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Why A Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist
Abstract and Figures
Radical geographers have been preoccupied with Marxism for four decades, largely ignoring an earlier anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s. When anarchism is considered, it is misused as a synonym for violence or derided as a utopian project. Yet it is incorrect to assume anarchism as a project, which instead reflects Marxian thought. Anarchism is more appropriately considered a protean process that perpetually unfolds through the insurrectionary geographies of the everyday and the prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association. Unlike Marxism’s stages of history and revolutionary imperative, which imply an end-state, anarchism appreciates the dynamism of the social world. In staking a renewed anarchist claim for radical geography, I attend to the divisions between Marxism and anarchism as two alternative socialisms, wherein the former positions equality alongside an ongoing flirtation with authoritarianism while the latter maximizes egalitarianism and individual liberty by considering them as mutually reinforcing. Radical geographers would do well to reengage anarchism as there is a vitality to this philosophy that is missing from Marxian analyses that continue to rehash ideas–such as vanguardism and a proletarian dictatorship–that are long past their expiration date.
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... Thanks to Covid-19 Caring Geographies are back on the scholarly radar (Springer, 2020) giving weight to recognition of fundamental social goods nobody can do without: i.e. health, housing, mobility, solidarity and community. Emphasising conflicts over (alienated) meaning and normative progress in global history, I will arrive at an agonist understanding of social conflict and social change that finds the Marxist search for one grand solution in the waiting room of history (Harvey, 2017;Springer, 2014). Focusing on Honneth's (1995) moral grammar of social conflict and Jaeggi's (2014, 2018) critique of alienation and forms of life -that do not engage with paternalist critique or assume perfect harmony at c08.indd 156 ...
... Harvey has been criticised as a rock in a hard place (Thrift, 2006) for his unchanging perspective on capital and class relations. 'Harvey is no crude materialist, of course', Thrift states (2006: 225), but a member of his time, that is, a US radical scholar, who has not substantially changed his theoretical argument on class struggle and social justice since the 1970s (see Castree and Gregory, 2006;Springer, 2014Springer, , 2017. In light of Harvey's renewed interest in alienation as a meaningful theoretical category to meaningless social practice, Thrift's critique of Harvey is somewhat shaken, which is timely. ...
... Searching for historical progress and alternatives to capitalist urbanisation, similar debate took place in human geography. Here, Simon Springer (2014Springer ( , 2017 has challenged the primacy of Marxist critique in radical geography and confronted David Harvey's analysis to be stuck in the waiting room of history. Arguing for two theoretical routes to socialism, Springer (2014) relies on anarchist theory and criticises Harvey's work to be rather static and totalising: overemphasising the role of the state, while neglecting the role of decentralised ideas of the good and everyday c08.indd 166 20-02-2021 17:37:43 practices of self-organisation. ...
... If we look through the above larger lens, we are currently living through an interregnum where old ways of neoliberal governance of science and knowledge are dead, but the new cannot be born. This calls for prefigurative politics of direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary association to transform science and society toward radical democracies that are capable of decision-making processes, which do not play to populism, but are informed by the values, ideas, knowledge, and interests of communities who comprise them (Springer, 2014). ...
... Prefigurative politics involves ''ongoing opposition to hierarchical and centralized organization that requires a movement that develops and establishes relationships and political forms that 'prefigure' the egalitarian and democratic society that it seeks to create,'' and importantly new definitions of community, for example, as ''a network of relationships that are more direct, more total, and more personal than the formal, abstract, and instrumental relationships that characterize contemporary state and society.'' (Farber, 2014;see also, Breines, 1982;Springer, 2014). ...
We are currently facing and traversing in the thick of a twin pandemic: coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and disinformation. Disinformation is false information created and spread deliberately with the intention to mislead public opinion, obscure truths, and undermine trust in knowledge. The digital age we live in is quite different than the printing revolution and invention of the oil-based ink printing press centuries ago. Digital technologies can spread and repeat disinformation at extremely high speeds, while anyone, a qualified expert or not, and with internet access, can become an author. To fight disinformation, we ought to dismantle the entrenched and extractive epistemologies that act as upstream drivers and sites of disinformation production. Epistemology refers to the value-laden knowledge frames, overarching master narratives, and storylines, in which knowledge is produced. If the epistemologies in which we generate knowledge are false, then the knowledge products will be laden with disinformation. Moreover, the harms caused by disinformation can extend well beyond the immediate knowledge domain where disinformation has originated. This occurs when "false equivalence" is used as a form of rhetoric. False equivalence is a type of flawed sense making where equal weight is given to arguments with concrete material evidence, and those that are conjecture, untrue, or unjust. This article presents an analysis of the disinformation pandemic attendant to COVID-19, with an eye to its causes-of-causes: unchecked extractive epistemologies (e.g., technocracy), and the practice of false equivalence in pandemic discourses. We argue that holding the political agency of master narratives to account is essential (1) to fight the disinformation pandemic and (2) for prefigurative politics to build egalitarian and democratic societies in place of the instrumental/transactional relationships that typify the contemporary nation states and the neoliberal university whose ossified rituals lack the normative capacities for critical governance in a time of converging social, digital, and ecological crises. For liberation from disinformation, we should start with liberation from entrenched extractive epistemologies in science and society.
... Despite its colonial roots, geography has a long tradition of radical scholarship that has examined how systems and flows of power operate violently across time and space to produce material inequities and vulnerabilities (Springer 2012). Indeed Marxist, anarchist, feminist, anti-racist, queer, and post-colonial traditions have produced a wealth of insight into the material basis at the heart of inequality and oppression (Peake and Sheppard 2014). ...
... We need to bring this into research, teaching and activism to build relationships that nurture and support the well-being and empowerment of others, particularly young people. We concur with Springer (2012) who argues that we need to embrace the immediacy of the here and now. We should ask ourselves and our peers: does our work support the ongoing efforts and resistance movements of those surviving on the margins? ...
This paper draws from experiences working with youth in Southern California, many of whom are increasingly under mental, emotional and financial duress. We write this paper to reflect on the capacity to be both radical and caring scholars within academia. We suggest that by combining the complimentary and parallel aims of radical geography's concern for social justice and care ethics' concern for relationality and emotions, we can gain important insights into what it might mean to be caring and radical academics. We propose three tenets for what we term a 'Radical Care Ethics' in geography: 1) Research and teaching that is committed to understanding and improving the material conditions of those living on the margins; 425 2) Scholarship and teaching that extends outside of academic circles to engage meaningfully with the lives of those on the margins; and 3) Attention towards the emotions of others and ourselves in ways that further a commitment to care. We argue that a radical care ethics can serve as an intellectual compass that can begin to address the precarity of those surviving on the margins, particularly young people. A radical care ethics has potential to not only pave the way for more socially responsive scholarship, but to also transform our universities into more caring and socially-just institutions.
... This anarchist orientation of CAS is itself very much aligned, and contributing to a broader (re)turn toward anarchism within the discipline (see Springer et al. 2012;Springer 2013Springer , 2014Springer , 2015, where a concern for the subjugation of animals should be taken as integrally related to the larger project of seeking wider spatial emancipation (Springer 2016). Importantly, this contemporary anarchist turn in geographical scholarship has also drawn fresh understanding and inspiration from influential anarchist geographers who problematized humano-centrism, and embraced the lives of other animals to inform our own modes of organization, Peter Kropotkin's (1902) "mutual aid," and Élisée Reclus' (1901) "universal geography." ...
The rise of Critical Animal Studies (CAS) can be attributed to many factors, not least in its original intersectional approach to social justice issues, and appealing for a politics of total liberation, where “human liberation should not be held distinct from nonhuman animal liberation” (Davis 2014,227; see also Best 2009; Taylor and Twine 2014). Significantly, the influence of CAS cannot be understood only with reference to academia. An ongoing
commitment and desire to forge progressive links and a meaningful relevancy beyond the academy, particularly within animal activist groups, and broader social justice movements, has added an important layer of activist-based scholarship that is largely absent, or ignored, across other animal studies discourse.
Seeking to push forward still the reach of CAS, and the relevance of
the work for both scholars and activists alike, we want to argue how a deeper,
more critical and attuned reading of geography in CAS can make an original
and timely contribution here.
... The (false) antagonism between anticapitalism and postcapitalism that Miller (2015) and others observe links to the debate between Marxism and anarchism that characterizes large parts of the history of the socialist left (Kellermann, 2011(Kellermann, , 2012(Kellermann, , 2014 and is reiterated recently in human geography (Harvey, 2015;Springer, 2014bSpringer, , 2017. This debate is largely between the more utilitarian, institutional, oppositional, and ruptural imaginaries of Marxism and the prefigurative, spontaneous, pluralistic, and interstitial imaginaries of anarchism. ...
... A full description of the declines in government control of urban life after 1965 that set the context for novel neighborhood-transforming collective action would include, at the national level, judicial relinquishment of an effort to define pornography in a manner reliably useful to law enforcement agencies; at the county level, the years-long reversal of funding for a new subway system and the withdrawal of mandated school busing/ 7 In various areas of scholarship, anarchy does not carry the alternatively negative and romantic connotations it is usually given in popular political discussion. The concept has been embraced in the study of international relations (e.g., Mearsheimer 2006) and across a wide range of political theory, from those who see in anarchy a non-Marxist possibility of socialism (Springer 2014) to followers of the Nobel-prized economists Ronald Coase and Elinor Ostrow, who find "market" and community-based solutions to prisoner's dilemmas and tragedies of the commons. A century after Max Weber emphasized a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force in defining the state (Weber 2004, 33), a definition of anarchy as a logically consistent, empirically clear antonym remains elusive. ...
In each of four nearby city areas, residents orient to local centers of collective activity in different geographic patterns. In a “perimeter” neighborhood, residents and outsiders are drawn to religious and retail organizations located on streets that form a rectangle. In an “intersection” neighborhood, residents are most visible to each other at an agglomeration of stores and services located where two high traffic streets cross. Residents of an “in-between” area travel to socio-economically and culturally different neighborhoods centered in all directions elsewhere. In a “contested” geography, rival organizations disagree over who, living where, for what purposes, has the right to define the neighborhood’s boundaries and social identity. These different social ecologies took shape without coordination yet became an interdependent, quadriplex set. After 1965, a series of retreats in government control of local social life created unprecedented opportunities for intermediaries who reshaped the social landscape with new businesses, cultural institutions, and interpretations of neighborhood identity. This case study revives the “collective action” explanations of the “Chicago School” by showing how urban social ecology was transformed in the late twentieth century as people of different generations and in different geographic areas interacted indirectly, creating durable neighborhood patterns without centralized, top-down leadership from business or government, in response to locally recognized affordances of anarchy.
... First, anarchism barely features in the canon of sociology, despite the fact that the anarchists were arguably instrumental in the establishment of sociology as a field of study (Purkis, 2018;Williams, 2014). Like in Geography, IR (Prichard, 2011;Springer, 2014), and elsewhere, anarchist theorists were sidelined when their theories and politics were insufficiently statist. While Lawson makes significant strides here, including 'the international' and challenging the Eurocentricity of conventional analysis (Lawson, 2019: 61-71), he nevertheless remains wedded to a very statist sociological methodology. ...
Lawson advances and defends a quite conservative theory of revolutions, one which is methodologically and normatively statist. In other words, if the revolutionary groups are not concerned with capturing state power, they do not feature in the analysis. What concerns me in particular is the absence of the anarchists and anarchism in the analysis. This omission is not explicitly by design, but more likely a consequence of Lawson’s methodology and definition of revolutions. I’m not going to pursue the ‘Reviewer Three’ strategy of wishing the author had written a different book. Rather, I hope my comments and suggestions illuminate the text from a different angle and, by exploring the limitations of the book, perhaps point beyond the fifth generation of revolution studies to a sixth. The aim is to draw in anarchist scholars and scholars of anarchism to this debate, as well as alerting students of revolutions to the existence of anarchist scholarship on this topic.
Nagar kirtans are street assemblies with Sikh spiritual music, political marches, and free food distribution. They are especially large in April during the Punjabi harvest festival of Vaisakhi but also take place in other months. This paper explores the political praxis of nagar kirtans in Canada to contribute to critiques of secularism and theorize the political ontology in the Sikh context. I conceptualize nagar kirtan as a mobile court of both poetic pilgrimage and politics, which engage an embodied and performative world-making process, termed performed worlding, that is at odds with the modern ontology of the secular state. The empirical study analyzes early 20th century nagar kirtans in Vancouver and contemporary ones in urban Canada in the 2010-decade. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out between 2017 and 2018 including analysis of interviews and archival and media content. Early nagar kirtans in Vancouver were aligned with the anti-colonial Ghadar Movement to protest the racial state of Canada. In the contemporary context, the study reveals competing ways of worlding the political ontologies of the mobile court. On the one hand, there is an increased commodification and state presence that refashions the practice at larger Vaisakhi nagar kirtan to be marketable to Canadian multiculturalism. On the other hand, the bottom-up assembling of participants align a spiritual politics of Sikh and Punjabi world-making, one that is grounded in practices of horizontal organizing and mutual care and sustain a form of embodied expression against racial Canada.
Full Text at: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1efQ93Qu6ubopS
Environmental movements have evolved and expanded across recent years in response to escalating ecological crisis. Developments include an increasingly prominent role for young people, more concerted efforts to integrate environmental and social struggles, and renewed critiques of global capitalism and its growth imperative. Underexplored throughout extensive scholarship in this field is how young environmental activists are (re)imagining socio-ecological crisis and transformation. This thesis aims to develop a deeper understanding of how young environmental activists envisage crisis and the types of futures they seek. The project draws on 30 semi-structured interviews and participant observation with young environmental activists (aged 16-28) in North East England. I develop an open case study approach in which data collected through local, low-impact empirical research is analysed through a theoretical lens centred around the burgeoning transnational academic-activist discourse of degrowth. The project evolved from a (pre)embedded position within this local activist milieu.
In contrast with earlier environmentalist discourse, the narrative analysis in this thesis reveals how young activists pursue ecologically sustainable and socially just futures as an integrated ambition. Such approaches reflect the ascendant influence of climate justice frames which foreground the intersections of climate breakdown with existing social-geographical inequalities and oppressions. Bound up with these framings, however, are risks: I caution against the neglect of dimensions of ecological crisis beyond climate, as well as the underappreciation of complex interdependencies between human and non-human wellbeing. I also uncover a predominant oppositional orientation characterising both the forms of action young activists engage in and how they envisage transformation(s). Tensions between antagonistic and imaginative politics are manifest in the way that many activists appear to defer the development of alternative socio-ecological imaginaries until an abstract future moment. For some this deferral is unconscious whilst, for others, it is expressed as a deliberative prioritisation of an oppositional politics in the present. I argue, however, that this
This paper examines the international community's post-war effort to promote the return of persons displaced by ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war itself began as an extreme ethnonationalist project, seeking security through territorial separation. This created a massive displacement with more than half the country's population driven from their homes largely as a result of the terrorism of ethnic cleansing. The peace settlement at Dayton guaranteed the right to return for displaced persons but also effectively divided the country into ethnonationalist homelands. Thus, while the initial security dilemma for the international community was to separate the warring factions and keep the peace, they soon faced an added security dilemma created by the displaced exercising their right to return to homes in what had become hostile ethnonationalist territories. Faced with obstructions to returns put in place by local ethnonationalists who continued to run day-to-day government operations in places of return, the implementation of the right to return forced the international community to overcome its apolitical and accommodating stance. Changes in the international governance of Bosnia enabled a series of policies designed to promote returns-recognized as key to reconstruction-that employed localized spatial strategies of intervention in support of returnees. After a decade of displacement, the legacy of ethnic cleansing endures, forming limits to returns and persistent insecurity for returning communities, thus permanently altering Bosnia's human geography and political future. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
An attempt to mesh elements of anarchist and Marxist traditions calling for a new revolutionary paradigm for human liberation.- Joe Doherty
This study examines Marx’s disputes with, and attacks upon, those anarchist theoreticians he encountered at various stages of his career. Marx’s attacks on Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin are shown to be of vital importance to his career as a theorist and revolutionist. The formative influences upon Marx’s writings and his political activity are discussed and analyzed. The author re-situates Marx’s thought in the context of the 19th century when Marxism was not an unchallenged orthodoxy but a doctrine and method that needed to be defended against rival revolutionary impulses.
In this collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Employing an unpretentious style to convey complex ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground: the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions and gender in rural Madagascar, the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests, and much more. But they're linked by a clear purpose: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken—or might take in the future.
In the best anthropological tradition, Graeber uses rich ethnographic and historical detail to support and illuminate broad insights into human nature and society. In the process, he shows how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy.