Tuesday, October 05, 2021

FORUM ON AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM AND THE RURAL WORLD
Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism: towards a more (state-)critical agrarian studies

Antonio Roman-Alcalá
International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands

ABSTRACT
This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. Anarchism’s relevance to agrarian processes is found in three general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics, everyday practices, and in forms of social organization or ‘anarchistic’ elements of human social life. Insights from anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the contemporary rise of‘ authoritarian populism’ and its relation to rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist political projects but are created and reproduced by varying political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of non-elite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of emancipatory politics.



J.A. Gutierrez Danton and F. Ferretti, 2019,

 “The nation against the State: the Irish

 question and Britain-based anarchists in

 the Age of Empire”, Nations and

 Nationalism,

 early view: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nana.12584

Federico Ferretti
176 Views43 Pages
1 File ▾
Irish Studies,
Political Philosophy,
Political Theory,
Transnationalism,
Republicanism
 ...more ▾
This paper discusses the relation between early anarchism and republican/nationalist ideas. We will focus on the case of British-based activists grouped around the journal Freedom and their engagement with Irish nationalism during the Age of the Empire. Freedom, founded in 1886, was the most important anarchist journal of the English-speaking anarchist-communist networks at the time, and was the main editorial reference for the worldwide community of anarchist activists, mostly exiled, who resided in London at that time. Extending current interdisciplinary literature on transnational anarchism, we argue that anarchist views of nations, while rejecting the novel notion of the nation-State, were associated with anti-colonial struggles and with republican anti-monarchical and egalitarian notions. Based on primary sources, we discuss the intersections between these Britain-based anarchists and anti-colonial Irish radicals, by engaging both with their writings and their international networks of solidarity, thus exploring the complex intermingling of anarchism, anti-colonialism and republicanism.







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