Anarchic update news all over the world - 15.07.2018

Today's Topics:

   
1.  France, Alternative Libertaire AL #285 - AL-Kurdistan tour:
      Three revolutionaries, 25 dates, a big success (fr, it,
      pt)[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  anarkismo.net: Some Lessons from Revolutionary History by
      Wayne Price (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
3.  black rose fed: WHERE MOVEMENTS GO TO DIE: 
     THE DEMOCRATS ARE
      DRAINING THE RESISTANCE'S LIFE By Eoin Higgins, Paste Magazine
      (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
4.  black rose fed: HORIZONTALISM BY MARK BRAY 
    (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1






 From May 27 to June 30, Alternative Libertaire organized a round of debates with the 
French Arthur and Siyah, and the American Arges, ex-combatants in the YPG in Syria. A very 
positive assessment. ---- Big success and great satisfaction for the meeting of rallies 
organized by Alternative libertaire this year, in solidarity with the Kurdish left. From 
May 27 to June 30, three former international volunteers in the YPG, accompanied by a 
driver, traveled the roads of France to hold 25 meetings in all regions of the country. 
Our comrade Arthur Aberlin, who held the Kurdistan-autogestion-revolution.org blog in 
2017, was there with two other revolutionaries engaged in the YPG between 2016 and 2018: 
the French Siyah and the American Arges.
Almost everywhere, the rooms were well filled , with peaks to more than 200 people, 
Toulouse, Nantes and Montpellier: libertarians, anticolonialists, revolutionaries, trade 
unionists, curious ... The Kurdish diaspora was also very present, welcoming several dates 
of the tour in its premises. It has often been the occasion of a warm rapprochement with 
local AL activists.

Because of some precedents, there was fear, here and there, a fist action of pro-Erdogan 
nationalists. It has not happened. A conspiratorialist here, a Soralian there: nothing 
serious. In Orleans, an attempted raid by the Action Francaise came to a halt (or rather 
Azincourt) for the royal junk, which promptly disengaged.

On the content side, the evening was generally introduced by the film by Mireille Court 
and Chris den Hond, Rojava, a utopia in the heart of Syrian chaos . This 45-minute 
documentary, produced in a semi-professional way, has the great advantage, over many other 
productions, of not focusing on the military aspects and avoiding the clichés about the " 
valiant Kurdish fighters ": it paints a A quick but well-documented overview of the 
different aspects of the revolutionary process in northern Syria, ideal for people with 
little knowledge of the issue.

Then, the speakers answered directly to the questions and objections of the room, or gave 
a conference in six points : the question of the emancipation of women ; the architecture 
of pluricommunity democracy ; the question of anticapitalism in the revolutionary process 
; the alternative to the state model ; the life of every day in the revolution ; the 
revolutionary structures that allowed this revolution to be born.

Report France 3 Kurdistan May 29, 2018 from Alternative libertarian on Vimeo .

A small report from France 3 on the occasion of the passage in Orleans of the Kurdistan 
Revolution self-management tour. Politically, the talk by the journalist is several 
notches above what is usually done on TV on the volunteer fighters in the YPG. It does not 
speak of warrior romance, but of revolution, political project and emancipation.

On the bottom, it was rich and dense, with political analyzes intertwined with things seen 
and lived sometimes unexpected.

At each stage, the AL groups who hosted the event recalled that the libertarian communists 
provide critical support to the Kurdish left: an authoritarian drift is indeed always 
possible (the democratic system of the communes coexists with a leading party, the PYD, 
who has the upper hand on the military command), as well as instrumentalisation by foreign 
powers (United States, Russia, France ...).

One subject has only been touched on: Afrîn . This cruel defeat has not been digested. The 
most advanced and prosperous Kurdish canton is now occupied by the Turkish army and 
Islamist militias of the ASL. Beyond the thousands of civilian and military deaths in the 
Turkish bombings, nearly 200,000 people were driven from their homes, now occupied by Arab 
or Turkmen displaced by Ankara, as in the good old days of the Ottoman Empire. The ethnic 
cleansing enterprise is thus confirmed and, as in Palestine, the question of the right of 
return of refugees will arise. We will have the opportunity to talk about it again.

Commission newspaper

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Tournee-AL-Kurdistan-Trois-revolutionnaires-25-dates-un-gros-succes

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Message: 2





Review of Loren Goldner, Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, 
Turkey, Spain, Bolivia (2017) ---- A review of a book by a libertarian Marxist sympathetic 
to anarchism who analyses four revolutions in the 20th century and discusses their 
lessons. ---- This book brings together a set of analyses of popular struggles in a number 
of countries-as its subtitle indicates. It is written by a someone within "the libertarian 
or left communist milieu" of Marxism (43), although he expresses a friendly attitude 
toward anarchism. Overall it has a conclusion, a rejection of "a methodology repeated 
again and again whereby different variants of the far-left set themselves up as the 
cheering section and often minor adjuncts to ‘progressive' movements and governments 
strictly committed to the restructuring (or creation) of a nation-state adequate 
to...world capitalism. This methodology involves imagining...a healthy ‘left' wing of a 
bourgeois or nationalist or ‘progressive' or Third World ‘anti-imperialist' movement that 
can be ‘pushed to the left' by ‘critical support', opening the way for socialist 
revolution....Their role is to enlist some of the more radical elements in supporting or 
tolerating an alien project which sooner or later co-opts or, even worse, represses and 
sometimes annihilates them." (225)

Goldner believes that rejecting this statist and capitalist "methodology" is necessary to 
re-arm the far-left if it is to overcome "the nearly four decades of quiescence, defeat 
and dispersion that followed the ebb of the world upsurge of 1968-77...the long post-1970s 
glaciation...." (1) "I nevertheless part ways with a swath of currently fashionable 
theories; I still see the wage-labor proletariat-the working class on a world scale-as the 
key force for a revolution against capital." (2) He writes, "the key force," not the "only 
force," since he includes peasants and other oppressed as necessary parts of an 
international revolution.

This overall conception, from a (minority) trend in Marxism, is consistent with 
revolutionary class-struggle anarchism, as it developed from Michael Bakunin and Peter 
Kropotkin to the anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists.

However, Goldner shows the limitations of his knowledge of anarchism by a number of 
errors. For example, he remarks that "the ideology of pan-Slavism[was]also advocated by 
their anarchist rival Bakunin...." (57) Actually Bakunin had been a pan-Slavist before he 
became an anarchist, not since. Goldner refers to "the early mutualist (Proudhon-inspired) 
phase of the Peruvian and Latin American workers' movement (...superseded by the global 
impact of the Russian Revolution)." (171-2) But after an early period, most anarchist 
influence in the Latin American working class was anarcho-syndicalist (although there was 
still some interest in credit unions and coops, alongside unions). This is why the 
Sandinistas and other Central American revolutionaries (nationalist and Marxist) later 
adopted black and red as their colors.These had traditionally been the colors of the 
anarcho-syndicalist-influenced workers' movement.

Lenin and the Russian Revolution

Goldner writes that revolutionary libertarian socialist currents, such as anarchism, 
syndicalism, council communism, and the IWW, "were effectively steamrollered by 
Bolshevism...and the ultimately disastrous international influence of the Russian 
Revolution...." (9) In this book, his criticism focuses on Lenin's misunderstanding of the 
Russian peasants. Lenin overestimated the extent of the peasants' production of 
commodities for sale on the market. He overestimated the extent to which capitalism had 
taken root among the peasants. He overestimated the decline of the peasants' communal 
institutions (the "mir"). He overestimated the class stratification among the peasants. 
These misunderstandings led to an authoritarian, repressive, and exploitative relationship 
of the Soviet state to the peasants. They were a major factor in the split between the 
Bolsheviks (Communists) and the peasant-based Left Social Revolutionary Party. That in 
turn contributed to the formation of the single-party dictatorship. (See Sirianni 1982) 
"The Soviet Union emerged from the civil war in 1921 with the nucleus of a new ruling 
class in power...." (43)

Goldner also reviews the relations of the early Soviet Union with Turkey, then led by the 
nationalist, Kemal Attaturk. Goldner had previously believed, with the Trotskyists, that 
it was only under Stalin that international Communist parties were turned into agents of 
the Russian state and the world revolution subordinated to Russian national interests. But 
he found that the government of Lenin and Trotsky had sought close relations with the 
Turkish nationalists, even as the Turkish government was repressing and murdering Turkish 
communists. He quotes a memo from Trotsky at the time, saying that the main issue of 
revolutionary politics in the "East" was the need for Russia to make a deal with Britain.

However, Goldner defends Marx, and-more oddly-Lenin from anarchist charges of laying the 
basis for Stalinism. "I...reject the commonplace view one finds among anarchists who see 
nothing problematic to be explained in the emergence of Stalinist Russia." (43) If he 
means that the Russian Revolution needs to be analyzed in detail, without assuming any 
inevitabilities, then I agree. And there are libertarian-democratic, proletarian, and 
humanistic aspects of Marx's thought. But anarchists correctly rejected Marx's program of 
a revolution in which the working class (or a party speaking for the working class) would 
seize power over a state and establish a state-owned, centralized, economy. The anarchists 
had predicted that this would lead to state capitalism and bureaucratic class rule. 
Whether this is "problematic," it seems to have been justified by experience.

Goldner denies "that there exists a straight line, or much of any line, from Lenin's 1902 
pamphlet What Is To Be Done? to Stalin's Russia." (43) Maybe not; there is a democratic 
aspect of WITBD?, a call for the working class party to champion every democratic cause 
large or small (peasants, minority religions, censored writers, etc.), no matter how 
indirectly related to working class concerns. But Lenin treated support for democratic 
issues as instrumental, steps toward his party's rule, rather than as basic values. 
Overall he had an authoritarian outlook. This can be demonstrated from much more evidence 
than just WITBD? (See Taber 1988.)

Anarchists and Trotskyists

Discussing the Spanish revolution/civil war of the ‘thirties, Goldner is "anything but 
unsympathetic to the Spanish anarchist movement."(119) His views are similar to that of 
the council communists (libertarian Marxists) Karl Korsch and Paul Mattick. Then living in 
the U.S., they were supportive of the anarchist-syndicalists in the conflict (Pinta 2017). 
Goldner writes, "The Spanish working class and parts of the peasantry in the 
Republican[anti-fascist-WP]zones arrived at the closest approximation of a self-managed 
society, sustained in different forms over two and half years, ever achieved in history." 
(118) He quotes Trotsky saying pretty much the same thing.

However, "Spain was the supreme historical test for anarchism, which it failed...," 
adding, "in the same way that Russia was, to date, the supreme test of, at least, 
Leninism, if not of Marxism itself." (118) Instead of organizing the workers and peasants 
in their democratic unions, factory councils, communes, and militia units, to replace the 
collapsed national and regional states-the mainstream anarcho-syndicalists joined the 
national Popular Front government and the Catalan regional government. "The Spanish 
anarchists had made the revolution, beyond their wildest expectations, and did not know 
what to do with it....Everything in the anarchists' history militated against ‘taking 
power' as ‘authoritarian'[and]‘centralist'...." (126-7)

Goldner does note that there were some anarchists who advocated a revolutionary program, 
not of joining the bourgeois government or of "taking state power," but of organizing a 
democratic federation of workers, peasants, and militia organization to manage the economy 
and the war. In particular, there were the Friends of Durruti who "called for a new 
revolution." (141) (For more on the Friends of Durruti , see Guillamon 1996.)

The main lesson Goldner draws from the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution is the need 
for radicals "to think more concretely about what to do in the immediate aftermath of a 
successful revolutionary takeover....[to devote]serious energy to outlining a concrete 
transition out of capitalism." (149)

Discussing the Bolivian revolution of 1952, Goldner shows how the Trotskyists made the 
same sort of errors as the anarchists had in Spain. There was a revolutionary situation, 
where the Trotskyists for once had a large influence among the rebellious (and armed) 
working class. Instead of advocating independent power to the mass workers' organizations, 
the Trotskyists gave support to radical (bourgeois) nationalists, claiming that they were 
really on the road to socialism (although, Goldner demonstrates, the nationalists had 
fascist influences in their formation). "The Trotskyist POR...ended up providing a 
far-left cover for the establishment of the new[bourgeois]state." (214) Eventually, the 
Trotskyists were no longer useful to the nationalists and were repressed (the classical 
"squeezed lemon" process). The regime swung to the right. This was another illustration of 
the "methodology" of radicals tailing "progressive' movements and governments strictly 
committed to the ... nation-state[and]capitalism," as I quoted in the first paragraph.

Anti-Imperialism? Anti-Capitalism? National Liberation?

I find Goldner's opinions on "anti-imperialism" and national liberation to be unclear. He 
is correct in rejecting the left program which substitutes national struggles for class 
struggles, which ignores class (and other) conflicts within oppressed nations, and which 
spreads illusions about the "socialist" nature of nationalist and Stalinist rulers. But it 
is unclear whether he regards national oppression as a real issue for millions of workers 
and peasants. If we recognize this as a real concern, then libertarian socialists can be 
in solidarity with the people of oppressed nations, while opposing their nationalist 
would-be rulers. It becomes possible to advocate national liberation through social 
revolution and to propose a class struggle road to national freedom.

This would seem to be consistent with Goldner's agreement with Lenin's WITBD? strategy of 
revolutionary working class support for all democratic struggles, as well as Goldner's 
expressed agreement with Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution." He specifically 
condemns the Popular Front government in the Spanish civil war for "the failure of the 
Republic to offer independence or even autonomy to Spanish Morocco (...) which could have 
had the potential of undercutting Franco's rearguard, his base of operations, and, in the 
Moroccan legionaries, an important source of his best troops. " (129) That is, the 
liberal-socialist-Stalinist-anarchist coalition failed to adopt anti-imperialist policies 
(due to Spain's imperialism and its attempted alliance with French and British imperialism).

This is a fascinating book, with detailed analyses of revolutionary turning points in 
world history. Loren Goldner's discussion of these events and the issues which arise from 
them is important and useful for anti-authoritarian revolutionaries to consider.

References

Guillamon, Agustin (1996). The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939. (Trans.: Paul 
Sharkey). San Francisco: AK Press.

Goldner, Loren (2017). Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, 
Turkey, Spain, Bolivia. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Pinta, Saku (2017). "Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War and 
Revolution, 1936-1939." In Libertarian Socialism; Politics in Black and Red. (Ed.: Alex 
Pritchard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, & David Berry.) Oakland CA: PM Press. Pp. 116-142.

Sirianni, Carmen (1982). Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience. 
London: Verso.

Taber, Ron (1988). A Look at Leninism. NY: Aspect Foundation.

*written for www.Anarkismo.net

https://www.anarkismo.net/article/31065

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Message: 3





For a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed that this time it might be different. Donald 
Trump's inauguration was followed by the largest one-day protest in American history. The 
next week, spontaneous actions broke out across the country's airports in response to the 
administration's travel ban. People started talking about a general strike. ---- That was 
then. This is now. The upswell of political action that began three and a half months ago 
continues, of course, as congressional representatives meet with angry constituents across 
the nation and every weekend brings a fresh march, action, or protest. But today, unlike 
in the immediate aftermath of the inauguration, the protest movement is becoming branded 
by the big blue D of the Democratic party. ---- That presents a problem. The reason that 
there's a saying that "the Democratic Party is where social movements go to die" is 
because it's true. America's second most enthusiastic capitalist party finds its purpose 
in crushing challenges to the socioeconomic order by co-option and assimilation.

Weimar Democrats
The immediate rejection of Trump came as a surprise to many in the Democratic Party and 
the political class. In the aftermath of Trump's election victory, then President Barack 
Obama told the president elect that "if you succeed, the country succeeds." His defeated 
challenger Hillary Clinton told her supporters that "we owe him an open mind and the 
chance to lead."

The Democrats were flailing after their crushing defeat last November. Their electoral 
machine was in shambles and they were all out of ideas, after having tried nothing.

It took a while for the party to read the mood of the electorate. Senate Democrats, with 
the exception of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, were mainly compliant with 
confirming Trump's cabinet nominees in the first week of the new administration.

That began to change, however, as the public pressure from a genuine grassroots movement 
pushed back against the Trump agenda. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker stopped 
voting for the president's Cabinet picks by February. They knew there would be 
consequences for collaboration.

Channel and Defang
Gillibrand, Warren, and Booker are each widely expected to have designs on the White House 
in 2020, and they each want to turn the new protest movement to their advantage. Booker 
showed up at an airport protest on Jan. 29. Warren and Gillibrand have popped up at 
rallies across their home states in the months since Trump took office. Their votes 
against Trump's nominees appear, to a cynic, to be the kind of politicking that will 
position each well to channel the anger against Trump from the base while defanging the 
parts of the movement they don't care for.

As for Clinton, she has reentered the political scene with both a new narrative and a new 
scheme. The failed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate has decided that she is mostly 
blameless for her defeat. Instead, the new narrative goes, Clinton was brought down by now 
former FBI Director James Comey and an unspecified but nefarious Russian hacking operation.

With that cleared up, Clinton is moving on to doing what she does best: grift. The former 
Secretary of State is starting a new political action committee to raise money for protest 
groups and, for the midterms, candidates. She's called the PAC "Onward Together," a play 
on her failed campaign's slogan "Stronger Together."

The Professionals
This move by Clinton encapsulates the problem of the Democrats coopting an organic protest 
movement against Trump perfectly. A real grassroots movement against the president and his 
administration could present a challenge to both the problems of the current 
administration and the problems of America as a whole. But if the movement is controlled 
and funded by the same party professionals that have created a brand so off-putting, and 
so toxic, that the American people prefer Trump, what measure of success can it 
realistically expect to have?

Further, a Clinton controlled PAC could allow the party machine to continue to determine 
the course of the movement. The Democrats have deep pockets-ask anyone who's ever run 
against the party without significant financial backing. By funneling extra cash and 
resources to her chosen candidates, Clinton and her ilk could continue to control the 
direction of the party.

Sure, a few more liberal candidates would slip through the cracks in the primaries. But 
for the most part, we shouldn't expect to see a Tea Party wave in the Democratic Party in 
2018. They won't allow it.

The Democrats plan to attach themselves, tick-like, to a political movement that was born 
from resistance. They'll drain it of its lifeblood and infect it with a debilitating 
disease, rendering the movement toothless, tired, and depleted. It's up to us to make sure 
that doesn't happen.

This article was reprinted from Paste Magazine. You can follow the author Eoin Higgins on 
Twitter.

If you enjoyed this piece we recommend "The Lure of Electoralism: From Political Power to 
Popular Power."  Additional articles related to these themes can be found in our 
"Electoralism" and "Strategy" tags.

http://blackrosefed.org/movements-democrats-drain-life/

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Message: 4





We are excited to present "Horizontalism" by Mark Bray which appears as a chapter in the 
recently published Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, published by Routledge and edited by 
Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun, and Leonard Williams. Bray is the author of Antifa: The 
Anti-Fascist Handbook and Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street and a 
member of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation. Given the length of the article we 
are also introducing a beautifully designed PDF reader format of the article which you can 
download by clicking on the reader image below. ---- In this piece Bray relates a range of 
global movements from mass neighborhood assemblies in Argentina, to the squares movement 
in Europe and Occupy Wall Street to various political conceptions of power, movement 
building and electoral politics. He begins with drawing a distinction between 
horizontalism as a specific form of popular mobilization that has recently emerged and 
more broadly the practices of horizontal style organizing. From this he points out that 
while anarchism is horizontal in it's approach to organizing and movement building, 
horizontalism is much more fluid, "non-ideological," and lends itself to decidedly 
non-horizontal directions of electoral organizing - politics which anarchist have 
traditionally contrasted their politics in opposition.

Horizontalism
By Mark Bray

The decades that have followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have witnessed a 
historic resurgence of directly democratic, federalist politics among global social 
movements on a scale unheard of since the first decades of the twentieth century. From the 
Zapatistas and Magonistas of southern Mexico, to the global justice movement, to the 
squares movements of Tahrir Square, 15M (15th of May), Occupy, Gezi Park, and many more 
around the world, to Black Lives Matter, we can see the powerful impact of the style of 
leaderless (or leaderful),[2]autonomous, direct action-oriented organizing that has 
characterized resistance from below during this era. Some of the groups and individuals 
that composed these movements were directly, or indirectly, influenced by the enduring 
anti-authoritarian legacy of anarchism, whose international popularity has surged over 
recent decades in conjunction with a heightened interest in federalist, anti-capitalist 
politics. Many more, however, came to reject the hierarchical party politics of 
authoritarian communism not as the result of an explicitly ideological influence, but 
rather because occupations, popular assemblies, and consensus decision- making were widely 
considered to be the most ethically and strategically appropriate forms of struggle given 
existing conditions. Such was the case for most of the Argentines who rose up to occupy 
their workplaces and organize neighborhood assemblies in the wake of the financial crisis 
of 2001. Out of this popular rebellion against neo-liberalism came the term 
"horizontalism" (horizontalidad). While this slippery term has meant slightly different 
things for different people, it generally connotes a form of "leaderless," autonomous, 
directly democratic movement building whose adherents consider it to be non- ideological. 
Since the Argentine uprising, the term "horizontalism" has established itself as the 
overarching label for this amorphous form of directly democratic organizing that has swept 
the globe.

Certainly horizontalism and anarchism overlap in their advocacy of federal, directly 
democratic, direct action-oriented, autonomous organizing. Long before the collapse of the 
Soviet Bloc, anarchists railed against the inherently deleterious effects of hierarchy and 
authoritarian leadership while building large-scale federal models of workers' 
self-management in the form of anarcho-syndicalist unions with memberships in the hundreds 
of thousands, or even above a million in the case of the Spanish CNT in the 1930s. In some 
cases, such as the French CGT in the early 20th century, anarchist unionists even endorsed 
creating non-sectarian revolutionary syndicalist unions that could group the working class 
beyond political divides (Maitron 1992, 326; Maura, 1975, 495). It is unsurprising that 
many anarchists have thrown their lot in with the horizontalist mass movements of the past 
decades in order to safeguard and promote their anti-authoritarian tendencies. The intense 
proximity that exists between these two currents raises some important questions: is 
horizontalism merely a new name for anarchism? Are they basically the same idea 
masquerading behind different histories? Given such a high level of overlap, are we simply 
quibbling about semantics if we insist on a distinction between the two?

To answer this question, I will draw a distinction between "horizontalism," which I use as 
a historically specific term to demarcate the wave of directly democratic popular 
mobilization that has emerged over the past few decades, and "horizontal," which I use as 
an analytical descriptor to describe any form of non-hierarchical activity, regardless of 
context. Once this distinction is drawn, it is apparent that although anarchism is 
inherently horizontal, the historical horizontalism of recent years is a fluid entity that 
occasionally promotes values and ideas that are at odds with anarchism as a result of its 
minimalist, "anti-ideological" ideology. Although some anarchists and others have 
characterized anarchism as "anti-ideological" as well, the history of the movement shows 
that most of its militants and theorists have viewed it as a solid, though flexible, 
doctrine anchored in a set of anti- authoritarian tenets. This stands in sharp contrast 
with the prevalent post-modern tendency of proponents of horizontalism to view it as a 
malleable set of practices disconnected from any specific political center. This 
"anti-ideological" focus on form over content, which is to say, its emphasis on how 
decisions are made over what is decided, has created significant tensions in the context 
of more or less spontaneous popular horizontalism for anarchists who are supportive of 
mass organizing and hopeful about the political openings provided by such movements. 
Because horizontalism attempts to divorce itself from ideology, its structures and 
practices are susceptible to resignification in decidedly non-horizontal directions, such 
as participation in representative government.

It is important to clarify that this critique of the "anti-ideology" of horizontalism 
applies to essentially spontaneous popular movements where thousands of random people 
suddenly engage in direct democracy with each other for the first time, not to examples 
like the Zapatistas of southern Mexico whose horizontal practices developed slowly over 
generations and were inextricably bound to widely shared values. When assemblies emerge 
without the opportunity for such steady growth and development, their lack of formal 
ideology greatly reduces the barriers to entry for a mass of disaggregated, disaffected 
people, yet it also makes the movement's content and trajectory capricious. The implicit 
horizontalist assumption that horizontal decision-making mechanisms are sufficient to 
yield egalitarian results stands in sharp contrast with the avowed anarchist commitment to 
both horizontal practices and anti-oppressive outcomes. This demonstrates that although 
anarchism is horizontal (in the analytical rather than the historically specific sense of 
the term), and horizontalism is anarchistic (meaning it bears many of the traits of 
anarchism), horizontalism and anarchism are not identical.

Horizontalism
In late 2001, a spontaneous rebellion erupted in Argentina when the government decided to 
freeze bank accounts to forestall a mounting financial crisis precipitated by the 
IMF-mandated privatization and austerity measures of the 1990s. In under two weeks, 
popular mobilizations ousted four governments. Against the hierarchical machinations of 
the political elite, social movements organized democratic neighborhood assemblies and 
workplace occupations around principles that were increasingly encapsulated in the concept 
of horizontalism. Occupied workplaces forged networks of mutual aid and assemblies formed 
locally before establishing inter-neighborhood organisms of direct democracy guided by 
both the sentiment and the practice of consensus decision-making. This uprising was 
eminently pre- figurative as it sought to embody the society it desired in its everyday 
practices. As Marina Sitrin (2006, 4) argues in her influential Horizontalism: Voices of 
Power in Argentina, horizontalism "is desired and is a goal, but it is also the means - 
the tool - for achieving this end." For many, it was "more than an organizational form," 
it was "a culture" that promoted new affective relationships and communal solidarity 
(Sitrin 2006, 49). This culture of openness and rejection of dogma could even impinge upon 
the consolidation of horizontalism as a fixed entity since, as the Argentine Colectivo 
Situaciones argued, "horizontalidad should[not]be thought of as a new model, but rather 
horizontalidad implies that there are no models.... Horizontalidad is the normalization of 
the multiplicity ... The risk is that horizontalidad can silence us, stop our questions, 
and become an ideology" (Sitrin 2006, 55).

The accounts Sitrin gathered from the direct participants in the Argentine uprising 
demonstrate that for many, horizontalism was perhaps an anti-ideological ideology composed 
of a fluid mixture of flexible, participatory, non-dogmatic values and practices oriented 
around consensus, federalism, and self-management. However, these attitudes and outlooks 
emerged in a number of different groups and movements long before they were associated 
with the term "horizontalism." In Unruly Equality: U. S. Anarchism in the 20th Century, 
Andrew Cornell (2016) demonstrates how the diffuse remnants of early twentieth-century 
anarchism that were increasingly inclined toward pacifism and the avant-garde in the 1940s 
and 1950s

provided theories, values, tactics, and organizational forms, which activists in the 
antiwar, countercultural, and feminist movements took up[over the following decades]; in 
turn, these mass movements radicalized hundreds of thousands of people, a portion of whom 
adopted anarchism as their ideological outlook. (245)

The destruction of the American anarchist movement in the middle of the century and the 
polarization of the Cold War led many American anarchists to experiment with new tactics 
and strategies. This included consensus, which was first used by American anarchists in 
the radical anti-war organization Peacemakers in the late 1940s (Cornell 2016, 180-181). 
More than a decade later, consensus was introduced into the civil rights organization 
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by Peacemakers organizer James Lawson 
(Cornell 2016, 229; Carmichael 2003, 300). This influence carried through Students for a 
Democratic Society (SDS) and other groups into the 1970s and 1980s where the New Hampshire 
Clamshell Alliance pioneered the use of spokescouncils and affinity groups in the 
anti-nuclear movement, feminist consciousness-raising circles experimented with 
non-hierarchical organization, and the Movement for a New Society (MNS) incorporated 
Quaker consensus methods (Farrell 1997, 241; Anarcho-Feminism 1977; Cornell 2011). During 
the same decades, similar tendencies were at play in Europe with elements of the feminist, 
anti-nuclear, and autonomous movements (Katsiaficas 1997). The tradition that these groups 
forged was adopted by subsequent groups such as the direct action AIDS group ACT UP, the 
radical environmentalist Earth First!, Food Not Bombs, and others feeding into the global 
justice movement at the turn of the twenty-first century (Gould 2009; Wall 2002; McHenry 
2012). The squares movements of the Arab Spring, 15M, Occupy, Gezi Park, Nuit Debout, and 
others were in part a reboot of the assemblies, spokescouncils, affinity groups and direct 
actions of the global justice movement oriented around a specific geographic space in the 
form of the plaza. Others have been influenced by the concept of rhizomatic organizing put 
forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987; Chalcraft 2012; Anderson 2013). While 
the specific practices of these groups and movements varied,

their investment in deliberation, consensus-building, individual participation, diversity, 
novel technologies, and creative engagement stands as a self-con- scious counterpoint to 
doctrinaire and hierarchical models of mobilization, political, and religious 
sectarianisms, polarizing debates over national identity, and even representative forms of 
democracy. (Anderson 2013, 154)

Horizontalist opposition to representative democracy usually comes in the form of 
consensus decision-making. Rather than formulating a proposal and simply concerning 
oneself with accumulating enough votes to push it through, consensus requires participants 
to take the concerns of the minority seriously and cater proposals to their outlooks. The 
idea is not that everyone has to agree all the time (the strawman portrayal of consensus), 
but rather that the majority is forced to make concessions to the minority and, for the 
group to function, the minority must grow accustomed to tolerating decisions that it finds 
less than ideal. Consensus seeks to promote not only the formal practice of assuring that 
proposals will satisfy the minority, but more deeply, a sense of unity within the group 
and a culture of care that can all too easily get trampled in the pursuit of a voting 
majority. This form of decision-making works best when all members of a group have a 
shared sense of purpose. When they don't, the process grinds to a halt. For example, 
Occupy Wall Street implemented modified consensus, only requiring 90% rather than 100% 
agreement, to provide a little breathing room for such occasions. Nevertheless, when 
members of a body are working at cross purposes it only takes 11% to shut down the 
objectives of the other 89%. Occupy Wall Street and many of the other squares movements 
encountered such problems when spontaneously incorporating thousands of random individuals 
into their decision- making bodies. Even when consensus is practiced by a cohesive group 
with a shared purpose it carries an inherent bias toward the status quo by making it more 
difficult to pass a proposal or resolution. As George Lakey of Movement for a New Society 
remarked, "consensus can be a conservative influence, stifling the prospects of 
organizational change" (Cornell 2011, 47). Clearly consensus carries a number of pitfalls, 
but so does majority voting. Ultimately it is very difficult to navigate conflict which is 
why anarchists place such a great emphasis on voluntary association (and, therefore, 
voluntary disassociation). Sometimes the only solution is for two groups to go their 
separate ways rather than forcing them to coexist.

Many of horizontalism's most energetic advocates view it as means and ends wrapped 
together into a unified set of practices and values. From this perspective, values inform 
practices which shift as they encounter varied circumstances. In turn, the horizontalist 
hostility to "dogma" allows values to adjust to the needs of the people as movement 
contexts twist and turn. Horizontalism's "non-ideological," "apolitical" focus on form, 
practice, and immediate problem-solving over large- scale "sectarian" conflicts has 
endowed this historically specific tendency with a portability and adaptability that has 
allowed it to flourish in contexts as different as rural Greece and lower Manhattan, 
Istanbul and Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the politics undergirding horizontalism have 
varied drastically. This is unproble- matic if one has no predetermined goal; if one 
adheres to the liberal notion I have referred to elsewhere as "outcome neutrality" (Bray 
2014). Yet, anarchism has always been about much more than direct democracy; it is a 
revolutionary socialist ideology grounded in anti-domination politics as well as 
non-hierarchical practice.

Anarchism and Horizontalism
Anarchist responses to the growth of popular horizontalism have ranged from elation to 
disgust, with many in between. Those who have been more enthusiastic have viewed 
horizontalist movements as opportunities for the mass promotion of non-hierarchical 
politics while critics have seen them as betrayals of truly horizontal principles 
especially as they have ventured into electoralism. There are a range of anarchist 
responses to horizontalism, as the examples below from Spain, the United States, and 
Turkey will demonstrate.

The shared federalism[3]of anarchism and horizontalism can be traced back to the 
eighteenth century. While one can also trace it back even further, in terms of the history 
of socialism it makes sense to start with the influence of the dictatorial Jacobin 
"republic of virtue" during the French Revolution, which pioneered elements of central 
planning and modern conscription. Over the following decades, the European republican 
movement was split between Jacobins and their sympathizers who longed for a renewed "reign 
of terror" and federal republicans who were aghast at the bloody consequences of 
centralized authority, even in the hands of republicans, and instead advocated local and 
regional autonomy. Unsurprisingly, many of the first disciples of the anti-authoritarian 
works of Proudhon and Bakunin began their political lives as federal republicans while 
many Marxists have hailed the Jacobin dictatorship as a preview of their desired 
dictatorship of the proletariat (Zimmer 2015, 73; Esenwein 1989, 16-17; Maura 1975, 68; 
Toledo and Biondi 2010, 365; Lenin 1975; Mayer 1999).

Anarchists advanced the federal republican opposition to centralization by forming a 
critique of the state, whether federal or centralized, and developing modes of struggle 
and methods of self-organizing that reflected the world they sought to create. Most 
Marxists reject the notion that anything approximating communism could be enacted in a 
capitalist society and therefore conclude that the form that an organization or party 
takes is only of instrumental value. For Marxist-Leninists, for example, this essentially 
amounts to the position that it is acceptable for a vanguard party to act in the best 
interest of the proletariat - to act as the proletariat would allegedly act if it had 
already achieved full class consciousness - as long as the same end result of communism is 
eventually achieved (though, of course, it never was). For most anarchists, however, the 
society of the future will inevitably reflect the values, principles, and practices that 
went into making it.

To understand how anarchists have attempted to put this idea into pre- figurative 
practice, it's important to distinguish between what David Graeber (2002) and others have 
come to refer to as "capital-A" and "small-a" anarchism. Although the gap that separates 
the two tendencies is often vastly overstated, the distinction can help us identify the 
connection between consensus and majority decision making and the areas of overlap that 
exist between anarchism and horizontalism. The anarchists that Graeber referred to as 
"capital-A" anarchists are much more self-consciously influenced by the legacy of 
"classical" anarchism (from roughly the 1860s to 1940). They tend to focus on the 
construction of large federal organizations, such as anarcho-syndicalist unions or 
anarchist communist federations, that operate by majority voting with a strong focus on 
class struggle and mass resistance. Historically such organizations have operated by 
federating local unions or political groups into regional, national, and even 
international bodies that operate by majority voting as carried out by recallable mandated 
delegates. As opposed to parliamentary democracy where elected representatives decide on 
behalf of their constituents, anarchist delegates are only empowered to express the 
perspective of their union or locality. Legislative power remains at the base level while 
allowing collective self-management to scale up. This does not mean that such systems 
become hierarchical, rather they allow locally-grounded decision-making bodies to 
coordinate across large regions. Lately consensus has become so ubiquitous in certain 
horizontalist/anarchist circles that some don't realize that the majority of anarchists 
throughout history have implemented majoritarian voting.

The anarchists that Graeber referred to as "small-a" anarchists are generally those whose 
anarchism has grown out of the anti-authoritarian and countercultural currents of the Cold 
War era rather than "classical" anarchism. They tend to create smaller, less formally 
structured groups and collectives that operate by consensus, associate with more 
countercultural milieux, and focus on non-class politics such as environmentalism or 
feminism. "Small-a" anarchist collectives are essentially examples of small-scale 
horizontalism infused with anarchist politics. This is unsurprising considering the fact 
that horizontalism and "small-a" anarchism grew out of the same post-war constellation of 
non-hierarchical, consensus- oriented groups discussed above, and "small-a" anarchists 
were among the original organizers of many recent manifestations of popular horizontalism. 
This demonstrates that, to some extent, horizontalism grew out of certain strains of 
anarchism. They part ways, however, when horizontal practice is divorced from 
anti-authoritarian politics. Certainly some anarchists eventually disowned the 
horizontalist movements they helped create because they allegedly strayed too far in a 
popular and/or reformist direction away from the more intentional and explicitly radical 
designs some of their early organizers had envisioned. Yet, pro-mass-movement anarchists 
(whether of a "smaller" orientation or not) have continued to play important roles in 
horizontalist movements because they see them as opportunities to promote elements of 
anarchist politics on a large scale.

I was certainly among those who joined Occupy Wall Street in order to advance the 
movement's non-hierarchical agenda and infuse it with more anarchist content while 
maintaining its popular appeal. I made a case for such an approach in my book Translating 
Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street where I documented how 72% of OWS organizers 
in New York City had explicitly anarchist or implicitly anarchistic politics (Bray 2013). 
For these anarchist(ic) organizers, and their counterparts in other movements, the 
horizontalist movement is a broad, dynamic space where popular struggles can interact with 
revolutionary politics, ideally shifting through such comingling. Such struggles are 
opportunities for anarchists to reclaim the mantle of democracy and attack what they 
consider to be the fraud of hierarchical, capitalist, representative government. In the 
United States, for example, anarchists have had some of their greatest successes winning 
liberals and centrists over to their ideas by arguing that non- hierarchical direct 
democracy is the only true democracy. In a country where the ideal, if not the actual 
practice, of democracy is universally revered, such arguments can strike a popular chord.

Yet not all anarchists have been equally enamored with the squares movements. Some 
anarchists rejected Occupy either because their local encampment truly was reformist (the 
politics of the many Occupy encampments ranged widely) or because they were hostile to 
popular politics that was not explicitly anarchist (Bray 2013, 168). In Spain, for 
instance, many anarchists supported and participated in their 15M movement for similar 
reasons as the anarchists of Occupy, but a significant number withheld their full support 
because they considered the movement to be reformist (Taibo 2011; 2014). Even when some of 
the anarchist unions wanted to support a 15M march, for example, they were frustrated by 
the movement's refusal to have unions and parties march with their flags which stemmed 
from the 15M's desire to remain "non-sectarian."

Another interesting element of the relationship between the 15M and Spanish anarchists is 
that they generally don't attempt to reclaim the mantle of "democracy" from the political 
parties and government. For example, a popular 15M chant goes "They call it democracy, and 
it isn't." Once, however, I was marching near a group of anarchists who sarcastically 
chanted "They call it democracy, and it is!" Here, the intent of the chant is to convince 
listeners that the corruption and disregard for the masses that epitomized the government 
is inherent to its very nature. From an anarchist perspective, that is what governmental 
"democracy" is and will always be. In part this stems from the popular association between 
the post-Franco parliamentary regime and the term "democracy." For many Spaniards, the 
government that has been in power since the 1970s is "la democracia," and therefore the 
term has more of a specific meaning than in the United States, where it is understood more 
as an egalitarian decision-making method that the government allegedly happens to embody.

In 2013, the Spanish Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados (Coordinated Anarchist Groups) 
published a little book called Contra la democracia (Against Democracy). This book created 
quite a stir in Spain in December 2014 when it was cited as evidence to support the arrest 
in Catalonia and Madrid of eleven people from Spain, Italy, Uruguay, and Austria accused 
of being members of what the state claimed was "a terrorist organization of an anarchist 
nature" responsible for "several bomb attacks" ("Catalan Police" 2014). In what came to be 
known as Operation Pandora, seven of the original eleven were held on terrorist charges 
because they had "Riseup" e-mail accounts, owned copies of Contra la democracia, and were 
found with a canister of camping gas. Later, the Chilean anarchist Francisco Javier Solar, 
who was ultimately convicted with fellow Chilean Mónica Caballero of bombing the Pilar 
Basilica in Zaragoza in 2013, denied accusations of being one of the text's main authors 
(Pérez 2016).

Given the importance that the authorities placed on this text, one might assume that it's 
a bloodthirsty bomb-making manual, but in fact, it's simply a historical analysis and 
critique of democracy. The book's introduction concludes by arguing that "If we believe 
that democracy is liberty we will never stop being slaves. We will unmask this great lie! 
We will construct anarchy" (Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados 2013, 8). Later, in its only 
reference to the 15M, the text attacks the movement, because it "asks for electoral 
reforms that benefit the small political parties ... it propagates citizenism 
(ciudadanismo) as ideology; a ‘democratization' of the police ...[and]the total 
pacification of conflicts through mediation and delegation by a corps of social services 
professionals" (Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados 2013, 68). Yet, despite these critiques of 
"democracia" and the 15M, the authors of this text are not against all directly democratic 
organizing. They advocate the creation of networks of social centers, free schools, and 
other bodies "to build a new society capable of freely self-managing (the only real sense 
that the term ‘democracy' could have) ..." (Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados 2013, 66). 
That, of course, is exactly what anarchists who call for true direct democracy have in 
mind. Contra la democracia shows us that although many anarchists in Spain and elsewhere 
may have a very similar vision of the future self- management of a post-capitalist 
society, some find it strategically useful to fight to reclaim "democracy" while others 
seek to permanently discard it.

Much of the reluctance that anarchists have had in getting involved in the Spanish 15M and 
other movements has had to do with the prevalent tendency of horizontalist mass movements 
to be siphoned into non-horizontal, electoral politics. The allure of representative 
government is so powerful that although early on movements may proclaim "¡Que se vayan 
todos!" ("Get rid of them all!") in Argentina or "¡Que no nos representan!" ("They don't 
represent us!") in Spain, frequently such cries are transformed into calls for 
horizontalism to be extended into office through the ballot box. Often such arguments are 
couched in terms of the perspective that after the initial wave of protest has raised 
awareness about an issue, what is necessary is to transition into the "serious work of 
making concrete change" through governing. In Spain, the most significant party that grew 
out of the 15M was Podemos (We can) which has formed electoral coalitions with other 
similar parties and platforms like Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) and Ganemos 
Madrid (Let's win Madrid) which calls for the promotion of "democratic municipalism" and 
the creation of political structures that are "democratic, horizontal, inclusive, and 
participatory ..." (Ganemos Madrid 2016). Their rhetoric is rife with horizontalist 
references to "autonomy" and "autogestión" (self-management). They essentially claim to be 
merging the spirit and ideals of horizontalist assembly with the lamentable "necessity" of 
taking office. Moreover, they fully embrace horizontalism's antagonism toward formal 
ideology by rejecting the left/right binary and eschewing the usual trappings of leftism. 
Yet, within a year Podemos had already drastically moderated its platform to cater to the 
electoral center, thereby alienating a number of the party's more leftist leaders who 
later resigned ("Spain's Poll-Topping" 2014; Hedgecoe 2016). After the June 2016 elections 
Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias announced that it was time for his unconventional 
horizontalist party to become "normalized," and enter a phase "of much more conventional 
politics." He even went so far as to argue that "this idiocy that we used to say when we 
were of the extreme left that things change in the street and not in the institutions is a 
lie" (Ríos 2016).

Turkish anarchists also formulated critiques of horizontalism. As the Gezi Park occupation 
movement of 2013 in Istanbul's Taksim Square developed, the Turkish anarchist organization 
Devrimci Anarsist Faaliyet (Revolutionary Anarchist Action, DAF) distributed hundreds of 
copies of a pamphlet it had written called "An anarchist criticism to ‘Occupy' as an 
activity of ‘99%.'" The pamphlet sought to diagnose what the group perceived to be the 
reformism and depoliticization of Occupy. It argued that the tactics of Occupy have "worn 
a libertarian discourse but[are]far far away from practicing it ..." and instead the 
movement tended, in their eyes, "to consume concepts such as occupy, direct democracy, 
freedom, action etc." While the pamphlet contains many insightful critiques of Occupy, 
certain elements of the authors' analysis suffered from the extreme distance separating 
them from events on the ground. At a meeting with several of the pamphlet's authors years 
later at the DAF office in Istanbul, I had the opportunity to answer their questions and 
clarify some misconceptions that they and many others had developed about Occupy Wall 
Street through the press and speak about the centrality of anarchist organizers. 
Nevertheless, the heart of their critique about the misapplication of libertarian 
principles applied to many (if not most) Occupy encampments and horizontalist movements in 
general. Despite the presence of DAF and their pamphlet, the Gezi Park movement also 
experienced electoral spinoffs such as the Gezi Party. Seeking to remain true to the 
movement's horizontalism, the party claimed that its leaders would only act as 
"spokespersons" ("Official Gezi Party" 2013).

Similar developments would have unfolded during the Occupy movement in the United States 
if it weren't for the narrowness of the two party system. Yet, several years later, many 
former Occupiers campaigned for Bernie Sanders in his failed bid for the Democratic 
Party's presidential nomination. Certainly many who participated in Occupy before 
supporting Sanders were simply leftists who travel from one manifestation of left populism 
to the next without any allegiance to (or often direct knowledge of) horizontalism. 
Others, however, attempted to argue that the Sanders campaign was an extension of Occupy. 
This was manifest in an article titled "Occupy the Party" from the Not An Alternative 
collective that appealed to former Occupiers to treat the campaign "like any street or 
park and occupy it" (Not An Alternative 2016). In the name of pragmatic populism, this 
article sought to drain the term "occupy" of its associations with direct action, direct 
democracy, "leaderlessness," and revolutionary politics to convince readers that it can be 
used as a catchy shorthand for buying into the cult of personality developing around a 
moderate social democrat attempting to burrow into a strati- fied, capitalist political 
party. From an anarchist perspective, parks and streets are terrain of struggle that can 
be occupied because non-hierarchical, direct action politics can be transplanted onto 
them. Working within political parties, especially those like the Democratic Party, 
requires jettisoning those practices and incorporating oneself into the party structure. 
As the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement organizer Andrew Flood (2014) argued in his essay 
"An anarchist critique of horizontalism," "horizontalism without a vision and method for 
revolution simply provides protest fodder behind which one government can be replaced with 
another." Indeed, many anti-horizontal organizers, have been perfectly willing to humor 
the directly democratic "quirks" of horizontalist movements while biding their time 
waiting for opportunities to convert popular upheavals into "protest fodder" for reformist 
objectives cloaked in the imagery of rebellion.

Conclusion
Debates over electoral participation within horizontalist movements are merely the latest 
rounds of a conflict that has challenged the broader socialist movement since the 
nineteenth century. Although his position changed several times, ever since Proudhon 
advocated electoral abstention in 1857 in response to the authoritarianism of Napoleon 
III, conflicts over electoralism have raged (Graham 2015, 62). Historically anarchists 
have opposed parliamentary participation for a variety of reasons, including their 
opposition to the hierarchical nature of representation, their rejection of the social 
democratic notion that it is possible to vote away capitalism (a goal that social 
democrats eventually discarded), and their argument that, as Mikhail Bakunin phrased it, 
"worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment ... will in fact cease to be 
workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become ... perhaps even more bourgeois than the 
Bourgeois themselves" (quoted in Graham 2015, 116).

In 1979 a group of German radicals attempted to bypass the dichotomy of socialist workers' 
parties and anarchist abstentionism to create a non-hierarchical "anti-party" that would 
operate based on consensus and rotate their representatives to preserve their commitment 
to direct democracy. This attempt to stuff horizontalism into the ballot box was called 
the Green Party. Despite the best of intentions, internal conflicts and "realist" calls 
for "pragmatism" doomed the party once it entered parliament. Within less than a decade it 
had become simply another left party (Katsiaficas 1997, 205-208).

In the wake of the sectarian strife of the twentieth century, many radicals have found 
refuge in the anti-ideological ideology of horizontalism. Yet, as we can see, it is often 
insufficient to guarantee truly horizontal and non-hierarchical outcomes. Even apart from 
electoralism, horizontalist movements have at times struggled to counteract the 
encroachment of patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, white supremacist, and ableist 
tendencies that inevitably come when broad swaths of society are suddenly brought 
together. I can still hear the common refrain of many white men in Occupy Wall Street that 
we had "lost sight of Wall Street" as our main focus when we addressed race or gender. 
Horizontalist movements spread notions of direct democracy, direct action, mutual aid, and 
autonomy far and wide. This is incredibly important insofar as they influence broader 
cultures of resistance and extend beyond the standard reach of most radicalism. Since 
political ideologies are digested whole only by their most committed militants, shifting 
political sentiments and practices in mass contexts is essential. Yet, the horizontalist 
reliance on form over content runs the risk of producing a muddled populism that is easily 
redirected away from its non-hierarchical origins. As the work of Michael Freeden (1996) 
suggests, the meaning of horizontalism shifts depending on its political content. From an 
anarchist perspective, this illustrates the value of anarchism's holistic analysis of the 
interrelatedness of all forms of domination and the interconnectedness of forms of 
self-management and their political outcomes. While they differed on the details, 
anarchists from Mikhail Bakunin to Errico Malatesta, from Nestor Makhno to the creators of 
the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) in Spain have agreed on the need for anarchists to 
collectively engage with mass movements to disseminate their truly horizontal political 
visions.

Notes
I would like to thank Stephen Roblin, Deric Shannon, Miguel Pérez, Özgür Oktay, and 
Yesenia Barragan for their insightful feedback and helpful information.
By "leaderless," Occupy and others really referred to the absence of institutional 
leadership, not the absence of those who lead. Hence the shift some made toward the term 
"leaderful" which implied that in a horizontalist movement anyone could become a leader by 
getting involved.
I use the terms "federal" and "federalism" to refer to broadly decentralized forms of 
organization. Certainly the anarchist use of the terms "federation" or "confederation" to 
describe their organizations, such as the Fédération Anarchiste in France and Belgium or 
the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in Spain, entails a greater level of 
decentralization than the federal state advocated by federalist republicans. Nevertheless, 
there is a shared tendency
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For more content by Mark Bray we recommend his interview with WNYC  "Antifa Means No Free 
Speech for Fascism." For more on anarchism generally we recommend listening to Mark Bray's 
interview on Revolutionary Left Radio.

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