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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
conviction was that it was a self-creative revolt, taking ‘radical
subjectivity as the basis for resistance’. It was about ‘the subject-inprocess
… the subject-in-rebellion’. 62 Elsewhere, Moore argued that
struggle was about the possibility of ‘becoming’ and ‘the emancipation
of life from governance and control’ by the ‘exploration of
desire and the free, joyful pursuit of individual lines of interest’. 63
Either way, it was not really about solidarity or collective action.
This idea of individual struggle bears some similarity to the libertarian
anarchist position. One of Rand’s great cries is that rational
individuals ought not be made subject to the actions of collectives.
However, there is an important difference between the two
positions. Whereas primitivists like Moore adopt an expansive
view of the individual, Rand takes an insular view. For her, struggle
is not about becoming, it’s about securing a realm of action for the
individual, free from interference. To this extent, Moore’s position
has more in common with Read’s or Tolstoy’s than it does with
Rand’s. Indeed, though their work had a spiritual dimension which
Moore’s lacks, they shared his belief that struggle was about
regeneration and that art was a touchstone for awakening the
unconscious.
The – postmodern – view also has something in common with
the primitivist position. Like primitivists, postmodern anarchists
identify struggle with notions of becoming, with creativity and
expression. For postmodern anarchists, however, struggle is a continual
process that is not so much focused on the individual as it is
on networks of individuals and their movements. The dominant
image – borrowed from the French philosophers, Giles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari – is of the rhizome: a root which sends out shoots in
different directions and which connects with others in complex and
unpredictable ways. The rhizome describes the nature of human
interactions and it suggests that struggle is not about breaking free
from constraints, but about defining identity and discovering
diversity within the root system.
Some anarchists – Moore was not amongst them – are prepared
to define their approach to the state’s abolition in terms of a conception
of power. For example, Bakunin identified solidarity as a source
of moralizing and humanizing ‘social power’ and called for social
revolution to destroy the institutions responsible for disabling this
power. SolFed similarly argue that solidarity is a means of overcoming
powerlessness, in other words, of empowering workers. On the
primitivist side of the debate, the Unabomber Manifesto positively