of Debord: “The world is an immense collection of spectacles”(check English quot). We live in a society of spectacle that fundamentally means commoditisation of the social imaginary within which all are socialized and cannot therefore exists. The global social imaginary we live in is imbued with commodities fetishism up to point that even our bodies are constituted by it. Fashion, pop culture, Hollywood films, along with the various technologies of the self are only the primary and most visible examples.

But it is not only anarchism that needs Marxism if a freedom of equals is to be realized. Anarchism plays an equally crucial part in that it contains the antidote for a possible (and real) statist and authoritarian degeneration of Marxism. It is a fact that Marx remained mainly vague as to the path to embark to realize freedom. The impression that one mainly gets by reading his entire work is that he believed a revolution would automatically follows from the contradictions of capitalism society. In this he probably remained too much linked to Hegel’s dialectic, according to which from a series of structural contradictions their inevitable overcoming must follow (quot ) . Yet, he also mentions the very much debated “revolutionary dictatorship of proletariat” as the moment of transition towards a communist society. As he puts in the Critique of the Gotha Program: “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” ( Marx 1978d: 538).

As well known the idea which, to be true, occupies only a couple of brief passages in his monumental work)[261] was taken up by Lenin along with other Marxist thinkers. Furthermore, to many it seemed to have become a concrete living reality with the Soviet state socialism — which, in fact, according to certain readings was in fact a form of bureaucratic State capitalism (see for instance Castoriadis). Against this statist degeneration, anarchism has the most powerful antidote: the idea that means must be commensurate to the ends and that freedom can only be realized through freedom itself. It is an idea that occupies a central part of Bakunin’s work but that recurs in all anarchist thinkers: freedom can only be realized through freedom itself and endanger it with the pretext to protect is dangerous non sense which ultimately cannot but destroy it (see for instance Bakunin 2000: 98 and Malatesta 2001: 52).

The experience of the Soviet Union showed that anarchists were right in their critique of Marxists: a workers’ state cannot but reproduce the same logic of every state, where a minority of bureaucrats rule over the majority of people (and, incidentally, I believe that the current resurgence of interest in anarchism is also due to the fact that the decline in popularity of Marxism following the fall of the Berlin’s wall has left a sort of vacuum in the left). But anarchism does not only provide the antidote to the statist degeneration: it can more broadly prevent the authoritarian trap into which any attempt to realize the freedom of equals can fall.

Proudhon pointed out this very clearly where he observes that communism can also be realized through the principle of authority. In his view, there are four main types of government , which correspond to the two main principles of authority and freedom: regimes of authority are both the government of all by one (monarchy) and the government of all by all (what he calls panarchy or communism), whilst regimes of freedom are both the government of all by everybody (democracy) and the government of everyone by everyone, which is the anarchy or self-rule (Proudhon 2001: 125–133). Proudhon’s federalism can indeed be interpreted as a combination of the last two forms of government, what he calls respectively democracy and anarchy. And the same hold for Bakunin’s free federation that we have mentioned above.

§. 4 One world, one freedom.

The connubial between Marxism and anarchism that we have outlined above is not simply a demand of the theoretical and practical reason. It is not a marriage that simply ought to take place if the freedom of equals is to be realized. It is something that is inscribed in the nature of the changes we are witnessing and that, for the sake of brevity, we can summarize under the name of globalization. Put in a nutshell, there is only one freedom because the world has become one. Globalization does not only mean that there are processes that objectively unifies the globe, but also, and foremost, that we have come to recognize this fact. In a minimal sense, this has always been the case, because we have always inhabited in one and the same planet. What is different today is that we have to recognize this, because there is no longer the possibility to call ourselves out.

Let me briefly illustrate what I mean with this. Globalization is often presented as a set of processes which shift the spatial form of human organization and activity to transcontinental and inter-regional patterns of activity, interactions and exercises of power.[262] Globalization, in its numerous aspects — economic, technological, political and cultural — has created such a situation that events, decisions and activities in one part of the world can have significant consequences for individuals and communities in other quite distant parts of the globe. In sum, the concept of globalization points to the stretching and deepening of social relations and institutions across space and time.

Fluxes from the local to the global and vice versa have unified the planet. The world has become one at all levels: economic, political, military and cultural. With regard to the first, we have already seen how early Marx diagnosed the “cosmopolitan” character of capitalism. Here suffice to add that, however more complex and flexible the current global capitalism may be, Marx and Engels’ prediction that “in the place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every directions, universal inter-dependence of nations” (Marx and Engels 1978: 476) still holds true. Together with economic comes the political globalization: they are inseparable from many points of view. Promoter of the economic and financial globalization, the nation state seems to be one of its most illustrious victim. Sure, states are far from vanishing (and the repressive policies they are enacting all over the world is a stark reminder of this fact) but they are certainly challenged by a dispersion of sovereignty both above and below them.

But perhaps the domain where the crisis of the system of nation states is more evident is that of security. It is in the field where the modern state, at least since Thomas Hobbes, has traditionally, although surreptitiously, drawn the strongest justification for its existence that one can at best measure the degree of its crisis. Human beings, so the modern argument went, are led to cede their unconditional freedom to the sovereign power in order to enhance their security.[263] Even admitting that this has ever been the case (and I would deny it did), it no longer holds true. The state is today simply patently incapable to guarantee the security of it citizens, not only vis-a vis attacks with nuclear, bacteriological or other non conventional weapons, but also, and perhaps most importantly vis-a vis ecological and other kinds of man-made global challenges. No single state could ever arrest an epidemiological attack or even simply contrast global warming effects. Hence the dispersion of sovereignty through what some have called a “multilayered global governance” and Negri and Hardt named instead “empire” by which they mean a system of authority which has no definitive center.[264] (Incidentally, in an epoch when book proliferate about the decline of the nation states it is surprising that so few academics felt the need to go back to anarchism, that tradition of thought which most incisively advocated and predicted their decline).

But this is only one side of the story. Globalization does not only mean an horizontal extension of the chains of interdependence: it also implies an intensification of vertical ones. Power is not only dispersed below and above the nation states, it has also penetrated within the deepest mechanisms of life: in a word, it has become bio-power. The biopolitical transformation that Hardt and Negri integrated in their concept of empire (Hardt and Negri 2000) has first been diagnosed by Michel Foucault who draws it back to the intimate constitution of modernity. Foucault major intuition is the idea the while in the first part of modernity the sovereign power was mainly a power to inflict death, with the late modernity it becomes a power that is aimed at inciting, promoting articulating, in a word disciplining life itself. The modality of such a power are the two poles of the individual body and the body of the populations, whereas the means through which it is exercised are disciplines such as medicine, biology, statistics, demography and the science of police.[265] Yet, today such a biopolitical transformation goes beyond Foucault’s political analysis: it now invests not only the modes of governance but also the economic production, in that it is the whole of our subjectivity that is invested by it in post-Fordist capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2000; Bazzicalupo 2006).

Today governance is therefore global both it its spatial and in its nature. The fact that people felt the need of a new word (“governance” or “governamentality” instead of “government”) is due to the fact that the thing itself has changed. No longer the centralized, vertical power of the modern nation state, but a reticular and decentralized form of power which is enriched by the pervasiveness provided by the new biopolitical technologies. It is a transformation that can offer possibilities for liberation but also open the path to the most horrible servitude. Power can today more than ever come to control the deepest mechanism of life[266] and together with it also the way in which we think about it.

The governance is global because it extends into our bodies and therefore also the way we think of them. Together with our bodies, it also disciplines our minds. Not by chance, economic and political globalization are unthinkable outside of the cultural one. The stretching and deepening of the social chains of interdependence also means the stretching and deepening of the imaginary chains that potentially connect the entire globe. We think globally, because the globe has become the horizon of our perception of the world, but also because our social imaginaries are increasingly intermingled.

This is what Debord tried to convey with his idea of a society of spectacle. He pointed out very early that the first danger for freedom comes from the commoditisation of our social imaginary. In the epoch of Hollywood and the global networks of communication, we cannot but agree that the world has become an immense collection of spectacles (Debord 1994: thesis 1). But Debord also persuasively argues that the spectacle is not only a set of images, but also, and foremost, a social relationship between people that is mediated through images (Debord 1994: thesis 4). This basically means that the way in which we relate to the others is mediated by the images that we have internalized from the social imaginary, which, however, is a social imaginary increasingly dominated by commodity fetishism.

Just consider what politics has become and what it used to be. The activity that we usually mean with this term is unconceivable outside of the continual flux of images that enter our screens every day. But the competition among images, like that among every other commodities, is very hard so that the golden rule of audience imposes itself: only those images that can capture peoples attention can become part of the spectacle. Hence the increasing spectacularisation of politics. What used to be an activity done by real people has become to a large extent a pure spectacle, so that images are no longer what mediate our doing politics, but what risks doing politics in our stead.

In one thing however Debord was wrong. Like Marx before him, he though that it was possible to counterpoise to the spectacle the reality of things (see, for instance, Debord 1995: thesis 7). In the epoch of virtual reality, images have instead become ongoing processes so that there is no longer the possibility to distinguish between original and fake. In other words, the society of spectacle has become global, in the double sense that it has stretched its boundaries to embrace the entire globe, but also that it has invaded all ambits of life so that one can no longer say where the spectacle ends and real life begins.

The major result of such a process is that politics has become to great extent a struggle for people’s imagination. Power has always depended on imagination. If power is the capacity to influence another person and make him or her do what he or she otherwise would not have done, then it is clear that the most effective power is the power that can be felt without being seen. In this sense, the power to construct a successful version of reality, much before than that to dispose of the means for coercion, is what ultimately guarantees political power per se. But today, as a consequence of the increased role that images play in our social life and their potential extension to the whole globe, this has reached a further stage: the control over the means for physical coercion is overcome by the greater role played by the control of the means of interpretation (Bottici and Challand 2010).

Within this scenario, freedom is possible only as freedom of equals. Bakunin’s idea that you cannot be free unless everybody else around you is free is more timely than ever. Cognitive is the oppression, cognitive, and therefore collective, must be the liberation. If our being increasingly depends on what other people think and imagine we are, then it is clear that freedom can only be attained collectively. There is no intermediate possibility: We are either all slaves or all free.

The new global movements that have emerged worldwide in the last fifteen years have shown this very clearly.[267] With their direct actions in occasion of G8 and other summits, they may not have changed the course of those specific political meeting, but they have changed the spectacle that was put on stage by them (Incidentally, note that the pure spectacle is the only purpose of such meetings as nothing concrete ever comes out of them that was not already decided before). The organization and the actions of the new-global movement perfectly responds to the challenges of our epoch. This is not only because many of its militants have been influenced by either Marxism or anarchism, the two traditions of thought from which we derived the idea of freedom as freedom of equals. This is because as Graeber put it, “anarchism is at the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what’s new and hopeful about it” (Graeber 2002: 62). By this I do not mean that its activists recognize themselves as “anarchist” in some sense — which is far from being the case as many have noted (Juris 2009). I mean that the intimate logic of its functioning is anarchical in its essence because it responds to the principle of free federation and association.[268]

As well known, the movement lacks any central authority, a single charismatic leader or even a fully fledged program decided once and for all. Yet, this does not mean that activists do not know what they want, as observers used to think in the traditional terms of hierarchical politics may think. It means that it a movement that grew up according to a logic of networking which strictly follows the each time emerging needs and affinities among the people. Its organization is non- hierarchical, its coordination decentralized, its decision making shaped by a new attempt to reinvent direct democracy (and thus favoring strategies for consensus finding rather than simple majority rule). In brief, it works according to the principle of free federalism.

So commentators are mistaken when they observe that the movement is not or only partially anarchist in that its logic derives from a wider networking logic associated with late capitalism (Juris 1999: 213). In my view, one can say exactly the opposite: the movement is anarchical precisely because it follows such a wider networking logic, which may well ultimately derive from post-Fordist capitalism, but has grown by far beyond it. One finds the same logic in the most different sectors of social life and the results are at times astonishing.

Let me give you two examples. The first taken from my home country, Italy. Of the most interesting examples of the way in which networking can fight capitalism exploitation are the experience of the so called GAS. This is the acronym for Gruppi di acquisto solidale or Solidarity Based Purchasing Groups, which proliferated often in the shade of the experience of the Social forums. The basic ideas behind them is that small groups of people gather together usually in the same territory to create a group that is able to buy directly from the producers. All of them are then networked in wider associations organized on a regional and then national level.[269] Through the flexible logic of networking, members of the GAS are able to buy products of a very high quality for a reduced price and at the same time support small enterprises that escape the logic of corporate capitalism. Such networks are very efficient in providing material goods for very convenient prices but also works as platform for the diffusion of information.

The second example concerns instead exactly this point, the sharing of information. Few people have in my view yet sufficiently stressed the revolution that the internet is bringing about for the diffusion of knowledge.[270] Internet has not only deeply changed our possibilities for networking, but also the way we can think about the world. In other words, it has change the spectacle of it. Independent media, websites of the most different sorts, open access sources such as Wikipedia. The latter is in my view an happy example of the efficiency of anarchism: apply to the principle that the competence is not individual but a collective process of free contribution and what you obtain is the biggest encyclopedia ever realized, working in many different languages and whose quality, according to an independent study, is equivalent to that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.[271] Sure internet requires technical skills and the possibility to have access to it, but all those who can have them automatically gain access to an immense reservoir of knowledge. This I believe is very likely to challenge the nature of the production of knowledge and in particular its extremely specialized nature that resulted from the logic of the modernity.

Conclusions

Globalization has become reflexive. People act in the world and think about their action with the entire globe as their horizon of experience. Activists networking from one side of the globe to the other, migrants crossing (legally or illegally) borders and, to a certain extent, even multinational corporations and political institutions above and below the nation states, they all say one and the same thing: networks are better than hierarchies. Otherwise said, globalization has demonstrated what modern political thought has always been reluctant to recognize: an anarchic order is possible and even desirable.

In conclusion, let me recall Pedrini’s poem from which we began. It is not by chance that his poem, first put into music by Paola Nicolazzi, has only recently become a very popular song in Italy and elsewhere under the tile of “The galeon” (Il galeone). Recovered by the contemporary rock band, “Les anarchistes,” it accompanied the rise of the new-global movements in Italy and elsewhere. The reason why so many people found it so inspiring in these days is that it perfectly expresses the view of freedom outlined before: one is the world, one must be freedom, because we are all on the same boat. In a world in which the fate of a few islands depends on the behavior of the industries on the other side of the globe, in which the planet has become a global society of spectacle, you cannot be autonomous without being free, or, what is the same, you cannot be free on your own. It is a very radical view of freedom, but one that is more timely than ever before. History itself has reversed the liberal motto “your freedom ends where that of the others begin” into a new one: “your freedom can only begin with that of everybody else.”

References