Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Global movement as a parallelogram of forces 145
If as Marcos suggests the fusion of north and south in this ‘open’ and
‘planetary’ action system has led to the prevailing image of revolution
becoming-carnival, this suggests that, the role of the AGM is crucial to
defining the contemporary anatomy of revolution.
The umbrella organisation Globalise Resistance (as an offshoot of the
Socialist Workers Party) repeats the refrain ‘One Solution Revolution’ with
no systematic or programmatic anatomy of a contemporary revolutionary
form. Under conditions of global complexity (Urry 2003) the Marxist–
Leninist historical record is of limited utility in reading off necessary conditions,
appropriate targets for revolutionary capture, or the desirability
and appropriateness of representative structures and processes. However,
this is not the only historical canon open to us.
Commentators, including ourselves, have noted the centrality of anarchism
in the expressive form adopted by the AGM (Graeber 2002, Chesters
2003a, Welsh and Purkis 2003, Bowen and Purkis 2004). The logic of an
anarchist stance is that revolution cannot be led by a vanguard party or sedimented
through a revolutionary government or state as these institutional
forms lead back to the establishment of old habits of mind. Instead, revolution
requires the dissipative undermining of established institutional
forms not their re-titling. The nineteenth century formalisation of the other
road to revolution involved the self-organising expression of associative
forms of productive activity. Federal associations between communes,
workshops, districts, towns would dissolve national frontiers integrating
societies through economic co-operation and exchanges with money being
a form of exchange medium not the form. Bakunin’s formalisation of anarchist
agency within this process emphasised the role of ‘invisible pilots’
working not through ‘overt power’ but by tapping into and expressing the
collective ethical stakes declared by ‘all our allies’:
Without tricks, without official titles, without official rights, and therefore
all the more powerful, as it does not carry the trappings of power.
(Dolgof 1972: 180–181)
This revolutionary coalition based on autonomy was essential because as
Bakunin wrote in a passage with significant contemporary relevance:
Never was international reaction in Europe so formidably organised
against any movement of the people. Repression has become a new
science systematically taught in the military schools of all countries.
(1972: 344, see also Chapter 4)
This anarchist sensibility has continued its trajectory as a historical force
for greater autonomy and freedom of self-organisation, becoming amplified
again through the parallelogram of forces constituted by the AGM. This
coincides with a Deleuzian pragmatics that is sensitive to the possibilities of