Introduction: Red on Black Marxist Encounters with Anarchism

Abstract

Science & Society is an interdisciplinary journal of and for Marxist scholars. In this special issue, we have assembled some studies of anarchist movements, theorists, and practices, primarily in contemporary or late–20th-century struggles. The articles are mostly exploratory rather than polemical, but there is a tonal continuum stretching from the firmly conclusive arms folded to the open, outstretched hand. A number of our contributors were active in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and related movements that crested in the year before our call for papers was released, in October 2012. This introductory essay will offer, in brief, an attempt to show some of the theoretical concerns interweaving through these pieces. It is a “conversation,” and not merely a confrontation, in the pages of this issue, at least: most of our writers do not simply reject anarchism but challenge and probe with some degree of sympathy. Indeed, one of our contributors claims allegiance to both Marxism and anarchism. Robert Paul Wolff argues in his brief communication that his commitment to a Marxist program of collective action does not in the least require him to affirm the de jure legitimacy of any state, even a socialist one — and it is this he rejects. Wolff’s philosophical anarchism starts in an insistence on the moral autonomy of the human individual, and entails, he thinks, the denial of the legitimacy of any political authority. Here, in its pure, abstract form, is theoretical anarchism’s anti-statism, its preoccupation with autonomy (and, one might add, that preoccupation’s abstract — not to say bourgeois — individualism). That preoccupation leaves the lecture hall for the streets in autonomism, the subject of Linda and Jose Alcoff’s critical conspectus included here. Identified as anarchist by Marxists and as Marxist by anarchists, autonomism, in the Alcoffs’ presentation, grew out of an early 20th-century “anti-authoritarian