By Charles Weigl

OAKLAND, MAY 2004—There's a glass ceiling in Left theory, an invisible barrier beyond which radical political thought rarely proceeds. Theorists pile up at this conceptual bottleneck every day, their projects stalled, unable to see a way forward. These writers tend to come from Marxist and state-socialist backgrounds and their blockage stems largely from an inability—and sometimes refusal—to seriously engage anarchist and anti-authoritarian social theory.

The pressure is building. The barrier becomes more obvious every day as leftists of all persuasions admit the extensive anarchist influence on the networked and somewhat nonhierarchical structure of the global justice movement. American anarchism, since the Red Scare of the early 20th century and the rise of the Communist Party, has led a largely fragmented and underground existence. It has re-emerged today as a guiding force in the largest international movement for social change we've seen in several decades.

Marxists, perhaps conditioned by a 150-year tradition of anarchist-bashing, seem largely at a loss when it comes to dealing with this fact in a productive manner that might strengthen and advance the movement. Three writers who have recently appeared on the Gloves Off site—Barbara Epstein, Emir Sader and Giovanni Mazzetti—provide related examples of this impasse. All three offer otherwise useful and incisive analyses of the global justice movement and/or its anarchist influences, but they end those analyses precisely where need to begin.

In her Gloves Off interview [March-April 2004] and her essay "Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement", Epstein argues that a nonhierarchical, network model of political struggle has certain built-in limitations. She asks several good questions. How can the currently marginal global justice movement become a mass social force? How can it develop "a strong, ongoing popular base" and especially make solid connections to the labor movement, if it doesn't create stable, permanent, accountable institutions and "some lasting bureaucracies" that provide continuity over time? What will prevent it, like previous movements, from appearing in a moment of crisis only to fade away? She leaves these questions open, honestly admitting that she can't see the answers. However, she makes it clear that anarchism can't provide them. She claims that effective organization, despite anomalies like the IWW, is not anarchism's forte.

Sader's analysis stalls at the same place. While he doesn't mention anarchism explicitly in his Gloves Off interview or his essay "Beyond Civil Society," the main problem he sees for the future of the World Social Forum lies in its "rejection of parties and governments." For him, a refusal to engage in state politics (which he seems to confuse with a refusal to engage the state at all) means the WSF has abandoned the field of battle, or at least has laid down its most powerful weapon.

The exclusion of political parties and governmental organizations, he maintains, forces the WSF to distance itself "from the themes of power, the state, public sphere, political leadership and even, in a sense, ideological struggle." This amounts to "giving up any attempt to build an alternative hegemony, or any global proposals to counter and defeat world capitalism's current neoliberal project." Why this is true remains unclear. Unlike Epstein, he doesn't pose his concerns as questions. He asserts them as self-evident facts that require neither explanation nor further investigation. Epstein can't see the answer. Sader doesn't see the question.

Mazzetti proceeds with eyes wide shut. In his article and interview on Gloves Off, he rejects anarchism and explains why. Unfortunately, his arguments ultimately rest as much on a foundation of unquestioned assumption as Sader's. "If one wants to go beyond the previous forms of socialization," he says, "one should not expect to be able to do it just by getting rid of them, but rather by elaborating new forms...The moment in which people subtract themselves from the previous form of hierarchy can be a necessary step in creating the need for a new organization. But it cannot be considered an end in itself."

No anarchist I hang out with would disagree, but Mazzetti sees this position as antithetical to anarchism. He sets up simple dichotomies, like freedom/necessity and spontaneity/organization, and constructs his version of anarchism entirely at one pole. His anarchists are all individualists, allergic to every form of organization.

Features include:

In the Belly of the Beast
A Gloves Off history of the global justice movement in the US. Our first major article chronicles the emergence and development of resistance to neoliberalism in the US and examines the larger historical, political and economic context out of which it grew.

The Gospel of Free Trade
Ramaa Vasudevan debunks the economic model at the heart of the "free-trade gospel."

Pursuing the Meaning of Abu Ghraib
Gloves Off co-editor Joe Smith on the challenges that the crimes from Abu Ghraib present to the Global Justice movement.

The Glass Ceiling
Anarchist reader Charles Weigel responds to Epstein's, Mazzetti's and Sader's Articles in the Spring 2004 issue of Gloves Off.

They are caricatures. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of anarchists who resemble the parody (and many who are even worse), but why focus on such easy targets—especially when they are a minority element in the anarchist tradition?

More fundamental is Mazzetti's claim that the elaboration of new social forms means reinstituting political and economic hierarchies. Here he has found something with which most anarchists would disagree. He has also brought us to the same glass ceiling that stopped Epstein and Sader. To transcend it, or at least justify remaining on this side of it, he would have to explain why the global justice movement doesn't already constitute a "new organization" and/or why forcing the movement back into hierarchical models is absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, he does neither. He simply declares the network structure a "nascent" form and leaves it at that. [note 2>]

His justification of hierarchy is equally brief: one quick reference to Engels' "On Authority", a list of very general points about the alleged ubiquity of authoritarian social relationships (babies need adults to procure their food, pupils [supposedly] never teach their teachers, we all live by rules, etc.) and moves on. This doesn't constitute theoretical engagement: it's the political equivalent of a cranky grandfather chastising children with clichés.

Why is there no serious Marxist engagement with the nonhierarchical structure of the global justice movement? Epstein, Sader and Mazzetti certainly make positive contributions to the beginnings of one, but they take us only so far. When it comes to practical, organizational questions about the movement's future direction they have little to say. A strength of all three, and of Marxist theory in general, is their attention to history, the insistence that a Left which doesn't study and learn from its past is doomed to continually "start from zero."

Yet the impasse they reach is a very old one in the history of the Left, one we should have learned long ago can't be addressed with simple assertions about the inevitability of hierarchy and centralization (or, on the anarchist side, simple assertions to the contrary). We need a rigorous exploration of alternatives and possibilities.

We need to re-pose assertions and ingrained assumptions as questions, rather than relying on the unexamined logics of our respective "traditions." [note 3>]

That Epstein, Sader and Mazzetti don't do this is frustrating for at least two reasons. First, Epstein's relative openness aside, it amounts to a dismissal or denial of an actually existing social movement. Critique is important, but there's a disturbing sense in which contemporary Marxists, when faced with a situation that doesn't mesh with their ideas, insist that reality is at fault, not theory.

Obviously the relationship between word and world, theory and practice, is more complex than that, but I think it's fair to say that the burden of proof and relevance always rests with the theorist. That burden also involves a responsibility to travel some distance with a movement, to learn from it's participants, before declaring that they've got it all wrong.

If we were to give the global justice movement this respect, not to mention the benefit of the doubt for sharing Marxism's anti-capitalist goals, we might get a lot further. In other words, before rejecting it, we should ask, for instance, how a nonhierarchical network structure might make the connections

Epstein calls for and build some sort of continuity and permanence without resurrecting the failed state-oriented solutions of the past? What would a project for Sader's "alternative hegemony" look like if it didn't align itself with governments or political parties? How can the network model become more efficiently and effectively organized (a la Mazzetti) and evolve from a clearinghouse for ideas into a real social force? And how can it do so without sacrificing the autonomy of its various sectors or the incredible fertility of its current arrangement?

The second reason the impasse is so frustrating is that these are precisely the questions anarchists have been raising since the time of Proudhon. Even Epstein's generally positive history of anarchism fails to mention any really substantial practical or theoretical contributions in 150 years of anarchist writing and praxis—beyond, that is, a vague "moral" attention to the dangers of tyranny and an "expressive" political style. [note 4>]

In one sense, there's nothing "new" about the networked structure of the global justice movement. To the extent that it can be called anarchist, it's the federated model Proudhon outlined throughout his uneven, ever-evolving career. It's the leaderless unity Bakunin advocated for the First International. [note 5>]

It's the embryonic association of soviets and factory committees the Russian anarchists helped to develop before the Bolshevik consolidation of power. It's the industrial and agriculture collectives the CNT-FAI tried to coordinate in Spain in the 1930s (after decades of educational and organizational preparation).

Some anarchist writers look even further back, citing the Mir of the Russian peasants and various indigenous societies as useful, pre-anarchist models—which becomes less far-fetched when we consider the indigenous roots of the Zapatistas, who have greatly influenced today's movement. I'd go further and say that "networks" (coordinated federations of disparate, democratic units) tend to be the initial form most revolutions adopt, if only because, once they reach a certain size, social movements must articulate an array of subgroups that, while they have certain shared goals, may differ on tactics and other particulars--and be understandably hesitant about ceding their autonomy to distant, unaccountable leaders. The network structure has always been an obvious, reasonable way to overcome ideological, regional, inter- and intra-class divisions, while maintaining overall unity.

However old, the network model remains an unrealized potential for the organized Left. The reasons are too numerous to mention here, but they certainly include the varied and repeated mistakes of the anarchists themselves. A fair appraisal of this history would also have to list the tactics of state socialists. Not as a convenient whipping boy or to engage in useless sectarianism, but with the simple admission that proponents of network models of social transformation and reconstruction have often been violently suppressed on two fronts: by the forces of reaction and by authoritarian elements on the Left. Which is to say that the glass ceiling in theory has had very real, frequently bloody, practical implications—ones that the Left has faced over and over—always, it seems, starting from zero.

We need to figure this stuff out. 19th century revolutionaries were fond of distinguishing between "Germanic" and "Latin" tendencies in the First International. [note 6>]

While the meaning of the distinction varied depending on who was making it, "Germanic" was usually code for the Marxist, centralizing inclinations of German and British delegates. It stood more generally for theoretical discipline, focused historical analysis, and a methodical, incremental organizational style. The "Latin" contingent (mainly French, Italian, Swiss and Spanish delegates) argued for decentralization, federated sectional autonomy, and what might be called a more "insurrectionist" approach to organizing.

While it's an imprecise and very loaded distinction, I'd like to borrow it for a moment and suggest that what we need today, in fact what we've needed for 150 years, is a "Germanic" attention to "Latin" concerns. Not, as is usually the case, for the purpose of endless negative critique designed to "win" debates with one's "opponents," but with a positive and constructive focus on the situation we actually face: a mass movement that has organized itself in a decentralized fashion.

After all, there is nothing inherently un-Marxist about decentralization. Marxist theory doesn't lead inevitably to authoritarianism. Not because Marx intentionally left the question open or unaddressed, but because he actually said many different (often contradictory) things—which one would expect of any vital theory developed in struggle over an extended period of time. One can read Marx and come away with, among other things, an extremely hierarchical vision, an anti-authoritarian and "communardian" exuberance, a social democratic policy, and a refusal to prescribe anything in advance. Since Marx, there has been a significant tradition of libertarian Marxism, council communism, and other less easily classifiable theories for us to draw on.

And it's time to start drawing. Obviously, we anarchists have yet to find a solution. If perceptive writers like Epstein, Sader and Mazzetti devoted their efforts to moving beyond familiar historical blockages, we might still shatter that glass ceiling.