A-Infos (en) Australia, "Rebel Worker" Vol.27 2-4 Review of Benjamin Franks "Rebel Alliances: The Means and ends of contemporary British anarchisms"* by Graham Purchase

Introduction: Post Anarchism and Carnivalism ---- Franks now believes the 
anti-globalization movement has been a fizzler. He admits in his Introduction 
that the initial inspiration and long since discarded first draft of his book 
focused upon the forgotten events surrounding the Carnival Against Capitalism 
protests of June 1999. (p.11) Like other recently published British academic 
books inspired by these protests (Kina’s and Sheehan’s recent work are 
considered in Anarchy in the UK # 1) Franks regards his analysis of British 
anarchism as compatible and influenced by postism. (p.17) ---- I personally 
found a refuge from postism within anarchism and fervently prayed that some 
academic bright-spark wouldn’t start promoting a silly and bewildering term like 
post-structuralist-anarchism or post-anarchism. But alas, we now have a small 
number of UK theorists whom in some sense identify themselves with such 
unnecessary and intimidating proliferisms.

Postism describes a generalized apostasy; the embracement of no-sign-postism 
with the corresponding rejection of any notion of essential truth. But a 
quintessential qualification of a post-whatever-ist is a university post or 
aspirations to secure one. Postist’s conclude that we are now post-everything 
but can never hope to have any sign-post to anything. According to Postism all 
goal posts are meaningless because we are in a post-game philosophical situation 
where no viewpoint won and can never can win because, the ball of knowledge has 
been irretrievably kicked out of the stadium of ideas by a handful of French 
academics whose philosophical opponents ridicule and dismiss them on account of 
foggy thinking and stylistic flatulence.

The answer as to why the anarchist movement concerns itself with trendy French 
intellectual sophistry must be sought in an examination of the deep malaise of 
anarchist thinking in particular and contemporary philosophical enquiry in 
general. I don’t believe we exist in either a post-capitalist or post-anarchist 
environment and the concept of a post-modern society is a purposelessly 
meaningless phraseology. I’m not too dumb or unfashionable to understand or 
embrace postism. I simply reject it as a conceptual vacuum; a philosophically 
and politically empty post-box. The assertion that there is no truth is a 
paradox explored by Plato who understood that the holder of this belief must 
assert the truth of their belief in there being no truth. Extreme relativism of 
this sort is a contradiction and doesn’t lead anywhere. Postism is a postlude or 
last-post intellectual position from which nothing of philosophical value can be 
extracted or expected. In practice postism rests not upon relativist sophistry 
but upon academic vulturism. This involves the post-graduate, post-doctoral and 
post-mortem dissection and separation of the leading insights of anarchist 
thinking from the corpse of the workers movement during an era when the worker 
has been shackled to the Thatcher-Regan whipping-post and endured a 30 year 
lashing by Anglo-American style state-capitalist madness. The result is oil and 
water wars, depressed wages, rising food prices and a global environmental 
backlash that threatens the very basis of civilization. Meanwhile Franks 
earnestly tells us that: “class struggle anarchism is consistent with 
contemporary poststructuralist anarchism, sometimes referred to as 
‘post-anarchism’, ‘postanarchim’ or postanarchisms that, reject a universal 
vanguard and assert a prefigurative ethic in agreement with the non-essentialist 
theories of Foucault.” (p. 17)

Chapter 1 British Anarchist History

Chapter 1of Franks’ book provides a brief historical overview of anarchy in the 
UK. The inordinately dull history of British anarchism is little more than a 
photocopy of the European movement. The British may be great for many reasons 
but anarchism hasn’t been one of them. British anarchism has been assured a 
footnote in the history of the movement only because a number of prominent 
European anarchist personalities reluctantly resigned themselves to exile in the 
UK “beginning in the 1880s” (p.31). Kropotkin, Malatesta and Rocker are the most 
famous members of these immigrant groups of continental anarchists that founded 
revolutionary organizations whilst settled in the UK and introduced their ideas 
and tactics to the British people in the late Victorian and early Edwardian 
periods. By the end of World War I (1914-18) these Russian and Jewish émigré 
communities had largely evacuated. Anarchy in the UK would undoubtedly have gone 
extinct, or never have taken root at all, were it not for the arrival of fresh 
influxes of continental anarchist refugees fleeing from the Fascist victory in 
the Spanish Civil War (1936-9): “providing a core of activists to revitalize 
what seemed to be more of a monument than a movement”. (p.49-50)

By 1944 Franks suggests the “character of British Anarchism” had, “changed from 
a working class based revolutionary movement to a more liberal-pacifist, 
intellectual and artistic centered avant-garde.” (p.53) This is far too rosy an 
assessment. Kropotkin in 1904 grumbled that British anarchism was “Anarchie de 
salon—epicurean, a little Nietschean, very snobbish, very proper, a little too 
Christian”. The decline of autonomously organized mass British working class 
activity in my opinion began with the end of the Great Dock Strike of 1899. The 
Parliamentary Labour Party established in 1893 drew the mass of British workers 
down a social-democratic path the utter bankruptcy of which was not fully 
revealed or contested until the arrival of Thatcherism followed by the torpor 
and phonyism of the New Labour sell-out. Contrary to Franks optimistic account 
the Bertrand Russel school of British anarchism was fully entrenched by 1920 and 
its dominance was carefully and expertly nurtured during the 1960’s by Ward’s 
Anarchy magazine catering to liberal academic and student audiences.

British liberal-academic-anarchism was involuntarily jolted into a copycat 
repetition of ideas and approaches emerging from the unanticipated 
student-worker uprisings of Paris 1968. British academic anarchist’s fawning 
obsession for contemporary French postism is a continuation of the post 1968 
copycatism of fashionable continental writers. French postism has nothing to do 
with Britain or with worker’s struggles and I personally struggle to see that it 
has any original contribution or insight that might improve or supplement 
traditional anarchist critiques and their vision of a free society.

Miniscule groups of revolutionary syndicalists or ‘class struggle’ anarchists 
continued to exist and function in the UK from the 1940’s up until the present 
day. These groups rather than finding inspiration in fluffy French philosophie 
focused their attention upon the Spanish Civil War experience. Because Franco’s 
dictatorship survived well into the 1970’s British activists could usefully busy 
themselves supporting the numerous imprisoned and impoverished Spanish comrades. 
Black Flag, the most consistently read anarcho-syndicalist orientated paper of 
the 1980’s originally grew out of a Spanish prisoner support group founded by 
“Meltzer and Christie” (p.65).

In the late 1970s British youth achieved what the French are famed for doing 
best. Brand UK swept the globe with the novel and imaginative Punk fashion 
statement. Though only an artful anti-statement it was arguably the first 
indigenously brewed and original expression of the spirit of Anarchy in the UK. 
After a century of foreign colonization Punk was a welcome and uniquely British 
youth movement unrelated to competing groups of émigré origin or focus and the 
bleating of liberal academia. Though punk rapidly and predictably became chic it 
clearly hadn’t originated in middle class fashion institutes, modeling schools 
and coffee table literature. It emanated from working class music subculture 
that sought to find self-expression and DIY fun without reliance upon an 
entertainment industry dominated by the inane or pallid offerings of commercial 
disco-pop and aging middle class hippies. Though ostensibly a cultural or 
pop-art phenomena its sources were detached from the clutches of immigrant 
ideologies, bearded professors and middle class university drop outs sporting 
long-hair and sandals.

Punk was purely a teenybopper movement absolutely detached from the traditions 
of the organized working classes that by this time was a graveyard of timid or 
complacent Laborites and mad supporters of dead Russian dictators (Trots, 
Leninists and Stalinists). The syndicalists or class struggle anarchists were 
hardly more attractive or influential. The remnant UK worker orientated cells 
exhibit sectarian division to this very day on account of individual adherence 
or rejection of The Platform—a document on anarchist revolutionary organization 
composed by Russian exiles fleeing the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1922. (p.19, 
83, 219-24)

There is no basis to Franks’ implicit thesis that, UK punk anymore than blues, 
reggae, jazz, world music, mods, rockers or hippies have had any real political 
significance or anchorage. Popular music-fashion maybe fascinating, but it is 
usually youth led and orientated with a generationally unique, unrepeatable and 
very limited expiry date. Fashion is transient, historically ephemeral and also, 
often an ethnocentric and geographically defined aspect of cultural change and 
evolution. There may well be Chinese, Senegalese, Turkish or Indian Punks but 
Punk certainly didn’t originate or influence anything in these places. 
American’s generally have no experience of UK punk beyond costume caricatures in 
goofy US college movies.

Franks plausibly suggests the most significant political or literary product of 
punk was the satirical news-rag Class War, founded in 1983. Class War 
brilliantly exploited the bloodthirsty luridness of native British working-class 
comic staples like The Beano and The Sun in a then fashionable punk-zine style & 
format conveying aggressive class confrontation and worker’s revolution.

Class War was overridingly just a bunch of bored and angry people having some 
fun. Their paper may not have achieved much circulation, readership or influence 
had its launch not coincided with major historic struggles involving mass 
self-organized working class opposition to Thatcher’s state-capitalist agenda as 
recorded by Inner City Riots, The Miners Strike and Poll Tax Rebellion.

The Miners Strike is perhaps the most significant and best-known struggle of 
this period. At the local village and regional level the Miners were supported 
by a plenitude of truly inspiring community based and international autonomous 
initiatives. (I with other anarchists at this time fundraised for the Dover and 
UKC miners support groups). But the National Union of Mineworker’s Leaders were 
acolytes of the soviet empire and their stunted political vision could only have 
taken Britain down an unattractive economic and social road mirroring the dull, 
discredited and doomed former East European Soviet-Communist States. These 
dictatorships were overthrown during the popular destruction of the Berlin wall 
only a few years after the Strike’s failure.

The destruction of the Typesetters, Miners and Seaman’s Unions by Thatcher’s 
paramilitary forces and the successful resistance to the imposition of a 
nationwide Poll-Tax heralded “the decline of the Class War Federation that had 
thrived during the build up of opposition to the Poll Tax”. (p.80)

I personally thought Class War antics and literature hysterically funny at the 
time and gleefully sold copies of their rags to 14 year old boys who’d cadge the 
20 pence cover price from their harassed and bewildered mothers accompanying 
them at bookstalls held at colleges, local events or demos. But Class War’s 
founder Tim Bone’s self-indulgent autobiography is in my opinion informative and 
useful only to the extent that it gives some insight into the silliness and 
organizational hopelessness of Class War’s imaginative self-promoting stunts and 
timely comic news-sheet. This is not a criticism so much as a statement about a 
group of people who had a lot of fun spreading the word of anarchy in a humorous 
way.

Franks post doctoral-level study with 100 pages of footnotes is designed to help 
politics students better understand the subtle nuances and critical discourses 
contained within Class War’s intellectually undemanding ideology for their 
social philosophy assignments upon post-whatever-ism. Frankly Class War poster 
politics and format doesn’t require a post-obit and post-paint gloss of 
Francophile post-fartism (or any knowledge of political theory at all).

Franks history of British anarchism more or less ends with Class War’s demise. 
He correctly regards Class war as having been generally focused upon community 
at the expense of industrial perspectives and actions. We are then told that 
SolFed the longest surviving syndicalist cell in the UK: “no longer attempts to 
create separate anarcho-syndicalist unions but create instead networks of 
militants within sectors of industry” (p.82). Franks also makes note of the fact 
that: “class struggle groupings have increasingly involved themselves in 
environmental actions.” (p.87)

Franks historical chapter fizzles out by feebly observing that, the “continual 
flux of groups appearing and dissolving” in response to local and global issues 
are finding “new internet forums for sharing information and planning mutually 
supportive actions”. (p.91) Despite the potential of the net many contemporary 
cyber-ghetto discussion groups obtain no larger contribution, involvement or 
audience than if they’d conducted their discourse in the real-life ghetto by 
means of yellow sticky paper Post-it notes on the door of a communal 
refrigerator. Indignantly blowing off about the virtues, stupidity or elitism of 
post-fartism within Internet postings to anonymous cyber-post-anarchists is 
surely merely a postponement of the Day of Reckoning with Capitalism. Franks 
book is arguably the best of a large but conceptually Pretty Vacant crop of post 
2000 post-fartistes on a University Bus to Nowhere with No Future.

Chapter 2 Ethical Anarchism and “Non-Essentialist Prefigurism”

Essentialism:

In the first half of chapter 2 Franks presents a passable and pretty much 
standard undergraduate introduction to moral theory by considering the ideas of 
Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Hegel. Then with the usual post modernist arrogance 
Franks concludes: “classical anarchism” as with all past philosophers was, 
hopelessly “essentialist” with its “fixed, benign, humanist” ideal of “human 
nature” (p. 112).

Kropotkin entirely contrary to Franks conclusion believed that, the essential 
lesson of systems science is that nature has never been constant, fixed or 
predictable. Kropotkin’s scientific investigation of ice ages and recent climate 
changes led him before becoming a revolutionary to conclude that, there is 
“nothing permanent in nature” it has “no fixed laws” and our “perception of 
stability” in nature is but a “provisory” and ever-changing “equilibrium” out of 
which new orders emerge continually from “everywhere and nowhere” (Anarchism: 
Its Philosophy & Ideal).

Kropotkin’s ‘classical anarchism’ clearly states that human nature isn’t fixed 
and capable and susceptible to change and evolution like everything else in 
nature. Kropotkin believed humans are a “result of the environment” in which 
they “grow up”. Kropotkin wrote several pioneering books and some brilliant 
pamphlets upon Prison issues. He anticipated the superficially original insights 
of Foucault who first acquired notoriety for his work on prisons. Kropotkin 
believed that the “artificial environment” of the prison led to a perverse 
situation where it became difficult to discern whom the real criminals are: The 
inmates or the keepers? This is the fundamental point that Foucault’s prison 
musings continually seek to underscore and Kropotkin illustrates this idea with 
his observation of an inmate who “shows disgust in the keeper’s trafficking in 
tobacco as he divides his bread with his neighbor”. Appoint saints in a prison 
officer’s uniforms, suggests Kropotkin and, the “institution” will soon make 
them “petty, mean persecutors” (Prisons and Influence on Prisoners). Kropotkin 
is arguing that there is no fixed or essential human nature and that it is the 
constantly changing, infinitely and locally variant natural or artificial 
environments or contexts where, people are born, raised, live or work that, 
shapes their ethical outlooks and moral behavior.

I’m unconvinced that this sort moral relativism helps in our search for 
collective moral guidelines and practices that might improve society and better 
inform our actions, but its certainly at the heart of Kropotkin’s classical 
anarchist thinking and not something that postism uncovered a century or so later.

Prefigurism:

Prefigurism is Franks’ very intimidating word for the simple idea that: Our 
actions should be consistent with or reflect our ideals in terms of 
organizational methods or lifestyle choices. A vegetarian interest group could 
not consistently serve meatballs at a fundraiser and, would automatically 
prefigure and promote their collective dream of a vegetarian society with 
sumptuous culinary offerings of fruit, nuts and vegetables.

Both Franks and anarchists generally are right to focus upon the questions of 
means and ends in response to the ghastliness of Stalinism or Pol-Pot’s 
Cambodia. In the light of these monstrosities committed in the name of socialism 
and collectivism it has been vitally necessary to carefully examine the tactical 
failures and human misery that authoritarian utopian experimentalism has caused 
in overriding ethical values and considerations in the name of a grand 
revolutionary Project imposed by intellectuals from above through the agencies 
of a police state.

In my view there is a certain amount of methodological validity and desirable 
intellectual objectives in Frank’s “prefigurative” 
analysis/approach/perspective/method of understanding, reconciling or making 
practical political activity and propaganda consistent with the broad 
theoretical ideals of the activists and with the goals of their actions. 
Politicians continually and blatantly act in ways that are in principle contrary 
to their stated ideals and the desire to better or more consistently conduct the 
affairs of anarchist propaganda and direct action groups is admirable.

But the misdirected and obsessive application of prefigurative thinking within 
and between propaganda cells in the anarchist movement over the last 40 years 
has yielded small, isolated, unhealthy, ineffective, self-centered, insular, 
cultish cliques connected with particular micro-ideologies, subcultures and 
lifestyles whose energy is expended by inwardly focused critical (Maoist-like) 
self-examination of the group’s internal processes, members and relationships 
and, correspondingly exhibiting unrelenting acrimony or intolerance towards 
different lifestyle groups; all of which shun or fail to engage with the broader 
society they say they want to change. Their activity is focused upon themselves 
and their propaganda group to the exclusion of anything much else.

Anarchist propaganda groups try to encourage and educate poor people to 
autonomously self-organize work without and in resistance to capital and state. 
Clearly propaganda groups should (but often don’t) act in a comradely and 
co-operative ways. But they can’t prefigure or create detailed model examples of 
their member’s social daydreams. Because they are just the dreams of a handful 
of likeminded people who have yet to convince the rest of the world that their 
dream is worthy of consideration (let alone possible). The effort to spread our 
dream has been hindered by inwardly misdirected and self-destructive attempts by 
small groups of dreamers to prefigure their dreams within their own dream 
factory. The attempt to prefigure anarchism within the processes and identity of 
the propaganda organization or group is relatively new. Kropotkin was the editor 
of Freedom because it was his newspaper not that he wasn’t perfectly able to 
secure the cooperation of numerous other likeminded people over several decades. 
Le Revolte was the French equivalent to Freedom for which Kropotkin contributed 
articles continuously for 30 years. Le Revolte was a product of Kropotkin’s 
greatest disciple, Jean Grave, the paper’s individual founder, owner, editor, 
publisher and printer. The fact that these historic propaganda outfits were not 
collectives and didn’t aspire to become collectives is because their purpose is 
to convince people to create collective approaches in their everyday working 
lives in opposition to state-capitalism and, not a daft attempt at figuring out 
some utopian configuration of collectivized organization out of the propaganda 
effort. The widespread practice of prefigurism since the 1970’s has failed 
because it puts the cart before the horse. A serious lapse in temporal logic has 
resulted in ineffective weak anarchist organization and individual 
demoralization of comrades when their propaganda group hasn’t transfigured into 
the utopian model prefigured or all-figured-out in their anarchist dreams. These 
preoccupations have predominated because anarchist ranks over this period have 
been weakened by a very large percentage of disillusioned and psychologically 
damaged refugees from Leninist party cults.

Despite the centrality of the anarchist bookshop in recent anarchist 
organizational history in the UK (and Australia) Franks makes no mention of 
these institutions in his long book. This is a serious omission because 
prefigurist navel-gazing and ensuing acrimony has led to the downfall or 
stagnation (relegated to small museum and hobby or pastime affairs) of all 
anarchist literary sales establishments. These still often serve as the 
base-support apparatus for the conception and production for some of the 
journals upon which Franks bases his study.

I will never forget how a German comrade once bitterly complained how their shop 
front was destroyed by incoming members whom vehemently objected to the sale of 
honey on account of exploiting Bees. This is far from an isolated example and 
perfectly illustrates the self-destructive stupidity of fanatical prefigurist 
holier than thou approaches to anarchist propaganda ventures conceived as 
operating according to perfectly figured out utopian collective principles and 
processes that even include concern and provision for the psychological welfare 
of insects.

It is also no wonder that people aren’t attracted to groups with boy-scout 
constitutions and impressively pompous but hardly credible claims to be a 
functioning example of an anarchist ‘collective’. In the real world everybody 
disregards the company’s statement of ethical and corporate principles. People 
want to collectivize something in the real world of work and are put-off by the 
imaginary Hokum conjured up by a handful of argumentative dreamers with their 
boy-scout promise to prefigure the best collective business practice in the 
production and distribution of anarchist propaganda.

Franks usefully explores the idea that anarchist social goals are prefigured by 
Direct Action. The non-hierarchical and egalitarian principles of anarchism are 
prefigured in virtuous or courageous “direct actions” of the “oppressed”, 
“subject” or “effected” groups and classes (whether consciously anarchist or 
not) autonomously self-organizing to resist state-capitalism. There is an 
obvious chasm between political and ethical theory or ideals and the actual 
practice of politics in general. All politicians have filthy hands because they 
specialize in making unethical compromises with some awful consequences in 
pursuit of glorious and greater ends. The Direct and unmediated Actions of 
workers and other oppressed groups in their collective struggle against 
injustice, Franks argues, unlike the secret police forces and representative 
hierarchies of the state, employ means that are compatible and prefigure their 
vision of a free and equal society.

Franks is correct in recognizing that, his “book analyses anarchist tactics 
through moral categories developed in Aristotle’s Ethics” (p. 101). The 
viewpoint that virtue is learnt and expressed by individuals through their own 
concrete moral practice and activity is a currently fashionable modern 
Aristotelian approach to reconciling abstract theoretical principles and actual 
political practice in the attainment of social happiness. An Aristotelian 
approach is consistently applied by Franks’ in his lengthy consideration of 
anarchist prefigurative ethics and the use of violent or non-pacifist tactics by 
anarchist or oppressed groups in pursuit of social justice or ultimately 
peaceful ends and goals. In opposition to the pacifist cult that has dominated 
British academic anarchism for a century Franks argues in a predictable 
post-modern fashion that violence isn’t wrong or right and that, depending upon 
the context it may be perceived as morally outrageous or supremely courageous. 
The virtuous, just or courageous use of violence in pursuit of social happiness 
is relative and depends on participants knowing or having learnt what is 
tactically responsible, useful, acceptable or appropriate with respect to the 
situation and community in question.


In the UK the rich get richer whilst it’s misguided peoples whatever their 
income, gender, race or sexual orientation are obsessed with wealth, sport and 
aping celebrity lifestyles. Meanwhile a handful of British ‘anarchist’ 
intellectuals with university positions do little more than engage in sophistry. 
Toying with meaningless but impressive sounding new words acquired from across 
The Channel. All recent UK liberal academic philosophical studies of anarchism 
display an unappealing and depressing similarity of method, discourse and
presentation. These books start discussing anarchism before rapidly moving on to 
post-modernism and then “post-structuralisms” without ever
attempting to explain or define either of these academic monstrosities or
how to distinguish between them.
I couldn’t tell you what Franks’ means by “activist post-structuralisms”. Is 
intellectual fog an active force in the world? Franks remarks that
“post-structuralisms” are equivalent or “consistent with ideal type
anarchism” (p.159) and the “anarchist ideal subject” (p.153). If anarchism in 
‘ideal and subject’ is more or less the same as post-structuralism why not just 
use the plain old term anarchism? Anarchism is already an intimidating, poorly 
understood and often ill-defined word. Postisms add unnecessary or unhelpful 
semantic complication and confusion. Mark Leier in his highly recommended new 
book, Bakunin: A Biography (2006) suggests postism is an “elitist” and “banal 
liberalism” (p.204) enabling and representing “the flight of intellectuals from 
radical politics” into “identity politics and resignation”. Leier further 
observes how posties believe “the working class” has “somehow failed in its 
prescribed historical mission” and can “now be abandoned, ignored or explained 
away” (p.273). Franks’ is found guilty of every charge levelled by Leier.
Escapism, class-denial, pseudo-radicalism, glorification of minority or
lifestyle identification, do-nothing-ism and academic egoism—these
counter-revolutionary fantasies and fallacies infect every page of Franks Book. 
Franks explains how identity groups oppress each other in a myriad of ways. This 
realization or insight necessitates and allows for abandonment of old-style 
class analysis and its outmoded and simplistic solutions. We are told that the 
industrial working class in post-modern societies is a small incohesive group 
among populations whose individual members primarily identify themselves with 
particular age-sets, sexualities, lifestyles, ethnicities, cultures or places 
rather than, according to their position in traditional economic class 
hierarchies that are now blurred, transformed or disintegrating. It is suggested 
that the idea of the working class being the revolutionary class has long been 
out-classed, re-classed and de-classed by Black, Women’s, Green and Gay 
Liberation Movements. A working class ‘identity’ is just one among a great 
diversity of ‘identities’ with corresponding oppressions and social hierarchies 
competing for revolutionary importance and public attention. Contemporary 
Anglo-American philosophical anarchism (British postism and Bookchin in U.S.A.) 
attack hierarchy instead of class in order to illustrate and integrate their 
belief in the existence and need for resistance to a multiplicity of oppressive 
hierarchical structures, relationships, traditions and institutions that they 
consider are equally if not more important than fighting capitalism and economic 
class division. Franks is haunted by a Kafkaesque world where all people are 
exploited or oppressed
to some degree in some context or another. But everyone in turn oppresses
someone or some other group in some other context or situation. Franks
characterizes our ‘hierarchical society’ (displacing the term ‘capitalist
society’) as a complex interactive mish-mash of pervasive oppressive
ideologies, traditions, practices, attitudes, habits, beliefs and
structures in which differing individuals and identity groups exist within a 
nexus of exploitation and discrimination such that: All are
simultaneously victims of oppression and guilty of having exploited and
oppressed ‘The Other’:“An individual or group in one social position may be 
subjected to forces that place them in a subordinate position, yet in another 
context they may wield oppressive authority. Oppression does not have one 
ultimate source, so consequently there is no vanguard or universal agent whose 
liberation ends all oppression (p. 154-5)”.
“Examples are unemployed people who intimidate their gay neighbours, or
businesspeople that face domestic violence or racial prejudice in other
aspects of their life (p. 159)”. “The essentialist hegemony in which all 
subjected positions are unified under production and class is rejected. In its 
place there exists a multitude of subjugated positions, based upon class, race, 
age, sexuality, ethnicity or gender. There is no irreducible single 
contradiction, such as that between Worker and Capital, just as there is no 
revolutionary subject. Forms of power and their intersections are in continual 
flux, often responding to countervailing forms of resistance, so too arenas of 
antagonism and identities of radical subjects are also altering (p. 192) ”. 
“There is no objective position from which to predict precisely which categories 
of people will be oppressed by the expansion of free market practices and what 
subject identities will be created. Neither is it possible to foretell what 
forms of resistance will be adopted or which groups will coalesce in networks of 
solidarity (p.243) ”.Franks says it isn’t clear who are the oppressors or who 
will become revolutionaries. Also, situations change so rapidly that it is 
pointless seeking answers to these questions and the attempt to do so is futile 
or an authoritarian exercise in ‘essentialist vanguardism’. The only thing we 
can know for sure is that we don’t know against whom and with whom to organize 
the revolutionary transformation of society. Franks is telling us nothing whilst 
providing unprincipled recipes for doing nothing. The concluding two sections of 
Frank’s long book discusses Jean Baudrillard’s “alluring pessimism” (p.341). 
Baudrillard’s banal, silly and dangerous theory of “hyper-passivity” and “total 
disengagement” claims the French are only interested in “football” so radicals 
should consume more until the capitalist system “bursts” (p.344). We may have a 
barely habitable planet long before this undesirable eventuality and we should 
question why Franks’ book subtitled “contemporary British anarchisms” concludes 
with a long discussion of Baudrillard’s hyper-stupidity.
“British anarchisms” is a subject matter that Franks exploits as a
launch-pad for discussion of French postism which has little to do with
British anarchism. The British people don’t need advice from French
philosophers suggesting they do-nothing and consume more as they have no problem 
managing that for themselves. One can only hope for a
mass-migratory return to substantial issues; an end to post-radical
dispersal flights to nowhere or the far-flung outposts of identity
politics and remote academic islands of post-what-ever-ism.
Group Identities and Racialist-Nationalism: Marx, Bakunin and Kropotkin all 
thought in nationalist terms sometimes expressed in ways now considered 
offensive or racialist-nationalist. The inherent dangers and destructiveness of 
racialist-nationalist-statism was realized and illustrated by two terrible world 
wars last century. It is generally agreed by all but the far right (as Rudolf 
Rocker suggested in
his masterpiece Nationalism and Culture) that, nationalism and racialism
involve mass collective group passions that can be so disadvantageous to
progress that we must seek to keep them in check whilst developing new
cultural identities, economic relationships and human ideals. Ongoing
ethnic or nationalist violence throughout the world shows us how
nationalism is not something that can be reformed as Kropotkin and Bakunin 
supposed. It is often overlooked that Kropotkin thought that mutual aid rarely 
extended beyond the group and that hostility and aggression was the norm towards 
outsiders. Kropotkin thought that the biological tendency for animals and humans 
through the practice of mutual aid to create strong group-psychologies fostered 
intolerance and hatred that had led to catastrophic conflicts between different 
peoples such as World War 1. The negative side of the human individual’s 
tendency to develop strong group identities can be readily observed in gangs, 
religious fundamentalism, nationalism and hatred toward foreigners. The group 
has allowed for collective economic survival but also manifests itself in 
opposing xenophobic tendencies to ridicule, humiliate, distrust, suppress, 
oppress or destroy The Other. This fact of nature is something that the 
biological right and left can agree upon. Richard Dawkins and Kropotkin both 
understand the dangers of group psychology. Franks is right to point out that 
the traditional left neglected racialist-nationalist beliefs and conflicts that 
continue to dog the human quest for social-environmental peace and harmony. But, 
Franks promotion of identity groups explicitly includes (along with gays, 
children etc) minority racial and ethnic struggles against oppressive or 
dominant national states or cultures.
Franks is a confused or straightforwardly contradictory position because
it is not possible to solve the problem of racialism whilst encouraging
strong minority ethnic identity grouping. The attempt to construct the New 
Society around identity politics that includes racial or ethnic identities 
reinforces regressive and divisive group psychologies that anarchism (and any 
ideally perfect future world vision) should be fighting to overcome.
B. Obama is not riding on a Black Presidential platform but on a
Post-Racial one. The modern and progressive meaning and values associated
with post-racialism has become apparent to a large number of Americans
whom have rejected Franks Pre-Modern politics of racial grievance,
polarisation and identity group ghettoism. The waxing of the American
liberal party political circus gathers momentum with a black and greener
presidential candidate but we are unlikely to see any waning of the local
and global capitalist assault upon the US working poor who lost their
health cover and “well-paid” auto-jobs to Mexicans who now risk losing
them to Chinese slave labour.

Identity Politics and Revolutionary Inertia:

Elderly women are consistently among some of the poorest people in many
societies. Gays fear the spectre of the death penalty in some states.
Immigrants and minority communities frequently face oppression and
discrimination. I don’t wish to minimize the importance of the struggle
for women’s, gays and immigrant rights. But, that said, these movements
have little to do with anarchism in particular because they impact upon
all political and cultural outlooks and movements. In the newspaper I am
reading right now I learn that a closet gay Gangsta Rappa has felt
compelled to ‘come out’ and, how Al-Qaeda and similar Jihadi websites are
receiving anonymous posts from frustrated Muslim women pleading for these
men-only organizations to accept and enable them to fight or become
terrorists. Although gay or immigrant rights groups practice self-help and may 
sometimes engage in direct “externally undirected self-organized” (p.211) 
actions of one sort or another they remain essentially minority
interest or lobby organizations with the goal of expanding the premises of 
liberal-capitalist democracies to include and protect groups identified or 
identifying themselves as disadvantaged or oppressed in a variety of ways and 
contexts. In the USA a black and women candidate compete with one another in the 
presidential race. An Indian immigrant women heads Coca Cola Corporation. Just 
this week Cuba nationally celebrates sexual diversity whilst public monuments 
are unveiled commemorating a gay politician in California and victims of Nazism 
in Germany. In the UK Lesbian couples won the right to have children by 
artificial insemination. Such everyday achievements of liberal reformism, 
involving ‘victories’ and expanding personal liberty for Gays, Blacks and Women 
in the USA and elsewhere don’t alter the fact that 47 million Americans don’t 
have health cover. The ‘working poor’ in the richest country are denied basic 
healthcare whether they are gay or black or anything else. In South Africa 
scores of ‘foreign’ black immigrants have recently been brutally murdered in a 
‘spontaneous’ eruption of black on black violence causing 100, 000 people to 
flee their homes. In contrast to this shameful rabble the initiative by South 
African Dock-Workers a few weeks before these tragic events had successfully 
prevented the unloading of a Chinese arms shipment bound for the Mugabe 
dictatorship of neighbouring Zimbabwe. Sth. Africa’s inept Imbeki government 
endorsed the ban several days after the worker’s had already directly acted and 
focused the global spotlight upon the issue. Only an international workers 
movement that fosters de-racialised non-nationalist solidarity against 
WalMart-ization, off-shoring and dictatorship can conceivably overcome racism 
and nationalist hatred between the World’s peoples. That the workers’ movement 
has failed to prevent two world wars is no more relevant than the likelihood of 
the U.S. Government failing to prevent Iranian nationalists from making a 
nuclear bomb. Oscar Wilde spoke very highly of Kropotkin but in both 
contemporary and historical terms the gay lib movement has always been a 
minority group interested only in gaining acceptance, normality or 
liberal-individual freedoms. Gays have not in any general sense or way sought to 
end oppression. In India urban male gay sex mostly consists of middle class 
married men buying sex from working class rent boys. Sex is about getting your 
rocks off and not about organizing or creating a fair society. Along with 
sexuality, gender and ethnicity environmentalism is another refuge for 
Francophile post-radicals on their flight-paths away from economic class 
confrontation to who knows where. The idea that the present environmental crisis 
can be decoupled from the global consumer capitalist monster is a dangerous lie.

Group Identities and Inter-Group Hierarchies:

Franks slots human social dynamics into two basic categories: Groups and 
Hierarchies. Individuals identify themselves and are identified
and stratified by others according to race, place, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality. In his view the goal of contemporary anarchism is to breakdown
hierarchies that place one of these several identity groups higher than
another such that male heterosexual whites are considered better or more
normal than women, gays or blacks. This is nothing but the
liberal-democratic notion of tolerance, respect and legal protection for
‘other’ individuals, sexualities, religions, peoples, nationalities,
ideas, views and “experiments of living”. Liberal-western democracies
through a process of legislative reform and cultural change are addressing many 
gender and sexual minority concerns upon a daily basis. The liberal state can’t 
control environmental destruction and nationalist forms of racism because their 
resolution is partly or wholly dependent upon the dissolution of nation-states 
and the overthrow of the global capitalist system. Social animals from Meerkats 
to elephants also treat foreigners, women, young, the old and men differently. 
The treatment or categorization of people according to age, gender or group 
membership is pre-human and pre-capitalist. Franks is suggesting that 
‘anarchism’ as he redefines it should pay less attention to working-class 
politics and concern itself more with the cultural expression of these elemental 
or underlying bio-social sets around which animal societies and human cultures 
evolve.
Before agriculture the specific status, role, function and treatment of
these natural sub-communities and within-group identities varied from
culture to culture and place to place, much as it does today. Age and/or
gender hierarchies may have been prominent in one early culture but not in 
another. The lack of economic classes and the extreme economic
interdependency of the close knit extended family and/or clan and tribe
meant that, natural gender groups and age-sets typically performed
specific essential but complimentary roles often balancing one another by
carrying similar power or value. Homophobia is more an invention of
authoritarian religion than of historical practice. Brothers and Sisters
were told by Muslim and Christian conquerors and missionaries that they
were sinners. In Greek civilization homosexuality was tolerated but
ambiguously situated. India has always had large transvestite communities
whom prior to colonization were not discriminated against and in some
places revered. Indian Tirunangais (trannies) now occupy a lowly but
recognized niche in society visiting every marriage ceremony in
expectation of alms. The Thais whom escaped colonization have
traditionally accepted sex-as-it-comes and applied no stigma to different
sexualities. Transvestite beauty pageants attract large national TV
audiences whilst their winners become presenters and advertise beauty
products. The idea of parity or equity (not equality) between elemental
social-biological groupings or minority sexual expressions and identities
is associated with liberal, socialist, anarchist and ‘modern’ thought in
the broadest sense. But liberalism only asks that foreigners and members
of other natural classes be accorded universally applicable and legally
enforceable individual human rights and freedoms whilst providing no
solution to the gross exploitation of poor people, resources and
environment by global capitalism. Liberalism seeks only to reform or
humanize nationalism and capitalism through NGOs or legislation outlawing
or preventing such things as the neglect, abuse or enslavement of
children. These are big and important issues but liberalism is addressing
the social-environmental symptoms of gross economic inequality and
nationalism rather than attacking its root capitalist causes.
Franks “post-anarchism” can be differentiated from ‘banal liberalism’ only in 
terms of the emphasis placed upon the need or practice of “unmediated” and 
“direct action” by members of these “oppressed subject groups themselves” 
(p.210) rather than, reliance upon local politicians or liberal legislative 
reforms. NGO’s of all political hues that conduct protests and pranks or 
emphasize and facilitate ‘self-help’ and independence among disadvantaged or 
neglected groups are modern liberal-activist tactics that approach anarchist 
notions of local and direct action. Franks falsely conflates and confuses 
contemporary liberal-activism with anarchism by arguing that because, some of 
these many and various “non-workplace” (p.196) identity, protest, local 
single-issue or minority “micro-political” activist groups that he champions, 
sometimes or often use “anti-hierarchical and participatory tactics” (p. 351) 
paralleling methods and approaches traditionally used by or compatible with 
anarchist theories that, anarchist and the myriad of micro-political 
liberal-minded activist groupings existing in the world today somehow amount to 
the same thing because, identity groups rather than economic class divisions are 
what really matter and concern people. This may be true but it doesn’t turn 
anarchism into liberal-activism. Anarchism is not changing or expanding. 
Anarchism is being diluted by UK posties to include the burgeoning catalogue of 
left-liberal activist and marginal or local interest groups representing an 
ideological scrambled egg or dog’s dinner the ingredients for which are readily 
obtainable from the life-style or identity group super-market. Kropotkin saw the 
flourishing of global mutual-aid and interest groupings as a distinctive feature 
of the late 19th century that he predicted would evolve as intellectual 
tolerance, technology, education and communication improved. It was the vast 
potentiality for liberal mutual aid and interest networks that Kropotkin saw as 
an organizational fact of recent human social evolution that concretely 
supported and illustrated the possibility of a global civilized anarchy. But, 
unlike Franks, Kropotkin didn’t confuse and conflate the growth and increasing 
sophistication of liberal mutual aid, interest and activist networks with the 
political and economic goals and practices of anarchism as an organized 
international worker’s liberation movement.

Nature, Anarchy and Hierarchy:

Kropotkin, Bookchin and Franks all agree that “at the heart of anarchism is the 
rejection of Hierarchy’ (p.156). Appeals for anti- or non-hierarchical tactics, 
organization, social-relationships etc., occur in every section of Franks book 
because opposition to social hierarchy is the One and Only principle that is 
shared by All movements inspired by anarchism (however misguided or degenerate) 
or of interest to anarchists. Moreover anti-hierarchical ideology differentiates 
anarchism from All other major alternative political philosophies and practices. 
Unfortunately anti-hierarchical approaches provide a convenient intellectual 
flight path for Bookchin and UK posties to bypass the workers.
The idea that hierarchy can simply be wished away is simplistic and based upon 
an absolutely false notion of animal and human collective social behaviour that 
Kropotkin first introduced in Mutual Aid. Social animals do not live in 
egalitarian communal groups as Kropotkin supposed, With the exception of 
goldfish, cockroaches and other lowly animals that naturally live in small 
non-hierarchical groups, All social animals above this level (seasonally) 
collectively compete for mates and/or territory in the creation of economic 
and/or reproductive hierarchies. Hierarchical and egalitarian forms of 
collectivity coalesce and coexist in animal and human groups and societies. All 
the Meerkats in a colony will collectively defend their territory as an 
egalitarian group but females aggressively compete with one another for 
exclusive dominance of a single reproductive female hierarchy. All primate 
groups collectively construct reproductive and economic hierarchies and 
networks. Observations of groups of wild chimps, baboons and bonobos reveal very 
different and highly complex structures of interacting hierarchies and networks 
regulating the behaviour of individuals and sub-groups in relation to one 
another. In the light of these broad and indisputable biological or evolutionary 
antecedents we should be less demoralized when formally ever-so radical students 
or union shop stewards appear to so readily and rapidly ascend the 
organizational or political career elevator and abandon their former fellow 
workers. The social-behaviour of animals suggests an innate tendency in the very 
structure of our brains responsive to status symbols and one’s position on 
social ladders. Anarchists following from Kropotkin’s original analysis
assume that hierarchy and status are unnatural or recent in human
evolution. But we were hierarchical before we were human. Age-hierarchies are a 
natural outgrowth or inherent/integral feature of the family and primary 
teaching/learning experience. The trainee is necessarily at the bottom of a 
natural hierarchy until the candidate learns or masters the job or trade. The 
hierarchies of a boy’s gang or girlie clique are naturally, universally and 
collectively elaborated by children themselves upon the street or in the school 
play ground/locker room (read Lord of the Flies).We mustn’t despair of 
eradicating (economic class) hierarchies.
Among animals hierarchy is collectively constructed by the social group
rather than determined genetically. Similarly, human economic-class, sex or 
racial hierarchies have been collectively and culturally constructed rather than 
genetically determined. Humans have a strong genetically inherited innate 
preference for sweet fatty foods known to be unhealthy.
We try to moderate our natural obsessions with junk food and TV dinners to 
lessen the social epidemic of obesity. Contraception is unnatural but beneficial 
to social health and women’s liberty. Economic class
hierarchies of state-capitalism cause global social, environmental and
individual psychological harm. Anarchism says that: It is necessary to
moderate our natural obsession with celebrity, money, status symbols and trashy 
Las Vegas culture; to liberate the economically enslaved and save the planet by 
the self-organization of the working poor according to town, city, trade, 
industry and ecological region in opposition to capitalism and state. Anarchism 
uniquely and in contrast to the
left-liberal-capitalist or communist party political state seeks a society that 
goes beyond capital’s formula of co-existence where formal equality exists 
alongside cavernous and self-defeating economic or political inherited or 
accumulated) inequities maintained and expressed in class hierarchies and upheld 
by national or international forces of Law and Order.

Conclusion:

Rebel Alliances though philosophically inept is a competent survey of the 
hopelessly ill-organized, messy, uninspiring, ineffective, misdirected, silly or 
degenerate assortment of marginalia and fuzzy thinking that has characterized 
what passes for Anarchy in the UK for the last quarter century. Franks concludes 
his study by voicing “misgivings” about membership of an “elite institution” 
and, how his “cultural and social background” may have led him to inadvertently 
commit errors in his analysis of the importance of working class (p. 351).
Apology accepted. Please don’t re-offend. Anarchism requires Anglo-Francophile 
Post-Structuralism like a fish needs a bicycle. Franks is a confused 
intellectual product maintained by an institution whose offices, side-walks, 
halls, bathrooms, rose gardens and coffee outlets are serviced by workers whom 
ensure a pleasant venue for educating his
undergraduates about how economic class divisions aren’t so very important these 
days. What more can one say to a generation of students that may perhaps find 
capitalist info-tech companies exciting or cool and, socialism boring, 
old-fashioned and probably dead? Over the last decade serious, book-length 
published Anglo-American anarchist theory has been conducted, can be 
characterized or has consisted of Bookchinism V. Primitivism (Watson et. al.) in 
the USA and, in the UK an exclusively scholarly effort conducted by liberal 
academic post-modernists working independently of each other but whom all 
positively contrast their individual post-modern conceptions or interpretations 
of ‘21st century
anarchism’ with ‘traditional anarchism’ which they see as on par with
boring old discredited rationalist workerist-Leninist essentialism (p.260) blah, 
blah. In reality, Bookchin doesn’t take us beyond Kropotkin and post-anarchism 
doesn’t take us anywhere. Bookchin’s huff and puff and UK postism’s fluff and 
guff, it is all duff. Kropotkin’s social-ecological vision remains as valid 
today as it did more than a century ago. It is really about how one fights, 
argues and most effectively realizes post-capitalist bio-regionally integrated 
autonomous green-cities serviced by local and global workers and interest 
associations struggling towards a happy, peaceful and sustainable world of 
health and plenty.
=================================
* Benjamin Franks Rebel Alliances: The means and ends of contemporary British 
anarchisms - Edinburgh & California, AK & Dark Star 2006
_________________________________________
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