The Rain Review of Books

Box 2684 Station Terminal, Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory BC/CA V6B 3W8 | 604-682-3269 ext 7326 | books@rainreview.net

The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End?

Alan Antliff, ed., Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.

Reviewed by Roger Farr
The Rain 3:1 (January-March 2005): 1

The mass demonstrations which shook Seattle in 1999, and the subsequent protests in Genoa and Quebec City—to name only the three most cited and spectacular examples—have become benchmarks for those involved both theoretically and practically in contemporary social movements. The spontaneous and obstinate battles with police, the deliberate attacks on corporations, the joyous eruption of carnivalesque street parties, and the apparent absence of a coherent “platform” or set of demands, made it clear that the familiar organizational models and protest genres developed by the civil rights, labour, and peace movements, had been superseded by new affinity-based forms and a “diversity of tactics”. Although the first appearance of these forms and tactics can be traced, via the European “autonomen” of the 80’s, back to the Situationist International and the May 1968 uprisings, this supercession has been linked to the surge in anarchist theory and activity that developed from and took hold of various radical milieus throughout the 80s and 90s.

Indeed, in its summative security report published in 2000 (#2000/08), “ANTI-GLOBALIZATION: A SPREADING PHENOMENON”, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) concludes that “One of the more impressive innovations [of the anti-globalization movement] has been the method of organizing, arranging, and directing the operational and administrative [sic] activities associated with the demonstrations—accomplished effectively without the obvious influence of central authority, command, or control. In many ways, the system is very similar to that advocated by anarchists….” Likewise, prominent Marxist academics, exhausted by the seemingly endless tasks of apologizing for (and then re-theorizing!) Soviet bureaucracy, while playing catch-up with radical history, found themselves having to admit that they had lost their longstanding ideological battle (if not the war) with anarchism over the centralized orchestration of mass social movements. “Anarchism is the dominant perspective within the movement”, confessed Barbara Epstein in the Monthly Review. Even Hardt and Negri seemed defensive; in Empire, Marxism’s Great White Hope for the new millennium, they felt obliged to announce “No, we are not anarchists”. In fact, it is beginning to seem that the only remnant of “Leftism” that still enjoys some currency in radical milieus today is the autonomist, or “open Marxist”, tendency associated with figures such as Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologona, Maria Rosa Dalla Costa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Werner Bonefeld, Harry Cleaver, and John Holloway. While it is true that Marxism’s rethinking, “opening”, and ultimate jettisoning of many its fundamental categories was largely informed by critiques marshaled by post-structuralism—critiques which, as Todd May and others have argued, the classical anarchists anticipated—it seems plausible to suggest that Marxism’s apparent political decline may in part be due to the cultural triumph of its anarchist doppelganger. Put simply, contemporary anarchist cultural productions are edgier, livelier, and more radical than the offerings of International Socialists, the Unions, and the New Left Review.

Broadly speaking, it is this particular quality of anarchism—its ability to fuse a radical social critique with vibrant DIY cultural production—that Only A Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology documents. As such, the work collected here, which includes the newspapers, posters, flyers, ‘zines, websites, street theatre, infoshops, bookstores and other “autonomous zones” that flourished in Canada “from 1976 to the present”, offers an invaluable resource to anarchist studies. The editor of the collection, Allan Antliff, an activist and an art critic who has been publishing articles in the anarcho-primitivist journal Fifth Estate for many years, is currently a professor of Art History at the University of Victoria. His 2001 book Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde, if it isn’t already, will likely become a standard reference work for those interested in anarchism and aesthetics. It comes as no surprise then that the overall approach to the material collected in Only A Beginning indicates a concern with aesthetics and art history.

I feel some ambivialence towards this aesthetic approach informing the collection, an approach which is evident in the careful reproduction of original documents, either in their entirety or as “thumbnails” accompanying reformatted excerpts of writing. On the one hand, I suspect it will be both informative and surprising for readers who are unfamiliar with the anarchist press to see that the often sophisticated theoretical discourse on the page they are reading was not originally disseminated in a slick academic publication. In this way, the visual rhetoric of the book helps to emphasize important aspects of the cultural productions that distinguish contemporary anarchism from other anti-capitalist tendencies. My fear, however, is that this approach may also put the cart before the horse: some of the publications reproduced here are still being circulated in the mail, or by hand at anarchist bookfairs and gatherings. The day I received Only A Beginning for review, I had on my desk a recent issue of the Denman Island anarchist ‘zine Minus Tides, which is included in the anthology. Granted, the issue on my desk had been published in 2002 (it is published “irregularly”, on island time) but it was strange to see what, for me at least, was still more or less “contemporary” reproduced as an “illustration”, an aestheticized object of contemplation. This is perhaps even more problematic when we consider the representations of non-print based materials: info-shops, theatre, demos, musical performances, bookstores, etc. It struck me for a moment that I had received a sign of “a beginning”, but that it was possibly the beginning of the end: a kind of anarchist wax museum, one in which the various personages and curiosos on exhibit were still alive.

But despite these fairly minor reservations, I think we are all indebted to Antliff for compiling this extraordinary collection, which is far too complex and nuanced to summarize in a review. Antliff’s collection is clearly a labour of love, the work of someone with both an intimate knowledge of various anarchist scenes and tendencies, and an eye for what is salient and worthy of more discussion. Vancouver and Montreal emerge as the two hot-spots of Canadian anarchism. The most prominent publications here include Open Road, BOA (Bevy of Anarcha-feminists), the much-missed Demolition Derby, No Picnic, Anarchives, Démanarchie, Reality Now, Bulldozer, Endless Struggle, the autonomist newspaper Resistance, and Kick It Over. For those readers who still imagine anarchism as a largely 19^th and early 20^th century antiquity linked in some vague way to liberalism, or for those who are so ill-informed as to think that Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are the primary intellectual figureheads of the anarchist movement, the collection will be especially instructive. As we read, the various tendencies within contemporary anarchism start to take shape: green anarchism, insurrectionary anarchism, anarcha-feminism, anarcho-primtivism, autonomist-anarchism, queer-anarchism, etc.; as do the key points of debate within anarchism: armed struggle vs. civil disobedience vs. autonomy, mass organization vs. the affinity group, protest vs. insurrection, the place of technology, the importance of creating anarchist enclaves and “temporary autonomous zones”, nationalism and native sovereignty, etc. At times this morass of –isms and issues can be difficult to navigate, and while Antliff’s division into various sub-headings and chapters is a helpful gesture, it can also be confusing. For example, it is not clear why “technology” is included under “Theory and Practice” while “industrialism” is subordinated to “Issues and Actions”; nor why “ecology” is listed under both “Theory and Practice” and “Debates”. Ultimately, however, this slippage only goes to show that taxonomical categories are more porous than we might imagine, and that anarchists are perhaps unwilling to disinguish theory and practice from debates about issues and actions, which is fair enough.

While it is always easy in reviewing an anthology to criticise it for what it leaves out rather than what it includes—a practice I will not engage in here—there are two oversights that deserve mention. The first and most obvious is Montreal’s Our Generation, which was for over three decades one of Canada’s most prominent anarchist/anti-authoritarian publications, and which was internationally regarded as such. A linked project, Black Rose Books, which has a long history of anarchist publishing is also not mentioned. The second is Vancouver’s Pulp Press. Pulp Press was the earlier imprint of Arsenal Pulp Press, the publisher of this anthology. In the 70s and 80s Pulp Press published a number of pamphlets and reprints dealing with revolutionary anarchism and armed struggle, very much in the Malatesta / RAF tradition. While Arsenal has kept its classic account of German guerrilla warfare, How it All Began, in print, Only A Beginning is, as far as I am aware, the only anarchist title it has published in some time. I hope this collection marks the beginning-again of anarchist publishing in Vancouver.

In closing I want to return to where I began, which was to locate this collection within the context of the anti-globalization movement, a movement to which anarchism has become closely, almost seamlessly, wed. Many recent critical overviews of anarchism, such as Seán M. Sheehan’s otherwise excellent Anarchism, often begin by pointing to the anti-globalization movement as the exemplary moment of 20^th century anarchist theory in practice. Spain has been replaced by Seattle. The cover of Only A Beginning also reproduces this now normalized connection: it shows a picture of what might be a group of “radical cheerleaders” at a demo, above which hovers the obligatory spray-painted circle-A. Why is this a problem? Because, to borrow from Heidi Hartmann, the marriage of anarchism and anti-globalization is starting to resemble the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: anti-globalization and anarchism are one, and that one is anti-globalization. And as a long-time, sympathetic friend, I am starting to wonder whether this marriage is such a good thing for anarchism. Indeed, as Chuck Morse has warned, the recent waning of large-scale demonstrations against capital is not simply “a temporary lull in activity”; rather it suggests that “the anti-globalization movement is dead”. Maybe anarchism should start packing her bags.