Political Media Review – PMR

Benjamin Franks
AK Press and Dark Star (2006)
Reviewed by Laurence Davis, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Reprinted with Permission from Anarchist Studies

The stated aim of Rebel Alliances is to “provide a convincing, documented account of contemporary anarchism and to critically evaluate its tactical and organisational forms through an appropriate framework.” If one qualifies this statement by replacing “contemporary anarchism” with “contemporary class-struggle anarchism in Britain”, then Rebel Alliances lives up to its promise most admirably. More than this, it is an extraordinarily well-researched and thoughtful example of activist research that adheres to exacting scholarly standards.

The book begins by delimiting the subject matter of study. Apart from naming the organisations that he groups under the heading of “class struggle anarchism”, Franks sets out four “hesitantly proposed” and context-specific criteria meant to distinguish class struggle anarchism from both liberal anarchism and Leninism. These include a complete rejection of capitalism and the market economy; an egalitarian concern for the interests and freedoms of others as part of a process of creating non-hierarchical social relations; a complete rejection of state power and other quasi-state mediating forces; and a recognition that means have to prefigure ends.

Following an opening survey of the histories of British anarchism, the book launches into a challenging and original discussion of anarchist ethics. Of particular interest is the attempt to develop an “ideal type” of anarchism that is then used throughout the book to assess various forms of contemporary libertarian practice. What chiefly distinguishes Franks’s method of ethical evaluation is the recognition that means and ends are irreducible parts of the same process. By comparison to this practical, prefigurative approach, alternative ethical frameworks are found wanting: among them instrumentalist, end-based accounts such as utilitarianism, blueprint forms of utopianism, and Franks’s bête noire in the book, Leninism. Franks also effectively targets liberal, means-centred ethics, but the critique of Leninism here and elsewhere in the work is particularly well handled. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of the book is the understated relish with which Franks carries out this particular piece of philosophical demolition work.

The contrast between Franks’s prefigurative conception of anarchism and the strategic politics characteristic of Leninism is particularly apparent in chapter three of the book, which deals with the vexed question of revolutionary agency. Whereas Leninist accounts tend to begin by identifying one ultimate source of oppression, and then proceed to develop the idea of a vanguard or universal agent whose liberation ends all oppression, Franks formulates a much more fluid and multifaceted conception of agency which he suggests shares certain features in common with contemporary poststructuralist theories.

Finally, in chapters four and five of the book, Franks uses the ethical framework developed in chapters two and three in order to analyse an exceptionally wide range of anarchist organisational forms and tactics. In both of these closing chapters the sheer volume of research material effectively synthesised is highly impressive, as is the thoughtful manner in which Franks consistently links anarchist practice and theory.

There are aspects of the work that might have been further refined or developed. First, I found the two-part structure of the bibliography somewhat confusing. Part one, entitled “Primary Sources”, is restricted to works written from an avowedly anarchist or anti-state communist perspective, while part two, entitled “Secondary Texts”, is devoted to “commentaries (which may still be compatible with anarchism but were not authorially positioned or generally viewed as promoting anarchism) or texts explicitly espousing a competing viewpoint.” In order to find a referenced work, I therefore had to think which category it was likely to fall into. In many cases, I found myself questioning the author’s judgements. Why, for example, is Stirner placed in the first category, while April Carter, Peter Marshall, George Woodcock, and Franks himself are assigned to the second? And what purposes might the categories serve other than potentially sectarian ones?

Second, the book makes a plausible case for the compatibility of certain features of “postanarchism” and contemporary class struggle anarchism, but it does so without exploring possible tensions between the two. In addition, this aspect of the book’s analysis is based primarily on a reading of Todd May’s work. It would be interesting to know whether a broader treatment of postanarchism would yield different conclusions.

Third, the text fails to do justice to the non-violent anarchist position, and in fact consistently refers to it in a somewhat mocking and dismissive tone as an entirely middle-class, intellectual, individualistic, passive, liberal, and Christian phenomenon. Quite apart from the contradictions between some of these adjectives, Franks’s account overlooks the distinguished libertarian and anarchist traditions of radically democratic and revolutionary non-violent resistance. In this regard I recommend George Lakey’s excellent Powerful Peacemaking: A Strategy for a Living Revolution (New Society Publishers, 1987), which in its first edition exercised a profound influence on the anarchist and feminist-inspired non-violent direct action movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, at a more philosophical level Rebel Alliances does not adequately address the argument made by those who subscribe to non-violent methods that violent means compromise the goal of a non-violent anarchist society. Franks replies that creating non-hierarchical associations may involve violently breaking authoritarian relations, but isn’t this an example of precisely the sort of ends-based, instrumentalist logic that he elsewhere consistently rejects? And at what point will the violence stop if revolution is no longer conceived in Leninist fashion as a millennial, time-bounded event?

Fourth, Franks adopts uncritically the elder Murray Bookchin’s distinction between social anarchism and lifestyle anarchism, and then correlates it approvingly with his own distinction between class struggle anarchism and liberal anarchism. This theoretical move is problematic on a number of grounds, most fundamentally because it potentially promotes the sort of sectarian squabbling that has long marred and sapped the strength of the Marxist revolutionary tradition. To his credit, Franks takes great pains throughout Rebel Alliances to steer clear of unreflective sectarian positions. But when he refers to leading historians of the anarchist tradition such as James Joll, George Woodcock and Peter Marshall as “critics of anarchism”, and conflates individualism tout court with the rational egoistic forms it frequently assumes under capitalism, one feels that he has strayed onto the terrain of ideological dogmatism.

These, however, are marginal criticisms of a book that is by any reasonable measure a major scholarly accomplishment. At a time of widespread, unreflective criticism of the very idea of class struggle, Franks has back-footed the critics with a fresh and largely compelling account of British class struggle anarchism characterised by enormous intellectual integrity. This book deserves to be read by all those with an interest in contemporary anarchism, whether of the class struggle variety or otherwise.

This review originally appeared in Anarchist Studies Vol 16, 2