As an anthropologist and active participant in the movement - particularly, in the more radical, direct-action end of it - I might be able to at least clear up some common points of misunderstanding. Though I cannot help but wonder how welcome some of this information might be. Much of the hesitation, I suspect, is based in a reluctance on the part of academics who have long fancied themselves radicals of some sort, to come to terms with the fact that they are in fact liberals: interested in expanding individual freedoms and pursuing social justice, but not in ways that would seriously challenge the existence of reigning institutions like state or capital. And even many of those who would, in fact, like to see revolutionary change might not feel entirely happy about having to accept the fact that most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism - a tradition which they have hitherto mostly dismissed with stupid jokes - and that taking this movement seriously will necessarily also mean a serious and respectful engagement with it.

I am writing as an anarchist. This means that what follows will simplify a lot of things: for example, I won't be entering into the complex synergies between radical direct action groups and more reformist (and hierarchically organized) NGOs, much though this has been the key to many of the movement's past successes. Still, if there is one aspect of the movement to highlight, surely anarchism is it. The very notion of direct action - with its rejection of a politics of protest (which would appeal to those in power to modify their behavior) in favor of efforts to physically intervene against power in a form which itself prefigures an alternative to its very existence - all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition. In a certain sense, counting how many people involved in this or that aspect of the movement are actually willing to call themselves "anarchists", and in what sense, and in what contexts, is a bit beside the point; [footnote 1] anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; from it has emerged most of what's new and hopeful about it.

What follows, then, is addressed primarily to those professional intellectuals who actually do feel there is something new and hopeful here. I'll start by trying to clear up what I think are the three most common misconceptions about the movement - our supposed opposition to something called "globalization", our supposed "violence", and our supposed lack of a coherent ideology - and then, make a few suggestions about how we, as intellectuals, might think about reimagining our own intellectual practice in the light of all of this.

We are not an Anti-Globalization Movement

The phrase "antiglobalization" movement is a coinage of the US media and activists have never felt comfortable with it. But in the US, language is always a problem. Insofar as this is a movement against anything, it's against neoliberalism, which can be defined as a kind of market fundamentalism (or perhaps it might be better to say, market Stalinism) that holds there is only one possible direction for human historical development and its secrets are held by an elite of economists and corporate flacks who must now be ceded all power once held by institutions with any shred of democratic accountability - most of all, through unelected treaty organizations like the IMF, WTO, or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan it would be possible to simply say this: "we are a movement against neoliberalism". But the US corporate media is probably the most politically monolithic on the planet; here, neoliberalism is accepted as the basic ground of reality; as a result, the word itself cannot be used. Such issues can only be discussed with propaganda terms like "free trade" or "the free market". So American activists find themselves in a quandary: if one proposes to use "the n word" in a pamphlet or press release, alarm bells immediately go off: one is being exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. There have been all sorts of attempts to frame alternative expressions - we're a "global justice movement", we're a movement "against corporate globalization"... None are especially elegant, or quite satisfying, and as a result it is common in meetings to hear the speakers using the expressions "globalization movement" and "antiglobalization movement" pretty much interchangeably.

The phrase "globalization movement", though, is really quite apropos. If one takes globalization to mean the effacement of borders and the free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it's pretty clear that not only is the movement itself a product of globalization, but that most of the groups involved in it - and the most radical ones in particular [footnote 2] - are in fact far more supportive of globalization in general than supporters of the IMF or World Trade Organization.

The real origins of the movement, for example, lie in an international network called People's Global Action, or PGA. The vision for such an "intercontinental network of resistance" was first laid out during the first Zapatista encuentro in Chiapas in 1996; [footnote 3] a formal structure was created the following year in Spain. From the start, PGA included not only anarchist groups and radical trade unions in Spain, Great Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist farmer's league in India (KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan fisherfolk, the Argentinean teachers' union, indigenous groups such as the Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian landless peasants' movement (MST) and a network made up of communities founded by escaped slaves in South and Central America, and any number of others. North America was for a long time one of the few areas largely unrepresented (except for the Canadian Postal Workers Union, which acted as PGA's main communications hub, now only partly replaced by the internet, and a Montreal-based anarchist group called CLAC). It was PGA that put out the first calls for global days of action such as J18, and N30 - the latter, the original call for direct action against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle.

Internationalism is equally reflected in the movement's demands. Here one need only look, for a particularly dramatic example, at the three planks of the platform of the Italian group Ya Basta!: [footnote 4] a universally guaranteed "basic income," a principle of global citizenship that would guarantee free movement of people across borders, and a principle of free access to new technology - which in practice would mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very insidious form of protectionism). More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to the fact that the neoliberal vision of "globalization" is pretty much limited to the free flow of commodities, and actually increases barriers against the flow of people, information and ideas. The size of the US border guard, for instance, has almost tripled since signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising: if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the world in impoverished enclaves where even existing social guarantees could be gradually removed, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind when people talk about the decline of "sovereignty" in the contemporary world: the main achievement of the state form in the last century or so has been the ability to establish a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world, halting and controlling the free movement of peoples; nothing that has happened recently, even the occasional collapse of entities like Somalia or Afghanistan, has altered this because the ultimate meaning of the state system lies not in the control of a territory by any one (this could never, by definition, be absolute), but in the relations between them. It is precisely this international system of control that we are fighting against, in the name of genuine globalization.

These connections - and the broader links between neoliberal policies and mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism...) - have played a more and more salient role in our analyses as we ourselves confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders became a major issue in Europe during the IMF meetings at Prague, and later E.U. meetings in Nice; in North America, the FTAA summit in Quebec City - where invisible lines which had previously been treated as if they didn't exist (at least for white people) were converted overnight into lines of fortification against the movement of would-be global citizens demanding the right to petition their rulers. The three-kilometer "wall" constructed through the center of Quebec City to shield the heads of state junketing inside from any contact with the populace became the perfect symbol for what neoliberalism actually means, in human terms; the spectacle of the Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters and grappling hooks, joined by everyone from Steelworkers to Mohawk warriors, tearing the wall down, became - for that very reason - perhaps the single most powerful moment in the movement's history. [footnote 5]

But here's the catch: it was powerful mainly for citizens of Canada, since they got to hear about it. In the US, no one knew any of this happened. The choke-hold on information and ideas by the corporate media remains the greatest impediment to any real globalization. The obvious solution is to create our own media, and this has happened with remarkable speed - in the last year or so, a worldwide network of Independent Media Centers, run on anarchist principles, has sprung up in at least 40 different countries world-wide, connected by the internet - but despite some remarkable triumphs (during Genoa, the IMC home page, www.indymedia.org, was getting more hits than CNN's) this is still but a faint challenge to those who control what gets put on the TV. (If it wasn't, I would not have to be writing this article). The days of action in Genoa, for example, were kicked off by a 50,000-strong march calling for lifting all barriers to immigration in and out of Europe - a fact that went completely unreported by the international press - the same press that the very next day gave headline status to statements by George Bush and Tony Blair denouncing "protesters" for calling for a "fortress Europe."

There is one striking contrast between this and earlier internationalisms, however. The former ultimately usually ended up being about exporting Western organizational models to the rest of the world; in this, the flow has been if anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps most, of the movement's signature techniques (consensus process, spokescouncils, mass nonviolent civil disobedience itself for that matter...) were first developed in the global South. In the long run, this may well prove the single most radical thing about it.

"Violent Protesters" and World Peace

In the corporate media, the word "violent" is invoked as a kind of mantra - invariably, repeatedly - whenever a large action takes place: "violent protesters", "violent protests", "violent clashes", "police raid headquarters of violent protesters" - I've actually seen headlines referring to "violent riots" (there are other kinds?) Such expressions are typically invoked when a simple, plain-English description of the acts that took place (activists holding hands blockading corners, a few throwing paint, one breaking a window, police beating them all with sticks and smashing dozens of their heads against walls...) would probably convince them that the only truly violent parties were the police. Again, the US media invokes the term most insistently - this despite the fact that after two years of increasingly militant direct action, it is still impossible to produce a single example of anyone to whom a US activist has caused physical injury. I would say that what really disturbs the powers-that-be is not the "violence" of the movement but its relative lack of it; governments simply do not know how to deal with an overtly revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into familiar patterns of armed resistance.

The effort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite self-conscious. Where once it seemed that the only alternatives to marching along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience or outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action Network, Reclaim the Streets, Black Blocs or Tuti Bianci have all, in their own ways, been trying to map out a completely new territory in between. They're attempting to invent what many call a "new language" of civil disobedience, combining elements of what might otherwise be considered street theater, festival and what can only be called nonviolent warfare (nonviolent in the sense adopted by, say, Black Bloc anarchists, in that it eschews any direct physical harm to human beings). Ya Basta! for example is famous for its tuti bianci or white overalls tactics, men and women dressed elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armor to inner tubes to rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white jumpsuits. As this odd, mock-army pushes its way through police barricades while protecting each other against injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to cartoon characters - misshapen, ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. (The effect is only increased when lines of costumed figures attack police with balloons and water pistols or, like the "Pink Bloc" dress as fairies and tickle them with feather dusters.)

At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) dressed in high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to press wads of fake money into the cops' pockets, thanking them for repressing the dissent. None were even slightly hurt - raising suspicions among many that police are given aversion therapy against hitting anyone in a three piece suit, let alone a tuxedo. This was, alas, not true of the Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their high bicycles, rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by attacking each other (or the billionaires). They had all the best chants: "Democracy? Ha Ha Ha!", "The pizza united can never be defeated", "Hey ho, hey ho - ha ha, hee hee!", as well as meta-chants like "Call! Response! Call! Response!" and - everyone's favorite - "Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant!"

In Quebec City, a giant media review catapult lobbed soft toys and confetti at the FTAA meetings. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to adopt for non-violent but very militant forms of confrontation: there were peltasts and hoplites at Quebec City, and research continues into Roman-style shield walls, "turtles", and similar formations. Blockading has become an art form: if you make a huge web of strands of colored yarn across an intersection, it's actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops get trapped like flies. There are Liberation Puppets which, when its arms are fully extended, can block a four-lane highway; snake-dances or bicycle swarms can be a form of mobile blockade. Rebels in London last Mayday planned Monopoly Board actions - Building Hotels on Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of the Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla Gardening - only partly disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even the most militant of the militant - eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation Front - scrupulously avoid doing anything that would cause harm to human beings (or animals, for that matter). It's this scrambling of conventional categories that so throws the forces of order and makes them desperate to bring things back to familiar territory (simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa, of encouraging fascist hooligans to run riot as an excuse to use overwhelming force against everybody else.

One can trace the origins of such forms in any number of directions. One could begin with the stunts and guerilla theater of the Yippies or Italian "Metropolitan Indians" in the '60s. Alternately, one might consider the squatter battles in Germany or Italy or even the peasant resistance to the expansion of Tokyo airport in the '70s and '80s. The latter marked perhaps a critical point of passage, the point where the governments of certain industrialized powers (all of them, interestingly, former Axis powers) had become so thoroughly demilitarized that it became possible for unarmed rebels not only to seize and defend territory against them, but engage in pitched battles which they were actually allowed to win - something that would, incidentally, be well-nigh inconceivable in the U.S., where the populace is assumed to be armed. But it seems to me that here, too, the really crucial origins lie with the Zapatistas, and other movements in the global South. In many ways, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) represents an attempt by people who have always been denied the right to non-violent, civil resistance to seize it; essentially, to call the bluff of neoliberalism and its pretenses to democratization and yielding power to "civil society". It is, as its commanders say, an army which aspires not to be an army any more. It is also about the least violent "army" one can possibly imagine (it's something of an open secret that, for the last five years at least, they have not even been carrying real guns.) The EZLN is the sort of army that organizes "invasions" of Mexican military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely unarmed to yell at and try to shame the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the Landless Peasants Movement gain an enormous moral authority in Brazil by reoccupying unused lands entirely nonviolently. In either case, it's pretty clear that if the same people had tried the same thing twenty years ago, they would simply have been shot.

However you chose to trace their origins, these new tactics are perfectly in accord with the general anarchistic inspiration of the movement, which is less about seizing state power than about exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy from it. The critical thing, though, is that all this is only possible in a general atmosphere of peace. In fact, it seems to me that these are the ultimate stakes of struggle at the moment: a moment that may well determine the overall direction of the 21st century.

It is hard to remember now that (as Eric Hobsbawm reminds us) during the late-19th century, anarchism was the center of the revolutionary left - this was a time when most Marxist parties were rapidly becoming reformist social democrats. [footnote 6] This situation only really changed with World War I, and of course the Russian revolution. It was the success of the latter, we are usually told, that led to the decline of anarchism and catapulted Communism everywhere to the fore. But it seems to me one could look at this another way. In the late-19th century most people honestly believed that war between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial adventures were a constant, but a war between France and England on French or English soil seemed as unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of passports was considered an antiquated barbarism.

The 20th century (which appears to have begun in 1914 and ended sometime around 1989 or '91) was by contrast probably the most violent in human history. It was a century almost entirely preoccupied with either waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly surprising, then, if the ultimate measure of political effectiveness became the ability to create and maintain huge mechanized killing machines, that anarchism quickly came to seem unrealistic. This is, after all, the one thing that anarchists can never, by definition, be very good at. Neither is it surprising that Marxist parties (already organized on a command structure, and for whom the organization of huge mechanized killing machines often proved the only thing they were particularly good at) seemed eminently practical and realistic in comparison. And could it really be a coincidence that the moment the cold war ended and war between industrialized powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism popped right back to where it had been at the end of the 19th century, as an international movement at the very center of the revolutionary left?

If so, it becomes more clear what the ultimate stakes of the current "anti-terrorist" mobilization are. In the short run, things do look very frightening. Governments who were desperately scrambling for some way to convince the public we were terrorists even before September 11 now feel they've been given carte blanche; there is little doubt that a lot of good people are about to suffer terrible repression. But in the long run, a return to 20th-century levels of violence is simply impossible. The September 11th attacks were clearly something of a fluke (the first wildly ambitious terrorist scheme in history that actually worked); the spread of nuclear weapons is ensuring that larger and larger portions of the globe will be for all practical purposes off-limits to conventional warfare. And if war is the health of the state, the prospects for anarchist-style organizing can only be improving.

Ideology, Consensus and Direct Democracy

I can't remember how many articles I've read in the progressive press asserting that the globalization movement, while tactically brilliant, lacks any central theme or coherent ideology. These complaints seem to be the left equivalent of the incessant claims in the corporate media that this is a movement made up of dumb kids touting a bundle of completely unrelated causes (free Mumia, dump the debt, save the old growth forests...). Even stranger are the claims - which one sees surprisingly frequently in the work of academic social theorists who you'd think might know better, that the movement is plagued by a generic opposition, rooted in bourgeois individualism, to all forms of structure or organization. It's distressing that, two years after Seattle, I should have to write this, but someone obviously should: in North America especially, this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, nonhierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. But unlike many other forms of radicalism, it has first organized itself in the political sphere - this, mainly because that was a territory that the powers that be (that put all their heavy artillery in the economic) has largely abandoned.

Over the past decade, activists in North America have been putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups' own internal processes to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could actually look like - drawing particularly, as I've noted, on examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on some kind of process of finding consensus, rather than majority voting. The result is a rich and growing panoply of organizational forms and instruments - affinity groups, spokescouncils, facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns, vibes-watchers and so on - all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity without stifling dissenting voices, creating leadership positions or compelling anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do. It is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of democracy among people who have little experience of such things is necessarily a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of stumblings and false starts, but - as almost any police chief who has faced us on the streets can attest - direct democracy of this sort can be astoundingly effective. And it is difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result. It's one thing to simply say "another world is possible." It's another to experience one, however momentarily.

Here, though, I mainly want to stress the relation of theory and practice this organizational model entails. Perhaps the best way to start thinking about groups like the Direct Action Network (DAN, or more explicitly anarchist versions of the same thing, such as the Anti-Capitalist Convergences which have begun cropping up everywhere from Chicago to the Philippines...) is to see them as the diametrical opposite of the kind of sectarian Marxist group that has so long dominated the revolutionary Left. [footnote 7] Where the latter puts its emphasis on achieving a complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; it's taken for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point of view. [footnote 8] The motto of such groups might as well be, "if you are willing to act like an anarchist now, your long-term vision is pretty much your own business" (which seems only sensible, since none of us really know how far these principles can actually take us, or exactly what a complex society based on them would really end up looking like.) Their ideology, then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay this way.

This is how consensus works. The basic idea is that rather than voting, one tries to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone - or at least, that no one finds profoundly objectionable. There are different sorts of process, some more formal than others, but the basic pattern is this: someone states a proposal, then the facilitator (the person who keeps the meeting moving) asks first for clarifying questions, then if anyone has any "concerns". Often, at this point, someone might propose "friendly amendments' to add to the original proposal, or otherwise alter it, to ensure concerns are addressed. If skepticism seems widespread, a proposal might just be tabled, or fused with a different proposal - compromises and creative syntheses are to be in every way encouraged - until one can finally get to the point of calling for consensus. At this point, the facilitator asks if anyone wishes to "stand aside" or "block". Standing aside is just saying, "I would not myself be willing to take part in this action, but I wouldn't stop anyone else from doing it". (Those who do so also get a chance to explain their conclusions to the group.) Blocking, however, is much more serious. A blocker is stating, in effect, "I think this proposal violates the fundamental principles or purposes of being in the group". It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposal completely by blocking it - although most groups also have ways to challenge whether a block is genuinely principled.

Consensus process operates best on a small scale, obviously; though there are all sorts of techniques (careful use of agendas, timekeeping, etc) to make sure meetings do not go on forever, and all this is not nearly so unwieldy as one might think, it is unwieldy enough that the process itself encourages extreme decentralization of decision-making. Much of it takes place on the smallest level, that of affinity groups, small groups of say 4-20 people who know and trust each other, wherein the process can be much less formal and more "organic". Before large-scale actions like Seattle or Quebec City, there are always "spokescouncils", in which each affinity group selects a "spoke" empowered to speak for them and participate in the actual process of finding consensus (in theory, each group is arranged in a vast circle like the spokes of a wheel, their spoke being at the center, as they whisper back and forth deciding what to advise her). Before major decisions there are usually breakout sessions, where each affinity group comes to consensus on what position they want their spoke to take. Or break-outs might mean creating a series of smaller meetings to focus on making decisions or generating proposals on specific topics, which can then be presented for approval before the whole group when it reassembles (not as unwieldy as it might sound). Facilitators come armed with any number of different "tools" to help resolve problems or move things along if they seem to be bogging down: one can ask for a brainstorming session, in which people are only allowed to present ideas but not to criticize other people's; or for a non-binding straw poll, where people raise their hands just to see how everyone feels about a proposal (to get a "sense of the room"), rather than to make a formal decision. A fishbowl would only be used if there is a profound difference of opinion: you can take, say, two representatives for each - one man and one woman - and have the four of them sit in the middle, everyone else surrounding them silently, and see if the four can't clarify exactly where the differences lie, before returning to work out some kind of solution or synthesis. Often there are "vibes watchers" to keep watch if anyone is feeling frustrated or excluded, or note if people are getting bored or the energy lagging. And so forth. The arsenal of tools and techniques tends to expand with practice constantly.

There is indeed something very new here, and something potentially extremely important. Consider, for example, the principles behind consensus. One of the basic ones is that one always treats others' arguments as fundamentally reasonable and principled, whatever one thinks about the person making it - in particular creates an extremely different style of debate and argument than the sort encouraged by majority voting, one in which the incentives are all towards compromise and creative synthesis rather than polarization, reduction and treating minor points of difference like vast philosophical ruptures. I need hardly point out how much our accustomed modes of academic discourse resemble the latter - or even more, perhaps, the kind of sectarian reasoning that leads to endless splits and fragmentation, which the "new new left" (as it is often called) has so far managed almost completely to avoid. It seems to me that in many ways the activists are way ahead of the theorists here, and that the most challenging problem for us will be to create forms of intellectual practice more in tune with newly emerging forms of democratic practice, rather than with the tiresome sectarian logic those groups have finally begun to set aside.

Some Final Directions

I want to end with some thoughts on how professional intellectuals might be able to contribute to this movement. If we are not longer going to play a role in the constitution of some kind of new vanguard (even a Gramscian one), what can we do? That is, as theorists.

Surely there is no one right answer to this question, but I'd like to suggest one possible direction, what I like to think of as the intellectual equivalent of a gift economy. It seems to me that insofar as we are not willing to actually go out and organize and take action on the streets, then one of our most important roles might be to tease out the possible moral and political implications of initiatives that arise from people who are, and then, to shape them into ideas and visions that can be offered back again to those making such initiatives. As gifts. By "gifts", here, I especially mean "in forms that are substantially detachable from the author's personality". This would actually involve a pretty major change in much of what passes for radical thought in the academy, since it would mean consciously rejecting the kind of intentionally arcane, mysterious declarations of high theory which even readers who actually can afford the requisite years of graduate education can never completely detach from the charisma of the (would be) Great Thinker. But let me throw out a few examples of one form I think such intellectual projects might take:

Organizations involved with direct action tend to combine a blanket refusal to enter into dialogue with what they consider inherently undemocratic ("evil") institutions, with standards of internal democracy so generous that it is considered a matter of principle to give everyone the benefit of the doubt for honesty and good intentions. Clearly, these are two sides of the same coin; and there is a certain kind of institutional morality implied here, one whose implications it would be helpful to elaborate. (Equally so, the fact that when such institutions fall into crisis, it is always when they have to confront structures of oppression - such as racism and sexism - which are embedded in individual dispositions as much as formal institutional arrangements.)

The fact that direct action and forms of organization surrounding it is essentially about experimenting with the creation of non-alienated forms of action raises all sorts of interesting questions about what we really mean by "alienation", and its broader implications for revolutionary practice. For example: why exactly is it that even when there is next to no other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one group most likely to be sympathetic to it consist of artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being (individually or collectively) and the ability to imagine social alternatives; particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity. One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a society's least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tend to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap. This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftsmen - or even more, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftsmen - who actually overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those inured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also help explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people's struggles in the new movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on earth; now that new, global communications technologies have made it possible to include them in revolutionary alliances, it is well nigh-inevitable that they should play a profoundly inspirational role in them.

Might it be possible to reimagine the very notion of human rights starting from this notion of non-alienated experience - particularly, from forms of directly democratic practice? If nothing else seeing rights as emergent from such forms of practice (and the explicit notion of 'rights' emerging, as a discourse, when the principles already immanent in certain forms of action become clearly articulated) would overcome the old problem of reconciling positive and negative rights, which never seems to get completely resolved. [footnote 9] If one starts from the assumption that fundamental human rights consist, say, in the right to full political participation in the affairs of one's community - or for that matter, to freedom of creative self-expression, or to freedom of sexual expression... - then it becomes obvious that such rights cannot be exercised in the absence of a certain baseline life security - since one cannot meaningfully participate in the democratic life of one's community if paralyzed by fear of homelessness, or death squads, or engage in free sexual expression if one has to sell one's body to get food. Most of what are usually seen as fundamental rights, positive or negative, could then be seen as already entailed by these more primary ones: one might even think of them as something in the nature of infra-rights. Direct action groups, or directly democratic community groups, could then be reimagined as groups whose political engagement with the world is aimed at addressing those forms of oppression which prevent the full realization of those principles and forms of experience already immanent in their own organization.

As I say, these are only suggestions (largely based on my own current intellectual projects); there are other groups of scholars - the Raisons d'Agir group in France, the Shifting Ground collective in Great Britain, numerous groups in Italy - who have been grappling with the same questions and finding rather different, if complementary, answers. At this point, the critical thing is simply to start asking. As I've said, none of us can really know how far these new, broadly anarchistic principles will actually be able to take us, or what new global syntheses might emerge; what matters is whether we are willing to find out.

– David Graeber

[1] There are some who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they are sometimes reluctant to call themselves ‘anarchists’ for that very reason. [2] Anarchists, obviously, are opposed to the very existence of national borders in any form. But generally direct action-oriented groups have highlighted this aspect far more than, say, the International Forum on Globalization which is much more ambivalent. [3] Read by Subcomandante Marcos during the closing session of the First Intercontinental Encuentro, 3 August 1996: Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, Juana Ponce de León, ed., New York 2001. [4] Which also appear at the end of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire. Their history, in fact, represents an interesting case study in the migration of ideas back and forth between intellectuals and social movements. Most of them emerged from the experience of Autonomia in the '70s, as refracted through the writings of authors like Paolo Virno, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, and Negri himself. I think it's important though to bear in mind that such ideas are not simply the product of individual heroic intellectuals, as academics (who by a rather elitist instinct like to give other academics as much credit as possible) almost always prefer to imply. [5] Helping tear it down was certainly one of the more exhilarating experiences of this author’s life. [Interviewed by Yvon LeBot, Subcomandante Marcos: El Sueño Zapatista, Barcelona 1997, pp. 214-5; Bill Weinberg, Homage to Chiapas, London 2000, p. 188. ] [6] ‘In 1905-1914 the Marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of Marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical Marxism.’ Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’, Revolutionaries, New York 1973, p. 61. [7] What one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the North East Federation of Anarchist Communists-whose members must accept the Platform of the Anarchist Communists set down in 1926 by Nestor Makhno-do still exist, of course. But the small-a anarchists are the real locus of historical dynamism right now. [8] Consensus is much misunderstood. It's quite different from unanimity, in that it assumes diversity - those objecting to a proposal have the option of either "standing aside", which means they don't think the proposal is a good idea and won't be bound by it personally, or "blocking it" - vetoing it - though blocks must be based in a groups founding principles or reasons for being. Similarly, consensus, rather paradoxically, has proved the form of decision-making most appropriate for radical decentralization, if only because finding consensus in large groups is often so laborious a process there's a strong incentive to keep decision-making among the lowest level possible. [9] I'm assuming most readers are familiar with the basic problem here. C. B. MacPherson (1962) first noted that bourgeois notions of human rights were basically negative, since they start from the notion that one owns one's person and property and can exclude others from intruding on it; efforts to expand on them have always seemed somewhat artificial.

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