AN ANARCHIST CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM AND POST-ANARCHISM
The 20th century, which began as a revolutionary whirlwind, ended with a collapse of emancipatory ideas, from anarchism to socialism, which were “defeated” by a capitalism that would mutate and transform itself according to its needs. Capitalist domination recovers old “revolutionary” struggles—social, economic, ecological—absorbing many of these emancipatory ideas and incorporating them into its program. On the one hand, the inability of revolutionary movements to see and analyze these new capitalist restructurings, and on the other hand, capitalism with its endless wars and conflicts of domination and destabilization of entire territories, or in its communist form, with its immense sinkholes of moral and material misery, represented by the gulags, led to the destabilization of the revolutionary movements that had cornered capitalism at different points in the 20th century.
This succeeded in shackling all yearnings for freedom and emancipation, provoking a widespread exodus of revolutionary movements that later converged in the ideas of postmodernism. Faced with the fall and crisis of these revolutionary movements, it seems that many found a way out: retreating into individual subjectivity and fleeing to the market as the guarantor of a happiness based on the privatization of life (the destruction of community) and the hyperconsumption characteristic of postmodernism. The hyperconsumption of identities is particularly noteworthy.
Thus, the postmodern ideas that today completely engulf the left and, to a large extent, anarchist and revolutionary movements are a product of disenchantment with politics, ideologies, and social and revolutionary movements. These postmodern ideas place the individual at the center, and thanks to social media, the disembodied and atomized individual, diminishing the possibilities of a revolutionary struggle that centers not on identities but on the community, on the collective that reignites the class struggle, seeking the tension, confrontation, and conflict that will bring about the collapse of the established order.
THE STATE OF PERMANENT HAPPINESS IS DECREED (MAY ’68 SLOGAN)
The fall of the Berlin Wall, mass society, leisure, hyperconsumption, disenchantment with revolutionary ideas, individual retreat, the end of the Cold War… all of this gives rise to postmodernity. During the second half of the last century, the idea gradually took hold that everything is interpretable and relative, that the categories that explained the world until very recently must be updated, reinvented, and redefined. That certain social categories such as Power, State, capitalism, and revolutionary movements had become outdated and should be dissolved in the blender of history.
From postmodernity onward, only those issues that provide well-being to this disenchanted Subject will be relevant and worthy of attention, for whom the aspiration to individual happiness (or the visibility of their own problems) will henceforth constitute a functional substitute for those revolutionary ideas that until recently held primary value. Postmodernity transforms the pursuit of subjective well-being into a moral imperative. This well-being implies a privatization of life, a structural feature of postmodernity; the individual takes refuge in themselves in a process of progressive isolation. Thus, lacking a close environment, a community, the State takes their place.
The State is no longer the enemy to be defeated, but rather the refuge to which one can turn to expose and make visible one’s problems. The loss of those collective projects that illuminated “a new world” will be “compensated” with individualism, represented by a disillusioned individual who will seek new sources of satisfaction in a society that offers new forms, via the market, promising a horizon of hope based on the materialization of their longed-for desires. Little by little, the world of ideas is crumbling in postmodernity. There are no longer religions or revolutionary ideas to cling to; everything acquires an evanescent, cool, superficial, ephemeral character. There is no longer room for grand revolutionary projects in postmodernity, since everything has a relative, transitory, provisional character…
Everything seems questionable, optional, relative. Thus, freedom is no longer a collective project but is now situated at the center of individual experience, and everything that affects the individual, from birth to death, acquires political significance: the choice of children, the way of eating, sexual orientation, health, the way of consuming, etc. Everything is a matter of opinion and has been turned into a commodity capable of being manipulated. Thus, issues affecting the structural conditions of social life, living conditions, and politics are displaced from the center of the struggle and retreated to the individual.
Postmodern ideas should not be equated with strict depoliticization; they are inseparable from a particular relational enthusiasm, as demonstrated by the proliferation of associations, assistance groups, and reformist groups. The postmodern individual is not an asocial individualist but rather seeks ramifications and connections in collectives with miniaturized, hyper-specialized interests that do not seek conflict with the State or with Capitalism. They seek people with the same identity-based desires: collectives of “racialized” people, vegan groups, associations of “disabled” people, trans-feminist groups—places to undertake micro-group solidarity, fragmenting political and/or revolutionary struggles. They form a diversity of groups that no longer seek to create those moments of tension or conflict that could lead us to widespread revolt. Thus, in postmodernity, the Individual has replaced that dangerous class which, through bombs, poison, knives, books, pamphlets… shook the foundations of the bourgeoisie. A bourgeoisie that now offers a whole culture and liberal consumption to all those who disguise themselves as revolutionaries.
A LA CARTE: CHOOSE YOUR REBELLION
Spectacle has transformed struggle. Numerous movements involved in uncertain battles no longer seek to project themselves in order to overthrow the existing order, to criticize domination, or to plan long-term struggles that will shake the system. We find ourselves in the technological age, which prioritizes the visual; not only is this sense prioritized, but at the same time, we are deprived of the rest. Sensory deprivation is a sign of scientific society. Therefore, we live in the “era of visibility,” where struggles must become visible not to be disseminated as propaganda that reaches the consciousness of the majority of the population, but to show the existence of the amalgam of subjects that make up the “liberal rebellion”—those who do not intend to overthrow the State or Capitalism.
They simply seek, in most cases, to reaffirm themselves and present themselves to the world as if they were a commercial display. At this point, personalization becomes especially important; that is, the possibility of a wide-ranging menu, as if in a restaurant, where you choose your own “rebellion.” We could call it something like “choose your own adventure,” “build your own journey.”
Capitalism offers this hyper-individualized consumption with a proliferation of choices that offer ever more options and tailor-made choices, a kind of self-service à la carte existence that consists of proposing different options for each person, replacing norms, authority, and uniform subjection with free choice, homogeneity with diversity, austerity with the fulfillment of desires. Thus, capitalism sells you a “rebellion” in a simple format. The idea is basic: that the population continues consuming and working but without being subject to old authoritarian norms and coercion; now you are “free” to achieve your desires (those that capitalism has wrapped up for you in gift paper). Thus, this capitalist way of life has infiltrated the previously resistant spaces now dedicated, in many cases, more to personal, narcissistic, hedonistic, and identity-based pursuits than to the destruction of what exists.
Rebellion now disguises itself as Identity; you can choose whichever one you want (the Spanish state already recognizes 37 gender identities; you can choose whichever one you like). The world has become the supermarket of identity. There are also different identities related to food that also claim to be rebellious. The norm now is not to be normative. You can go further and cease to be human: wire yourself, implant different chips, wear an exoskeleton, and fill your body with prostheses to transform yourself into a transhuman; everything is malleable, everything is an option to consume in postmodernism. Even certain “feminists” like Butler, Preciado, or Haraway opt to turn us into cyborgs, using the excuse of being able to reinvent ourselves as whatever we want, so that neither men nor women will exist anymore.
We, as those who resist and love freedom, vehemently oppose such an aberration. Society, having dissolved its authoritarian rigidity, has become open, pluralistic, taking into account the desires of individuals and increasing their freedom according to individual motivations—a flexible life in the age of consumption. The Left has bought into this model of society and sells it to us as something rebellious.
Thus, social movements, the left, and some anarchists have fallen into the trap where the “struggle” is reduced to the consumption of objects and artificial signs, which paralyzes revolt and atomizes the social fabric. Here we see the cool destruction of the social struggles, replaced by a process of isolation that is administered no longer by brute force or the regulatory grid, but by hedonism, desire, visibility, and consumption.
“It is classes that make revolutions, not individuals.” Kropotkin
For us, the different forms of exploitation and domination are not a problem in themselves, but rather an issue adjacent to the social question. Political discourses that reduce exploitation and domination to different spheres avoid seeing the root of the problems common to all the exploited. These discourses (postcolonial, neofeminist, neoecologist, etc.) seem to surrender to the only plausible solution: social fragmentation based on ethnic, racial, gender, food, and other criteria. This social fragmentation leads to the creation of different groups within which various conflicts and tensions arise, forgetting the true enemy to be defeated: capitalist social reproduction, the world mediated by commodities and technology, and wage labor.
On this shifting ground, ways of thinking about the commons, as well as any approach to capitalism, disappear. On the one hand, we see a reconfiguration of the struggle in ethnic, cultural, sexual, and other terms. On the other hand, we see that critical analyses and practices regarding economic exploitation and social reproduction are no longer the norm. These fragmented struggles don’t aim to destroy the existing order, much less provoke tensions and conflicts that could lead to a widespread revolt. The objective of these leftist struggles is to positively shift perceptions of people. Indeed, wanting to make them visible, wanting to change the perception of others, and understanding the workings of their “community” doesn’t necessarily imply modifying the situation of exploitation in which they find themselves. In other words, making certain groups visible or trying to change perceptions about them (sexual, ethnic, etc.) is not a revolutionary struggle; it is leftism doing its work of reclaiming these struggles and leading the way in guiding their direction.
Thus, multiculturalism and the public defense of minorities risk becoming the best guarantors of a capitalist order that produces the great structural difference: that which divides the rich and the poor.
The class war is forgotten in all these fragmented struggles. As Walter Benn Michaels says, “diversity is not a means of establishing equality; it is a means of managing inequality. There is nothing radical about it on the political level; highlighting or glorifying diversity […] is nothing other than our way of accepting inequality today.” The only thing erased by diversity and these fragmented struggles is the difference between classes. The enemy to be defeated is no longer class society; now the aim is the inclusion of everyone within it, a diverse class society. Leftist ideology has deeply permeated certain resistant ideas, and anarchists have managed to fragment struggles and infiltrate parts of their program into anarchist projects, leading to unprecedented paralysis and sterile internal struggles. Once certain “old issues” such as the State, Capital, commodities, and wage labor were sidelined, leftists had a free hand to reorganize the political “agenda” in terms of fighting against the power of norms, instead of fighting against a capitalist system that produces alienation, misery, poverty, and ecocide. This struggle becomes superficial; it is no longer about critiquing or attacking our enemies, but rather about “deconstructing” the adversary’s thinking, ideas, and postulates.
A BRIEF CRITIQUE OF POST-ANARCHISM
We insist that leftist ideas have seeped into anarchism, and sometimes their logic permeates the thinking of many anarchists. These ideas come from the “radical left,” from some bastards like Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, but also from new feminists like Butler and Haraway, or from postcolonial discourses. One of the first to use the term post-anarchism was Hakim Bey, famous for his book T.A.Z. (Temporarily Autonomous Zones). This author was a postmodernist who used anarchism to give free rein to his ravings. Among other “delights,” he observed that power is never more than pure “simulation” or that “pornography and popular entertainment serve as vehicles for radical re-education.” We will never understand how this author has had so much “success” in certain anarchist circles; perhaps it was his radical/situationist language, perhaps it was that he presented something new—we will never know.
A fundamental tenet of anarchist thought, namely “power,” which entails the exploitation and domination of the rich and the poor, is undermined. Foucault also argued that power was “abstract,” and thus post-anarchism was formed. These authors, hiding behind the fallacy of post-anarchism because they believe everything is malleable and fluid, even attempt to redefine anarchism, which for them should no longer represent revolutionary aspiration but rather the decomposition of the social order, under the guise of a spectacular individual rebellion.
In this way, they try to destabilize everything upon which classical anarchism rests, attempting to impose their model of a malleable, fluid, and moldable world onto anarchism. In this “redesign” of anarchism, we find absurdities like those of the Canadian university professor Sandra Jeppesen, who claims, “Anarchism is not a white movement, […] anarchism is not a two-generation heterosexual monogamy movement […] anarchism does not involve the worker […] anarchism is about creating events.” Although it’s not funny, we can’t help but smile upon hearing such nonsense. Anarchism doesn’t involve the worker? It must be admitted that, unless one simply erases the past and confines oneself to mere immediacy, it is strange and erroneous to assert that about a movement that was born in 1872 from a split within the International Workingmen’s Association, from which Bakunin and Guillaume had been excluded. They want to destroy anarchism, but we will not allow it.
We are as stubborn as our 19th-century comrades, attacking with everything we have against those who sought to destroy them. Today the enemy attacks from the left. We ask ourselves, to whom is this anarchism, which is not “for the worker,” directed? Post-anarchism reduces political action to the subversion of identity; its deconstructionist thinking makes it impossible to conceive of critique in terms of alienation or exploitation. We find ourselves in assemblies and spaces where “each person’s pronoun,” “their sexual identity,” or “what they eat” takes precedence over the realization of projects that, through praxis and critique, could shake this world that condemns us to misery. A clear example of this is feminism. On one hand, we find radical feminists, those who fight against the patriarchal system and oppressive mechanisms, and on the other hand, neofeminism/queer feminism, which seeks exclusively the destabilization of norms, deploying its politics in a social vacuum, exacerbating the slogan “the personal is political” to the point of dissolving politics into the reinvention of sexuality. In these discourses of so-called post-anarchism, all criticism of life mutilated by commodities, wage labor, or technology disappears.
The current “anarchist spectrum” seems incapable of shedding this postmodernist and leftist cocktail that shapes how we act, think, and feel in our circles. Thus, we see how thought within anarchist movements becomes increasingly constrained and homogenized, with little chance of critiquing the post-anarchist monolithic thinking that is spreading like wildfire. These post-anarchist movements are often comprised of authoritarian individuals who, under the guise of a “friendly” ideology, make debate, in-depth exploration of certain aspects, or even any criticism impossible, because you will quickly be expelled from their “big brother.” Attempting to fragment anarchism by categorizing people based on their privileges, abilities, etc., and blaming the other side for being ableist or privileged, is nothing more than a charade devoid of any revolutionary meaning.
Anarchism, through mutual aid and solidarity, resolves problems of ability or privilege without the need to establish social categories. Turning part of the population into victims is part of the capitalist discourse absorbed by those who claim to oppose it. Looking the enemy straight in the eye, staring fearlessly into the abyss, opens possibilities for insurrection. Creating categories and fragmenting the revolutionary movement only perpetuates the status quo. Anarchy here serves as a vehicle for tyranny. It is all too easy to blame an environment riddled with scruples and paralyzed by anxiety at the idea of prohibiting or imposing anything, posing as “victims,” “representatives of the dominated,” “oppressed,” or “discriminated against” minorities. Deep down, these activists, supported and celebrated by universities, publishing houses, the entertainment industry, and the media, are the ideological agents of transhumanist technocracy, intent on destroying all forms of defense for a free humanity in a wild nature.
CHIMPANZEES OF THE FUTURE
MADRID, OCTOBER 2025