Originally published on November 22nd, 2025 at The Polar Blast. Recently republished by Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) UK on July 22nd, 2026.
For the past few years, a peculiar current has swept through parts of the anarchist milieu, particularly those corners closest to academia, the NGO apparatus, and the broad “social justice” ecosystems of the liberal left. It goes something like this: “we don’t live in revolutionary times”. The line is always delivered with a kind of weary resignation, as if the speaker has grown too sophisticated, too worldly, too traumatised or too professional to still believe in any of the old principles.
We are told that anarchists cannot reject electoralism, because that would be “dogmatic” or “purist.” We cannot maintain a principled anti-militarism in the face of imperial alignments and geopolitical chessboards, because that would be “naïve” or “privileged” or simply “not how the world works.” We cannot challenge nationalism, because apparently even anarchists must kneel before the altar of flags when the right war breaks out. And in Aotearoa, we are increasingly instructed that anarchists, of all people, should simply fall into line behind Labour, the Greens, or Te Pāti Māori, and that anything else amounts to assisting the Right, aiding fascism, or failing to take “real-world consequences” seriously.
It is a remarkable ideological contortion, one that has transformed a large portion of self-identified anarchists into adjuncts of liberalism, junior partners to parliamentary leftism, and in some cases loud defenders of militarised state power. This collapse is not merely political drift; it represents a profound refusal to uphold the most basic tenets of anarchism. It is a capitulation dressed up as realism, a surrender disguised as nuance, and a fear of being politically unfashionable mispackaged as maturity.
But at its core, this discourse expresses something simple and corrosive – a belief that anarchism is incapable of acting as a revolutionary force in its own right, and must therefore outsource its agency to liberal institutions.
One cannot understand the present collapse of anarchist independence without understanding the cultural ecosystem that many leftists now inhabit. In Aotearoa, as across the Western world, political energy has been systematically redirected into NGOs, consultancies, academic departments, and publicly funded “progressive” institutions which operate comfortably inside capitalism’s infrastructure. These spaces speak the language of radicalism but behave according to the incentives of bureaucracy.
Many young anarchists do not radicalise through struggle anymore, through occupations, workplace organising, anti-militarist resistance, housing fights, or anti-police action. Instead, they are socialised into a professional sphere where the primary goal is to secure contracts, maintain social capital, and avoid political risk. The result is predictable: anarchism becomes merely a branding aesthetic rather than a commitment to revolutionary action.
Inside those institutional spaces, rejecting electoralism is framed as childish. Criticising leftist parties is framed as sabotaging “progress.” Maintaining anti-militarist principles is presented as dangerous idealism. Refusing to collapse into a Labour-Green-Māori Party electoral bloc is seen as a betrayal of the “community.”
But these are not moral judgments, they are occupational ones. Anarchists working within NGO and academic networks quickly internalise that their material survival depends on aligning with the soft-left consensus. Electoral criticism risks contracts. Anti-militarism risks reputational safety. Anti-state politics complicates relationships with funders.
And so a new norm develops – anarchists should avoid being too anarchist. Radical rhetoric is allowed, even encouraged, so long as it ends up reinforcing the parliamentary left. Anything that threatens the state’s monopoly on legitimacy becomes unspeakable.
The result is an anarchism that speaks fluently about “mutual aid” yet forgets that mutual aid is not a social service but a weapon against the state’s claim to necessity. An anarchism that condemns racism and colonialism yet funnels all resistance into state-aligned institutions. An anarchism that champions decolonisation yet recoils from any challenge to parliamentary authority in Aotearoa. An anarchism that supports struggles overseas only when they align with Western strategic narratives.
In essence, it is an anarchism that has lost its nerve — and then rationalised that loss as intellectual sophistication.
The drift into electoral reasoning is a key symptom of this collapse. It takes several forms.
Sometimes it is explicit: “We must vote for Labour/Greens/TPM to keep the Right out.” Sometimes it is dressed up in social-justice rhetoric: “Marginalised communities are harmed when the Right wins, therefore anarchists have a responsibility to vote.” Sometimes it is wrapped in strategic fatalism: “Voting won’t save us, but it helps buy time.”
But underneath all of this is the same core assumption that the state must remain the primary vehicle for social change, and anarchists must adjust their politics to accommodate that reality.
It is extraordinary how quickly anarchists forget that the modern state, liberal or conservative, is structurally unable to abolish the exploitation, hierarchies, and coercive apparatus that define it. Even when left governments attempt reforms, they do so by strengthening the machinery anarchists seek to dismantle: police, prisons, militaries, borders, welfare bureaucracies, surveillance technologies, taxation extraction systems.
In Aotearoa, Labour is a textbook example. Every time it returns to power, the anarchist milieu fractures. Those closest to NGO infrastructures begin arguing for strategic support. The rhetoric of “harm reduction” becomes weaponised to shut down criticism from those who insist, rightly, that Labour has proven itself a reliable servant of capital, imperial alliances, and domestic managerialism.
This dynamic intensified during the Ardern era. Many anarchists who had once mocked parliamentarians found themselves reduced to timid criticism, or complete silence, because the social atmosphere of liberal adoration made genuine dissent feel culturally taboo. Within activist circles, Ardernism was treated as “good enough,” and anarchists who disagreed were cast as troublemakers, misogynists, or unrealistic purists.
A movement that views itself as revolutionary should never be this fragile. Yet the collapse was widespread and revealing: many anarchists were more committed to social belonging within the liberal cultural class than to anarchism itself.
Once this cultural shift occurs, a fatal logic takes hold: anarchists must not reject electoralism because their allies, often their employers, depend on it.
This is how a revolutionary tradition turns into a lobby group.
The most alarming expression of this drift has been the abandonment of anarchist anti-militarism. For centuries, anarchists have insisted that war is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of the capitalist state system. Militarism is the purest expression of hierarchical power, resource extraction, nationalism, and obedience. It is the machine that devours working-class youth to protect the interests of competing ruling classes.
Yet in recent years, many self-described anarchists have adopted a military logic indistinguishable from Western liberalism. They cheer for NATO when it suits them. They speak approvingly of sending weapons to proxy conflicts. They amplify the language of “defence,” “security,” and “strategic necessity.” They shame anti-militarists for “not supporting the right side.”
This is the most dangerous capitulation of all.
Once anarchists accept the legitimacy of war, they have surrendered their last meaningful distinction from the statist left. The result is an anarchism that obediently follows the emotional rhythms of Western media cycles, outraged when instructed, supportive when instructed, silent when instructed, instead of maintaining its own anti-militarist compass.
Part of this collapse is ideological. Part is material. But a significant part is psychological.
Many anarchists today are terrified of being seen as “irresponsible.” The wider liberal-left culture frames politics through the lens of compliance, safety, and harm-minimisation. Anything that challenges institutional frameworks is seen as reckless. Anything that disrupts political normalcy is dangerous. Anything that undermines parliamentary leftism is indirectly “helping the Right.”
This creates a paralysing moral landscape where the worst sin an anarchist can commit is not supporting the status quo loudly enough. The fear of being blamed for a right-wing victory becomes so overwhelming that many stop imagining politics outside the narrow horizon of elections. The fear of being accused of “not caring” about marginalised communities becomes a weapon used to silence radical politics.
In such a climate, anarchism becomes an identity, not a praxis – a way of feeling radical while behaving safely.
This anxiety-based politics produces an anarchist who:
• privately agrees the state cannot liberate anyone, but fears saying so publicly.
• privately knows elections change nothing fundamental, but votes anyway and pressures others to do so.
• privately opposes war, but shares liberal talking points so as not to appear insensitive.
• privately wants to resist capitalism directly, but settles for symbolic action within the system.
The result is tragic: anarchists who are radical everywhere except where it matters.
The situation in Aotearoa intensifies this collapse because the liberal left is structured around moral frameworks linked to biculturalism, Treaty discourse, and NGO-based social justice work. These are important terrains of struggle, but the state has learned to weaponise them to maintain legitimacy.
This produces a political landscape where anarchists are pressured to treat parliamentary actors, especially Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori as central vehicles for “progress,” even when their track record is deeply entangled with colonial administration, policing, market capitalism, and militarised foreign policy.
The liberal state in Aotearoa has become adept at performing moral virtue while intensifying its structural violence. It deploys kupu Māori in its rebranding while expanding prisons. It funds “community providers” while crushing working-class living standards. It hires iwi consultants while pushing militarised surveillance in the Pacific. It offers symbolic recognition while evading material decolonisation.
Yet many anarchists, immersed in NGO environments and Treaty workshops, struggle to critique this dynamic without being accused of cultural ignorance or reactionary politics. The result is silence, caution, or apologism, behaviours entirely incompatible with anarchist commitments to confronting state power, all state power, regardless of the rhetoric it cloaks itself in.
And so the argument returns: anarchists must support leftist parties; anarchists must not reject electoralism; anarchists must not oppose nationalist or militarised frameworks when they are framed as protective of Indigenous sovereignty or marginalised communities.
Such reasoning conflates the state with the people, a mistake anarchists spent 150 years warning against.
The claim that anarchists “can’t” reject electoralism, or “can’t” oppose leftist parties, is ultimately a claim about the impossibility of political imagination. It assumes that the state is the only terrain available, that nothing meaningful can be done outside of it, and that anarchists must align themselves with the managerial left because the alternative is irrelevance.
But this is only true if we accept the premises of liberal fatalism. The entire anarchist tradition exists because previous generations refused those premises. Emma Goldman did not look at the early 20th century and decide anarchists must support progressive mayors. Kropotkin did not conclude that the working class should vote for liberal reformers. Māori radicals in the 1970s did not decide that liberation ran through Parliament. The Spanish CNT did not believe emancipation required alliances with bourgeois parties, until internal liberal capture weakened them with disastrous consequences.
Anarchism has always insisted that politics extends far beyond electoral cycles. If anything, the crises of our age, climate breakdown, housing collapse, militarised imperial alignments, collapsing social infrastructure, prove that anarchist organising is not merely viable, but necessary. The state is not the only site of political action. It is not even the most effective one. It is simply the only one liberals can imagine.
If anarchism is to reclaim itself from liberal capture, it must reaffirm some basic, uncompromising truths.
Anarchists must reject electoralism not because elections are morally impure, but because electoral participation actively undermines the development of autonomous working-class power. Every hour poured into canvassing is an hour not spent organising. Every argument about strategic voting is a diversion from the real labour of building alternatives. Every second spent defending leftist parties is a second spent normalising the idea that liberation flows downward from Parliament rather than upward from struggle.
Anarchists must oppose all militarism, not selectively, not only when it aligns with Western interests, not only when liberals approve, because every war strengthens the state, intensifies nationalism, and expands the repressive apparatus that will ultimately be used against us.
Anarchists must reject the notion that leftist parties represent “the community.” Labour does not represent working people. The Greens do not represent ecological resistance. Te Pāti Māori does not represent decolonisation. Parties represent themselves – their leadership, their funders, their institutional incentives, their careers.
Anarchists must refuse the guilt-trip politics of liberalism — the idea that we are responsible for right-wing victories if we refuse to align with the parliamentary left. That logic is emotional blackmail used to discipline dissent.
Most importantly, anarchists must rediscover the confidence that we can act, we can organise, and we can build political power outside the state. We must stop believing that autonomy is impossible. The future belongs not to voters but to those who take the risk of creating something outside the suffocating frameworks of capitalist governance.
The liberal discourse infecting contemporary anarchism ultimately reduces to one pitiful sentence:
“Anarchism can’t do anything, so anarchists should help the liberals.”
It is a defeatist creed masquerading as pragmatism. It is the whisper of a movement that has lost faith in itself. It is the ideology of an anarchism that has forgotten its own history, its own victories, its own capacity to terrify the powerful.
When anarchists argue that they cannot reject electoralism, they are abandoning the principle that liberation grows from below. When anarchists argue they cannot oppose leftist parties, they are surrendering their independence to the very institutions designed to neutralise social movements. When anarchists argue they cannot maintain anti-militarism, they are accepting the logic of empire. When anarchists argue they cannot act without state permission, they are no longer anarchists at all.
We stand at a moment when capitalism is unravelling, the climate is breaking down, global militarism is accelerating, and the old political categories are collapsing. This is not a moment to retreat into the exhausted pragmatism of the liberal-left. It is a moment to reclaim the audacity and clarity of anarchism: the belief that the working class can organise itself, that communities can govern themselves, that solidarity can replace coercion, and that states, all states, are obstacles to freedom, not vehicles for it.
We owe the world something better than becoming the auxiliary wing of liberalism.
Comments
These kinds of pieces of…
These kinds of pieces of superficial: despite identifying "material" causes for this decline in "anarchism" (they really mean the entirety of the Left), the author provides no such materialist explanation. We are told that Leftists are simply psychologically weak.
Well, they are. But that's not an explanation. Notice that despite repeatedly attacking these various parties the author puts forward no anarchist path to victory, no anarchist strategy, no anarchist anything. Indeed, the author does not even identify who, exactly, they are speaking about.
The author's piece is not a challenge against the Liberals. It is validation against anarchism. The author cannot define who he is speaking about, who he is defending, why this amorphously defined mob of "anarchists" has any political relevance or strength, or even why they would hold the keys to the failures of the reformist parties. This isn't a "tendency" or a "trend" in anarchism. It IS anarchism: an undefined, structureless mob of people with vaguely and superficially dissident ideas that are indeterminate, overbroad, and incoherent and which default to small groups and individuals, i.e. groups that are incapable of scaling. These actual ties that make up the actually existing anarchist non-movement are the material ties that are missing from the piece and of course there are no meaningful efforts to study that question, here or in most places, because the answer would of course be discrediting: anarchism is wholly made up of people involved in various bourgeois civil society initiatives that have no defined constituency of their own, except maybe in the abstract.
The supposed creep of reformist and non-profit politics is unsurprising. Anarchism lacks even a coherent definition, which is why half of the debates on sites like LibCom are about what "counts" as anarchism in the first place (the answers are always arbitrary). Nor can this be solved by picking a particular "wing" or "flavor" of anarchism: the individual flavors and wings are so ill-defined that they regularly bleed into each other, conveniently allowing almost anything to be simultaneously described as a type of anarchism, outside of anarchism, or an internal split within anarchism.
The end result of this indeterminacy is that "anarchists," by which one can only ultimately mean "people who call themselves anarchists, but with an asterisk so we can exclude the ones we don't like, whoever they happen to be" have no praxis or political agenda of their own. So where do they get their ideas about revolution, social change, praxis, what is to be done, who is to do it, etc.?
The same place everyone else gets it: the dominant political parties. That is why even though one can find an "anarchist" justification for virtually any path of action or policy or belief or disposition, anarchists nonetheless end up generally agreeing on certain things: police are bad, capitalism is bad, bad things are bad, Nazis are bad, etc. But they are stymied by the fact that beyond the bourgeois parties doing their thinking for them, they cannot put forward a meaningfully independent politics that doesn't share the bourgeois priorities. At best they can "out-radical" the bourgeois parties: where the bourgeois people call for reforming broken capitalism, they call for overthrowing it. Where the bourgeois parties call for regulating racism, they call for killing racists. Where the bourgeois groups call for X, the anarchists call for X+1!
But they cannot define the enemy properly, hence the superficial takes about Israel that repeat Zionist propaganda, the long history of homophobia (until the bourgeois parties began to embrace LGBT groups), the endless confusion about identity politics, etc. Anarchists inherit politics from the people they officially condemn, because the ideology is designed to blunt, disorient, and confuse any meaningful answer.
Notice that despite…
Notice that despite repeatedly attacking these various anarchists, Drakula13Masr puts forward no alternative path to victory, no alternative strategy, no alternative anything.
> Notice that despite…
> Notice that despite repeatedly attacking these various anarchists, Drakula13Masr puts forward no alternative path to victory, no alternative strategy, no alternative anything.
No kidding: I'd need my own article for that, and in any case, it's not necessary to put forward an alternative if an existing strategy is quite confused.
Specifically, the author of this piece appears to believe that a pep talk will fix the problem he has cited without acknowledging that the problem he has cited is not the result of a particular tendency or a psychological disposition at all (with only a very superficial reference to materialism). The inevitable disposition of any attempt to create a movement based on the ideological leanings of people united by an indeterminate, overbroad, and superficial pseudo-philosophy will always fail because those ideological bonds have no material basis. They are at best a broad collection of vaguely dissident ideas.
My "alternative" would be to drop this kind of childish "anarchist movement" organizing altogether. It only takes five minutes in most anarchist spaces to recognize that nobody reads, no one is required to read, and indeed reading marks you as a target of whoever is the loudest because you might accidentally call into question whatever silly politics actually binds the organizers together.
Instead, I would encourage activists to start from the classics (Marx, etc.) while finding the segments of the population whose interests actually coincide with the interests of the working class. Then build organizing ties directly with those who are oppressed. From there one can start to see all the crazy ways in which ruling elites divide people, leave them voiceless, etc. and you can maybe try organizing some kind of alternative or support. It's not exactly a complete roadmap but I think it's better than this kind of thing.
Childish is base a entirely…
Childish is base a entirely movement in a single man...
Better read the classic that build the international revolutionary movement. Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin...
Also: https://www.blackrosefed.org/anarchist-theory-and-history-in-global-perspective/
Thanks, Ragnar. I appreciate…
Thanks, Ragnar. I appreciate the link to this retrospective on how anarchism has been defined in the past. But while the authors (basically) confirm most of the critiques I have repeated here, I don't think they overcome them. At best they are putting forward yet another questionable definition that has no real material roots. At best it is a narrower definition.
Insofar as they appear to be suggesting that anarchism refers to some sort of ideal-type associated with particular instances of social revolution I think that's correct but it does not necessarily justify organizing an "anarchist movement" as opposed to anarchism being an ideological influence in supporting actually existing communities of struggle, including those that lack anarchist or even leftist views.
Drakula13Masr wrote: At best…
Which one? The anarchism born in the First International (anarchist socialism, how they begin call themselves). And it has a clear definition of what stands for and what doesn't.
Ragnar wrote: Drakula13Masr…
This one: "Anarchism is a socialist and revolutionary ideology that is founded on specific principles, whose bases are defined by a critique of domination and a defense of self-management; in structural terms, anarchism advocates a social transformation based on strategies which must allow for the substitution of a system of domination by a system of self-management.37"
And it's not real material…
And it's not real material root because of?
It sounds like another…
It sounds like another arbitrary ideal-type. Anarchists are a vaguely defined group of people who believe in fairly broad ideals. These authors went through the list and either discounted people who were previously counted (such as Stirner) and added people who had been excluded. Maybe that is a worthwhile academic endeavor but it hardly suggests a clear strategy, constituency, theory, etc., like the kind that might be rooted in real-world social relations.
I think you're making a much…
I think you're making a much stronger claim than you've actually argued for.
You keep saying anarchism lacks "material roots", but I haven't seen you explain what you mean by that. What exactly would count as a material root in your view? And why would the anti-authoritarian current that emerged within the First International, with its organisations, newspapers, congresses, strikes, and revolutionary practice, not qualify?
At the moment, it feels as though you're dismissing a historical political tradition simply because it doesn't fit your preferred framework. But that isn't an argument; it's an assertion.
Likewise, you say the definition is "arbitrary". Compared to what? Every political tradition has to draw historical and theoretical boundaries. Marxists distinguish Marx from Lassalle, Luxemburg from Bernstein, Lenin from Kautsky. Nobody concludes from those debates that "Marxism" is therefore an arbitrary ideal-type.
So I'd encourage you to move beyond slogans like "ideal-type" or "no material roots" and defend those claims. What is your criterion? Why does anarchism fail it, while whatever alternative framework you're proposing succeeds? Unless you can answer those questions, I don't think you've shown that e.g. the Black Rose definition is arbitrary, only that you disagree with where it draws the boundaries.
And finally, I don't see why it follows that because anarchists should work within broader communities of struggle, there should therefore be no anarchist movement. Historically, those things have gone together rather than being opposed. If you think they are incompatible, I'd be interested to hear the argument rather than simply the conclusion.
Drakula13Masr: My …
Drakula13Masr:
My "alternative" would be to drop this kind of childish "anarchist movement" organizing altogether. It only takes five minutes in most anarchist spaces to recognize that nobody reads, no one is required to read, and indeed reading marks you as a target of whoever is the loudest because you might accidentally call into question whatever silly politics actually binds the organizers together.
ASN: I think you are capturing correctly what's going in much of the USA and other parts of especially the Anglo World with many who "identify" as anarchists and so called anarchist bookshops/centres. Perhaps connected to coverage about anarchists/anarchism/black blocs in the corporate media.. What you are touching on is the sect/cult/pseudo church phenomena.
Definitely something like this occurred at Jura Books in Sydney associated with moves to establish a cult form 2003 to 2013 and afterwards. But also some who actually do read any anarchist stuff and identify as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists - they develop a very perverted/warped interpretation stemming from the pervasive stalinist political culture and legacy and being influenced by the Trot groups of various tendencies
> I think you're making a…
> I think you're making a much stronger claim than you've actually argued for. You keep saying anarchism lacks "material roots", but I haven't seen you explain what you mean by that. What exactly would count as a material root in your view? And why would the anti-authoritarian current that emerged within the First International, with its organisations, newspapers, congresses, strikes, and revolutionary practice, not qualify?
Well let's be clear that every political movement that has more than 1 or 2 people has some kind of material roots. The question should be whether it has material roots in social relations that are predicated around opposition to the existing system. The ideological bonds among anarchists -- which appear to be their only bonds -- are not outgrowths of class relations that, when unencumbered by political repression, co-optation, etc. would tend towards revolution. People who talk about a new world but ultimately meet each other in the non-profit sector, academia, etc. have no such roots. Some of them may be very dedicated (in my experience, the opposite is equally true), but that does not mean the ideology is organized around a particular constituency that has revolutionary potential. Insofar as anarchism in practice tends to revolve around vague opposition to forms of oppression, hierarchy, or rule, such an ideology not only ends up being inevitably abstract, but also leads to the kinds of indeterminacy I've described before. It is difficult to even define who is welcome or welcome, who is the opposition or who isn't, what is acceptable and what isn't, what is to be done (or not be done). And even if those questions could be answered, it would be impossible to enforce their conclusions. Hence the problem with the Black Rose definition: even accepting that this is not yet another arbitrary definition of anarchism, what difference does it make?
That is what leads to what the author is describing. There is no ideological "neutral" zone. All political ideologies reflect class interests and, in the absence of rootedness in the working class rather than unity around a vague set of ideals, anarchist movements default to the class interests of the dominant class. Hence the opportunism the author describes.
> Likewise, you say the definition is "arbitrary". Compared to what? Every political tradition has to draw historical and theoretical boundaries. Marxists distinguish Marx from Lassalle, Luxemburg from Bernstein, Lenin from Kautsky. Nobody concludes from those debates that "Marxism" is therefore an arbitrary ideal-type.
I think there are fundamental differences. While all of the ideological differences you've mentioned may exist (Lenin vs. Bernstein etc.) they are generally rooted in an actual body of theory stemming from Marx's writings on historical materialism. They don't necessarily get it right or agree all the time, but the ideas and debates are centered around this understanding of history and how it changes. Even the name is more specific. It's the ideas associated with Karl Marx and their lineage. That alone makes it more straight-forward: it is a theory whose lineage can be traced, analyzed, changed, and measured against the real world.
Likewise, the generalized belief in party structures, states, and other institutions designed to enforce the hegemonic rule of the working class are to ensure (in theory) that the kind of indeterminacy and vagueness associated with anarchism does not get in the way of creating a counter-hegemonic political movement.
Whether or not Marxists have actually done any of that properly is of course a matter of debate but that means it is more than just a vague collection of people with shared values (though it may also be that). There is an objective component of the theory (historical materialism) that in turn explains or informs the rest of Marxist politics.
> And finally, I don't see why it follows that because anarchists should work within broader communities of struggle, there should therefore be no anarchist movement. Historically, those things have gone together rather than being opposed. If you think they are incompatible, I'd be interested to hear the argument rather than simply the conclusion.
Anarchists and everyone else should find oppressed people and support them. But a "movement" should be designed to protect the interests of its constituency. A movement based around theoretical vagueries is no such movement.
I think you've clarified…
I think you've clarified your position, but I also think you've smuggled your conclusion into your premises.
You say a political movement only has meaningful material roots if it is the direct political expression of social relations that inherently tend towards revolution. But that's precisely the point that needs demonstrating, not assuming.
Why should that be the criterion?
More importantly, I think you're creating a false contrast between Marxism and anarchism.
Marxism isn't "material" because people call themselves Marxists. It's material because it claims to analyse society through historical materialism and seeks to intervene in class struggle accordingly. But anarchism has never been merely a collection of ethical principles either. From Bakunin onwards, anarchism also developed a material analysis of capitalism, class, exploitation and the state, even where it disagreed with Marx's conclusions. Rejecting historical materialism as a closed system is not the same as rejecting materialist analysis altogether.
Likewise, political organisations are not themselves classes or social relations. They are political expressions that emerge within them. The anti-authoritarian current of the First International didn't appear because a group of philosophers invented "anarchism" in isolation. It emerged from concrete disagreements inside an international workers' movement over strategy, organisation, the state, federalism and revolution. Those debates reflected real conflicts within the labour movement itself.
Your argument also seems difficult to apply consistently.
Today there are countless academics, NGO workers and middle-class professionals active in Marxist organisations. Does that mean Marxism no longer has "material roots"? I don't think you would accept that conclusion, because you would probably argue that what matters is the politics, strategy and social orientation of those organisations rather than the individual class background of every member.
I'd say exactly the same applies to anarchism.
Historically, anarchist organisations rooted themselves in the workers' movement through unions, workers' associations, neighbourhood organisations, cooperatives and revolutionary federations. Contemporary especifismo expresses this through the concept of 'social insertion': anarchists do not see themselves as a substitute for working-class struggle, but as militants embedded within it, helping to build mass organisations while maintaining their own political organisation. That is precisely an attempt to root anarchist politics in working-class social relations rather than treating anarchism as a self-contained ideological subculture.
Finally, I think your definition of what constitutes a political movement creates another problem. You say a movement should defend the interests of its constituency. But what exactly is the constituency of Marxism? It isn't "the working class" in any direct sense. Marxist organisations are political minorities within the working class, just as anarchist organisations are. If being organised around a political theory rather than encompassing an entire class means anarchism lacks material roots, then the same criticism would seem to apply to every Marxist party as well.
So I don't think you've shown that anarchism is uniquely abstract. Rather, you've proposed a criterion that either excludes almost every revolutionary political organisation, or else has to be applied differently to anarchism than to Marxism. I'd be interested to hear why.
I also wonder whether you're conflating contemporary activist culture with the historical anarchist movement. If your critique is aimed at a certain NGO-oriented or campus-based anarchism, I share some of those concerns. But that seems quite different from claiming that anarchism as a historical current (from the First International through the CNT, FORA, FAI or especifista organisations today) has no material roots in working-class struggle.
"You say a political…
"You say a political movement only has meaningful material roots if it is the direct political expression of social relations that inherently tend towards revolution. But that's precisely the point that needs demonstrating, not assuming. Why should that be the criterion?"
How can it be anything else?
"More importantly, I think you're creating a false contrast between Marxism and anarchism. Marxism isn't "material" because people call themselves Marxists. It's material because it claims to analyse society through historical materialism and seeks to intervene in class struggle accordingly. But anarchism has never been merely a collection of ethical principles either. From Bakunin onwards, anarchism also developed a material analysis of capitalism, class, exploitation and the state, even where it disagreed with Marx's conclusions. Rejecting historical materialism as a closed system is not the same as rejecting materialist analysis altogether. Likewise, political organisations are not themselves classes or social relations. They are political expressions that emerge within them. The anti-authoritarian current of the First International didn't appear because a group of philosophers invented "anarchism" in isolation. It emerged from concrete disagreements inside an international workers' movement over strategy, organisation, the state, federalism and revolution. Those debates reflected real conflicts within the labour movement itself. "
You brought up Marxism, not me. I simply pointed out how they are ideologically distinct.
"Your argument also seems difficult to apply consistently. Today there are countless academics, NGO workers and middle-class professionals active in Marxist organisations. Does that mean Marxism no longer has "material roots"? I don't think you would accept that conclusion, because you would probably argue that what matters is the politics, strategy and social orientation of those organisations rather than the individual class background of every member. I'd say exactly the same applies to anarchism."
That's not the argument. Indeed, individual Marxist professors or graduate students that belong to a Marxist study group, Marxist drinking club, or Marxist internet chat group are also not engaged in meaningful class struggle. The difference is there is more to Marxism than that. Can that truly, honestly be said of "Anarchism"? It never scales. It is designed to be limited to individual activists and their small groups because the ideology is centered around decentralization. That in turn leads to both the larger indeterminacy and solipsistic ideas about what technically constitutes anarchism, but also the inevitable ideological spinelessness: because anarchism is designed to be solipsistic, it cannot put forward a strategy that is rooted in history and represents the interests of the working class, and inevitably slides into the reformism/opportunism the author mentions. To be clear, so do all the other "Leftist" movements that are floating around. They are also ideologically confused and weak. The difference is that the confusion is not necessarily baked into the theory.
"Finally, I think your definition of what constitutes a political movement creates another problem. You say a movement should defend the interests of its constituency. But what exactly is the constituency of Marxism? It isn't "the working class" in any direct sense. Marxist organisations are political minorities within the working class, just as anarchist organisations are. If being organised around a political theory rather than encompassing an entire class means anarchism lacks material roots, then the same criticism would seem to apply to every Marxist party as well."
Indeed, they are all doing a terrible job.
"The anti-authoritarian current of the First International didn't appear because a group of philosophers invented "anarchism" in isolation. It emerged from concrete disagreements inside an international workers' movement over strategy, organisation, the state, federalism and revolution. Those debates reflected real conflicts within the labour movement itself....Historically, anarchist organisations rooted themselves in the workers' movement through unions, workers' associations, neighbourhood organisations, cooperatives and revolutionary federations. Contemporary especifismo expresses this through the concept of 'social insertion': anarchists do not see themselves as a substitute for working-class struggle, but as militants embedded within it, helping to build mass organisations while maintaining their own political organisation. That is precisely an attempt to root anarchist politics in working-class social relations rather than treating anarchism as a self-contained ideological subculture....I also wonder whether you're conflating contemporary activist culture with the historical anarchist movement. If your critique is aimed at a certain NGO-oriented or campus-based anarchism, I share some of those concerns. But that seems quite different from claiming that anarchism as a historical current (from the First International through the CNT, FORA, FAI or especifista organisations today) has no material roots in working-class struggle."
Where is the evidence of this? Where are these mass organizations? Who is building them? And more importantly, where and how does the theory underlying anarchism actually call for this? You are suggesting that campus-based student lefty groups and NGO-oriented groups are somehow different. If they are different, where is the dividing line, ideologically? Where is it in the real world?