After the success of such Leefbaar parties in some bigger cities in the mid-1990s, an initiative was made to try to bundle this locally dispersed force into a national Leefbaar Nederland party.
The bundling of loose parts implies the use of a binding element, and little coherence could be found in the diverse assembly of many of those local parties.. . .So . . .they started looking for a leader . . . in the person of a commentator on Dutch social and economic affairs, a former professor of sociology . . ., a . . . homosexual, and a provocative public debater: Pim Fortuyn.[147]
It should be noted that Fortuyn’s primary significance was rooted in his role as a symbolic figurehead of a grassroots, authentically populist movement. His appeal seems based on the fact that, as a gay, Marxist, social liberal opponent of immigration, he found a hearing among both the liberal cultural elite and the instinctively nationalist and xenophobic common people as well. Some might argue that Fortuyn’s subsequent assassination by a reactionary leftist ideologue is indicative of his political failure. However, the martyrdom of John Hus did not prevent the Protestant Reformation.
Anarchist militants should begin to assemble diverse coalitions in local communities across the United States, tailoring their specific programs to the culture of the local community. Anarchists, as the intellectual and activist vanguard, should maintain communication with one another irrespective of local boundaries and formulate a common agenda and plan. The first goal is to become the dominant force at the local level, whether by electoral means, strikes, boycotts, armed insurrection, or whatever. Once established in local communities, the next step would be to issue formal declarations condemning central government as some communities have already done regarding such matters as the US invasion of Iraq and the USA PATRIOT Act. Alliances between such communities should then be formed with the eventual goal of secession from the national regime. Larry Gambone describes how such a revolution might take place:
People begin taking control at the local level, developing or re-instituting forms of self-government and ignoring the state. Certain politicians at the national level become cognizant of the anti-statist sentiment, and for genuine or opportunist reasons, will help prevent the regime from attacking the decentralists. They may also pass certain “de-fanging” legislation which will weaken the state. Demonstrations accompanied by mass strikes will occur on an almost daily basis in the capital cities in support of the local movements and as means to keep up the pressure on the politicos. [Allies] . . . in other countries will also be developed to insure a massive outcry should the state choose to repress the libertarian upsurge. The outcome will be the development of genuine federal institutions.[148]
If history is any guide, such an insurgence is likely to occur following both an unpopular and failed war and a series of scandals leading to the loss of perceived legitimacy on the part of the state in the eyes of the public. One needs only to look at the loss of prestige suffered by the US regime following the combined Vietnam/Watergate fiasco and the fall of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the disastrous Afghan war. The US regime is currently moving into such a scenario once again, thanks to the imperial ambitions of the neoconservatives, brewing scandals in the Bush administration, and impending economic collapse resulting from currency devaluation and outrageous levels of both private and public debt. In the likely scenario that armed confrontation with the regime becomes necessary, popular militias formed at the community level combined with defector units from the state’s military forces will become the basis of the armed struggle. The task of anarchist and populist leaders will be to redirect the apparent natural zeal for war among the commoners towards the war against the illegitimate ruling class, appealing to American revolutionary traditions, and to redirect the natural patriotic inclinations of the masses towards the struggle against the state in defense of their own communities, regions, cultures, and religions.[149] Such efforts are apparently not as impossible as they may seem. After all, if a former National Review conservative like Joseph Sobran can be converted to the anarchist position, who couldn’t be?[150]
The struggle against the Anglo-American-Zionist empire, the authentic Axis of Evil, is not simply a matter of idealism, advancing one’s own social or political aesthetics, or humanitarian concern. Rather, it has become a matter of planetary survival (in a human, rather than eco-doomsday, sense). The conservative commentator Paul Craig Roberts points to the real agenda of the Empire and its neoconservative court intellectuals:
. . . influential advisors at the Pentagon are backing the development of a new generation of low yield nuclear weapons . . . In the place of bad old nuclear weapons, the new good nukes will be easier to use and more “relevant to the threat environment” . . . The Pentagon report designates “terrorists” as the targets of the mini-nukes. New nuclear weapons are said to be necessary in order to destroy deeply buried biological weapons caches, terrorist cells and hidden weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons caches will exist wherever neoconservatives declare them to be. Obviously, nuclear weapons of any size are too destructive to use against terrorists . . . The only purpose of the “small nuclear weapons” is to incinerate Muslim cities. It looks as if the neocons intend a final solution to their “Muslim problem” and are organizing genocide for Arabs.[151]
The use of such weapons by the US regime will necessitate the development, deployment, and use of such weapons by other states, and the provision of such weapons to freelance military organizations by states. The neoconservatives’ ambitions amount to little more than worldwide nuclear holocaust. Larry Gambone perceptively describes the neocons as “an American version of the Khmer Rouge . . . The possible roots of neocon nihilism? A mad desire to revolutionize the world, not for socialism, but for global corporatism, the Zionazi hatred of everything Arab, and the ‘Christian’ fundi’s world-hating lust for an apocalypse.”[152]
Whatever one’s perception of Islamic “terrorists” and “suicide” bombers, the Muslims are fighting for the defense of their culture, religion, and homelands. The neocons have no excuse. Eminently destructive weaponry in the hands of such fanatics constitutes the greatest danger to the world yet to emerge, surpassing even the looming nuclear holocaust of the Cuban missile crisis and the apocalyptic showdown between the imperial powers during the Second World War. Therefore, the defeat of Empire and the development of a new political paradigm that is antithetical to Empire has become an imperative. Hopefully, philosophical anarchism will help to show the way.
Anti-Imperialists of the World, Unite!
Towards an Anarchist Theory of Geopolitics
In the century and a half that modern anarchist movements have been in existence, anarchism has thus far passed through two distinct phases. The first of these was the era of classical anarchism, a movement inspired by the thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, which arose out of the rebellions of 1848 and came to position itself as the most militant wing of the international workers movement. The orientation of classical anarchism towards proletarian socialism was appropriate given that the “labor question” was the dominant political struggle of the time. This embryonic era of anarchist history lasted for nearly a century before meeting its end after the defeat of the anarchists at Kronstadt and in the Spanish Civil War, the achievement of hegemony by Communism on the Left, the massive strengthening of states during the “managerial revolution” of the mid-twentieth century, and the unrivaled levels of militarist bloodshed and statist repression perpetrated by the rival imperialist powers during the two world wars.
The second phase of modern anarchism, what might be termed “neo-anarchism,” had its roots in the student rebellions of the late 1960s. Neo-anarchism reflected the general trend within the New Left milieu in which it was born by shifting its focus away from workers’ struggles and the proletarian class towards an agglomeration of both privileged class youth and members of traditional social and cultural outgroups, such as racial minorities, feminist women,
homosexuals, immigrants, and the like, all the while becoming intertwined with the growing ecological consciousness, pop psychology, and therapeutic culture of the time. This ideological formula continues to dominate anarchist movements at the present juncture nearly a half century after it emerged.
The proletarian socialist orientation of classical anarchism may continue to possess considerable value in those nations and regions where the level of economic and technological development continues to approximate that of the West during the classical anarchist era. Likewise, the orientation of neo-anarchism towards social justice for racial minorities, women, gays, and other outgroups, preservation of the natural environment, and critiquing cultural barriers to self-actualization may retain its relevance in those regions where the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has not taken root or become particularly entrenched. However, both the orientation of the classical anarchist movement towards the proletarian class and the orientation of neo-anarchism towards the cultural margins have become anachronistic in the modern Western nations where the working class has become integrated into the political mainstream, where labor unions have become respectable public institutions, and where criticism of cultural or demographic sectors regarded as traditionally excluded or disadvantaged has become a taboo subject to severe social opprobrium and, in some cases, legal repression.
If anarchism is to regain the political status that it held in the late nineteenth century, that of the premier revolutionary movement in the West that simultaneously arose on the periphery as the vanguard of anti-colonialist struggles, it will be necessary to construct a theoretical paradigm, ideological formulation, and strategic orientation for twenty-first-century anarchist movements that possesses a contemporary analysis and factual understanding of the nature of the institutions that actually dominate modern societies. If the orientation of previous anarchist movements towards proletarian socialism or cultural radicalism is inappropriate in societies where the state reflects both social democratic and multicultural values, then the question arises of what the primary focus of contemporary anarchist movements should actually be.
The Nature of Contemporary Imperialism
Anarchist anti-imperialism of the classical era had its roots in resistance to the European colonial empires that were in turn outgrowths of the conquests that followed the meeting of European civilization and the societies of Asia, Africa, and the Americas during the Age of Discovery, the commercial revolution, and the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. European colonialism reached its zenith at the end of the nineteenth century but went into decline following the decimation of the European nations by the two world wars and the overthrow of the traditional monarchies and aristocracies in these nations by the rising liberal, democratic, and socialist movements of the early twentieth century.[153]
The decimation of the European and Asian continents by war and the resulting destruction of the traditional colonial empires created the international geopolitical conditions for the achievement of American hegemony as the United States had been the only major power that had not experienced the two world wars within its internal boundaries and had therefore avoided the destruction inflicted on the European and Asian powers. For the first four decades following the conclusion of the Second World War, the “First World” hegemony of the United States and its Western European allies and protectorates was countered with a limited degree of effectiveness by the regional imperialism of the “Second World” Soviet Union and its modest efforts to aid anti-colonial struggles in the pre-industrial “Third World.” However, the collapse of the Eurasian empire of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s allowed for the full achievement of global American hegemony.[154]
The American model of imperialism during the postwar era was not the traditional model of formal acquisition of colonies through direct military conquest. Rather, the form the American empire began to assume in the mid-twentieth century was one largely predicated on the informal domination of other nations by means of economic hegemony, the cultivation of local elites as clients, cultural imperialism exercised by the increasingly dominant American mass media, destabilization and counter-insurgency campaigns fought with local forces but financed and given diplomatic cover by the American state, proxy wars fought by mercenary armies, and small scale military interventions often conducted under the guise of “police actions.” Large-scale warfare was utilized only in extraordinary circumstances, such as American intervention on the Korean peninsula, in the former French colonies of Indochina, and in the Persian Gulf. Though the degree of overt militarism displayed by the American state has escalated since the historic events of September 11, 2001, the general structure of mid to late twentieth-century American imperialism outlined above largely continues as the modus operandi of the American empire and the client states and network of international institutions through which its hegemony is maintained.[155]
Our Enemies: Marxism and Totalitarian Humanism
Any serious analysis of anti-imperialist resistance movements during the twentieth century must necessarily seek to address the unquestionable fact that Marxism eventually eclipsed anarchism as the prevailing ideology of those with a radically anti-imperialist perspective. Why was this so? Surely, it was not due to the ability of Marxism to provide a more comprehensive theoretical critique of imperialism than anarchism. The actual historical contrasts between the perspectives of classical anarchism and Marxism regarding imperialism have been aptly summarized by Michael Schmidt:
It cannot be overemphasised how for the first 50 years of its existence as a proletarian mass movement since its origin in the First International, the anarchist movement often entrenched itself far more deeply in the colonies of the imperialist powers and in those parts of the world still shackled by post-colonial regimes than in its better-known Western heartlands like France or Spain. Until Lenin, Marxism had almost nothing to offer on the national question in the colonies, and until Mao, who had been an anarchist in his youth, neither did Marxism have anything to offer the peasantry in such regions—regions that Marx and Engels, speaking as de facto German supremacists from the high tower of German capitalism, dismissed in their Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries.” Instead, Marxism stressed the virtues of capitalism (and even imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping stone to socialism. Engels summed up their devastating position in an article entitled “Democratic Pan-Slavism” in their Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 14 February 1849: the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and invasion of Mexico in 1846 in which Mexico lost 40% of its territory were applauded as they had been “waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation,” as “splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it” by “the energetic Yankees” who would “for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization . . .”
So, “the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places ‘justice’ and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?” By this racial argument of the “iron reality” of inherent national virility giving rise to laudable capitalist overmastery, Engels said the failure of the Slavic nations during the 1848 Pan-European Revolt to throw off their Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian yokes, demonstrated not only their ethnic unfitness for independence, but that they were in fact “counter-revolutionary” nations deserving of “the most determined use of terror” to suppress them.
It reads chillingly like a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ racial nationalist arguments for the use of terror against the Slavs during their East European conquest. Engels’ abysmal article had been written in response to Mikhail Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot in which he—at that stage not yet an anarchist—had by stark contrast argued that the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps were divided not by nationality or stage of c
apitalist development, but by class.[156]
Clearly, Marxism possessed no greater intellectual force in its critique of imperialism than anarchism. Indeed, Marx and Engels were demonstrably pro-imperialist in their geopolitical outlook. It is also abundantly clear from the pervasiveness of anarchist tendencies throughout the world during the classical anarchist era that Marxism traveled with no greater ease than anarchism. Schmidt goes on to describe the vastness of the anarchist presence throughout the colonized world:
By 1873, when Bakunin, now unashamedly anarchist, threw down the gauntlet to imperialism, writing that “Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asiatics, asleep in their servitude, will necessarily awaken and begin to move,” the newly-minted anarchist movement was engaging directly and repeatedly with the challenges of imperialism, colonialism, national liberation movements, and post-colonial regimes. So it was that staunchly anti-imperialist anarchism and its emergent revolutionary unionist strategy, syndicalism—and not pro-imperialist Marxism—that rose to often hegemonic dominance of the union centres of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in the early 1900s, almost every significant economy and population concentration in post-colonial Latin America. In six of these countries, anarchists mounted attempts at revolution; in Cuba and Mexico, they played a key role in the successful overthrow of reactionary regimes; while in Mexico and Nicaragua they deeply influenced significant experiments in large-scale revolutionary agrarian social construction.
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