A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #36-25 - 21st Century Anarchism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Summary of the paper presented at the Carrara Conference (October 11-12, 
2025) on the 80th anniversary of the FAI ---- Lacking prophetic visions, 
it will be difficult to predict what forms anarchism will take in the 
21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, 
social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion 
of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity-individual 
and collective-(including and especially among strangers) will always 
constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and 
modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the contexts of anarchism, 
or rather anarchisms.

I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but 
intersecting but not hierarchically descending, within which anarchists 
of the 21st century will strive to identify the best forms of action. 
Clearly, there is a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other 
contributions will provide us with general and specific features and 
contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not 
exclude or downplay the more common, everyday, and perhaps more local 
areas of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rootedness in the 
territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will 
also "overdetermine" local or traditional conflicts, changing their 
forms and modalities and imparting significant changes.

The first is climate change, which alters the planet's living 
conditions, jeopardizing its ecosystemic survival, with the risk of 
demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent grabbing of 
resources (fertile land, water), etc. The typical (and even original) 
nomadism of the human species cannot be stopped by state or "natural" 
borders; such will be the migratory pressure in search of better living 
conditions. If the rate of exploitation of humanity's resources (land 
and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody 
conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world's population is of 
working age, and a quarter of it lives in rural areas, where 80% of 
global poverty exists. This is without even considering the informal, 
obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. 
In such conditions, which it would be unworthy to call "emergency"-so 
endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality 
on a global scale-the approach to problems can only rely on bottom-up 
self-organization to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate 
policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from 
this practice of solidarity and self-organization that an anarchic ethos 
is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem 
solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganization of 
social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is 
therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the 
political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot 
count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars 
following Elon Musk & co.

The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to 
planetary hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear 
annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the end of the last 
millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the 
hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and 
its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against 
which to weave policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. 
It is not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and 
studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, 
throughout history, successions of global hegemony have never occurred 
calmly and peacefully-quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, 
and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarization of 
societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of 
hard-won "rights," even without losing the pretense of 
(pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional 
states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, 
speech, expression, the ability to shape one's life as one sees fit, and 
the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all 
practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some 
cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalized or 
translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants 
and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary 
majorities. The path will make the difference.

By militarization, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible 
presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war 
industries, etc.). We must address the internalization of a warmongering 
and bellicose culture that arms consciences from a young age, pressuring 
them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming 
the obstacles that life throws at us at every turn. Cultural models in 
which violence is exalted because it is simulated-game over, and we 
begin again-life is like a video game in which you kill and are killed, 
but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no 
coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled 
by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that 
transform war in its forms, numbing its wounds and physical traumas and 
transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least true for those 
who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who 
suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows.

We must not underestimate or minimize the hybrid militarization that 
insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. 
These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for 
commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control 
exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an 
infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our 
physical and virtual experiences. These data are transformed into 
numerical data that can be easily processed by algorithms, resulting in 
a unique mass profiling-and this may not sound contradictory-that can be 
used to predict and even guide our future behavior.

Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital 
technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionizing 
the way of life of our societies, not only in the areas of living labor, 
which can be replaced by robots and various machines, but also in the 
ways in which "political" opinions are channeled during elections. The 
split between the corporeal, "real" sphere and the "virtual" dimension, 
whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of 
a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to 
in the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In 
an era of extreme individualism, advocated and fostered by the 
neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has 
shattered to be "resurrected" in the relationship between the self and 
the screen of my digital device; physical sociality has in some ways 
evaporated in favor of a virtual "sociality," managed by proprietary 
platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue with 
just as many other selves is enacted, each connected via their own 
screen. The fiction of possessing a following of followers, of having 
tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, 
within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see 
them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the 
pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the 
emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between 
different people. And when these virtual expulsions return to life in 
the space-time of corporeal existence, the lack of habit of relating to 
different others transforms into gratuitous, senseless, and unexpected 
violence, except as a "defensive" form of a psychology devoid of real 
sociality, precisely because it is imbued with "social" surrogates.

Neoliberal individualism, translocated even further into the digital 
universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a 
machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely 
become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones 
using the devices, but perhaps it's exactly the opposite. Outside of any 
community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to 
another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What 
kind of community could give rise to the communism of goods and 
services? What critical and diverse subject could exist in the 
increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine?

The new ways in which we feel ourselves to be subjects of ourselves, 
aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our 
analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for "social" connections 
from which we can rebuild a strong destituent community capable of 
imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized 
around the pivot of powerlessness.

Salvo Vaccaro

https://umanitanova.org/anarchismo-del-xxi-secolo/
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