“Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response by individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, states, pre-ordained standardization, excessive planning, etc.” So writes Paul Goodman, one of the most important social critics as well as anarchist thinkers of the 1960s, in “The Black Flag of Anarchism.” His work, whether in the form of social and political criticism, fiction, poetry, literary criticism, or psychology, always stressed how modern society and its institutions hindered human creativity, freedom and non-violence. His 1960 best-selling book Growing up Absurd was one of the major philosophical works of the decade that critiqued the absurdity of American society and which influenced and justified youth rebellion.

“To provide for the permanence of life of the population of each nation of humanity that inhabits the planet Earth is the primary and essential function of politics.”
-- Enrique Dussel [1]

“The bourgeoisie live on like specters threatening doom.”
-- Theodor W. Adorno [2]

It would unfortunately not be entirely absurd to claim climate change to be the greatest social problem of the twenty-first century. Short of the historical development and proliferation of nuclear weapons, nothing else seems to pose such a dire threat to human welfare as do the projected consequences of climate change; a recent report released by The Lancet, [3] for example, claims it to constitute the greatest threat to human health in this century. The dialectics of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the global climate and the greenhouse effect—which itself dialectically has allowed for the emergence and evolution of life on Earth for nearly four billion years—represents a problematic that, in Dussel’s view[4], joins the mass persistence of global material poverty in constituting the final limit to the age of modernity, the capitalist mode of production, and political liberalism.

There is little doubt today that we are living in apocalyptic times. From mega-selling Christian “end times” novels on the right, to the neoprimitivist nihilism that has captivated so much of the antiauthoritarian left, people across the political spectrum seem to be anticipating the end of the world. Predictions of “peak oil” have inspired important efforts at community-centered renewal, but also encouraged the revival of gun-hoarding survivalism. A 2009 Hollywood disaster epic elaborated the myth, falsely attributed to Mayan peoples, that the world will end in 2012. A cable TV series featured detailed computer animations purporting to show exactly how the world’s most iconic structures would eventually crumble and collapse if people ceased to maintain essential infrastructure. Numerous literary genres have embraced the apocalyptic mood, from Jared Diamond’s detailed histories in Collapse, to Margaret Atwood’s current dystopian trilogy, which began with the darkly satiric biotech nightmare, Oryx and Crake.

The prevalence of apocalyptic images is not at all limited to literature and popular culture. Disaster scenarios stemming from the accelerating global climate crisis look more severe with every new study of the effects of the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. Steadily rising levels of drought, wildfires and floods have been recorded on all the earth’s continents, and people in the tropics and subtropics already face difficulty growing enough food due to increasingly unstable weather patterns. Studies predict mass-scale migrations of people desperate to escape the worst consequences of widespread climate disruptions. And the diplomatic failure of the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen raised the profile of several new studies forecasting the dire consequences of temperature increases that may exceed 15 degrees in the Arctic and in parts of Africa.[1] Bill McKibben’s latest book, Eaarth, elaborates the view that we are now living on a far more turbulent planet, one that is already strikingly different from the one most of us grew up on.

How the G20 demonstrations in Pittsburgh prefigured new models of resistance in North America
Over the last decade, we have experienced the collapse and disintegration of broad-based resistance movements within the United States. The antiglobalization movement largely dissolved in the tides of repression following the emergence of post 9/11 security apparatuses. Soon after, the antiwar movement preceding the invasion of Iraq that had animated social machines across the globe crumbled under the weight of its failure to prevent the war.

The collapse of economic and political models which have defined the first breaths of the 21st century have been accompanied by this collapse of our capacity to be antagonistic and act against such systems. Two basic models continue to be activated by antiauthoritarians and anticapitalists in the U.S. despite this – that of the organizational model (which draws its structure from the collectives of civil-war Spain) and that of the summit protest (which pulls largely from the autonomous movements of the 1980s and 1990s). As capitalism stumbles and stutters and its structures globalize and transform, the radical left has continued to operate within these same failed models which have become increasingly ineffective.

Anarchist political theory is perhaps one of the most neglected traditions in contemporary political science. In a world created by the existence of the state, this makes sense. Nonetheless, thinking beyond the state paradigm is essential. Here we explore a work by one of the most influential anarchist thinkers, Peter Kropotkin, looking at the argument presented in Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal, in terms of its sweeping rejection of capitalism and state. We examine interpretations of Kropotkin’s argument by notable poststructuralist anarchists—postanarchists, for short—Saul Newman, Todd May, and Uri Gordon. We also consider Ruth Kinna’s attempt to revise Kropotkin, in light of the postanarchist critique, and conclude with a brief commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of Kropotkin’s argument and its interpretations.

Are you at risk? “At risk of what?” you may ask, but the specifics are hazy. Tsunami. Eviction. Influenza. Does it really matter? Disaster threatens—any disaster will do: “Risk has become an intellectual and political web across which thread many strands of discourse related to the slow crisis of modernity and industrial society.”1 A discursive web of risk sensitivities enshrouds the term. “Systemic risk is an issue that requires fuller understanding;”2 but understanding is complicated by proliferate use. An examination of radicals calls me.

China experienced a tide of anarchist activity in the May Fourth era. Particularly in the early part of the 1920s, many young people were so inspired by anarchist political critiques and cultural and social insights that they began publishing their own radical journals. Although many of these publications lasted only an issue or two and their content was largely derivative of existing writings, they proliferated in the universities and large cities across China. Though many of these publications are lost, there have been a few attempts to document them. These journals form part of the story of anarchism's development in China and demonstrate its relevance to modern China. They tell us much about what aspects of anarchism were most attractive to Chinese intellectuals and to what extent anarchism influenced China's political climate in spite of the growing communist hegemony of the period's politics.

The threat of an impending climate crisis has rightly dominated the headlines over recent years – unabated carbon emissions, alongside peak oil, are leading us to a bleak, even apocalyptic scenario. In addition to this we are experiencing a crisis of neoliberalism, where the restructuring of capital is finding ways to exploit (and hence worsen) the ecological collapse it has fomented. Both in the UK and worldwide, we have seen the emergence of movements aiming to tackle climate change. These movements embody a politics that appears to cross the political spectrum, but in fact all gravitate around a single apolitical space, or as Steven has termed it, a “post-political space.”

As the UN prepared to meet for the COP15 in Copenhagen, we found our movements in a state of political crisis. Dominated by methodologies that rely on an emerging carbon consensus as the basis of their (a)politics, movements such as the Camp for Climate Action find themselves powerless to engage with the decentered problem of climate change. There is an urgent need to reassess climate change in terms of power and productive relations, and to move beyond the single-issue environmentalism that has isolated climate change as the preserve of a specialist eco-activist vanguard.