positive anarchy

Recently, I have been involved in a few short discussions about cooperatives and utopian doing as germs in the building of an alternative and as a basis for social change. A good reason to rummage through my archives again.

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In 1988 social theorists Agnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér wrote: “The absence of any single organising centre in modern western societies does not decrease the possibility for action, nor the  capacity  for  changing  social  relationships.  Action  potentials  are  simply  relocated. Precisely because of the de-centred character of the social system, emancipatory actions need not focus on changing a single, all-encompassing and dominating centre or institution but they can be pursued in every system and sub-system, in all spheres of society including everyday life. In this context, emancipatory action becomes diffuse. Moreover, it is no longer necessary for  all  actors  who  aim  at  emancipation  to  join  forces,  as  such  ‘joining  of  forces’  was necessary only as long as one could pinpoint a single organizing centre of all social sub- systems.  Different  groups  of  actors  can  engage  in  emancipatory  action  within  different systems and spheres (including everyday life)” (1988: 33).

A year later, in 1989, the Brazilian town of Porto Alegre initiated its participatory budget (orçamento participativo), that in 2001 would become an important source of inspiration for the World Social Forum in the same region. The idea was to install on a municipal or local level a system of budget control that would allow those groups that were traditionally not involved in political decisions to fully participate in and influence the outcome of budgetary allocations. This was from the beginning supposed to be more than a municipalist movement. The aim was the establishment of a kind of ‘solidary federalism’ that from the bottom up would  reform  the  relations  between  the  different  levels  of  the  state.  And  whatever  the outcome   today   of   the   experiment   in   Porto   Alegre   itself,   worldwide   some   15.300 municipalities on all continents are using the method (Allegretti, 2011: I).

In the years that followed, the impetus of Porto Alegre led to a world-wide array of experiments with self-organization, self-government, ‘mutual aid’ (Pjotr Kropotkin !), local money systems (lets), gift economy (Fernand Pelloutier !), etc. In short, in their resistance against the disastrous effects of worldwide unbridled capitalism, several institutions of collective action fell back on the classical anarchist proposals: self-organization, federalism, mutual support, the bottom-up construction of circles of self-government, etc. Although numerous studies have been conducted on these initiatives in developing countries (Ostrom,  1990), they are in  no  way  restricted to agricultural or industrializing societies.  In contemporary western contexts, one speaks of forms of ‘insurgent citizenship’ or, in Italy, of cittadinanza societaria. What terms like these relate to are relations that are established between citizens in a very specific, concrete and local environment, in order to provide for specific and concrete needs, and this without expecting anything from the state or even local authorities.

However, in as far as these initiatives mostly fit in a context of ‘deliberative democracy’, the purpose is never to do away with the state or democratic representative systems. And this reformist  approach  carries  with  it  the  risk  of  utilitarian  recuperation  by  national  and international institutions, which – again – use local participation purely as a vehicle to cut back the role of the state, and to replace the old mechanisms of institutional solidarity with mechanisms of charity or the free market (as seems to be the case in Porto Alegre nowadays). Similarly, when we look at Franco Archibugi’s ideas about the governance of complexity, we see that, although he pleads for subsidiarity and functional and territorial decentralization, his frames of reference and the consequential systemic planification remain profoundly state-bound. It is on the national level (if necessary on the supra-national level) that all sectoral and territorial plans are gathered, synthesized and verified in view of their mutual compatibility and the institutional requirements. In his view, the initiative lies with these very public and private, sectoral and territorial operators; they formulate their own plans, and it is on state-level that efficiency and coherence between them is sought after. This of course does not exclude that the state can and should formulate the general guidelines for the procedure to establish coherence between the various plans of different levels.

But what if we don’t believe anymore in the nation-state and representative democracy? What if we embrace the concept of Empire, where frontiers are irrelevant, where imperial power is diffuse, where mechanisms of discipline have been traded in for the machinery of control and biopolitics, where politics have vanished due to the disappearance of ideology and resistance? Jean-Marie Guéhenno wrote in 1993 (169):

C’est en ce sens que la révolution à accomplir est d’ordre spirituel. Les débats de l’avenir porteront sur le rapport de l’homme au monde : ils seront des débats éthiques, et c’est par eux qu’un jour, peut-être, renaîtra la politique, dans un processus qui partira du bas, de la démocratie locale et de la définition qu’une communauté donnera d’elle-même, pour aller vers le haut. Le processus sera le même qu’il s’agisse des parties du monde où la démocratie ne s’est jamais imposée, comme l’ancienne URSS, ou de celles où elle arrive à épuisement. La solidarité qui doit permettre de dépasser le repli  communautaire ne sera donc pas,  au départ,  « politique »,  elle trouvera son fondement dans le sentiment d’une commune responsabilité devant un monde dont les limites doivent borner l’ambition des hommes.

Maybe the recent and growing interest in the recovery, defence and management of what is called ‘the commons’ offers an impetus to think about and experiment with new forms of autonomous self-government. Elinor Ostrom and the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University have showed that all over the world people are able to organize themselves, independently from the state and from ‘the market’, to administer resources, food systems and other common goods (such as, in a technological field, open source software).

Meanwhile, the new anarchist theories, with their references to Foucault and Deleuze (and even Debord), emphasize categories and concepts such as singularity, multitude, difference, contingency,  events  and  becoming,  or  situation.  What  Proudhon  once  called  ‘positive anarchy’, is now translated into contemporary terms such as assemblage (agencement) or fields of immanence or densification. But in the end, what it comes down to is the theoretical and practical project of the free association of those who are learning to build up common ‘assemblages’ and the common intention to produce a maximum of freedom. In that sense, anarchism is at least a critique on the existing societal structures from the touchstone of non-state, non-heteronomous community relations.

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This short text is the final part of my contribution to the conference bundle Subsidiarity and Multi-Level Governance (Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, Contactforum 12 October 2011). In their introduction, Jan Loisen & Ferdi De Ville wrote:

« In the first chapter, Hugo Durieux analyses the current debates around the principles of subsidiarity and multi-level governance as a way to capture and cope with complexity. He points out that these concepts have some similarities with the classic anarchist theories about the construction of federated societies and decision-models. This allows Durieux to draw attention to similarities and differences between the two schools, and to related criticisms and pitfalls that both anarchism and multi-level governance may encounter (cf. Hardt and Negri’s discussion of imperial control). To give just one example, Durieux aptly observes that contemporary governments as Italy’s second Berlusconi-government (2001-2005) and Cameron’s Conservative-Lib-Dem Government have decentralized and further privatized responsibilities (e.g. on education, health, local policing), while at the same time cutting budgets. This kind of subsidiarity would clearly not enhance basic democracy. Durieux offers many more new intriguing questions than answers. But this will allow the reader to approach the other contributions with a much wider perspective, and as she or he will notice much .of the questions raised by Durieux reappear in more concrete shapes elsewhere. »

Here the full text of my contribution, ‘Subsidiarity, Anarchism and the Governance of Complexity’: