DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY

vol.7, no.3, (November 2001)

 

The End of Traditional Antisystemic Movements and the Need for A New Type of Antisystemic Movement Today   

 

TAKIS FOTOPOULOS

 

Abstract:  The aim of this article is to examine the systemic parameters which gave rise to the flourishing of antisystemic movements in the 19th and 20th centuries and their subsequent decline in the era of neoliberal modernity. It is shown that their recent decline is not irrelevant to the nature of the traditional antisystemic movement which challenged a particular form of power rather than power itself, as a result of the one-dimensional conception about the ‘system’ adopted by these movements which typically saw one form of power as the basis of all other forms of power. Today, the issue is not anymore to challenge one form of power or another  but to challenge power itself, which constitutes the basis of heteronomy. In other words, what is needed today is a new type of antisystemic movement that should challenge heteronomy itself, rather than simply various forms of heteronomy. The antiglobalisation ‘movement’, which is seen as a continuation of the democratic movement that began in the 1960s, has the potential to develop into such a movement provided that it starts building bases at the local level with the aim to create a new democratic globalisation based on local inclusive democracies that would reintegrate society with the economy, polity and Nature, in an institutional framework of equal distribution of power in all its forms.

 

 

Postmodernist ideas do not simply constitute the core of today’s ‘dominant social paradigm’[1]. As I will try to show in this essay, they have  penetrated even radical social movements like the old social movements (socialist, anarchist), the ‘new’ social movements (feminist, Green etc) as well as the anti-globalisation movement. Thus, at present, we are supposedly witnessing not only the end of History, as liberal postmodernists declare, but also the end of modernity, the end of political ideologies, the end of revolutions, the end of classes, and, par excellence, the end of antisystemic movements together with any kind of ‘universalism’ —the latter, on the grounds that it supposedly leads, more or less ‘automatically, to totalitarianism.

No one would deny of course that we are going through significant transformations both at the institutional level, as is indicated by the major structural transformation of our times, the establishment of  globalised neoliberal modernity but, also, at the ideological[2] level, as the predominance of postmodernist ideas itself shows. As one could expect, these two main transformations are directly related. In other words, postmodern ideas play the role of justifying either deliberately, (as in the case of the liberal side of postmodernism), or objectively, (as in the case of mainstream and ‘oppositional’ postmodernism) the universalisation of liberal ‘democracy’ and the present marketisation of the economy and society. In this sense, postmodernism plays the role of the emerging dominant social paradigm which is consistent with the neoliberal form of modernity. The issue therefore is not whether we are going through fundamental transformations. The real issue refers to the nature of these transformations and their implications as regards the possibility of systemic change today.

In this context, having considered elsewhere the nature of today’s’ structural transformation,[3] the postmodern myths about the end of modernity[4] and the corresponding myths about the end of classes,[5] the crucial issue that arises is whether antisystemic movements are still possible in the era of globalised neoliberal modernity or whether, instead, we have to assume, as many in the ex-radical  Left do, that the era of systemic change has passed.[6] Furthermore, the issue of the conditions under which a new global antisystemic movement could develop out of the present anti-globalisation protests, capitalising the bitter historical lessons of the failures of the antisystemic movements of the past, becomes critical.

 

1. The meaning of ‘antisystemic movements’

Antisystemic vs. reformist movements

A good starting point in discussing the significance of antisystemic movements in the past or in the present is to define our terms and, in particular,  to make explicit the analytical framework which we use in determining the meaning of the ‘system’.

As regards first the meaning of social movements we may define them, in general terms, as the collective carriers of a particular paradigm, in the broad sense of a system of beliefs, ideas and the corresponding values. As this definition implies, a social movement is characterised by a number of elements :

  • some sort of  organisation, which distinguishes it from spontaneous gatherings of people with similar ideas and values,

  • a common outlook on society, i.e. a common world-view and

  • a common set of values that include, on the one hand, the program, which is derived on the basis of a set of shared long-term goals with respect to society’s structure and, on the other, the ideology, i.e. the body of ideas which justify the program and the strategy of the movement.

The type of social movement that we will consider in this article, the ‘anti-systemic’ movement, is distinguished by other social movements because it is characterised by a crucial extra element: it  explicitly or implicitly challenges the legitimacy of a socio-economic ‘system’, both in the sense of its institutions, which create and reproduce the unequal distribution of power (considered here as the ultimate cause of systemic social divisions[7]), and also in the sense of its values, which legitimise the domination of a human being over human being, or of Society over Nature. In this sense, an antisystemic movement differs radically from a reformist movement because whereas the former aims at the replacement of the main socio-economic institutions and corresponding values with new institutions and values, the latter aims at simply changing the existing institutions (‘deepening democracy’, better regulating the market economy etc)

The above differentiation between reformist and antisystemic movements differs from the usual distinction drawn between reformist and revolutionary movements in which the former aims at a slow, evolutionary change and the latter at a rapid, precipitous change. It is obvious that this taxonomy is based on the means used to achieve social change and not on the goal itself that may still be either systemic or reformist.

Similarly, we should not confuse the distinction that should be drawn between violent and non-violent movements with that between antisystemic and reformist ones since, again, the former refers to the means used to achieve a given goal rather than to the goals themselves. The social democratic movement for instance, both before the first world war and, even more so, after the second world war, when it abandoned  even the goal of socialising property, has always been a non-violent reformist movement and never an antisystemic movement. For Bernstein, the father of revisionism and social democracy, socialism meant the gradual socialisation of the existing political institutions and property rather than the replacement of representative democracy and the market economy with new institutions securing the equal distribution of political and economic power. Thus, as  Kolakowski points out:[8]

The essential question (for Bernstein) was not whether  to accept or reject revolutionary violence but whether  processes of socialisation within  the capitalist economy were ‘already’ part of the building of socialism (...) The movement towards socialism was not the prelude to a great expropriation but simply meant more collectivisation, more democracy, equality and welfare —a gradual trend with no predetermined limit and, by the same token, no ‘ultimate goal’. When Bernstein said that the goal was nothing and the movement everything (...) he meant, first and foremost, that the ‘ultimate goal’ as understood in Marxist tradition —the economic liberation of the proletariat by its conquest of political power— had no definite content.  

On the other hand, the communist and the anarchist movements were clearly antisystemic preaching the revolutionary change of society. However, the above categorisation does not imply that an antisystemic movement should necessarily see the systemic change of society in revolutionary terms. It is possible to envisage an antisystemic movement aiming at a  radical rupture of the system, which uses non-violent methods for this goal and resorts to violence only in case that it is attacked by the ruling elites in the transition towards the new society. This is the case of the Inclusive Democracy (ID) project that we shall consider in the last section, which aims at a systemic change through the establishment of new institutions (and corresponding new values) that would reintegrate society with the economy, polity and nature.

Types of antisystemic movements

The traditional antisystemic movement, implicitly or explicitly,  challenges the legitimacy of a system that institutionalises the inequality in the distribution of a particular form of power (political, economic, social), as the basis of all other forms of power, and aims at the replacement of the fundamental institutions and values which it considers responsible for the inequality in the distribution of this form of power with new ones promising an equal (or at least a better) distribution of power.

  • Thus,  depending on the form of power which was the target of the traditional antisystemic movements, one could distinguish  between:

  • political antisystemic movements that challenged the unequal distribution of political power, (e.g. the ‘civil society’ movements against bureaucracy in ‘actually existing socialism’),

  • economic anti-systemic movements that challenged the unequal distribution of economic power (e.g. socialist movements)

  • social antisystemic movements that challenged the unequal distribution of particular forms of social power, as it was reflected in  social institutions that established sexual, racial discrimination etc (e.g. women’s’ or black liberation movements), 

  • ecological antisystemic movements that challenged the unequal distribution mainly of economic and political power, and the corresponding cultural values, with respect to the effort to dominate Nature  and so on.

This type of antisystemic movement, which explicitly or implicitly challenged a particular form of power, was the inevitable consequence of the one-dimensional conception about the  ‘system’ adopted by these movements—a conception which, in fact, expressed their world view about the defining element within the system that creates the fundamental social divisions.

Thus, Marxists define the ‘system’ as ‘the world system of historical capitalism which has given rise to a set of antisystemic movements’[9] based on economic classes and status-groups aiming at the replacement of capitalism with socialism. In other words, for Marxists, the defining element of the system is the mode of production—an element which refers to the distribution of economic power[10] in society—which, in turn, determines, or at least conditions, the distribution of other forms of power.

On the other hand, for anarchists the defining element  is a political one, the State, which expresses par excellence the unequal distribution of political power[11] and determines, or decisively conditions, the distribution of other forms of power. As Bakunin puts it:[12]

It is clear that the juridical idea of property, as well as family law, could arise historically only in the State, the first inevitable act of which was the establishment of this law and of property. 

Finally, for feminists the defining element is the patriarchal structure of society, whereas for ecologists this element is the culture of domination of Society over Nature —a culture which is conditioned by the unequal distribution mainly of economic and political power.

However, today we  face the end of ‘traditional’ antisystemic movements which used to challenge one form of power as the basis of all other forms of power. The question is not anymore to challenge one form of power or another but to challenge the inequality in the distribution of every form of power, in other words, power relations and structures themselves. It is this collapse of the traditional antisystemic movements which raises the need for a new type of antisystemic movement, as I will attempt to show in the last section.

 

2. The change in the systemic parameters in the era of neoliberal modernity

There is little doubt that the traditional antisystemic movements, both old (socialist and anarchist) and ‘new’ (Green, feminist etc) have collapsed. As I will attempt to show in the following sections, although these movements are still around, they have predominantly lost their antisystemic character and continue to exist either as reformist movements (most communist parties, many anarchist currents and all the ‘new movements’) or as supposedly antisystemic moments which however do not raise any explicit antisystemic demands adopting instead the familiar ‘popular front’ practice of the Left around a program of reformist demands (Trotskyites and others). In fact, the only significant anti-systemic forces today, which directly challenge the ‘system’ (i.e. the  market economy and representative democracy) are some currents within the anti-globalisation movement. The issue arising therefore is how we may explain this effective collapse of antisystemic movements today and how we may assess the chances for a new global antisystemic movement. To discuss this issue we have to consider first the systemic parameters today since it is the change in these parameters in the last quarter of a century or so that may explain both the collapse of the antisystemic movements, as well as the form that the present antisystemic forces within the antiglobalisation movement assume.

To my mind, the following are the changes in the systemic parameters which are important in explaining the present crisis of antisystemic movements:

  1. The shift from statist to neoliberal modernity
  2. The consequent class structure changes and their political implications
  3. The ideological crisis and the rise of postmodernism and irrationalism

In the remainder of this section I will consider briefly these parametric changes which have been discussed extensively in previous issues of Democracy & Nature.

 

The shift from statist to neoliberal modernity

As I attempted to show elsewhere,[13] in the ID problematique, the main developments which marked the emergence of modern society, about two hundred years ago, were the institution of the separation of society from the economy (market economy system) and the parallel institution of the separation of society from polity (representative ‘democracy’). Once the market economy system was established, a long social struggle began that raged for over a hundred and fifty years, from the Industrial Revolution up to the last quarter of the twentieth century, between those controlling the market economy, i.e. the capitalist elite controlling production and distribution, and the rest of society. The elites controlling the market economy (with the support of other social groups which were benefiting by the institutional framework) aimed at marketising labour and land as much as possible, that is, at minimising all social controls that had as their goal the protection of labour and land, so that their free flow, at a minimal cost, could be secured. On the other hand, those at the other end, and particularly the working class that was growing during this period, aimed at maximising social controls on labour that is, at maximising society's self-protection against the perils of the market economy, especially unemployment and poverty.

The interplay of ‘subjective’ factors (i.e. the outcome of this social struggle at each historical moment) and ‘objective’ factors (the ‘grow-or-die dynamic of the market economy and its technological and organisational implications) has determined the character of modern society over time, which has gone through the following transformations that defined the three  historical forms of modernity:

  • first, liberal modernity, which barely lasted half a century between the 1830s and the 1880s and was accompanied by the first attempt to internationalise the market economy—an attempt that for the reasons I mentioned in the last issue of D&N[14] failed,

  • second, statist modernity, which followed liberal modernity ( after a transitional period of protectionism) with an extreme form of statism being established in the East (as a result of the first successful socialist revolution in 1917) and a milder form of statism in the West-- at the beginning, in the form of national socialism and later on in the form of the welfare state (as a result of the flourishing of the socialdemocratic movement in the aftermath of the second world war). The statist form of modernity was characterised by a systematic attempt to eliminate the market-based allocation of resources in the East, and a parallel attempt to introduce significant controls over markets to protect labour in the West. But, for reasons on which I expanded elsewhere[15], both forms of statist modernity collapsed. Thus, the Eastern form of statist modernity collapsed because of the growing incompatibility between, on the one hand, the requirements of an ‘efficient’ growth economy and, on the other, the institutional arrangements (particularly centralised planning and party democracy) which had been introduced to these societies, in accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideology.[16] Similarly, the Western form of statist modernity collapsed because of the fundamental incompatibility between the requirements of a growing statism and the parallel accelerating internationalisation of the market economy,[17]

  • third, the present globalised neoliberal modernity, which followed the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ (the Eastern form of statism) and the parallel collapse of social democracy (the Western form of statism). It is globalised, because for the first time in History a successful, almost self-regulating, internationalised market economy has been established and its reproduction is guaranteed by the activity of the transnational elite that manages this globalisation. And it is neoliberal, because the opening and freeing of markets is the necessary condition for the reproduction of a successful  self-regulating internationalised market economy. ‘Successful’ does not of course mean, as socialdemocratic economists and politicians argue confusing the aims of social democracy with those of the elites, that the present globalisation secures that everybody benefits from this process or even that growth accelerates as a result of globalisation. The degree of success of the present globalised economy should always be assessed with respect to the aims of the elites controlling it. Their main aim has always been to secure the reproduction of an economic system that guarantees the maximum concentration of economic power in their hands and on this account the present internationalised market economy is highly successful in achieving this goal, as the data about the accelerating concentration of wealth and income (i.e. the growing inequality) in the era of neoliberal modernity show.[18]

In this problematique, it is a grave error to assign the present neoliberal globalisation solely to ‘objective’ factors or, alternatively, to subjective factors alone, ignoring the interaction between these two sets of factors.

The first type of approach is the one adopted by neoliberals and ‘social-liberals’[19] who stress the importance of technological changes (information revolution etc), ignoring the crucial importance of the decline of the labour movement in the aftermath of the de-industrialisation of the last quarter of a century and the consequent predominance of the neoliberal movement over the socialist movement. 

The second type of approach is the one adopted by the reformist Left, within which we may distinguish two main trends.

One trend (Bourdieu, Chomsky et al[20]) refers to capitalist plots aiming to impose a neoliberal globalisation, ignoring the objective factors and particularly the rise of the transnational corporation and the subsequent emergence of the transnational elite, in their daft effort to show that the present neoliberal globalisation is reversible —if not a myth! Their groundless conclusion is that a controllable globalisation (i.e. a return to some form of statism) is possible even within the institutional framework of the present market economy.

Another trend (Handt & Negri), claiming Marxist orthodoxy, adopts a more sophisticated version of the capitalist plot theory according to which capital, faced with a crisis of its ability ‘to master its conflictual relationship with labour through a social and political dialectic’, resorted to a double attack against labour: first, a direct campaign against corporatism and collective bargaining and second a reorganisation of the workplace through automation and computerisation, thereby actually excluding labour itself from the side of production’.[21] The conclusion drawn by Hardt and Negri is that ‘the neoliberalism of the 1980s constituted ‘a revolution from above’. This ‘revolution’, as they stress in a later  book,[22] was motivated by the accumulation of the proletarian struggles that functioned as the ‘motor for the crisis’ of the 1970s, which in turn was part of the objective and inevitable cycles of capitalist accumulation. The interesting aspect of this analysis —that is mainly based  on unfounded assertions about the nature of the welfare state (which they assume still exists in neoliberal modernity ignoring the fact that it is being replaced everywhere by a ‘safety net’) and a confused as well as contradictory analysis of neoliberal globalisation— is that it also ends up with reformist demands and no clear vision for a future society.

Thus, although the content of the demands proposed by these two trends in the  Left are not exactly the same, the former suggesting a return to a kind of statism to control globalisation and the latter proposing  free movement of labour, a social wage, a guaranteed income for all, free access to sources of knowledge, information, communication etc[23], the reformist character of the demands of both these trends is striking. However, whereas the first trend assumes that the present neoliberal  globalisation is reversible, even within the system of the market economy, the second trend not only assumes that globalisation is irreversible but it also views it favourably, as an ‘objective’ basis on which an alternative globalisation could be built (although the meaning of this alternative globalisation is never spelled out).[24] But, as I attempted to show elsewhere[25], the internationalisation of the market economy is a process, which was set in motion with the very emergence of the market economy itself. Therefore, although it is true that throughout the post-war period the internationalisation of the market economy was actively encouraged by the advanced capitalist countries, in view —in particular— of the expansion of `actually existing socialism' and of the national liberation movements in the Third World, still, this internationalisation was the outcome mainly of `objective' factors related to the dynamics of the market economy. The ‘subjective’ factors, in the form of the social struggle, played a passive role with respect to this intensifying internationalisation of the market economy; particularly so after the above mentioned major retreat of the labour movement.

In this sense, the changes in the policies of the major international institutions (IMF, WTO, WB etc) and the corresponding changes in national policies that aimed at opening and liberalising markets were ‘endogenous’, reflecting and institutionalising existing trends of the market economy, rather than exogenous, as those in the reformist Left suggest. In other words, although the creation of a self-regulating market system in the 19th century was impossible without crucial state support in creating national markets, still, once this system was set up, it created its own irreversible dynamic which led to today’s internationalised market economy.[26] Therefore, the emergence of the neoliberal internationalised market economy is basically the outcome of this dynamic process and not the result of conspiracies, or of the policies of evil neoliberal parties and/or degraded socialdemocratic parties, as reformists in the Left assert. It represents, in fact, the completion of the marketisation process, which was merely interrupted by the rise of statism in the 1930s that however collapsed l  in the 1970s when It became obvious that the kind of state intervention in the market that marked the statist period of marketisation was no longer compatible with the new internationalisation that emerged at the same time. This monumental event, at the political level, implied the end of the social democratic consensus which marked the early post war period –i.e. the consensus involving both conservative and socialdemocratic parties which were committed to active state intervention with the aim of determining the overall level of economic activity so that a number of socialdemocratic objectives could be achieved (full employment, welfare state, better distribution of income etc).

As one could expect, the fundamental changes in the economic structure mentioned above, which mark the shift from statist to neoliberal modernity, had their implications at the political level. As I pointed out elsewhere,[27] the typical form of political structure in a modern society, which can be shown to be more consistent than any other form of political structure  (theoretically as well as historically) with the market economy, is the representative (liberal) ‘democracy’. However, there are significant variations between the various forms of political structures in the era of modernity. Thus, the representative ‘democracy’ of liberal modernity evolved  into a political system of a much higher degree of concentration of political power in the hands of the executive during  statist modernity, both in the West and, even more so, in the East. This system is presently being replaced by new internationalised political structures to fit the already internationalised economic structures, representing an even higher degree of concentration of political power to match the corresponding huge concentration of economic power brought about by globalisation. Thus, in neoliberal modernity, the old Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states is being replaced  by a multi-level system of political-economic entities which at the micro-level extends to ‘micro-regions’, world cities and up to traditional states, whereas at the new internationalised macro-level (where the most important decisions are taken)  extends to the new transnational elite[28] and its political and economic expressions (G7+1, IMF, WTO, World Bank etc)’. xe "internationalised market economy"

However, if neoliberal globalisation is neither a plot, nor irreversible within the market economy system, this does not mean that it should be welcome, as Hardt and Negri[29] do, because it supposedly provides an ‘objective’ basis on which an alternative globalisation could be built—reminding one of the usual ‘objectivist’ type of analysis about the ‘necessary evils’ supposedly created by the process of  Progress.  One should not forget,  as I pointed out elsewhere,[30] that the adoption of the idea of Progress (shared by very few nowadays) implies also the endorsement of such ‘progressive’ conclusions as the  Marxist one about the 'progressive' role of colonialism[31], or the corresponding anarchist one that the state is  a 'socially necessary evil'.[32] On the other hand, if we adopt the view that there is no unilinear or dialectical process of Progress and a corresponding evolutionary process towards forms of social organisation grounded on autonomy and we assume, instead, that the historical attempts for autonomy/democracy represent a break with the past, then, forms of social change like colonialism and the institution of the  state can be seen as just 'social evils', with nothing 'necessary' about them, either as regards  their emergence in the past, or  the form that social change has taken since, or will take in the future.

The same applies to neoliberal globalisation which has  nothing ‘necessary’ about it, as it is simply the inevitable outcome of an initial choice imposed on society by economic and political elites: the choice for a market economy and representative ‘democracy’.[33] Furthermore, neoliberal globalisation cannot be the ‘objective basis’ for a new democratic society. Such a society should, instead, unravel what passes for political and economic democracy today and create genuine democratic institutions that will hardly have any relationship to the present supposedly democratic institutions. Therefore, if by systemic change one means a real  change towards a new society based on the equal distribution of power, like the type of society envisaged by the ID project, then obviously neoliberal globalisation is far from the objective basis for such a society!

 

Class structure changes and their political implications

The shift from statist to neoliberal modernity had very important implications on the class structures, particularly of the North but also of the South, although the peripheral character of the market economy in the South has led to the creation of some significant differentiations on their class structures with respect to those of the North. The neoliberal internationalisation of the market economy, in combination with the significant technological changes (information revolution) marking the move of the market economy to a post-industrial phase, led to the creation of new ‘class divisions’ both at the economic and the non-economic levels, as I attempted to show elsewhere.[34]

At the economic level, the combined effect of these developments was a drastic change in the employment structure which reduced massively the size of the manual working class. For instance, in the `Group of 7' countries (minus Canada), the proportion of the active population employed in manufacturing fell by over a third between  the mid seventies and the mid nineties -- a fact which had significant implications on the strength and significance of trade unions and social-democratic parties. Thus, in the US, trade unions have been decimated in just two decades, their membership falling from about 35 million to 15 million, while in Britain, 14 years of Thatcherism were enough to bring down trade union membership from 13.3 million in 1979 to under 9 million in 1993. Similar trends are observed  in union membership in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway and even Sweden.[35] Using economic categories alone we may see the following class divisions in today’s internationalised market economy. xe "internationalised market economy"At the two ends of the economic class divide are the underclass and the overclass. The  underclass consisting mainly of the unemployed and those of the inactive (which do not consist merely of women staying at home as before, but, mostly, of men of working age and single parents) and the underemployed (part-timers, casual workers etc.) who fall under the poverty line. The underclass therefore includes a variety of underprivileged, ranging from old aged pensioners and state-supported single parents, to the ‘working poor’,  migrants and ‘guest’ workers, the unemployed and the homeless. In Britain, it has been estimated that the “absolutely disadvantaged”, (a  term defined similarly to the underclass)  constitute about 30 percent of the adult working population[36] and a disproportionately large number of women, blacks and other ‘second class citizens’ (ethnic minorities etc) belongs to the underclass, as a result of their relative lack of political and economic power with respect to first class citizens. At the other end of the scale is the new overclass consisting of the upper class and the upper middle class, that has been created by the marketisation process in neoliberal modernity. The overclass, in a country like Britain, amounts to about 5-6 percent of the population but receives a disproportionately large part of income and wealth.

Finally, between these two poles are the ‘middle groups’ which constitute the vast majority of the population.  If we take the British example again, these middle groups constitute about two-thirds of the population. However, to get a better glimpse of this class structure we should distinguish between the lower and the upper part of these middle groups, given the important differentiations characterising the social groups belonging to each part as regards their income, safety of employment, values and politics.

Thus, the lower middle groups, consisting of about 30 percent of the population, include all those in insecure, usually low-paid and poorly protected jobs (the marginalized and the insecure as they have been called)). Most of the growing army of part-timers and occasional workers in low-paid jobs with no formal employment protection but with incomes above the  poverty line, as well as the traditional blue collar low-skilled working class,  belong to this category. So, in this part of the population we may include the following class divisions: the petty bourgeoisie, which in the neoliberal phase shows signs of an increase in numbers as a result of a significant rise in the number of self-employed; the farmers, whose numbers continually decline as a result of the intensification of international competition; and, finally, the traditional working class, whose numbers also fall drastically during this phase, particularly in advanced market economies, as a result of technological developments and the transfer of parts of the manufacturing process to low cost  areas in the South.  On the other hand, the upper part of these middle groups consists of  what we may call the new middle class which plays a crucial role in supporting the neoliberal consensus. It is composed mainly of those employed in high paying occupations in the booming service sector of advanced market economies. Today, it is estimated that the number of professional and technical workers alone, in most advanced market economies, constitutes more than 20 percent of employees.[37] However, the new middle class overall should include approximately 35 percent of the population,[38] forming what has been described as  the privileged minority[39] or  the contended electoral majority.[40] It is only this part of the population which is in full-time, well-paid and secure jobs and controls almost two thirds of national income,[41] while by its political and economic power determine the electoral outcome.

The values, culture and behaviour of the new middle class are located somewhere between those of the petty bourgeoisie and the overclass. As a result, on some issues they may ally with the petty bourgeoisie and the traditional working class whereas on other issues they may ally with the overclass. The former is the case with respect to such issues as taking measures to avert a complete marketisation of society, or a deterioration of the ecological crisis –issues on which an electoral alliance from below has been formed in advanced market economies (new middle class, petty bourgeoisie, traditional working class) that constitutes the power base of the social liberal or centre-left parties (ex-social democratic parties) as well as of the Green parties. The latter is the case with respect to such issues as the  hostility to any expansion of statism and the welfare state -- an electoral alliance on these issues between the new middle class and the overclass constitutes the power base of the ‘pure’ neoliberal or centre-rught parties. It is obvious that as the new middle class is also the electoral majority (because its members take an active part in the electoral process, unlike the members of the underclass who usually do not bother to vote frustrated by the inability of political parties to solve their problems), the electoral outcome in advanced capitalist countries is basically determined by the attitudes of the members of this class. Furthermore, the predominance of the service sector today, with the polarisation characterising it between a middle-class salaried professional stratum (a significant part of which is women) and a lower paid stratum working under increasingly factory-like conditions, was of tremendous importance for the rise of the ‘new social movements’ (feminists, greens etc)

At the non-economic level, social divisions based on gender, race and other ‘identity’ categories, (e.g. the national identity), which throughout modernity did not take the form of class divisions in the Marxist sense but were nevertheless simmering, became even more important in the era of neoliberal modernity due to the changes I mentioned above. Thus,  hierarchical structures, like the patriarchal family structures, not only remained unaffected by the rise of classes, but, in effect, were interacting with class structures and became a basic means of reproducing them. Similarly, the  rise of the nation-state in early modernity set the foundations for conflicts of nationalist character. Finally, a new development in late modernity,  the ecological  crisis, which was the inevitable outcome of the growth economy, added one more ‘transclass’ problem: the problem of the environment and quality of life. These developments at the non-economic level are crucial in explaining the rise of the ‘new social movements’ (ecological, feminist, ‘identity’ movements and so on) in neoliberal modernity.

However, the fact that dominance and conflict are being socially constructed  today around such diverse focuses as racism, sexual preferences, gender discrimination, environmental degradation, citizen participation, ethnic self-determination, religious commitments rather than economic class issues does not mean of course the end of class divisions, as some assumed. What it does mean is that the class struggle (which may perhaps better be called “the social struggle” to take into account the conflict arising from all forms of unequal distribution of power), is not anymore --exclusively or even mainly-- about ownership of the means of production but about control of oneself at the economic but, also, at the political and the broader social level. This is a  matter which, directly or indirectly, raises the issue of democracy, as it was clearly expressed first in May 1968 and today again  by the emergence of the antiglobalisation movement.

 

The ideological crisis and the rise of postmodernism and irrationalism

The above changes in the structural parameters were accompanied by a parallel serious ideological crisis which put into question not just the political ideologies, (what postmodernists pejoratively call ‘emancipatory metanarratives’), or even ‘objective’ reason, but  reason itself, as shown by the present flourishing of irrationalism in all its forms (revival of religion but also of all sorts of spirituality). Thus, not ignoring some positive aspects of  postmodernism, one may argue that postmodernism in general and irrationalism have become the ‘two curses’ which constitute the most serious ideological enemies of any kind of antisystemic movement.

However, although the two sets of phenomena mentioned above, i.e. the structural changes that marked the entry into the present neoliberal modernity (or neoliberal globalisation) and the ideological crisis that gave rise to postmodernism and irrationalism, have taken place roughly during the same period of time, i.e. the last quarter of a century or so -- a fact which, by itself, indicates a close relationship-- this does not imply a strict causal relationship between them of the type that Marxists used to assume between changes in the economic base and changes in the ‘superstructure’. Postmodernism, in particular, developed mostly independently of these economic structural changes, as the result of a combination of parallel developments at the epistemological level (the crisis of ‘objectivism’ and ‘scientism’), the ideological level (the decline of Marxism that was linked to the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’) and the ecological level (the vast ecological crisis which cast a serious doubt on the idea of progress).[42] 

In fact, as I attempted to show elsewhere,[43] the present era of neoliberal modernity has already developed its own dominant social paradigm. Thus, the various forms of modernity have created their own dominant social paradigms-- which in effect constitute sub-paradigms of the main paradigm as they all share a fundamental characteristic: the idea of the separation of society from the economy and polity, as expressed respectively by the market economy and representative ‘democracy’ (with the exception of Soviet statism in which this separation is effected through central planning and Soviet ‘democracy’). On top of this main characteristic, all forms of modernity share, with some variations, the themes of reason, critical thought and economic growth.

Within this main paradigm, the dominant (sub)paradigm in liberal  modernity features, also, the belief in a mechanistic model of science, objective truth, as well as some themes from economic liberalism such as laissez faire and minimization of social controls over markets for the protection of labour. Similarly, the dominant (sub)paradigm in the statist period still features the  belief in objective truth and (a less mechanistic) science, but also certain elements of the socialist paradigm, i.e. socialdemocratic statism based on  Keynesianism in the West, or Soviet statism based on Marxism-Leninism in the East. Finally, the present form of neoliberal modernity is characterised by the emergence of a new (sub)paradigm which tends to become dominant, what I called elsewhere‘[44] neoliberal postmodernism’ (Bell, Fukuyama etc), whose main elements are certain neoliberal themes, such as the minimisation of social controls over markets, the replacement of the welfare state by safety nets and the maximisation of the role of the private sector in the economy, as well as a critique of progress (but not of growth itself), of mechanistic and deterministic science (but not of science itself), and of objective truth.             However, if the main elements of the present dominant social paradigm express one pole of postmodernism, i.e. neoliberal postmodernism, the ‘new social movements that developed in the past quarter of a century express the other pole of postmodernism, what has been called ‘oppositional’ or ‘reconstructive’ postmodernism that attempts to reconstruct Enlightenment values and socialist politics using the postmodern critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and foundationalism. The events of May 1968, as well as the collapse of Marxist structuralism, played a crucial role in the development of this form of postmodernism with its main themes of rejection of:

  • an overall vision of History as an evolutionary process of progress or liberation;

  • ‘grand narratives’, in favour of plurality, fragmentation, complexity and ‘local narratives’;

  • closed systems, essentialism and determinism, in favour of  uncertainty, ambiguity and indeterminacy;

  • ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’, in favour of relativism and perspectivism.

As the listing of the main themes of postmodernism shows, the flourishing of postmodernism is not  irrelevant to the corresponding rise of irrationalism. In fact, some postmodernists are explicit about this connection. Thus, for  Griffin[45]‘postmodern science seeks to loosen the boundary between scientific and “non-scientific knowledge” in order to incorporate other realms of knowledge and value in the sciences, involving “a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religions intuitions” and a “creative synthesis” of premodern, modern, and postmodern ideas. In fact, the irrational element, despite the efforts of rationalist postmodernists (usually of the post-Marxist variety) to downgrade it, exercised  a decisive influence in the postmodern paradigm.  Jeremy Rifkin’s New Age ecometaphysics and mystical tendencies that ‘wax poetically about love, the “timeless” realm of the spirit, and the ‘natural goodness of the cosmic process’[46] are well known.

The irrationalism[47], which has flourished both in the North and the South in the last quarter of the last century or so, has taken various forms ranging from the revival, in some cases, of the old religions (Christianity, Islam etc) up to the expansion of various irrational trends (mysticism, spiritualism, astrology, esoterism,  neopaganism,  "New Age" etc) which, especially in the West, threaten old religions. The spreading influence of  irrationalism is such that in the USA for instance a new kind of sub-science is created (something similar to the sub-culture promoted by today’s Hollywood) in which scientists supposedly use ‘scientific’ methodology to ‘prove’ the need for religious belief![48].

The reasons which may account for this flourishing of irrationalism, apart from the indirect influence of postmodernism I mentioned above, are, as I attempted to show elsewhere[49] the universalisation of the market/growth economy and the consequent rise of neoliberal modernity, the ecological crisis and the collapse of ‘development’ in the South. In particular, the realization of the social effects of the rise of the consumer society, as well as of the ecological implications of growth, together with the expansion of poverty, insecurity and the cultural homogenisation— all of them brought about by the neoliberal globalisation —as well as the parallel failure of ‘development’, were instrumental for the rise of irrationalism in the North and the consequent expansion of various fundamentalisms in the South.

As we shall see in the next two sections, the influence of postmodernism and irrationalism are crucial in interpreting the loss of the antisystemic nature of both the old and the new social movements.

 

3. ‘Old’ antisystemic movements

In this section, I will discuss the two main forms of the ‘old’ antisystemic movements which were born in the context of  the split between statist and libertarian socialism —a split which reached its climax in the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within the First International. Today, almost a century and a half since this debate, the socialist project is in ruins after the collapse of both versions of statist socialism (the form of socialism which has been dominant within the socialist movement since then) i.e. the ‘actually existing socialism’ of the East and social democracy of the West.  Furthermore, despite the fact that libertarian socialism is still untried, (after the most serious attempt to implement its principles during the Spanish civil war was stifled by the fascist hordes, which were acting under the tolerant eye of Western ‘democracies’), the collapse of the statist version of  socialism has not led to a revival of its libertarian version. Instead, the institutional framework defined by modernity (i.e. the  market economy and liberal ‘democracy’) has become universal; consequently, the chronic multidimensional crisis (political, economic, ecological, social and cultural) which arose with the emergence of this institutional framework has also been universalised and exacerbated.

Antisystemic movements are very much a product of modernity. It was the separation of society from polity  and the economy, heralded by the modern era, which created —for the first time in History— a  ‘system’ controlled by political and economic elites. The emergence of  correspondingly organised social movements against the system, i.e. against the control of political and economic power by elites, was therefore inevitable. Thus,  in the middle of the 19th century, the first antisystemic movements emerged, when groups of persons involved in antisystemic activity began to create a new institution: the continuing organisation with members, and specific political objectives. In fact, as Arrighi et al point out,[50] it was the lessons that oppressed groups learned from the 1848 uprisings, i.e. that ‘spontaneous’ uprisings would not be able to achieve a systemic transformation, that led to the creation of the first organised antisystemic movements. It was clear at the time that since the states could control the masses and the powerful elites could control the states a serious effort of social transformation would require counter-organisation —both at the political and cultural levels. The fact that these first antisystemic movements were organised on a bureaucratic basis, which later led to Bolshevik totalitarianism, does not of course make redundant the need for organisation of antisystemic currents as organised social movements with their own long-term goals, strategy and means to achieve them —as supporters of direct action for its own sake think today. In fact, what these experiences teach us is that a different form of democratic movement is needed to achieve a true democratic society.

 

The collapse of socialist statism as an antisystemic movement

As I hinted in the last section, the decline of socialist statism and the antisystemic movements around it began well before the actual collapse of social democracy in the West and ‘actually existing socialism’ in the East. The decimation of the manual working class was the ‘objective’ factor which, together with the decline of class solidarity (the ‘subjective’ factor) —mainly due to the gradual conversion of active citizens and workers into passive consumers— led to the rapid decline of the labour movement in the era of neoliberal modernity and, even more so, of the antisystemic movements based on statist socialism that have always relied on the labour movement as the ‘revolutionary subject’. Thus, the traditional political expressions of statist socialism, the communist and socialdemocratic parties, have entered a period of terminal decline since the mid of the 1970s, when the neoliberal globalisation began taking hold. Then, several communist parties in Western Europe, in an effort to slow down or even reverse their electoral decline, attempted to expand their electoral base by attracting parts of the flourishing middle class, through adopting the ‘eurocommunism’ stand —a stand, which was indicating not simply a position of independence from the Soviet Communist Party but, even more so, a trend towards socialdemocratic reformism. However, it was soon realised that this effort to attract parts of the expanding middle class was futile, particularly so since it was inevitably accompanied by the loss of traditional labour support. As a well known statist socialist was stressing at the end of the 1980s, ‘our movements, the classic socialist or Communist labour parties, were born in a specific epoch which has now passed’[51]. At the same time, the decline of the labour movement in the 1980s, in combination with the change in the systemic parameters I mentioned in the last section, let old socialdemocratic parties like the German and British ones to a sharp turn to the Right and the abandonment of the traditional socialdemocratic goals (socialisation of means of production, economic equality, full employment through direct control of the economy etc) in favour of the ‘social-liberal’ goals (i.e. privatisations instead of nationalisations, safety nets instead of welfare states, ‘empowerment’ instead of full employment policies and so on.)

However, the cataclysmic event, which led to the final collapse of  socialist statism as an antisystemic movement, was the passing away of ‘actually existing socialism’. Thus, instead of learning the lessons of the failure of socialist statism, most supporters of antisystemic socialist statism either abandoned any antisystemic goals for good, or simply covered up this choice under the well known ‘popular front’ strategy around reformist demands. A typical example is Eric Hobsbawm (who —for many years now!— has prophesised the end of neoliberal modernity, attracting the ironic comments even of the renewed New Left Review[52]) for whom the marketless and moneyless ‘utopia’ of old socialists including Marx cannot be maintained any longer:[53]

socialists of all varieties have ceased to believe in the possibility of an entirely non-market economy’ (...) the debate between liberals and socialists today (...) is about the limits of capitalism and the market uncontrolled by public action (...) in short, the difference between liberals and socialists today is not about socialism but about capitalism (...) socialists and liberals (with the exception of the neoliberal theologians) both accept a mixed economy in principle

Today, most Marxists have joined various forms of postmodernism rejecting any idea  of a ‘universalist’ antisystemic project. Furthermore, it is indicative of the way in which postmodernism is taken for granted by all versions of the statist Left that, even when more ‘orthodox’ Marxists condemn the outright rejection of antisystemic projects, they still agree with the axiom that postmodernism cannot be attacked from without but from within and adopt the  position that the only viable modern left politics today could develop from within postmodernism itself.[54] However, many in the statist Left not only take postmodernism for granted but also the supposed impossibility of building any ‘credible’ alternative to neoliberal modernity. Thus, Jeffrey Isaac[55] conveniently  ignores (or implicitly characterises as ‘not credible’) the ideas recently promoted by the libertarian left for a wholesale alternative to capitalism[56] :

[N]aïve confidence in a future beyond commodity production, surplus value, exploitation and alienation is no longer possible (...) given the history that we have inherited and the world that human beings have created, there exists no credible wholesale alternative to capitalism (...) there exists neither a credible idea of what might replace it nor a substantial portion of human kind committed to any ‘universal’ alternative to it.

But, as far as the argument that there is not at the moment a  substantial portion of human kind committed to any ‘universal’ alternative to it, this is  only partly true. In other words, as the development of certain currents within the anti-globalisation movement shows, there is surely a rising anti-capitalist movement, even though at the moment it does not adopt a concrete alternative ‘universal’ alternative to it.[57] Furthermore, it seems that  supporters of such views are not aware of the fact that it took many years for the early anticapitalist movement, which developed after the establishment of the market economy system, to adopt a concrete universal alternative to capitalism.[58]

Finally, another confirmation of the collapse of socialist statism as an antisystemic movement (if further confirmation was needed!) is that even what has been widely characterised as ‘the new communist manifesto’, i.e. Hardt & Negri’s Empire, comes down not in favour of building a new antisystemic movement with clear goals and means, as the original Communist Manifesto did, but in favour of global ‘resistance’ against a nebulous ‘empire’ (which has no centre in the form of, say, a transnational elite, or even a transnational capitalist class) on the basis of a set of reformist demands. Still, the authors do not hesitate to end their book by extolling the ‘joy of being communist’ –the communist militant being resembled by Hardt & Negri to Saint Francis of Assisi,  who also happens to be  Mrs Thatcher’s’ idol!

What however is ironic and at the same time disturbing for the future of the alternative libertarian tradition is the development of a similar ‘pragmatism’ among several currents in the libertarian Left, as I will attempt to show next.

 

The bankruptcy of anarchism as an  antisystemic movement

The decline of the anarchist movement (which, almost by definition, has always been antisystemic with no significant reformist trends within it ever recorded in the past) began earlier than that of the socialist statist movement. The last historically significant appearance of this  movement was in the Spanish civil war when it was subjugated by the fascist forces (often with the significant contribution —for their own reasons— of socialist statists) sealing its fate as a mass antisystemic movement. In the post-war period, if we exclude the events of May 1968 and today’s anti-globalisation movement—the emergence of certain currents in which I consider to signify the appearance of a new democratic movement, significantly influenced by libertarian ideas but by no means constituting just another expression of the anarchist movement—the anarchist movement has been fractionalised and marginalized, whereas lately significant parts of it are even becoming reformist! All this, at the very moment when, for the first time in History after the split in the First International, the anarchist movement had a real chance to ‘take its revenge’ and  prevail over statist socialism.  

In the post second world war period, anarchism as a significant movement has mostly disappeared and it was only in the 1960s that some relatively significant manifestations of it began emerging. In France, the Situationists, although not a proper antisystemic movement in the sense defined above[59] (i.e. a mass movement with clear antisystemic goals and strategy) but rather a cultural movement, played a significant role in demystifying some aspects of the ‘system’ and in particular the role of consumerism in reproducing it. In Italy, despite some slight revival of anarchism amongst disenchanted workers after the war, the New Left in the 1960s was dominated by the statist Left, and today significant anarchist currents within the anti-globalisation movement, like Ya Basta!,[60] are clearly reformist. In Holland, the interesting experiment to initiate social change from below (even with participation in local elections) expired when the Provos and the Kabouters were eventually absorbed by the libertarian wing of the Greens. In Britain, the two main trends in the post-war period were anarcho-syndicalist and ‘life-style anarchism’ but, with the eventual disappearance of the former, life-style anarchism, together with eco-anarchist and direct action trends, are today dominant. However, Reclaim the Streets, which have been heavily involved with the anti-globalisation movement, seem to overcome ‘British pragmatism’ that has led to the cul-de-sac of life-style anarchism, although they have not as yet taken  the next step to function as catalysts for a new antisystemic movement in this country. Similarly, in the USA, anarchists today are mainly influenced by life-style anarchism, irrationalism (see, for example, eco-libertarian trends like Deep Ecology) and rising postmodernist trends.

But, let us briefly see these trends, most of which, to my mind, clearly signal the end of anarchism as an antisystemic movement. In fact, one may argue that the only trend which has a clear antisystemic character, in the sense that it tries to build a programmatic antisystemic movement, is Murray Bookchin’s social ecology (to distinguish it from various hybrids, most notable that of John Clark[61] which has nothing to do with an antisystemic trend) sometimes called confederal municipalism, libertarian municipalism and lately communalism. Bookchin has always stressed that if we are going to change the direction of society in a libertarian way, we will need to build a systematic and coherent project and that the overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. Furthermore, he insisted that the best arena to do that is the municipality —the city, town, and village— where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy. But, contrary to the wishful thinking of the main trends in today’s anarchist movements, he has always insisted that:[62]

People will never achieve this kind of face-to-face democratic society spontaneously. A serious, committed movement is necessary to fight for it. And to build that movement, radical leftists need to develop an organization — one that is controlled from the base, so that we don't produce another Bolshevik Party. It has to be formed slowly on a local basis, it has to be confederally organized, and together with popular assemblies, it will build up an opposition to the existing power, the state and class rule.

However, these are not the dominant views among American, or generally Anglo-Saxon, anarchists, as Bookchin himself recognised when in his late years increasingly dissociated himself from the anarchist movement (which, however, he attempted to renew more than any other thinker of the second half of the 20th century) and unequivocally condemned individualistic anarchism, postmodernism and irrationalism, the main trends in today’s’ anarchism.[63] Thus, the American Institute of Anarchist Studies (prominent Board members of which are also faculty members at the Institute for Social Ecology) seems to be dominated by postmodernist influences, as it was recently indicated by the fact that its theoretical organ heavily promoted  a new book on ‘post-structuralist anarchism’, going as far as to host an interview of the IAS General Director with the author.[64] In this interview, the author made explicit his anti-universalist, if not anti-democratic, tendencies as well as his hostility against any kind of mass antisystemic movement with clear democratic goals and strategy. As the author of post-structuralist anarchism stressed, ”I would point to the necessity of understanding and participating in struggles against racism, sexism, the WTO, etc., and in doing so to see the interactions among those struggles and the oppressions those struggles seek to overturn, without trying to reduce them all to a simple formula”, the ‘formula’ consisting —as he then goes on to explain— of the main political and economic institutions of the present system:

If capitalism and the state were the sole culprits, then eliminating them would by itself open us up to a utopian society. But we ought to be leery of such simple solutions. One of the lessons of the struggles against racism, misogyny, prejudice against gays and lesbians, etc. is that power and oppression are not reducible to a single site or a single operation. We need to understand power as it operates not only at the level of the state and capitalism, but in the practices through which we conduct our lives

The obvious conclusion is that there is no need for any antisystemic movement but that we have to rely instead on the various ‘identity movements’, —or generally the ‘new’ social movements (which, as we shall see next, have already lost any antisystemic character)— to fight ‘the power relationships that arise in various practices’. It is clear that in this ‘analysis’ --which confuses the (correct) view that political and economic power are not the only forms of power with the (reformist) view that there is no ‘single Archimedean point for change’-- there is no space for a view that sees the system of organisation of political and economic power as interlinked with the  other forms of power. Instead, it is assumed that eliminating political and economic power relations (state and capitalism) would by itself open us up to a utopian society! Clearly, the supporters of such views and the American Institute for Anarchist Studies[65], which promotes them, provide one more indication of the bankruptcy of today’s anarchism as an antisystemic movement.

Another indication of the same bankruptcy is the present flourishing of individualistic anarchism with its offsprings ‘life-style’ anarchism, pragmatic anarchism etc. To interpret this rise of individualism one has to go back to the movements that arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Schematically, two were the main elements that dominated this period. One was the ‘individualistic’ element expressed by the counterculture movements but also by the reformist currents within the ‘new’ social movements. The other was the ‘antisystemic’ element, expressed particularly by radical students and some workers, as well as by the radical currents within the ‘new’ social movements (feminism, Greens etc). However,  the antisystemic feelings which culminated in May 1968 did not only represent a rejection of statism in all its forms but also the desire for a new truly democratic society, beyond capitalism and bureaucracy, in which power in all its forms was equally distributed. It is in this sense that I pointed out above that, to my mind, the events of May 1968 have sown the seeds for a new democratic movement, which implicitly expressed a synthesis of the best elements in the ‘old’ antisystemic movements with some elements of the rising at the time ‘new’ movements and, particularly, the radical currents within feminism and the Green movement

Still, a radical democratic movement, in the form of an organised antisystemic movement with clear goals and means to achieve them, did not materialise at the time. Instead, the statist Left in its various forms (Maoism, Trotskyism etc) attracted most of the antisystemic activists, whereas the individualistic elements were either absorbed by postmodernism or simply enhanced the individualistic trends within the ‘new’ movements and the anarchist movement —in which a strong individualistic tendency was always in conflict with the collectivist tendency. Furthermore, the general turn to individualism, marked by the rise of neoliberal postmodernism as the core of the dominant social paradigm, had its inevitable effects on the anarchist movement. Thus, irrational tendencies, as well as postmodern influences mixed with counterculture currents, created today’s mix of ‘life-style anarchism which is presently dominant  in Anglo-Saxon countries.

But what is lifestyle anarchism? Bookchin described it as follows, attracting much hostility from many self-declared anarchists: ‘spray-can graffiti, postmodernist nihilism, antirationalism, neoprimitivism, antitechnologism, neo-Situationism, cultural terrorism, mysticism’[66], i.e.  any form of activity in which, as he puts it, ‘the sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and the intuitive supplant the consistent, purpo­sive, organized and rational, indeed any form of sustained and focused activity apart from publishing a “zine” or pamphlet—or burning a garbage tin’,[67] or as he summarised these behaviours, all those activities which articulate Foucault’s approach of ‘personal insurrection’ rather than social revolution’.[68]

Although these trends are obvious among many activists involved in communes of various kinds, like for instance the ‘eco-village movement’ I discussed elsewhere[69] or those involved in ‘affinity groups’ organising various forms of direct action, I will also include in  lifestyle anarchism such activities as ethical finance, co-ops, community supported agriculture, rural economic renewal, town banks, land trusts, LETS, permaculture, as well as Third World alternative development projects. In other words, this broad description covers all those who are involved in such activities for their own sake rather than with the aim to build a new antisystemic movement with a clear vision about a future society and a strategy to reach it. These activities often present many of the characteristics attributed by Bookchin to life style anarchism, for instance,  assailing organization, programmatic commitment and se­rious social analysis, as well as rejecting the need for building a political movement (unlike the anarcho-syndicalist movement which in its heyday tried to en­gage in creating an organized movement) and relying instead on bringing social change ‘by example’ and the corresponding change in values.

Such trends are rampant in countries like Britain since the 1970s, when the ideas of Colin Ward and others around him (concerning what they called ‘Anarchy in Action’ —in fields as diverse as town planning, housing, education and allotments) became influential. Similar trends are expressed today by various anarchist currents that extol the virtues of co-ops, which they consider as ‘anarchism in its latest practical manifestation’ since ‘they allow  the practice of anarchism to be conducted within the larger capitalist economy’,[70] or adopt a ‘pragmatic’ anarchism, which rejects the traditional antisystemic demands of anarchists to abolish the market economy and money![71]

However, such activities not only are usually not related to radical antisystemic politics in the sense of promoting an alternative society-- if indeed they are related to politics at all-- but, in fact, are often so politically harmless that the political elites frequently use them for their own ends. In Britain, for instance, Tony Blair’s social-liberal government openly endorses schemes like LETS with the obvious aim to alleviate the pressures created on the budget, as a result of the running down of the welfare state –a process which was initiated by Thatcher’s neoliberalism and continued by Blair’s social-liberalism.[72]  As I pointed out elsewhere,[73] this sort of activities are utterly ineffective in bringing about a systemic change. Although helpful in creating an alternative culture among small sections of the population and, at the same time, morale boosting for activists who wish to see an immediate change in their lives, this approach does not have any chance of success —in the context of today’s huge concentration of power— to create the democratic majority needed for systemic social change. This is because the projects suggested by this strategy may be too easily marginalized, or absorbed into the existing power structure (as has happened many times in the past) while their effect on the socialisation process is minimal —if not nil. Furthermore, life-style strategies, by usually concentrating on single issues, which are not part of a comprehensive political program for social transformation, do not help in creating the ‘anti-systemic’ consciousness required for systemic change. Finally, systemic social change can never be achieved outside the main political and social arena. The elimination of the present power structures and relations can neither be achieved “by setting an example”, nor through education and persuasion. A power base is needed to destroy power and the only way in which this goal could be consistent with the aims of the democratic project would be, to my mind, through the development of a comprehensive program for the radical transformation of local political and economic structures.

Finally, as regards the other major trend within present anarchism, direct action, its major expression is the anti-globalisation ‘movement’ which I will consider below. Briefly, although some of the anarchist elements within the antiglobalisation ‘movement’ do raise anti-‘systemic’ demands, still, they have not as yet shown that they are able to function as catalysts for the formation of a new  democratic movement for systemic change. 

In conclusion, the general picture emerging as far as  post-war anarchism is concerned, is one characterised by an unwillingness of anarchists to build a programmatic movement with its own concrete analysis of the situation and long term goals and strategy. This fact constitutes the fundamental cause for the present withering away of the anarchist movement as a significant antisystemic movement. Another aspect of the same crisis is that very few libertarians today (notably, Murray Bookchin) attempted to renew libertarian theory in general and, to my knowledge, none (with the exception of the work around the project of Inclusive Democracy) attempted to make it compatible with the reality of today’s economy and society and the democratic trends that emerged since 1968, which rejected any ‘objective’ bases to found the liberatory project. Instead, most anarchist writers have either been stuck to the old debates with statist socialists, or  have turned to various forms of ‘pragmatism’, postmodernism and irrationalism.

Therefore, unless the radical elements within the anarchist movement, which is presently torn between direct action for its own sake and life-style anarchism, manage to overcome their present inability and unwillingness to function as catalysts for a new antisystemic democratic movement, missing in the process the historical chance that the collapse of the project for statist socialism has created , they are bound to confirm the present trend towards the terminal demise of anarchism as an antisystemic movement.

 

4. ‘New’ Antisystemic  movements

The rise of the ‘new’ social movements

If the ‘old’ antisystemic movements  were very much the product of ‘liberal’ and ‘statist’ modernity, the ‘new’ social movements (student, black, feminist, Green), which emerged in the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as the antiglobalisation movement which I shall consider in the last section,  were correspondingly expressions of late (‘neoliberal’) modernity. As such, they clearly reflect the changes in the systemic parameters I considered in the second section and in particular the changes in the class structures brought about by the rise of neoliberal modernity, as well the parallel ideological crisis which was accompanied by the flourishing of postmodernism and irrationalism.

As regards first the influence of the class structure changes, as I pointed out above, it was the rise of the middle classes in the 1960s and the 1970s, specifically the expansion of the salaried professionals and of women service sector employees, which provided the basis for the emergence of these movements, particularly the Green and the feminist movements.

Second, the influence of the ideological crisis and of postmodernism and irrationalism in particular was manifested in several ways and specifically in the rejection of universalist projects that has resulted in the fractionalism which characterises these movements, in the frequent adoption of reformist demands, as well as in the irrational elements that characterise the ideology of several currents within these movements.

However, there were several ‘antisystemic’ currents within the new  movements and particularly within the student, feminist, black  and green movements. In fact, some of them specifically charged the ‘old’ antisystemic movement as being no longer antisystemic, or sufficiently antisystemic. As a result, the period 1960-75 was one of deteriorating relations between old and new antisystemic movements, which however was succeeded by a new period of  rapprochement between old and new movements once the reformist currents started dominating  the ‘new’ movements.

Another general characteristic of the new social movements is  that they seem to be much more influential than the old movements in the North —a fact which is confirmed by at least one study