Many anarchists are not taken (sufficient) account of:

There are so many anarchists of that period whose many ideas and intuitions often anticipated some of the postmodern developments. For this, one doesn't even have to go to Stirner, or to Nietzsche (insofar as he had anarchist tendencies).

What about Emma Goldman? She was by no means an outlier in the anarchist movement, insofar as her involvement and influence was concerned.

And Rudolf Rocker, who wrote that anarchism is not the final goal because there is simply “no such thing as a final goal”; and that anarchism is not some perfect “Utopia” and is “no patent solution for all human problems”, and that “on principle [anarchism] rejects all absolute schemes and concepts”?

And Landauer whom I earlier quoted?

And Renzo Novatore who, like Goldman, was also influenced by Nietzsche and Stirner, and wrote, for example, that “anarchy is not a social form, but a method of individuation”?

One can go on...

But one doesn't even have to go to all these thinkers who, to some extent, might be seen as outliers in terms of the radicalness of their ideas and the affinity of their ideas to post-structutalism/postmodernism.

One can find many such things even in Kropotkin and Bakunin, who supposedly represent the "central figures" of "classical anarchism" (even this notion is wrong).

I focus a bit more on Kropotkin (and Bakunin) here, since the two of them are often the main targets of postanarchist distortions; but what I say here generally applies to other anarchists as well...

(And since I've mentioned a particular quote from Novatore, I'd like to add that Malatesta also wrote that “one must consider anarchy above all as a method.”)

This is not to say that postanarchism has nothing to offer, or that it's all bogus, but given this commonplace misrepresentation by postanarchists like Newman, I think some skepticism, some caution is warranted regarding their presentation of "classical" anarchism.


Examining Kropotkin some more:

One of the things Foucault is best known for is his critique of asylums as prisons. And we have here Kropotkin, seventy years earlier, arguing the same:

[M]ost of those who are kept now in jails, or put to death, are merely people in need of the most careful fraternal treatment. I do not mean, of course, that we ought to substitute lunatic asylums for prisons. Far be it from me to entertain this abhorrent idea. Lunatic asylums are nothing else but prisons; and those whom we keep in prisons are not lunatics, nor even people approaching the sad boundary of the borderland where man loses control over his actions. Far be from me the idea which is sometimes brought forward as to maintaining prisons by placing them under pedagogists and medical men. What most of those who are now sent to jail are in need of is merely a fraternal help from those who surround them, to aid them in developing more and more the higher instincts of human nature which have been checked in their growth either by some bodily disease—anemia of the brain, disease of the heart, the liver, or the stomach—or, still more, by the abominable conditions under which thousands and thousands of children grow up, and millions of adults are living, in what we call our centres of civilization. But these higher faculties cannot be exercised when man is deprived of liberty, of the free guidance of his actions, of the multifarious influences of the human world.

Kropotkin further writes:

There was a time when lunatics, considered as possessed by the devil, were treated in the most abominable manner. Chained in stalls like animals, they were dreaded even by their keepers. To break their chains, to set them free, would have been considered then as a folly. But a man came—Pinel—who dared to take off their chains, and to offer them brotherly words, brotherly treatment. And those who were looked upon as ready to devour the human being who dared to approach them, gathered round their liberator, and proved that he was right in his belief in the best features of human nature, even in those whose intelligence was darkened by disease. From that time the cause of humanity was won. The lunatic was no longer treated like a wild beast. Men recognized in him a brother.

The chains disappeared, but asylums—another name for prisons—remained, and within their walls a system as bad as that of the chains grew up by-and-by. But then the peasants of a Belgian village, moved by their simple good sense and kindness of heart, showed the way towards a new departure which learned students of mental disease did not perceive. They set the lunatics quite free. They took them into their families, offered them a bed in their poor houses, a chair at their plain tables, a place in their ranks to cultivate the soil, a place in their dancing-parties. And the fame spread wide of “miraculous cures” effected by the saint to whose name the church of Gheel was consecrated. The remedy applied by the peasants was so plain, so old—it was liberty—that the learned people preferred to trace the result to Divine influences instead of taking things as they were. But there was no lack of honest and good-hearted men who understood the force of the treatment invented by the Gheel peasants, advocated it, and gave all their energies to overcome the inertia of mind, the cowardice, and the indifference of their surroundings.

Liberty and fraternal care have proved the best cure on our side of the above-mentioned wide borderland “between insanity and crime.” They will prove also the best cure on the other boundary of the same borderland. Progress is in that direction. All that tends that way will bring us nearer to the solution of the great question which has not ceased to preoccupy human societies since the remotest antiquity, and which cannot be solved by prisons.

Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons

(It might be said that Kropotkin was being uncritical of Pinel and of his role in the development of psychiatry etc; but the rest of the passage shows that Kropotkin's ideas here are radically different from those of the supporters of psychiatry; and it may be noted that Pinel was only mentioned in passing… also, this book wasn't a study on Pinel.)


And although it's only a brief remark and made in passing, one may note that Kropotkin also compared the kindergarten to a prison:

“…the Kindergarten…has often become a small prison for the little ones” where “teachers often make of it a kind of barrack in which each movement of the child is regulated beforehand.”

Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops

Anarchists and "power":

Anarchists often did use "power" in a negative sense but it was contextual, and as I said, one couldn't expect that they'd engage in analysis of each word in such elaborate ways...

But just as the word "power" (or any other word) is used in various ways colloquially, they've also used it in different ways at different times: negatively, but also positively.

It's notable that even Nietzsche, who theorized the Will To Power (der Wille zur Macht) — who indeed also had a very significant influence on post-structutalist, postmodernist thought — would write, in as late a work as the Twilight of the Idols, that “power makes (one) stupid” („die Macht verdummt“)
(We might want to add, for our "post"-anarchists, that this was said in the context of political power, lest they—as usual—read it out of context and proclaim that Nietzsche was a Manichean essentialist who hated power)

So I don't think we should focus externally and superficially only on the words...

As far as I can tell, speaking of most of the prominent anarchists, they didn't represent ressentiment etc as some postanarchists have accused them of... nor did they have a simplistic, dogmatic view of morality, and nor did they hate power as an external evil that corrupts inherently good humans...

It might help our post-structuralist anarchists to use a little bit more of post-structuralism in analyzing the usage of words (such as "power") by anarchists, just as they do in other cases... ;)

An example:

One of the quotes commonly used by our "post"-anarchist post-distorters is this:

In proportion as the socialists become a power in the present bourgeois society and State, their Socialism must die out

It is from Kropotkin's Modern Science and Anarchism. Let's see some more quotes from the same work:

As Socialism in general, Anarchism was born among the people; and it will continue to be full of life and creative power only as long as it remains a thing of the people.

Anarchism is obviously the representative of the first tendency — that is, of the creative, constructive power of the people themselves, which aimed at developing institutions of common law in order to protect them from the power-seeking minority. By means of the same popular creative power and constructive activity, based upon modern science and technics, Anarchism tries now as well to develop institutions which would insure a free evolution of society. In this sense, therefore, Anarchists and Governmentalists have existed through all historic times.

(Added emphasis lest our post-anarchists miss it like they miss context)

Speaking of context, this is the whole paragraph from which the first quote is taken:

Looking upon the problems of the revolution in this light, Anarchism, obviously, cannot take a sympathetic attitude toward the programme which aims at “the conquest of power in present society” — la conquête des pouvoirs as it is expressed in France. We know that by peaceful, parliamentary means, in the present State such a conquest as this is impossible. In proportion as the socialists become a power in the present bourgeois society and State, their Socialism must die out; otherwise the middle classes, which are much more powerful both intellectually and numerically than is admitted in the socialist press, will not recognize them as their rulers. And we know also that, were a revolution to give France or England or Germany a socialist government, the respective government would be absolutely powerless without the activity of the people themselves, and that, necessarily, it would soon begin to act fatally as a bridle upon the revolution.

I think it is pretty clear that the term "power" is used in a specific sense, namely an authoritarian one, a hierarchical one.

One point I'd like to note is that many of the texts of Kropotkin and Bakunin were originally in Russian (or French, some of them)... (likewise, Malatesta's were in Italian, etc etc). Without knowing those languages, and without analyzing the etymology and usage of those words, and the context they're used in, it's hard to comment on their conception of the concept of power solely based on these usages.

And indeed, the book quoted from earlier, Modern Science and Anarchism, was originally in Russian. And a comrade from Russia brought this to my attention:

In the original "Looking upon the problems of the revolution in this light, Anarchism, obviously, cannot take a sympathetic attitude toward the programme which aims at “the conquest of power in present society”" is "Очевидно, что при таком понимании задач социальной революции анархизм не может чувствовать симпатии к программе, которая ставит себе цель «завоевание власти в современном государстве»."

Kropotkin uses the word власть which means political power, political authority and can mean the government in general.

And given that Kropotkin used a French phrase in the above quote, one may also note that the word pouvoir, as a noun, can mean "authority" or "power" in the authoritarian sense.
And in general, the word 'conquest' is used to refer to authoritarian means and the whole thing is rarely if ever used in a libertarian sense.

So it's fairly clear, I think, that a certain specific sense of power is meant here rather than a reference to any kind of power whatever; I don't think it amounts to seeing the very concept of power as essentially evil. It's also clear from the other usages of the term 'power' in the same work (at least judging from the English translation).

The rant continues:

But there is no doubt that our post-anarchists, being able post-salespersons, would ridiculously cherry pick quotes, out of context, to make their distorted claims...

A rich, vast, diverse, lively movement and theory is narrowly reduced to a dead monolith; let alone the whole multiplicity of anarchist thinkers and writers, even the supposed "central figures" of (this "classical") anarchism are terribly misrepresented.

Precisely where you'd think they'd distinguish themselves, they however, unfortunately, turn out to be covered in prejudice.
Instead of critically analyzing the language, they study it on the most surface level and misrepresent even that; supposing that they even read any significant amount of relevant literature.

Now, maybe, one more quote from Kropotkin — from The Conquest of Bread:

A revolution is more than the destruction of a political system. It implies the awakening of human intelligence…. It is a revolution in the minds of men, more than in their institutions.

New anarchism is rightly associated with inventive and distinctive literatures and practices. Post-anarchism has similarly generated important and insightful critiques. But the lenses that leading writers in these currents have used to examine Kropotkin are woefully distorting. While Kropotkin’s place in the classical tradition is said to be representative rather than exhaustive, the mismatch between his political thought and the classical denoscriptor raises questions about its general value: what remains of classical anarchism if one of its chief exponents turns out to be something other than the model allows? Post-anarchist analysis of historical anarchism has been subject to a number of important critiques. Yet as Nathan Jun notes, the ‘helpful caricature of anarchism’ is ‘used again and again to play up the alleged novelty of postmodernism’ and the classical model survives largely intact.…

The myth of classical anarchism similarly warps and distorts analysis of historical thought and the pigeonholing of generations of anarchists by the invention of this tradition is a barrier to the examination of anarchist political ideas. The tendency towards the ideological framing of Kropotkin’s political thought is similarly disfiguring.

— Ruth Kinna, Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition (p. 200)

Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition (by Ruth Kinna)

A brief consideration of Bakunin:

Below is a quote from Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State. (As a side note, I'd add that many anarchists, including myself, are critical of this kind of usage of the word 'authority' in anarchist discourse, as it tends to lead to unnecessary confusion.) Now, this quote is usually only seen as referring to the concept of 'authority' and as a clarification of what the word means (for anarchists)... however, I'd like to point to an interesting idea: if we, in the place of 'authority', substitute the word 'power', this quote would seem, even if in a limited and embryonic form, as if it's an anticipation of the postmodernist conception of power.

Consequently, no external legislation and no authority—one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themselves.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.

If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed upon me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give—such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

This same reason forbids me, then, to recognize a fixed, constant, and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life.

Anyway, here is another quote from Bakunin—as quoted by Errico Malatesta in his pamphlet Anarchy—which doesn't require much speculation, one that's more straightforward:

To whoever might claim that action so organised would be an assault on the freedom of the masses, an attempt to create a new authoritarian power, we would reply that he is nothing but a sophist and a fool. So much the worse for those who ignore the natural and social law of human solidarity, to the point of imagining that an absolute mutual independence of individuals and of the masses is something possible, or at least desirable. To wish it means to want the destruction of society, for the whole of social life is no other than this unceasing mutual dependence of individuals and masses. All individuals, even the most intelligent and the strongest, indeed above all the intelligent and strong, each at every moment in his life is at the same time its producer and its product. The very freedom of each individual is no other than the resultant, continually reproduced, of this mass of material, intellectual and moral influences exerted on him by all who surround him, by the society in the midst of which he is born, develops, and dies. To want to escape from this influence in the name of a transcendental, divine, freedom that is absolutely egoistic and sufficient unto itself, is the tendency of non-being. This much vaunted independence of the idealists and metaphysicians, and individual freedom thus conceived, are therefore nothingness.

In nature, as in human society, which is no other than this same nature, all that lives, only lives on the supreme condition of intervening in the most positive manner, and as powerfully as its nature allows, in the lives of others. The abolition of this mutual influence would be death. And when we vindicate the freedom of the masses, we are by no means suggesting the abolition of any of the natural influences that individuals or groups of individuals exert on them; what we want is the abolition of influences which are artificial, privileged, legal, official.

Anarchism, essentialism:

The article Bakunin, Class and Post-Anarchism, although probably a bit too critical of postmodernism (and of Stirner), has some interesting points on Bakunin's ideas in connection with the subject at hand.

Going further, here is one more quote from Bakunin's God and the State, a quote that I'm afraid doesn't support the notion that Bakunin believed in the essential goodness of humans (and it's a quote that is, arguably, critical of certain essentialist/universal concepts):

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world. How do [the Idealists] get over this? Why, they call one divine and the other bestial, representing divinity and animality as two poles, between which they place humanity. They either will not or cannot understand that these three terms are really but one, and that to separate them is to destroy them.

And Kropotkin wrote, for example:

When we ask for the abolition of the State and its organs we are always told that we dream of a society composed of men better than they are in reality. But no; a thousand times, no. All we ask is that men should not be made worse than they are, by such institutions!

The following quote from Bakunin might be interpreted as a naive essentialism etc... but it seems to me that it contains a (perhaps crude) conception of the will to power, expressed in different terms.

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

And as Jesse Cohn notes:

[Anarchist] theorists do not regard anarchy as something merely spontaneous, natural, biological, given, but as something that had to be evoked, elicited, created, made from the materials of history and biology. What “every individual inherits at birth,” according to Bakunin, is “not ideas and innate sentiments, as the idealists claim, but only the capacity to feel, to will, to think, and to speak”—a set of “rudimentary faculties without any content”; this content must be supplied by the social milieu…. Nature is a set of potentials, not a telos; social construction is the determining factor. In this sense, classical anarchist theory goes beyond the binary opposition of essentialism/non-essentialism.

Conclusion (finally!):

The point of this discourse is not to depict "classical anarchism" as post-modernist, since postmodernist/poststructuralist philosophy is not the "ultimate standard" of philosophy against which all thoughts and philosophies should be measured (it'd be a great irony to say otherwise); and much less to present anarchism/anarchists as being immune to criticism... but rather to show both that many postmodernist insights, that are often presented to us as novel, can be found in anarchist writings of the classical period; and that the post-anarchist representation of anarchism is largely a caricature, lacking any deep understanding of anarchist movement and theory, and perhaps coming from little more than post-salesmanship...

(Once again, it is not that anarchists—or any thinkers, any persons—of any period don't have to be criticized or critically viewed... rather, this whole discourse is only meant to point out—at some length—that postanarchist representations/critiques of "classical anarchism/anarchists" have been to a very significant extent misleading and shallow)

As Allan Antliff notes in the beginning of their essay Anarchy, Power, and Poststructuralism:

My purpose is not to further [Todd] May’s positioning of anarchism as poststructuralist. Rather, I am interested in the claim that “classical” anarchism — and by extension, contemporary anarchism — founds its politics on a flawed conception of power and its relationship to society. Based on this premise, May has urged anarchist-oriented theorists to press on without looking back — and some, notably Lewis Call and Saul Newman, have done just that.

(This short essay by Antliff has some further interesting points and quotes which I have not included here, so it's worth checking out...)

And I end this discourse with Antliff's concluding remarks:

To conclude, the history of the Russian Revolution makes abundantly clear that “classical” anarchism does have a positive theory of power. Not only that, it offers an alternative ground for theorizing the social conditions of freedom and a critical understanding of power and liberation as perpetually co-mingling with and inscribed by a process of self-interrogation and self-overcoming that is pluralistic, individualist, materialist, and social. Finally, it has the advantage of an historical record: this theory has been put into practice, sometimes on a mass scale.

Arguably, then, contemporary radicals would do better marshaling classical anarchism to interrogate poststructuralism, rather than the other way around. As it stands, the continual rehashing of May’s spurious characterizations in a bid to theorize “beyond” anarchism has merely set up a false God adjective, poststructuralism, at the price of silencing the ostensive subject.

...while adding that, if this rant sounded a bit too polemical, that was partly satirical... but overall light-hearted ❤️

(and finally, posting this rant on Christmas is 100% a coincidence)

“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols (§1. 26)

„Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein.“

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Affinities; Bk. II, Ch. 5)

“Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has so often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human living conditions, which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. The worst crime of any type of state is just that it always tries to force the rich diversity of social life into definite forms and adjust it to one particular form, which allows for no wider outlook and regards the previously exciting status as finished. The stronger its supporters feel themselves, the more completely they succeed in bringing every field of social life into their service, the more crippling is their influence on the operation of all creative cultural forces, the more unwholesomely does it affect the intellectual and social development of any particular epoch.”

— Rudolf Rocker,
Anarcho-Syndicalism (chapter 1)

“Anarchism recognises only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is therefore not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account. The less this natural development of man is influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more will it become the measure of the society in which it has grown.”

— Rudolf Rocker,
Anarcho-Syndicalism (chapter 1)

Mutual influences of ideas and ideologies

“A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of ‘virtue,’ as Kant would have it, is pernicious. ‘Virtue,’ ‘duty,’ ‘good for its own sake,’ goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity – these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Königsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every ‘impersonal’ duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction. – To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life!… The theological instinct alone took it under protection! – An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection.… What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure – as a mere automaton of ‘duty’? That is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy.… Kant became an idiot. – And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopher – still passes today!… I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans.… Didn’t Kant see in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn’t he ask himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, ‘the tendency of mankind toward the good’ could be explained, once and for all time? Kant’s answer: ‘That is revolution.’ Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German décadence as a philosophy – that is Kant!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (11)

Bourgeois individualism as an attempt to prevent solidarity

“Those feminists who weep crocodile tears over ‘exploited’ sex workers are doing nothing new. In the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class women in New York threatened to keep vigil outside brothels and to publish clients’ names. They attacked low wages as a cause of prostitution and advocated better employment opportunities for women (perhaps in domestic service, where they might provide free sexual favours to the men of the house, who could then stop frittering away the family wealth in houses of ill-repute). In England in 1858 the Female Mission on the Fallen distributed tracts on the streets at night and opened rescue homes. The latest campaigns in this vein target sex tourism and mail-order brides. The poverty of third-world women was never of prime feminist concern until they became afraid that too many ‘eligible’ western men would be wrested from their grasp. The feminist who seeks a mate in lonely-hearts columns has to maintain the self-deception that her aims are all to do with romance and nothing to do with financial gain.”

— Claudia, Fear of Pornography
(from Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism)