Contemporary anarchism


Contemporary anarchism, in the history of anarchism, is the period of the anarchist movement continuing from the end of the Second World War and into the present. Since the last third of the 20th century, anarchists have been involved in student protest movements, peace movements, squatter movements, and the anti-globalization movement, among others. Anarchists have participated in violent revolutions and anarchist political organizations exist since the 19th century.

Overview

Anarchism was influential in the Counterculture of the 1960s and anarchists actively participated in the late sixties students and workers revolts. In 1968 in Carrara, Italy, the International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international anarchist conference held there in 1968 by the three existing European federations of France, the Federazione Anarchica Italiana of Italy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the Bulgarian federation in French exile.
In the United Kingdom in the 1970s this was associated with the punk rock movement, as exemplified by bands such as Crass and the Sex Pistols. The housing and employment crisis in most of Western Europe led to the formation of communes and squatter movements like that of Barcelona, Spain. In Denmark, squatters occupied a disused military base and declared the Freetown Christiania, an autonomous haven in central Copenhagen. The relationship between anarchism, punk, and squatting has carried on into the 21st century.
trade union CNT marching in Madrid in 2010
Since the revival of anarchism in the mid 20th century, a number of new movements and schools of thought emerged, well documented in Robert Graham's, Volume Two, The Emergence of the New Anarchism . Although feminist tendencies have always been a part of the anarchist movement in the form of anarcha-feminism, they returned with vigour during the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. The American Civil Rights Movement and the movement against the war in Vietnam also contributed to the revival of North American anarchism. European anarchism of the late 20th century drew much of its strength from the labour movement, and both have incorporated animal rights activism. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and anarchist historian Andrej Grubacic have posited a rupture between generations of anarchism, with those "who often still have not shaken the sectarian habits" of the 19th century contrasted with the younger activists who are "much more informed, among other elements, by indigenous, feminist, ecological and cultural-critical ideas", and who by the turn of the 21st century formed "by far the majority" of anarchists.
Around the turn of the 21st century, anarchism grew in popularity and influence as part of the anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-globalisation movements. Anarchists became known for their involvement in protests against the meetings of the World Trade Organization, Group of Eight, and the World Economic Forum. Some anarchist factions at these protests engaged in rioting, property destruction, and violent confrontations with police. These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs; other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet. A significant event of this period was the confrontations at WTO conference in Seattle in 1999.
International anarchist federations in existence include the International of Anarchist Federations, the International Workers' Association, and International Libertarian Solidarity.
The largest organised anarchist movement today is in Spain, in the form of the Confederación General del Trabajo and the CNT. CGT membership was estimated at around 100,000 for 2003. Other active syndicalist movements include in Sweden the Central Organisation of the Workers of Sweden and the Swedish Anarcho-syndicalist Youth Federation; the CNT-AIT in France; the Union Sindicale Italiana in Italy; in the US Workers Solidarity Alliance and the UK Solidarity Federation. The revolutionary industrial unionist Industrial Workers of the World, claiming 10,000 paying members, and the International Workers Association, an anarcho-syndicalist successor to the First International, also remain active.
Anarchist ideas have been influential in the development of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, more commonly known as Rojava, a de facto autonomous region in northern Syria. Abdullah Öcalan—a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party who is currently imprisoned in Turkey—is an iconic and popular figure in the DFNS whose ideas shaped the region's society and politics. While in prison, Öcalan corresponded with Murray Bookchin, an anarcho-communist theorist and philosopher who developed Communalism and libertarian municipalism. Modelled after Bookchin's ideas, Öcalan developed the theory of democratic confederalism. In March 2005, he issued his "Declaration of Democratic Confederalism in Kurdistan", calling upon citizens "to stop attacking the government and instead create municipal assemblies, which he called 'democracy without the state.

Post-classical schools of thought and movements

Whilst the classical schools of anarchist thought remain popular and relevant to the modern world, anarchism continues to generate many philosophies and movements, at times eclectic, drawing upon various sources, and syncretic, combining disparate concepts to create new philosophical approaches.
"New Anarchism" is a term that has been notably used by Andrej Grubacic, amongst others, to describe the most recent reinvention of the anarchist thought and practice. What distinguishes the new anarchism of today from the new anarchism of the 1960s and 1970s, or from the work of US-UK based authors like Murray Bookchin, Paul Goodman, Herbert Read, Colin Ward and Alex Comfort, is its emphasis on the global perspective. Essays on new anarchism include David Graeber's "New Anarchists" in A Movement of Movements: is Another World Really possible?, ed. Tom Mertes and Grubacic's "Towards Another Anarchism" in World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, ed. Jai Sen and Peter Waterman. Other authors have criticized the term for being too vague.