Radical isomorphism and the anti-authoritarian diffusion of leaderless organizations

Social movements are interested in the creation of alternative social practices, but must rely upon previous ideas and actions for a starting place. Ideally, anarchists seek to borrow good ideas and avoid bad ideas. This is challenging given anarchist movements’ horizontalist structures—tactics and organizational forms must be transmitted non-hierarchically in order to remain legitimate, as there is not central organization managing, authorizing, and dictating to new anarchist organizations. They key means for institutional isomorphism—how organizations tend to have comparable characteristics—with anarchist movements, is mimicry. This chapter analyses the creation and founding iterations of four “anarchistic franchise organizations”: Anti-Racist Action, Critical Mass, Earth First!, and Food Not Bombs. These tactics and organizational forms have spread through networks of activists and organizers (mainly via word-of-mouth and first-hand experience) and media (especially the Internet, as well as activist press and sometimes mainstream media).

Social capital in anarchist movements

Implicit in the study of social movements is the fact that movements require many people collectively participating together in some fashion to succeed. Social capital—the valuable social connections individuals have with others—is one way of approximating people's relationships to each other. Movements both require social capital in order to form and succeed, but movements also create social capital while organizing. This chapter explores the ideas from major social capital theorists, including James Coleman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Robert Putnam, and considers the value of social capital (which is infrequently utilized in movement analysis) for anarchist movements. Important attributes of social capital, such as trust, information channels, norms, and others receive particular focus. A closer inspection suggests that the dense networks of anarchist association serve as a bulwark against state repression, but also alienates the movement from wider audiences, unless efforts are not made to popularize discursive frames and organizing methods. The World Values Survey is used to explore the extent to which anarchist-inclined people—who trust in others, but lack confidence in government—throughout the world are more apt to protest and advocate revolution.

Anarchism as a “new social movement”?

Anarchism is a commonly misunderstood social and political ideology, yet it has remarkable affinities and commonalities with many contemporary global social movements. While most current social movement theories either poorly or inadequately explain the anarchist movement, the new social movement (NSM) theories describe many characteristics closely synonymous with anarchism. Due to the historically confused and contradictory discourse around NSMs and NSM theories, I adopt two distinct approaches here, by (1) considering what conditions or factors lead to the current movement moment and (2) evaluating the “objective” analysis of certain movement qualities. This chapter analyzes anarchism and anarchist movements via six primary characteristics of NSM theories, and finds a great deal of compatibility. Specifically, anarchism has grown beyond—but not completely—industrial conflict and politics, broadened to include new social constituencies such as middle class participants, used anti-hierarchical organizations and networks, engaged in symbolic direct actions, used a strategic and self-limiting radicalism, and has created new anarchist identities. However, modern anarchism may be differentiated from other NSMs (like ecological and LGBT-rights movements) by certain unique characteristics, including revolutionary anti-statism, radical practicality, anti-capitalism, and a degree of core compatibility with classical anarchism. The strategic and tactical benefits of these characteristics are discussed.

Anti-state political opportunities

The anarchist movement utilizes non-statist and anti-statist strategies for radical social transformation, thus indicating the limits of political opportunity theory and its emphasis upon the state. Using historical narratives from present-day anarchist movement literature, I note various events and phenomena in the last two centuries and their relevance to the mobilization and demobilization of anarchist movements throughout the world (Bolivia, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Greece, Japan, and Venezuela). Labor movement allies, failing state socialism, and punk subculture have provided conditions conducive to anarchism, while state repression and Bolshevik triumph in the Soviet Union constrained success. This variation suggests that future work should attend more closely to the role of national context, and the interrelationship of political and non-political factors. Additionally, the key question of what constitutes movement “success” for revolutionary movements that “move forward”, yet do not achieve revolutionary transformation (indeed, who conceive of a final, complete transformation to be theoretically impossible), seems to be a problem faced uniquely by anarchist movements. Instead, thinking of opportunity as being global, non-politically-based, and unattached to “ultimate objectives” like revolution, help to make these ideas more useful for understanding anarchist mobilization.

Anarchists as individuals: a micro-structural analysis

The goal of this chapter is to explore the micro-level characteristics of anarchists. How do anarchists today identify socially and politically? What is the class composition of anarchist movements? In recent decades, some observers have claimed that anarchist movements have changed to focus less on economic issues and are more divorced from the working class. Through the analysis of survey responses, this chapter demonstrates that the union membership of anarchists is related to subjective working-class status, age, residence, economic anarchist ideology, anarchist movement participation, and activist identity. While not conclusive or uncomplicated, these findings call into question the claims that all modern movements (including anarchism) are postmaterialist, and emphasize collective cultural identity to the neglect of economic identity and class.

Anarchists of the world, unite! A meso-structural analysis

The global anarchist movement, while an international phenomenon, is not even distributed through the world. This chapter adopts a meso-structural approach to analyze the variety and distribution of anarchist organizational forms throughout the world. I utilize the Anarchist Yellow Pages (AYP), an international directory of anarchist groupings, which listed over two thousand organizations in 2005. This chapter explores the types of these anarchist organizations and their geographic clustering throughout the world, with special emphasis on 21 countries that had at least 20 such organizations. The concentrations of anarchist organizations found in the AYP suggest that the movement tends to be strongly European-centered. North Americans are disproportionately involved in various media organizations; Spain, France, and Sweden have strong syndicalist tendencies; Italy and Germany tend to have a high percentage of physical spaces like social centers and info shops. Finally, the presence of rights and “democracy” in different countries may, in part, explain where the global anarchist movement is concentrated.

Conclusion: Revisiting the epistemology of anarchist movements

Numerous conclusions can be drawn from preceding chapters. These conclusions include: anarchist movements are legitimately and empirically social movements; anarchists and their organizations are diverse, geographically dispersed, and have pronounced connections to past anarchists and their organizations; theories like political opportunity, new social movements, and social capital help to illuminate the variation and functioning of anarchist movements; and anarchists use a variety of techniques to successfully operate with non-anarchists, without compromising their ideological integrity. Then, a larger and more serious question needs to be asked by researchers who are sympathetic to their research subjects: can having an intimate, empirical understanding of a movement be bad for the movement and good for governments (and other agents of social control)? Or, hopefully, will the benefits of greater knowledge outweigh any negative outcomes? Finally, although research is never perfect or universally-generalizable, it may sometimes (and its best instances) be practical and useful to activists.

The significance of social movement theory to anarchism

While academics are apt to seek the development of theoretical explanations for social movements, activists are more concerned with learning practical lessons about their movements in order to further their goals. Activist theorizing happens within all social movements, but academics have tended to focus exclusively on reformist, mainstream movements. There have been impressive contributions by sociological theorists of movements, but activists remain frustrated and indifferent to the poor attempts to theorize about revolutionary or anti-authoritarian movements, such as anarchism. Consequently, the established theoretical explanations for movements—including relative deprivation, resource mobilization, frame alignment, and dynamics of contention—are of mixed relevance to anarchist movements. This chapter briefly introduces these assorted theories and applies to anarchist movements. Some of these theories address crucial concerns, like strategy, timing, scale, and risks of movements. More importance will be placed upon other key interpretations to be introduced later in the text (i.e., political opportunity, new social movements, and social capital theories). An appropriate orientation is taken toward developing “better theories”: conserving and improving what exists (of both American and European scholarly origin) that is good, and building better theories from currently un-addressed concerns. This chapter also explores what is the utility of social movement theory for anarchist movements themselves.

Introduction to social movements: anarchism as a unique example

Modern societies generally contain multiple, varied social movements that contend for influence or power. Anarchist movements share many similar features as mainstream movements, but also have numerous unique characteristics that require additional attention and qualification. It is crucial to transcend the common perceptions of anarchism (typically associated with chaos, violence, and fantasy) and treat it as a movement. This chapter introduces the central issues relevant to the sociological study of anarchist movements. Mario Diani's (1992) well-known definition of a social movement is employed to understand anarchist movements: networks of individuals and organizations, united by some shared identity, that engage in extra-institutional action with the interest of changing society. This definition is used as the starting place for understanding how anarchist movements are similar and different from other movements (in terms of leadership, representation, and autonomy), and the chapter presents an overview of certain attributes of anarchism that will continue for the next two chapters. Anarchism does satisfy all the requisite criteria for being a social movement. Thus, the chapter models the anti-anarchist counter-network (corporations, governments, and media), considers the various levels of analysis that anarchism could be investigated at, and describes the helpful comparisons worth making to better understand anarchist movements.