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Anarchist geographies and revolutionary strategies
journal contribution
posted on 2014-09-24, 11:12 authored by Uri GordonThese are certainly fruitful times for anarchist intellectual publishing. Reading
through the articles in this special issue of Antipode, I was impressed by the
diversity and creativity of efforts to apply anti-authoritarian perspectives to the
geographical discipline, whose notorious breadth of application (“everything is
spatial”) seems to offer unlimited possibilities for new avenues of research. I also
began thinking about two related issues that seem to run across much of what
appears in the preceding pages. The first concerns the anarchademic enterprise
itself, and its possible contribution to the development of anarchist politics. The
second concerns a more specific problematic, which accompanies the integration of
poststructuralist insights into our understanding of anarchism, and the concomitant
celebration of prefigurative politics in the present tense. What connects the two is
the question of revolutionary strategies. Does the postanarchist shift of perspective
require us to abandon strategy as a valid category for our struggles? If not, how
are strategies supposed to emerge as a conscious artefact of such a decentralized
and swarming movement? What is the role of anarchist intellectual labour in such
an emergence? Finally, what considerations—however preliminary and open to
debate—can be presented as its starting point, and what might a geographical
perspective contribute to their elaboration?
In what follows, I begin with some thoughts on the pitfalls of anarchist intellectual
labour becoming institutionalized in the academy. I then turn to look at the
question of revolutionary strategies, a concept that I fear may have fallen victim
to a careless misunderstanding of postanarchist insights. Finally, I reiterate a few
basic coordinates, which I believe should at least be considered when projecting
ourselves into the future of social struggles.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
ANTIPODEVolume
44Issue
5Pages
1742 - 1751 (10)Citation
GORDON, U., 2012. Anarchist geographies and revolutionary strategies. Antipode, 44 (5), pp. 1742 - 1751.Publisher
Wiley © The Author. Antipode © Antipode Foundation Ltd.Version
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2012Notes
This is the accepted version of the following article: GORDON, U., 2012. Anarchist geographies and revolutionary strategies. Antipode, 44 (5), pp. 1742 - 1751, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01036.xISSN
0066-4812Publisher version
Language
- en