An an anrchi

 In that article, Antiff says the following :

"Todd May claims that Anarchists need to look back at classical “classical” figures from the nineteenth-century European wing of the movement .May suggested that anarchists had yet to come to terms with power as a positive ground for action. (positive power as in Marxism/Marxism Leninism)

The anarchist project, he argued, is based on a fallacious “humanist” notion that “the human essence is a good essence, which relations of power suppress and deny.” This impoverished notion of power as ever oppressive, never productive, was the Achilles heel of anarchist political philosophy (ibid., 62). Hence May’s call for a new and improved “poststructuralist anarchism.” The poststructuralist anarchist would not shy away from power: she would shed the husk of humanism the better to exercise power “tactically” within an ethical practice guided by Habermas’s universalist theory of communicative action (ibid., 146).

 But in the piece, Allan Antiff set out to refutre the claims by post structural post anarchists like Todd May that  “classical” anarchism — and by extension, contemporary anarchism — found its politics on a flawed conception of power and its relationship to society. This critique by Antiff is important because the post structuralism post anarchism of Todd May calls to ignore the past of Anarchism to press forward which has caused other Anarchists like Lewis Call and Saul Newman to follow suit. 

So in said piece, Antiff writes: "This is my modest aim: to provide a brief corrective meditation on “classical” anarchism and power."

So Allan Antiff drew upon classical Anarchist figures to do this, like Emma Goldman

"Emma Goldman’s statement certainly confirms May’s point concerning how anarchism widens the political field (May, 50). Goldman critiques religion for oppressing us psychologically, capitalist economics for endangering our corporal well-being, and government for shutting down our freedoms. She also asserts that the purpose of anarchism is to liberate humanity from these tyrannies. That said, one searches in vain for any suggestion that Goldman’s liberated individuals are, as May would have it, a priori good. Rather, she posits a situated politics in which individuality differentiates endlessly, according to each subject’s “desires, tastes and inclinations.”

Next Antiff used Anarchist Peter Kropotkin to further his critique of Todd May's post structuralism post anarchism claims on power 

" In his 1896 essay, “Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal” (Kropotkin, 143), Kropotkin wrote that anarchism was synonymous with “variety, conflict.” In an anarchist society “anti-social” behavior would inevitably arise, as it does at present; the difference being that this behavior, if judged reprehensible, would be dealt with according to anarchist principles, as he argued in his 1891 “Anarchist Morality” (Kropotkin, 106). 

More positively, the libertarian refusal to “model individuals according to an abstract idea” or “mutilate them by religion, law or government” allowed for a specifically anarchist type of morality to flourish (ibid., 113). This morality entailed the unceasing interrogation of existing social norms, in recognition that morals are social constructs, and that there are no absolutes guiding ethical behavior. 

Quoting “the unconsciously anarchist” Jean-Marie Guyau (1824–1882), Kropotkin characterized anarchist morality as “a superabundance of life, which demands to be exercised, to give itself ... the consciousness of power” (ibid., 108). He continued: “Be strong. Overflow with emotional and intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others! 

This is what all moral teaching comes to” (ibid., 109). Shades of Friedrich Nietzsche? Kropotkin is citing a passage from Guyau’s Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, ni sanction (1884), a book that also influenced Nietzsche’s “overman” concept and the related idea of going “beyond good and evil” — an interesting confluence, to say the least, given poststructuralism’s indebtedness to the German philosopher. [3] 

More to the point, Kropotkin’s subject, who exercises power by shaping her own values to accord with a “superabundance” of life, is antithetical to May’s claim regarding “classic” anarchism: “human essence is a good essence, which relations of power suppress and deny.” Kropotkin, contra May, embeds power in the subject and configures the unleashing of that power on morality as the marker of social liberation, predicting that it will generate both “anti-social” (fostering debate) and “social” (socially accepted) behavior in the process.

"Kropotkin wants power to “overflow”; it has to if a free social order is to be realized. 

Next Antiff moved on to use Michael Bakunin to further his critiques using Bakunin's calls to socialize property:

"We find the same perspective articulated by Michael Bakunin (1846–1881), the anarchist who most famously declared “the destructive urge is also a creative urge” in his reflections on freedom and equality:

I am free only when all human beings surrounding me — men and women alike — are equally free. The freedom of others, far from limiting or negating my liberty, is on the contrary its necessary condition and confirmation. I become free in the true sense only by virtue of the liberty of others, so much so that the greater the number of free people surrounding me the deeper and greater and more extensive their liberty, the deeper and larger becomes my liberty. (267)

Again, theory mitigates against the characterizations of the poststructuralist anarchists. In “Anarchism and the Politics of Resentment,” Saul Newman asserts that “classical” anarchism assumes “society and our everyday actions, although oppressed by power, are ontologically separate from it” (120). But if power is separate from society, why has so much theorizing been devoted to the social conditions through which libertarian power can be realized? The poststructuralist anarchists have yet to acknowledge, let alone address, this issue.

"the history of the Russian Revolution makes abundantly clear that “classical” anarchism does have a positive theory of power. Not only that, it offers an alternative ground for theorizing the social conditions of freedom and a critical understanding of power and liberation as perpetually co-mingling with and inscribed by a process of self-interrogation and self-overcoming that is pluralistic, individualist, materialist, and social. (similar to Marxism which can help unite Marxism and Anarchism) Finally, it has the advantage of an historical record: this theory has been put into practice, sometimes on a mass scale.(unlike the Post structuralism Post anarchism of Todd May and Saul Newman)

Arguably, then, contemporary radicals would do better marshaling classical anarchism to interrogate poststructuralism, rather than the other way around. As it stands, the continual rehashing of May’s spurious characterizations in a bid to theorize “beyond” anarchism has merely set up a false God adjective, poststructuralism, at the price of silencing the ostensive subject.

So the post structuralist anarchism I support takes these critiques by Allan Antiff into account.  Like for example "Be that as it may, “classical” anarchism offers some promising avenues for exploration, as a brief examination of anarchist theory and practice in Moscow during the Russian Revolution (1917–1921) reveals. "   Also since I support Max Stirner (more so in my other sets of blogs, here only on rights and parts of post anarchism)  reading that Allan Antiff says that Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own "merits close reading" further makes me motivated to reform post structuralist post anarchism using Allan Antiff's ideas in that article.

"Stirner’s thesis is that anarchist liberation could only be accomplished if all habitual subservience to metaphysical concepts and social norms ended and each unique individual became egoistic — that is, self-determining and value-creating. Anti-statism, Stirner argued, was an inescapable facet of egoism because when the individual achieved “self-realization of value from himself” he inevitably came to a “self-consciousness against the state” and its oppressive laws and regulations (361). 

The criminalization of society’s outlaws was the state’s response to those who asserted their desires over the sanction of morality, law, and authoritarian forms of power (314–19). Every state formation — monarchical, democratic, socialist or communist — demanded subservience to abstract principles in a bid to exert power over the subject. Stirner wrote:

Political liberty means that the polis, the state, is free; freedom of religion [means] that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the state, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like state, religion, conscience, is free. (139)

Stirner posited that an anarchist social order would be based on voluntary associations (“unions”) of “egoists” acting co-operatively (414–15). Regarding the Federation from this perspective, we can begin by noting that it grew by bringing disparate groups together to “unionize” on a foundation of shared criminality. Its headquarters, “The House of Anarchy,” was the old civic Merchants’ Club, “confiscated” and communalized in March, 1917. 

From there it expanded spontaneously as anarchists organized themselves into clubs, joined the Federation, and began contributing to the collective welfare. By way of furthering mutual aid within the Federation, detachments of “Black Guards” continued to carry out expropriations — building occupations in the main — into the spring of 1918 (Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 179–80; 184–85). In April, 1918, these activities would serve as the excuse for Lenin’s Communist government to conduct a series of police raids against the Federation. The official goal was to arrest and charge “robber bands” in the anarchist ranks — an assertion of the power of the Communist state over anarchist direct action — but the authorities quickly expanded the scope of illegality, announcing that “entire counter-revolutionary groups” had joined the Federation with the aim of “some covert action against Soviet [government] power” (Antliff, 200). 

Following this logic, smashing the organizational structure of the state’s most determined opponents “just happened” to go hand-in-hand with law enforcement. From an anarchist perspective, of course, the raids were tantamount to “executing” freedom, to paraphrase the editors of the anarchist Burevestnik (The Petrel) (ibid.) 

Certainly they underlined the stark contrast between the anarchist exercise of social power and state power in its Marxist guise. After the attack in Moscow and similar raids in St. Petersburg, the legality of anarchist activity was subject to the whims of the state police and the Cheka. Criminalization effectively brought an end to anarchism as an above-ground movement within territories controlled by the Communist Party, and the last instance of libertarian-inspired resistance in March, 1921 — an uprising of workers, soldiers and sailors at the Island Fortress of Kronstadt — was destined to be put down in “an orgy of blood-letting.“ [10]

The Ego and Its Own singled out the proletariat — the “unstable, restless, changeable” individuals who owe nothing to the state or capitalism — as the one segment of society capable of solidarity with those “intellectual vagabonds” who approached the condition of anarchistic egoism (Stirner, 148–49). 

Liberation for the proletariat did not lie in their consciousness of themselves as a class, as Marx claimed. It would only come if the workers embraced the egotistic attitude of the “vagabond” and shook off the social and moral conventions that yoked them to an exploitive order. Once the struggle for a new, stateless order was underway, the vastness of the working class ensured the bourgeoisie’s defeat. “If labor becomes free,” Stirner concluded, “the state is lost” (152).

This class orientation was reflected in the makeup of the Federation’s clubs and communes, most of which were located in Moscow’s working class districts (Avrich, 1967, 180). 

Indeed, the Federation’s conceptualization of free individuality was indebted to Stirner’s theory of class (an issue that falls by the wayside in much poststructuralist thinking) (Callinicos, 121–162). Among Moscow’s anarchists, A.L. and V.L. Gordin distinguished themselves in this regard. The Gordins were arch-materialists who argued that religion and science were social creations, not eternal truths. Manifest Pananarkhistov (Pan-anarchist Manifesto), a collection published in 1918, opened with the following declaration:

The rule of heaven and the rule of nature — angels, spirits, devils, molecules, atoms, ether, the laws of God-heaven and the laws of Nature, forces, the influence of one body on another — all this is invented, formed, created by society. (Gordinii 5–7, cited in Avrich, 1967, 177–78)"

"Here the Gordins took a page from Stirner, who condemned metaphysics and dismissed the idea of absolute truth as a chimera. Stirner argued that the metaphysical thinking underpinning religion and the notions of absolute truth that structured a wide range of theories laid the foundation for the hierarchical division of society into those with knowledge and those without. From here a whole train of economic, social and political inequalities ensued, all of which were antithetical to anarchist egoism. 

The egoist, he countered, recognized no metaphysical realms or absolute truths separate from experience; “knowledge,” therefore, was ever-changing and varied from individual to individual (Stirner, 421). The Gordins agreed, arguing that the individualistic “inventiveness” of the working class made for a sharp contrast with the “abstract reasoning” of the bourgeoisie and its “criminal dehumanization” of the individual (Gordinii 28, cited in Avrich, 1967, 178).[11]

Stirner also drew distinctions between insurrection and revolution, reasoning that whereas revolutions simply changed who was in power, insurrection signaled a refusal to be subjugated and a determination to assert egoism over abstract power repeatedly, as an anarchic state of being. 

“The insurgent,” wrote Stirner, “strives to be constitutionless,” a formulation that the program of the Moscow Federation put into practice (ibid.) Autonomous self-governance, voluntary federation, the spread of power horizontally — these were the features of its insurgency. As a result, wherever the Federation held sway, power remained fluid, unbounded by central authority, and ever-creative in its manifestations.

No wonder the state-enamored Communists felt compelled to stamp it out. They saw themselves as the vanguard disciplinarians of the proletariat, building socialism by molding the masses under the aegis of state dictatorship. As Lenin put it during the assault on Kronstadt:

Marxism teaches ... that only the political party of the working class i.e., the Communist Party, is capable of uniting, training, and organizing a vanguard of the proletariat and of the whole mass of the working people ... and of guiding all the united activities of the whole of the proletariat, i.e., of leading it politically, and through it, the whole mass of the working people. (Lenin 1921, 327)

Ever vigilant, “the dictatorship of the proletariat” was established to combat the “inevitable petty-bourgeois vacillations of this mass” towards anarchism during the initial revolutionary upheaval and to create a socialist society in its aftermath (ibid., 326–27). The “practical work of building new forms of economy” required a state, Lenin reasoned (328), because whenever and wherever “petty-bourgeois anarchy” reared its head, “iron rule government that is revolutionarily bold, swift, and ruthless” had to repress it (Lenin 1918, 291). And repress it, it did.

Complementing the power of social insurrectionism, Stirnerist egoism also called for our psychological empowerment through the cultivation of a critical consciousness that would, metaphorically, devour oppression. In the Ego and its Own Stirner deemed belief in a transcendent unchanging ego to be an alienating form of self-oppression. Libertarian “egoism,” 

Stirner wrote, “is not that the ego is all, but the ego destroys all. Only the self-dissolving ego ... the — finite ego, is really I. [The philosopher] Fichte speaks of the “absolute” ego, but I speak of me, the transitory ego” (237). Much like Kropotkin’s moralizing anarchist, the liberated egoist’s “free, unruly sensuality” overflowed with ideas — “I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts” — a fecund multiplicity that defied absolutes (453). 

Stirner characterized the internalization of authoritarian psychology as a mode of self-forgetting, a desire to escape the corporeal that found ultimate expression in the otherworldly delusions of immortality prescribed by Christianity (451–53). The liberated ego, on the other hand, would never subordinate itself to an abstract truth because it was conscious of its finitude and gained power from this knowledge. Stirner argued,

‘Absolute thinking’ is that thinking which forgets that it is my thinking, that I think, and that it exists only through me. But I, as I, swallow up again what is mine, am its master; it is only my opinion, which I can at any moment change, i.e.; annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. (453)

The consuming impulses of liberated egoism left nothing sacrosanct. As Stirner put it, “there exists not even one truth, not right, not freedom, humanity, etc., that has stability before me, and to which I subject myself. They are words, nothing but words” (463). He concludes:

I am the owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, out of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it human, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: I have set my affair on nothing. (490)

Russian anarchism’s engagement with the psychological dimensions of Stirner’s theory has barely been documented, and the historical and theoretical threads are too complex to recapitulate here. [12] 

For now it will suffice to note that during the movement’s last bid for power in March, 1921, the rebels at Kronstadt issued two statements, “What We Fight For” and “Socialism in Quotation Marks,” protesting not only against political and economic oppression, but also against “the moral servitude which the Communists have inaugurated” as they “laid their hands also on the inner world of the toilers, forcing them to think in the Communist way.” [13] While state power grew;

The life of the citizen became hopelessly monotonous and routine. One lived according to timetables established by the powers that be. Instead of the free development of the individual personality and a free labouring life, there emerged an extraordinary and unprecedented slavery... Such is the shining kingdom of socialism to which the dictatorship of the Communist Party has brought us. [14]

Anarchist subjectivity was a threat to the regime because freedom was, and is, its essence."

Post structuralist anarchism does have positives despite what I wrote above. I support its structuralist critique of the Enlightenment subject as unitary and absolute, I support it rejecting Marxist hierarchy of social forces that determine the subject's formation . Post structuralist anarchism tries to instead develop a more dynamic notion of decentered subjects while deepening their critique of authoritarianism in all its guises.

I like how it draws on like on the the first instance, on Frederick Nietzsche (see my values post and other parts of all my blogs for more on my views on Frederick) as the understudied alternative to Marx (see Purkis, 51–52). This is good because Nietzsche and Marx have similarities and maybe that could unite Marxists and Anarchists if Anarchists as a whole ever embrace post structuralist post anarchism 

"Anarchism, it appears, never showed itself on the political horizon. Perhaps this can be attributed to a lingering misreading of the anarchist subject as just another variation of the humanist individual, autonomous from the social forces, which structuralism attacked. [6] (which is why post structuralist post anarchism is justified in some ways)

This, after all, was the accusation leveled by Marx and Engels in their polemics against the anarchists of their day — notably Bakunin and Max Stirner (1806–1856). [7] It is ironic indeed, then, to encounter the same claim being leveled over 150 years after the fact by poststructuralist anarchists."(so post structuralist anarchists are emulating Karl Marx and Frederich Engels which is a way for them to unify with Marxists but as mentioned above there are areas where they have to fix in order to do so better)