So, What the Hell is Post-Left Anarchism Anyway?
From CounterPunch by Nicky Reid
I have spent the better part of my life as a bomb-throwing, dyed-in-the-wool, radical leftist, and there was a time when I would have gladly laid down my own life for that cause, probably because there was a time when that cause quite literally saved my life. Growing up Queer and strange in a very small, spiritually abusive community, I didn’t have a whole lot to live for but the far-left, at least as I understood it, gave me something to fight for and gave me something to fight with.
In a profoundly unsafe environment where I was surrounded by institutional authoritarianism, in a place where literally everyone I knew and every institution that I engaged with on a daily basis was strictly governed by the same church that oversaw my molestation, it was the analysis of iconoclastic creatures like Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, and Frantz Fanon that gave me the means not just to comprehend the cruelty of my existence, but to overcome it as well.
These values were driven home even further by my exposure to early punk rock and 60’s counterculture absorbed through the unlikely medium of moldy old magazines in my mother’s basement vintage clothing store. Time and Life may have intended for those articles to demonize someone else’s youth culture, but I was electrified by their shocking stories about Black Panthers and Sex Pistols.
Fearless degenerates going toe to toe with the same high-minded culture of moral decency which had forfeited my scary body over to a pair of pedophile priests and gagged my screams with balled up pages of the Old Testament. These were junkies and juvenile delinquents with shotguns and Stratocasters, taking pot shots at the greatest empire on earth and then shouting ‘fuck you’ from the ramparts when the beast came roaring back.
This was the left as I knew it. One that existed, much like my bewitching gender identity, somewhere else, on the periphery, but one committed to doing battle directly with the forces of authoritarianism on every conceivable front, and it was under this influence that I committed myself entirely to the social anarchisms of libertarian Marxism and libertarian socialism. But lately I’ve been coming to believe that either the left has changed, or I never really understood the movement to begin with.
During an age when the Atlanticist war machine is suing for nuclear holocaust on multiple battlefields and the prison state is digging its claws into every pocket carrying a smartphone, most self-proclaimed leftists seem to be more concerned with quibbling over the petty details of 19th century dogma, that is when they’re not busy virtue signaling on a soapbox of collegiate cultural superiority and labeling any portion of the map that has fallen under the poisonous sway of Trumpism to be irredeemably fascist.
Meanwhile, even professed social anarchists seem eager to hop into bed with any big government solution that gets them laid with cute hippie chicks on the quad. Sure, just give the federal government unfettered access to every school, hospital, and computer lab, just so long as they promise to make it free for the proletariat because that’s leftism, right? Not smashing the institutions of upper-class domination but handing them even bigger hammers in exchange for a conditional allowance of free shit.
Maybe. Maybe not. But in this environment, I can no longer call myself a leftist without cringing and so, in this environment, I have increasingly come to self-identify as post-left. But what the hell is a post-left anarchism anyway? According to some typically brilliant social anarchists like Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky, it’s all just “lifestyle anarchism”, a bunch of horny faggots and luddites playing Rousseau and getting their “noble savage” on by smashing computers in gawdy face paint.
A decidedly less grouchy-grandpa interpretation would be a return to non-sectarian 19th century style anarchism, what was once referred to as anarchism without adjectives, only updated with a critique of modern anarchism’s problematic relationship with traditional left-wing politics. But if you’re asking me personally, I prefer to refer to my old mentor Johnny Rotten, at least before he sold out.
When the Sex Pistols failed to serve as anything but a shallow parody of the iconoclasm that they once represented, John Lydon, the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten, didn’t give up on punk rock to sell patio furniture in Cornwall. He formed Public Image Ltd and helped re-invent punk rock with post-punk, a subgenre that sought to revitalize punk not just by looking back to its founding fathers in acts like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground, but by expanding its revolutionary potential with some assistance from noisy troublemakers that existed totally outside of the genre like Yoko Ono, Alice Coltrane, and Captain Beefheart.
The result was returning punk rock to its avante garde roots while also encouraging kids like Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye in the burgeoning hardcore scene to build their own revolution in their parents’ garages.
To me, this is the true meaning of post-left anarchism. It is not a wholesale rejection of leftism but an attempt to expand upon its original vision by thinking outside of the rusty lockbox that has become the increasingly antiquated left-right paradigm. It’s about returning to the deeper critiques of mainstream society and modern progress as a whole laid out by often overlooked left-wing thinkers like William Morris, Emma Goldman, John Africa, and the Situationist International while also daring to expand upon those ideas under the influence of provocateurs totally outside of traditional leftist dogma like Michel Foucault, Murray Rothbard, Malcolm X, and Ted Kaczynski.
But more than anything, it is about expanding the far-left’s critique of power dynamics to every institution in which one class is made the master of another. This means confronting the tyranny of psychiatry over those of us deemed insane. This means confronting the tyranny that teachers maintain over their students and the tyranny that doctors maintain over their patients. This means confronting the fact that these institutions are no more redeemable than the prison or the police.
This means holding all means of class division accountable including those created by the tax code and the welfare state, regardless of whether that squares with whatever the hell leftism is or whatever the hell leftism has become. And yes, this means smashing computers in gawdy face paint because theater is a weapon accessible to everyone and civilization is a weapon of the rich.
That’s what being post-left means to me. It’s not a rejection of leftism but a reassessment of what leftism means and that means not only being willing to confront old school leftism on its bullshit but also being willing to learn from its triumphs as well.
Post-left anarchists who choose to reject leftism in its entirety do so to their own detriment because there is still a great deal that leftism has to teach us that we all seem to forget, perhaps the most important of which is solidarity and intersectionality across all lines, including ideology. This means being willing to stand by Islamists in Palestine, Orthodox traditionalists in the Donbass, anti-modern tribalists in New Guinea, and yes, even Maoists in the Philippines.
And this is why I feel very strongly that panarchy is the strongest tactic that post-left anarchists can utilize in our struggle to smash the tyranny of the modern nation state. Rejecting the traditional propertarian model of governance entirely in favor of thousands if not millions of totally voluntary governments that exist without boundaries, allowing a tribe of grumpy Bookchinites to operate a busy system of social services in the same neighborhood as my pack of feral Queer luddites, just so long as neither of us attempts to impose our system on anyone without their consent, including our own citizens.
I believe that this is the way out, the escape hatch in the current apocalyptic nightmare of our dystopian age and it doesn’t even require a bloodbath to achieve it. The revolution could be as simple as a million communities becoming self-sufficient and removing themselves from a deeply polluted society en mass.
My favorite quote by a stodgy old social anarchist comes from Rudolf Rocker, the father of anarcho-syndicalism who also happened to be an anarchist without adjectives. Rudolf once proclaimed quite sagely that “I am not an anarchist because I believe that it is the final solution, I am an anarchist because I believe that there is no final solution.”
Well, I suppose that you could say that I am not a post-left anarchist because I believe that rejecting the left is the final solution, I am a post-left anarchist because I believe that the true legacy of the left lies in a world with a million final solutions. Pick twelve and pay it forward.
