Do you see any parallel motives in postanarchism and post-Seattle anti-globalization movements?
Yes, certainly. Postanarchism is a political logic that seeks to combine the egalitarian and emancipative aspects of classical anarchism, with an acknowledgement that radical political struggles today are contingent, pluralistic, open to different identities and perspectives, and are over different issues - not just economic ones. The broadly termed ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, despite its uncertain future, is one of the most important developments in radical politics in recent years. It transcends the logic of new social movements - it is not simply another identity demanding recognition and autonomy. Rather it re-invents a universal politics in the way that it challenges capitalism as the general background to domination and exploitation. But the same time, it is not like the old Marxist working class struggles over economic issues. There’s no vanguard party leading the way. It doesn’t privilege any class or identity over another; nor does it see any particular issue as being central and overriding the others. Rather it combines a multiplicity of different issues and concerns - environmental concerns, labour rights, the rights of refugees, consumers, indigenous people, etc. Here I think it may be seen as an example of Laclau’s logic of hegemonic politics: it takes place against the universal background of global capitalism and state domination, but rather than this struggle being incarnated in a central identity - as in the proletariat, for Marx - it incorporates plural identities which mutate and form unexpected alliances with others during the course of the struggle. So it involves what might be seen as a contamination of the universal and the particular: there is a universal ‘enemy’ - global capitalism - but this is a kind of ‘empty universality’ that has different implications for different groups. The difference between this movement and Marxism is that, while Marxism created an imaginary universality on the basis of one particularity - the anti-globalisation movement creates a real universality on the basis of multiple particularities, particularities whose identities are themselves contingently constructed through the struggle itself, rather than being pre-determined.
