Fields of Vision: Kropotkin and Revolutionary Change

The rise of a global anti-capitalist protest movement is widely regarded as a sign of anarchism’s revival. For some, the protest movement’s complex diversity points to inherently anarchistic principles of organization. As Naomi Klein argues, the movement has a “decentralized, non-hierarchical structure.” Instead of “forming a pyramid … with leaders up on top and followers down below,” it “mirrors the organic, decentralised, interlinked pathways of the internet … a network of hubs and spokes … [of] hundreds, possibly thousands of ‘affinity groups’…” (“Vision”). Anarchist activists make a stronger claim: no matter how the protesters describe their affiliations, the movement as a whole is rightly regarded as anarchist. Anarchism, David Graeber argues, “is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what’s new and hopeful about it” (61). Other grass-roots activists warmly endorse this contention, treating the global protest movement as the clearest and strongest assertion of practical anarchism since 1968. After the protest in Seattle—the movement’s “coming out party” (Klein 81)—Fifth Estate led with the headline “Much More Than A Few Broken Windows.” The mass direct action, the report continued “and the new alliances formed in the streets and across international borders mark a hopeful escalation in a newly forming and worldwide movement of resistance to corporate globalization and capital” (1). In a more general discussion of summit protests and networks, Andrew Flood has argued: