Illusory Alternatives: Neo-Anarchism’s Disengaged and Reactionary Leftism

Abstract

The global economic crisis and anger over government measures— ranging from meek attempts at reintroducing financial regulation to harsh austerity programs—have produced a Hurry of fresh political activism. Ihe publicity garnered by the Occupy Wall Street protests in the United States emboldened organizers to confront longstanding political issues with a renewed sense of the power of mass protest. Occupy Wall Street emerged mere months after the Arab Spring. Although the protests in the Middle East were directed at one-party states that had ruled for decades, the closely timed occurrence of the occupation of Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park led some to speculate that a new era of global protest is on the rise, seeing solidarity where important distinctions might otherwise have been drawn.¹ One such difference is that Occupy found its inchoate impetus in a mainly anarchistic theoretical orientation.² Neo-anarchists,³ such as the anthropologist David Graeber, played a direct role in planning the action that was originally called for by the anticorporate magazine Adbusters.⁴ Once activists settled in Zuccotti Park, they embraced “horizontalist” decision-making strategies, like the kind the anthropologist cum journalist Marina Sitrin has chronicled in Argentine workers’ cooperatives. Though it remains difficult to see how Occupy affected political or economic policy in a meaningful way, the spirit and mythos surrounding the episode has had a lasting impact on how activists think about what constitutes effective political engagement.