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The Ballerina and the Bull

Anarchist Utopias in

the Age of Finance

Johanna Isaacson

Johanna Isaacson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design: Johnny Bull
Typography and typesetting: Jan Middendorp
Typefaces: Chaparral Pro and Absara Sans

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Introduction

No Future

From the uprisings in Seattle in 1999 to the Occupy movement of 2011, our moment has seen a resurgence of an anarchist sensibility. Against the vacuity and drift of financialized capitalism, these insurgent movements have insisted that an alternative is possible. But the idea of possibility itself, and the ability to maintain a stable boundary between utopia and dystopia, shifts in an age of historical breakdown. As Fredric Jameson has recently argued, “the power of the negative” is intensified in our new moment of historical crisis – “an ominous perpetual present in which no one knows what’s coming… and indeed no one knows whether anything is coming at all” (“On the Power”). This book makes a wager for jerry-rigged, DiY practices, social experiments, quixotic contestations against the capitalist behemoth that allow us to see the limits and hopes of our largely depoliticized moment. DiY offers an alternative to a narrative that says we have arrived at the end of history and that there is no alternative to the isolation and alienation of capitalist individualism. The title of this book, The Ballerina and the Bull, refers to the initial call for Occupy Wall Street in the pages of anti-corporate Adbusters magazine, which featured an image of a simply dressed ballerina perched on the symbol of Wall Street, a rearing bull. While Adbusters framed this as a kind of triumph of the ballerina over the bull, I take the dynamism of this duality as an emblem of the generative relationship between the prefigurative, utopian actions of anarchists as they come up against economic and social limits to transformation. This tension itself is a rich point of entry into political-cultural dilemmas and potentialities of our spectacular moment.

Periodizing the Present

With some reluctance, I am calling contemporary DiY “postmodern,” which, with Fredric Jameson, I see as interchangeable with “late capitalism.” Other interpretations of postmodernism see it as a post-Marxist moment. However, I follow Ernest Mandel’s periodization of “late capitalism” which suggests that capitalism has mutated and adapted to crises, rather than waned, becoming “if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it” (Jameson, Postmodernism 1). In this stage of late capitalism, the appearance of endless choice and endless identity positions creates the need for intensified scrutiny, modes of thinking that aim not at providing answers but at figuring out the questions to ask. Contemporary anarchism correlates to post-Sixties logic, as Jameson frames it, in which the “unbound energies which gave the sixties their energy” were harnessed to a new stage of global capitalism, giving way to an expansion of proletarianization and its resistance (“Periodizing the Sixties” 108-109). Looking at these struggles as both theory and practice offers us a point of purchase from anti-utopian, neoliberal “capitalist realism.”

This navigation of contemporary byzantine forms of reality requires the category of mediation and an epistemology that is able to move beyond surface phenomena. Although the category of the proletariat may seem outdated in a moment of widespread first world deindustrialization, I want to argue that a messily grouped emergent precariat, a word which I’m using, following Aaron Benanov, as a placeholder for a multi-levelled and differentiated workforce that is nevertheless affected deeply and systematically by precarity, has the potential to occupy this standpoint from which mediation is accessible. The precariat can be seen as the majority of the globe’s occupants: those who lack a social contract with the welfare state, lack trust relations with capital, lack labor security, lack reliable and consistent status positions and attachments (Standing 10). This precariat has a special place in relation to knowledge, a standpoint from which it can embody both the position of a subject and an object. The standpoint of the precariat allows some purchase on immediacy and facticity by refusing to let facts stand for themselves, and instead interrogating the values of the society in which those facts exist. At stake in the concept of precariat epistemology against the empirical standpoint of power is an understanding that social relations aren’t only as they appear and are vulnerable to change.

The anti-utopian periodizations that frame the present as “the end of history” devolve from this empirical logic which accepts the facticity of power relations and cultural values unquestioningly. What Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” demands that we accept the present as eternal. The standpoint of the precariat keeps open the idea that static, fetishized forms of history and commodified life contain clues to the relationships which make social realization impossible under capitalism, and that the knowledge of these relationships is an essential element in transformation and realizing the possible. As zinester Johnny Sunset notes, “By the very definition of who and where we are, we are made to imagine the possibility of a lawless world” (7).

In this moment, subsumed by globalized capital, representation and aesthetics play a key role in providing what Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle call “cartographies of the absolute.” This representational mapping, however, takes the form of negation, the gauging of that which is by definition invisible. This book looks at the way that DiY maps these disappeared and marginalized spaces and logics. I argue that anarchist utopian projects can be read simultaneously for their prefigurative and cognitive aspects. In both of these registers there is a shift from the emphasis on the proletariat and its context of the factory to the post-industrial precariat and its urban milieu. Here, the problem of representation is diagnosed in postmodern city-dwellers’ inability to map their own sense of place.

Implied in this dual view of anarchist utopia is also a critique of anarchist self-perception. Recognizing the limits and horizons of direct action does not constitute pessimism or cynicism. In fact, it does the opposite. A self-critical view of anarchist utopia along with a foregrounding of political economy allows for a true optimism that structural change is possible. This optimism in what I am calling DiY’s “expressive negation” counters the pessimistic narrative of “the end of history” in which the perpetuity of capital is naturalized and seen as inevitable. This form of complacent “realism” finds its rhetorical center in a discourse of “maturity” set against an irresponsible youth culture. While there is nothing inherently revolutionary about the category of youth, and indeed, this figure can be seen to have analogous characteristics to a hedonistic stage of commodity capitalism in which consumerism and culture eclipse the serious business of building new social relations, a simplistic critique of youth and political passion will not suffice in an age of enforced austerity. The rise of austerity as an antagonist should teach us that “maturity” is a central “ideologeme of the right” used to coerce the global precariat to participate in her own oppression. The postmodern foreclosure of the concept of utopia and the narrative that foregrounds “the end of grand narratives” came at the price of an attenuation in the scope of political and historical vision. We should instead analyze youth culture generously with the goal of resurrecting and broadening struggle, following Marx’s thesis on Feuerbach: Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

In its focus on overcoming the separation between the aesthetic and the everyday, DiY brings back a logic that values the concept of totality. This is an undervalued aspect of DiY practice, known primarily for its idealism, its post-structuralist influences, and its inattention to political economy (Clover “The Coming Occupation”). I’m arguing, instead, that anarchism does have the capacity to draw our attention to political economy and it is for this reason that the primary antagonist in this book is pragmatism. DiY negation provides a critical rather than pragmatic view of politics. Activity, praxis, and refusal are here set against an increasingly homogenized, passive, abstract, contemplative, image-saturated world where, as Guy Debord argued, separation is perfected.

This condition cannot be voluntaristically transcended. Insofar as political projects create “alternatives” without taking into account the larger trajectories and limits of capitalism, they will fall into the ideological trap Greg Sharzer attributes to “localism,” the notion that local projects, such as the creation of organic gardens, constitute a viable political strategy. There is no unmediated means for DiY subculture to wave a magic hoodie and smite the angel of history. And yet, the agility, the brilliance, and the militant optimism of anarchist expressive negation exceeds its own symptomaticity and gracefully eludes the dour scolding of political pragmatists.

What are the Politics of Style?

This book assumes that DiY cannot fully transcend its subcultural roots, the politics of style. Even DiY involvement in political actions such as the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” and the Occupy movement are moments of mediation and representation as well as action. These movements directed a critical gaze at global capitalism, naming and denaturalizing an increasingly opaque system of power. Such power to name and to stand up to capitalism goes against the idea made popular by Frances Fukuyama, that we have arrived at the end of history and should concede any battle against the best of all possible worlds. This posits that the late 20th century signifies a triumph of economic and political liberalism, with every alternative entirely played out. Here, inequality is seen as simply the remainder of older social formations such as the racial legacy of slavery. For Fukuyama, pragmatism must take the form of a strong anti-utopianism that sees the fall of the Soviet Union as having finalized the last serious alternative to liberal democracy. This is the finalization of what Margaret Thatcher referred to as TINA (There Is No Alternative), and demonstrates the stakes for thinking on a register other than the “pragmatic.” Expressive negation allows for a narrative of “failure” that does not converge with an anti-utopian logic that dismisses all practices and discourses aiming at systematic transformation.

With the anthem “no future”, DiY activity is actually insisting there is a future, a possibility of transformation beyond this state of capitalist crisis. The power of the negative in DiY is a form of realism about mediation in the face of an intractable society of the spectacle. That is, the politics of style are most productively framed as a politics of historical materialism set against what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,” a naturalization and sedimentation of the logic of contemporary capitalism creating a context where, in a phrase commonly attributed to Fredric Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. In the face of this impasse, capitalist realism consists of dead and quantified cultural monuments incapable of merging with or transforming the lifeworld in a moment devoid of the new (Fisher 3). This capitalist realism, characterized by the “deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion,” is countered by a punk affect of anger, a permeating urge to destroy, which demands the impossible while maintaining a realism about impasses in contemporary cultural innovation (4).

The politics of style are, then, the politics of mediation. This is particularly evident in the DiY “détournement” of commodities. If the commodity form is all-pervasive in a moment of late capitalism, commodities themselves are twofold, both displacing and containing the social relationships denied to people in their daily lives. Dick Hebdige begins his analysis of DiY subcultural politics of style with a focus on objects – a tube of Vaseline, a safety pin. In subcultural practice the mundane object becomes a sign of refusal or an estrangement of commodity forms, so that they are no longer taken for granted as natural. By recognizing the range of potential meanings in the commodity, DiY opens channels for resistance. This is a factor in the ongoing struggle between representatives of power and the precariat to frame and understand the world around us. So the politics of style in postwar youth subculture points to an unraveling of consensus and an opening of critical awareness.

The politics of style implicit in the subcultural reuse and recombining of mundane objects is détournement, a practice begun by the Situationist International (SI), a group of militant artists and intellectuals instrumental in the Paris revolt of 1968. Experiments in détournement came about as a response to the increasing complicity of artistic expression in systems of powers focused on “creativity” and media. Hoping to avoid the pitfalls of recuperation (the absorption of radical ideas and culture into hierarchical societal norms) and the impossibility of originality, the SI opted for a process of research and propaganda. The situationist movement resists the dictum that art should “show not tell,” and instead aims to infuse expression with an explicitly political, pedagogic, and critical mode.

This struggle for expressive negation through détournement has been popularly exemplified by the band Negativland’s pioneering and controversial use of collage in their music. The band describes their legal battle to sample and redeploy music as related to a radical political strategy that uses humor to navigate complexity rather than divide politics into crude “black and white” dichotomies (Sinker 225). Negativland, a punk band but an anomalous one, is characteristic of the examples I will refer to in this book. The writers, musicians and activists whose forms of expressive negation give insight into and provide weapons against “capitalist realism” are often slightly off the nose of punk doxa.

These forms of punk recognize and negotiate the impossibility of fully escaping the commodity form. Punk’s subversion stems from its appearance as threat, representing both emergence and repression of political desire in mass culture. The politics of style, then, is not an escape from symptomaticity (inevitable conforming to the logic of one’s historical moment), but an exploitation of openings, contradictions and emergence through an immersion in the dominant modes of commodification, or as the SI puts it: “the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding.”

Anarchism: US Style

The politics of style in DiY is inextricable from the politics of anarchism. DiY’s focus on culture, subjectivity, and anti-electoral politics partially explain this alliance. Another element is the historical shift away from communism with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late Eighties, and the unraveling of worker-centered politics in an age of deindustrialization. For these reasons, anarchism emerges as a significant form of political expression in our moment. However, it’s important to keep in mind a longer narrative of anarchism as source and influence on contemporary practices. Most of the DiY projects considered in this book are US-based and are informed by the currents of anarchism that developed from the late 19th century.

In early individualist anarchists such Josiah Warren and Benjamin Tucker, the ideas of Max Stirner and Pierre Joseph Proudhon mingled with native Jeffersonian and Thoreauvian utopianisms to form the first visible anarchist presence in the US. With the depressions and strikes of the late 19th century, some members of immigrant radical socialist groups, such as the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), became increasingly disillusioned with electoral politics, turned to revolutionary socialism and then, inspired by the first anarchist international and the arrival of Johann Most in America, turned to anarchism. The revolutionary splinter group from the SLP, the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), gained up to six thousand members and was a central militant force in the Eight-Hour Movement of 1886. The Haymarket incident and its repercussions cut this momentum short. However, figures such as Johann Most continued to speak and circulate pamphlets advocating social revolutionary approaches to anti-capitalism.

Most of the participants in these early anarchist formations could be classified as anarcho-communists whose ideology was characterized by a subscription to the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin’s theory of the state and his communistic bent. They considered their goal to be communism, but differed with socialists on tactics, and felt that sabotage, direct action and the general strike were the appropriate means of revolutionary change. However, these ideas mingled with the influence of such individualists as Stirner in the ideology of prominent anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre. Whereas individualists like Tucker opposed insurrectionary tactics, Goldman championed a social revolutionary, syndicalist approach to liberation, but framed many of her arguments for anarchism in terms that lay more stress on the individual than the collective, as evidenced in her essay “Minorities versus Majorities.” In the work of Voltairine de Cleyre this mingling of strains of anarchism led to an initial identification with Benjamin Tucker, but eventually turned to focus on anti-imperialism and solidarity with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and a subscription to “anarchism without adjectives.”

The syndicalism of the IWW derived from an amalgamation of anarchist and socialist thought. They forged class consciousness in this period of rapid industrialization through the inclusion of African Americans and immigrants. Some of the philosophy of anarcho-syndicalism can be seen in the earlier work of Rudolf Rocker, who locates the central tenets of anarcho-syndicalism as antimilitarist propaganda, economic boycotts, armed resistance, and, as the trigger of revolution, the general strike. This form of syndicalism was able to mobilize class consciousness and make substantial gains in its support of the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, and several other strikes. However, the imprisonment and deportation of its leaders, opposition from the American Federation of Labor, and the shift of the political climate with the US entrance into World War I led to its demise.

Following this period there was a lull in anarchism, which survived in such utopian educational projects as the Stelton School, and in such journals as Road to Freedom, Adunata dei Refrattari, and Il Martello, the Yiddish Freie Arbeter Shtimme, and in scattered social organizations of immigrant communities. In the Forties and Fifties anarchism appeared in pacifist groups and literary circles, in the establishment of Pacifica Radio, and in such journals as Politics and Liberation. These magazines were influential on the New Left and involved transitional figures such as Paul Goodman. The notion of “participatory democracy” in the early Students for a Democratic Society and the turn to consensus in projects such as the Economic Research and Action Project were anarchist influenced. The Lower Eastside Anarchists, spearheaded by Murray Bookchin, a former communist and a writer on ecological issues, had a publication, Anarchos, which encouraged a focus on personal lifestyle issues and which rejected the focus on imperialism and class that was advanced by the more Marxist influenced left.

In the Sixties anarcho-syndicalist ideas were espoused in Black and Red publications and in Fifth Estate, which were linked to the former artists turned “street gang with an ideology,” the Motherfuckers. Fredy Perlman was influential on both journals and connected with the French situationists, whose anarchism focused on the imbrication of daily life and the commodity form, and the role of the state in this process, as well as on insurrectionary means to combat alienation. US situationists such as Point Blank leveled critiques at the reification of activism and violence evident in the student movements. Anarcho-syndicalism also had an influence on later waves of the New Left such as “Prairie Power.” This can be seen in Carl Davidson’s manifesto, “Towards a Student Syndicalist Movement.” New Left journals such as Radical America were also influenced by anarchism. Additionally, with the expulsion of libertarians from the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the influence of science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, a right-wing anarchism merged with the counterculture.

After the Sixties, US anarchism primarily survived in the ecology movement. This was influenced by Murray Bookchin’s eco-anarchism and in the anarcho-feminism developed in the early women’s movement, and can be seen in organizations such as Friends of the Earth, the Clamshell Alliance, and the Abalone Alliance. The writings of Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey and the concept of sabotage or “monkeywrenching” influenced Earth First!, at that time a nativist anarchist movement that subscribed to a form of eco-anarchism more related to the rugged individualism of early 19th century anarchism than the feminist breed. A later generation, more related to the new social movements, brought eco-feminism to Earth First! While Bookchin, in his later development of municipal anarchism, rejected the “lifestyle” anarchism that he earlier espoused for a “social anarchism,” which has little relationship to the class consciousness of anarcho-syndicalism and rather draws on organic metaphors to construct a view of revolution.

The subjects of Bookchin’s attack on “lifestyle activism” were Hakim Bey, John Zerzan, David Watson and, implicitly, Bob Black. For Bookchin, these anarchist theorists were all lumped together under the Stirnerite tradition of individualism. In contrast, Bookchin asserted he had inherited the legacy of communal anarchism (in its post-scarcity, post-class form). These authors were all differently related to primitivism, a theory that centers around the refusal of work, as well as an “anti-civilizational” myth of the “hunter-gatherer” as “The Original Affluent Society,” based on work by anthropologist Marshal Sahlins. These authors’ relationships to technology differ, with Zerzan in favor of a neo-luddism and Hakim in favor of subversive action that makes use of technology. Authors such as David Watson, Fredy Perlman, and Bob Black subscribe to an “anti-civilizational” ideology, which looks to Paleolithic culture for inspiration, but does not actually suggest a regression to hunter/gatherer culture.

Second and third wave feminism, especially such phenomena as consciousness raising groups, drew from a long tradition of sexual freedom and feminism in anarchism. Free love, polyamory, birth control, and marriage laws were taken on by anarchist pioneers such as Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Lucy Parsons, the Spanish Mujeres Libras, Josiah Warren, and Emile Armand. In the Sixties and Seventies, anarcha-feminism became a prevalent mode of organizing women’s liberation movements, with figures such as Susan Brown, Peggy Kornegger, and Carol Ehrlich claiming that feminism was inherently anarchist and using anarchism as a form of negating what they saw as impasses in both socialism and feminism. Ehrlich developed an anarcha-feminism based on the situationist critique of Marxist forms of hierarchical structures. Kornegger saw anarchism as a way to interrogate not just patriarchal action, but patriarchal forms of knowledge that denigrate sensuality, intuition, and play as feminized forms of thought. Tactics such as spontaneity, direct action and small organizational units, collectives and consciousness raising groups, would serve to negate alienating modes of communication and sociality.

In the Eighties, US anarchism primarily stayed alive through environmental, feminist, punk, and neo-situationist channels, as well as through the direct action against US support of military dictatorships in Latin America and surrounding AIDS issues. Without the anchoring presence of the New Left, these strands transformed and merged. For example, the situationist-oriented organs such as Fifth Estate moved from a situationist to a primitivist position, as can be seen in one of Perlman’s last writings, Against History! Against Leviathan!. Bob Black also straddles this position, advancing situationist-styled critiques of work as well as anti-civilizational polemics. These forms influence a host of anti-work zines such as Processed World and Temp Slave.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and current transformations in global relations, other forms of radicalism have gained more visibility. Autonomous forms of anarchism, communization, and far-left communism have been active in Germany, Italy and England, giving rise to cross-fertilization in the form of internet journals and international actions. The widespread popularity of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, for instance, forges a connection between Italian autonomia and the American grassroots movement. The Zapatista movement has been a great influence on contemporary forms of anarchism; their militant and playful battle against both global capitalism and oppressive governmental forces inspire the ethos of the new revolutionary structure of feeling.

As a descriptive and prescriptive way of talking about DiY I will draw on its many links to and popularization of the theories of the French situationists who were linked to the Paris uprisings of 1968. The situationist dual focus on the transformation of everyday life and the critique of emerging logics of capital link to the duality I see at work in contemporary DiY practices, many of which directly cite situationist influences and more who are indirectly influenced by the group through punk culture or a generally diffused post-situ politics. The key critique that DiY inherits from the situationists is the notion that post-war developments have led to a passive “society of the spectacle” where human relationships have been displaced onto the relationships between images. This lead to an impoverished experience of the world, but for the situationists, this experience does not preclude the joy and hope for transformation that plays out in the creation of experimental spatial practices. Rather than nurturing nostalgia for pre-capitalist modes, the situationists saw capitalist development as creating a lag between reality and possibility for emancipation and free time that allows for sustained social desire. Referring to their projects as propaganda, the situationists refused specialization and the fantasy of impartiality, instead aiming for the unity of politics and aesthetics.

As with situationist practice, DiY actions are not focused on “survival” in the face of austerity, but rather denaturalize the category of austerity, showing it to be constructed and imposed on a society whose technological development has the potential to unleash abundance and possibility which is unevenly distributed in the current regime. This refusal of mere survival takes on what Henri Lefebvre calls the “possiblist” mode, as in the slogan “demand the impossible.” Here, unleashing desire is both a seizure of opportunity and a kind of representational realism. While postmodernism is often framed as a moment where the industrial proletariat has disappeared and therefore the revolutionary class has disappeared, the situationists argue that the expansion of capitalist logic into the everyday, leisure, and urban space expands revolutionary subjectivity to previously unthought-of categories such as youth and criminality.

DiY anarchism that continues this logic is a broad and loose category including all manner of projects that are conducted outside of state or corporate institutions. DiY includes activities such as permaculture and guerrilla gardening (planting gardens in vacant lots), Reclaim the Streets (impromptu festivals in which streets are shut down and turned into party spaces), punk subculture (including punk music, punk venues, punk squats, punk record distributors, punk zines, punk shops, riot grrrl and queercore), infoshops (all-volunteer Anarchist bookstores and lending libraries), and black bloc activism (masked protest cells attending economic summits and other capitalist events with the aim of shutting them down through obstruction and sometimes property destruction). DiY is a prominent contingent of global justice mass protests at the WTO, IMF, GATT, Republican and Democratic conventions, as well as the more recent Occupy movement.

Contents

Introduction

No Future

Periodizing the Present

What are the Politics of Style?

Anarchism: US Style