The Journal of Peasant Studies
ISSN: 0306-6150 (Print) 1743-9361 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20
Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism:
towards a more (state-)critical ‘critical agrarian
studies’
Antonio Roman-Alcalá
To cite this article: Antonio Roman-Alcalá (2020): Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism:
towards a more (state-)critical ‘critical agrarian studies’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI:
10.1080/03066150.2020.1755840
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1755840
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa
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Published online: 20 May 2020.
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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1755840
FORUM ON AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM
AND THE RURAL WORLD
Agrarian anarchism and authoritarian populism: towards a
more (state-)critical ‘critical agrarian studies’*
Antonio Roman-Alcalá
International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper applies an anarchist lens to agrarian politics, seeking to Anarchism; authoritarian
expand and enhance inquiry in critical agrarian studies. populism; critical agrarian
Anarchism’s relevance to agrarian processes is found in three studies; state theory; social
movements; populism;
general areas: (1) explicitly anarchist movements, both historical
United States of America;
and contemporary; (2) theories that emerge from and shape these moral economy
movements; and (3) implicit anarchism found in values, ethics,
everyday practices, and in forms of social organization – or
‘anarchistic’ elements of human social life. Insights from
anarchism are then applied to the problematique of the
contemporary rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ and its relation to
rural people and agrarian processes, focusing on the United
States. Looking via an anarchist lens at this case foregrounds the
state powers and logics that underpin authoritarian populist
political projects but are created and reproduced by varying
political actors; emphasizes the complex political identities of non-
elite people, and the ways these can be directed towards either
emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on resentments
towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived
moral economies; and indicates the strategic need to prioritize
ideological development among diverse peoples, in ways that
provide for material needs and bolster lived moral economies. The
paper concludes with implications for the theory and practice of
emancipatory politics.
Introduction
For the peasant, the state is a negative quantity, an evil, to be replaced in short shrift by their
own “homemade” social order. That order, they believe, can run without the state, hence, pea-
sants in rebellion are natural anarchists. – Eric Wolf in Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century
(1969, 295)
CONTACT Antonio Roman-Alcalá antidogmatist@gmail.com International Institute of Social Studies, P.O. Box
29776, The Hague, 2502 LT, Netherlands
*Editorial Note: This paper is part of the ‘JPS Forum on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, framed and introduced
by Ian Scoones and colleagues in their joint paper, ‘Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism’,
published in JPS in January 2018. The contributions to this forum will be published separately and in clusters in 2018
and 2019. This forum is one of the initial outcomes of the activities of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI,
www.iss.nl/erpi).
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
Throughout the rural world, capitalist ‘economic-development’ continues to exploit human
and nonhuman resources, with the support of subnational, national, and international gov-
ernments. Large-scale dams and ‘green’ infrastructures, plantation monocultures, urbaniz-
ation, mining, and fossil fuel-seeking continue to reproduce the marginal status of rural
people. Meanwhile, partially in reaction to this marginalization, electorates have turned
to a variety of scapegoating nationalisms, bolstering the electoral success of certain neo-
’authoritarian populists’, like Trump, Modi, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and Duterte (see this jour-
nal’s recent forum on authoritarian populism). Rightwing achievement of state power has
emphasized the seemingly central role of state control in any emancipatory political
project. Further emphasizing that salience is the surging threat of climate change to econ-
omic (re)production and societal stability. A standard assumption is that climate change
could only be meaningfully addressed via a strong state (Wainwright and Mann 2013);
indeed, that humanity’s survival depends on the state – and who controls it.
In this paper, I make the claim that anarchism continues to be relevant to these issues,
and to critical agrarian studies (CAS), even if both proponents and detractors of anarchism
commonly understand anarchism as antithetical to any form of state. During the height of
anarchist movement activity, it was most often self-described as ‘libertarian socialism’, dis-
tinguishing it from other socialisms of the time that believed it necessary to centralize
coercive power in the course of making social change. When looked at in this way, anar-
chism seems ill suited to support sober assessment of current conditions in order to make
positive change: how could anarchism aid emancipatory movements if those movements
‘must’ engage the state? Furthermore, what can anarchism offer those particularly inter-
ested in the agrarian and rural aspects of current conditions?
Regarding the latter question, in anarchism we see a parallel to the mistaken belief
(found in some of the more determinist Marxist agrarian studies, committed to a ‘historical
materialist’ science claimed to have predictive powers) that the peasantry would inevitably
disappear: like the peasantry, anarchism has never died the death it was supposed to. It
survives in existing social movements applying the label in action, in political theories
that remain in circulation due to such movements, and (arguably) in social practices
that reflect and produce anarchist ethos/ethics. Overtly anarchist movements continue
to be disparaged, misunderstood, and attacked by almost every other political force in
society – yet they continue to exist. Anarchism remains relevant in theory and practice
to processes of human social organization, broadly, and to attempts to radically make
make society. Anarchism’s relevance, in short, is found at three levels: as movements, the-
ories, and in anarchistic behaviors.
Few researchers commonly leverage the above lenses on questions of rural agrarian
change, the politics of development, or (more specifically) the contemporary moment
of regressive authoritarian populist politics. Some notable exceptions exist upon which
this works seeks to build (Scott 2012; Wald 2015; Ashwood 2018a; Dunlap and Jakobsen
2020), but the anarchist lens is surely underutilized in CAS. This journal, for example,
returns only 18 responses when searching for the keyword ‘anarchism’ (76 for
‘anarchy’), compared with 263 for ‘Marxism’ (checked 25 February 2020). This is largely
representative of Leftish critical social science as a whole, though some journals are
expressly oriented to anarchist theory (e.g. Anarchist Studies) and others do exhibit
greater inclusion (e.g. ACME, Antipode and Journal of Political Ecology). These trends may
reflect the fact that anarchists reject the University-focused hierarchy of knowledge and
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 3
have developed theory outside academia largely through (often anonymous) direct action;
anarchist theory is less ‘great thinker’-oriented and relies less on academic validation for its
self-worth. In sum, anarchism remains relevant to political theory and practice, even if it
appears marginal in academia and politics at large (Gordon 2008).
In the remainder of the introduction, I outline a few examples of the movements, the-
ories/values, and anarchistic elements of anarchism, before detailing each in its own
section in order to continue making the case for anarchist critical agrarian studies. After
describing what these three lenses offer CAS, I apply them to the case of authoritarian
populism in the United States (US). Though I pull in geographically diverse examples to
make the case for anarchist CAS, I often return to my focus of the US, in order to
provide continuity and focus in the application of the lens to a single case. I conclude
with some reflections on what an anarchist lens offers a view of contemporary agrarian
movement organizing in the US.
Movements, theories/values, and anarchistic elements
The hegemonic quantitative logic of political analysis – which anarchism rejects – makes it
seem that overt anarchist movements have been weak, small, and ineffectual in compari-
son with right-wing and more mainstream left sectors (in parliamentary politics). Histori-
cally, as Carter (1971, 105) and others have reminded, anarchism can claim no definitive
victories. Its ‘near misses’ are, however, quite important to world history: anarchism and
anarchists played key roles in nineteenth-twentieth century development of socialism
and socialist movements, e.g. in the Spanish Revolution (Gomez Casas 1986; Evans
2020); the Mexican Revolution (Wolf 1969); or in the contribution of Nestor Mahkno’s
anarcho-peasant militias to the Ukrainian and Russian Revolutions (Wolf 1969; Palij
1976). Perhaps most crucially, anarchist ideas have spread from overtly anarchist move-
ments to other modern era movements.1 Anarchism’s influence has extended even to
future non-anarchist state leadership, as in Dirlik’s (1991, 294–297) study of early twentieth
century Chinese anarchist revolutionaries whose ‘work-study’ programs were attended by
future Chinese state leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
Because common understanding is that anarchism has seen little success in formal poli-
tics, it is often a surprise to left activists and scholars that anarchism was a dominant,
ascendant portion of revolutionary left movements at the turn of the twentieth
century.2 This prevalence was largely due to anarchism’s ideas and social forms spreading
via illegalist, insurrectionary networks and ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ unions, particularly the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in the US in 1905 (van der Walt 2016;
Cole, Struthers, and Zimmer 2018). While anarchism and syndicalism do not completely
or simply overlap, anarcho-syndicalism is more accurately traced to anarchist than other
socialist sectors (McKay 2012). Eventually suppressed and largely dismantled by state
and private forces, especially during the period leading up to and through World War I,
1
See Epstein (1993), Cornell (2016) for studies referencing anarchist influence on US social movements.
2
For historical references, see: Graham (2005, 2009, 2012), Hirsch and van der Walt (2010), Schmidt (2013), Marshall (2010),
Cappelletti (2018), Maxwell and Craib (2015), Porter (2011), Zaragoza Rovira (1996), Ramos, Rodrigues, and Samis (2003),
CILEP (2011), Páez (1986), Hart (1978), Hirsch (2010), Shaffer (2000, 2013), Quail (2019), Berry (2009), Pernicone (1993), de
Góes (2017), Voline (2019), Mbah and Igariwey (2001), van der Walt (2011, 2016), Dirlik (1991), Hwang (2017), Crump
(1993), Cornell (2016).
4 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
these movements spread over the globe including to Latin America, Europe, Asia, North
America, and to a lesser degree Africa. Countries where nineteenth and twentieth
century anarchist movements existed include: Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Jamaica,
England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland,
Ukraine, Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa, India, China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Aus-
tralia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.
Ultimately, it is the ideas (‘theories’) developed through these struggles that have
shaped and continue to shape social life and political change. These ideas most often
were articulated by active movement organizers, who were also theorizers. Anarchist
ideas have in different times and places resulted in different kinds of effects – impacts
not always deep, or positive. But in general, CAS has ignored or forgotten canonical anar-
chist theory, and even less has it addressed recent anarchist theory. In the next section, I
outline elements of anarchist theory, describing its relevance to contemporary rural poli-
tics and overlaps with other CAS traditions. Though overtly anarchist movements from the
past have largely been forgotten, and in almost all cases the movements have reduced in
numbers and influence, and overt anarchist movements today are less massive than in
their heyday, anarchist movements still exist (including in less visible, underground and
informal forms). Addressing historical and contemporary manifestations of overtly anar-
chist social organization is the focus of section three.
CAS is also better off taking a more decolonial approach to rural politics, and instead of
seeking to find overt Anarchism outside of European and settler-colonial contexts, looking
for its interconnections with freedom struggles elsewhere, as in James Scott’s discussions
(2009) of anarchistic rural peoples in Southeast Asia or Maia Ramnath’s (2011) study of
India in Decolonizing Anarchism. Ramnath (2011, 7) distinguishes between ‘small a anar-
chism’ and the Western (or ‘Capital-A’) Anarchist tradition:
with a small a the word anarchism implies a set of assumptions and principles, a recurrent ten-
dency or orientation–with the stress on movement in a direction, not a perfected condition–
toward more dispersed and less concentrated power; less top-down hierarchy and more self-
determination through bottom-up participation; liberty and equality seen as directly rather
than inversely proportional; the nurturance of individuality and diversity within a matrix of
interconnectivity, mutuality, and accountability; and an expansive recognition of the various
forms that power relations can take, and correspondingly, the various dimensions of emanci-
pation. This tendency, when it becomes conscious, motivates people to oppose or subvert the
structures that generate or sustain inequity, unfreedom, and injustice, and to promote or
prefigure these structures that generate and sustain equity, freedom, and justice.
Africa may of all continents lack substantial anarchist historical presence, but as African acti-
vists have argued (Mbah and Igariwey 2001) anarchist values are reflected in its many pre-
colonial traditions (some of which survive today). If we take Wolf’s (1969) analysis of anar-
chistic resonances in peasantries seriously, the result is that CAS must consider anarchism
as part of the CAS tool set. Addressing these more anarchistic elements of social organiz-
ation in various contexts and their relation to agrarian change is the focus of section four.
Anarchist theory
An anarchist objection to Marxism was that Marxism, with its preoccupation with the proletar-
iat, had a blind spot towards the peasantry and ignored eighty percent of the world’s
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 5
population. – Arif Dirlik (1991, 238, referring to the early twentieth century context, when pea-
santries formed the bulk of human populations)
I begin by focusing on anarchist theory, since theory forms the baseline for engaging
with ‘the literature’ in CAS. Table 1 gives an overview of theoretical positions among
five CAS lenses: orthodox and agrarian Marxism, agrarian populism, social and individu-
alist anarchism. Anarchist theory was and is historically embedded in social movement
experiences. Because of this, anarchism is weighted by its movement history – e.g. lega-
cies of European ideologies and Eurocentric thinking – but it is also not static, being
responsive to conditions and capacious in its internal diversity. Anarchist theory thus
is best treated as open-ended and not quite fully definable. Yet in contrast to carica-
tures of it, anarchism is not bereft of theory. While male and European dominated
(par for the nineteenth century course), its classical canon offers plenty to parse. The
French philosophers Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles
Fourier, and Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen formed the earlier proto-anarchists,
while Errico Malatesta, Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Élisée Reclus, Emma
Goldman, Max Stirner, Ricardo Flores Magón, Lucy Parsons, Alexander Herzen, Leo
Tolstoy, Nestor Mahkno and Rudolf Rocker are some of the more well-known from anar-
chism’s heyday. Many less-known activist-agitators also have provided relevant theory
in historical writings. Considering the breadth of anarchist thinking and positions,
and these being diverse by nature, an essay like this can offer only a necessarily selec-
tive and truncated treatment of anarchist theory, in its barest of outlines. Accordingly,
this essay introduces merely one of many potential perspectives on anarchist theory.
Importantly, there exists a main division within anarchism between individualist and
insurrectionary trends, and those sometimes described as ‘social’ anarchism. This
essay focuses on the latter largely due to my own preferences and background; still,
individualist anarchism should also be appreciated in CAS, especially given its particular
influence on eco-anarchist and anti-civilizationist currents in environmentalist struggles
worldwide (GA 2012; Seaweed 2013; Pellow 2014; Loadenthal 2017).
Anarchist theory flourished during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
evolving and defining itself in dialogue and disagreement with other threads of revolu-
tionary and left social thought, most notably Marxism (see Prichard et al. 2017). Anar-
chism shares with Marxism a fundamental concern for revolutionary change, though
also like Marxism, it has developed more reformist aspects so as to fit with less revolu-
tionary circumstances over time. Anarchism’s theoretical relationship to Marxism is
complex, both enmeshed and antagonistic. If the birth of CAS may be traced back
to Marx’s Capital, written under the influence of (and in debates with) Proudhon,
and early Russian agrarian populists engaged with anarchist theories and sought
counsel from Marx on the role of peasants in revolution (Gamblin 1999; Shanin
2018), we can see how drawing hard lines between lineages in CAS serves little but
polemic value. Rather than continuing generations-long polemics, it seems preferable
to start with a normative appreciation of both traditions and the importance of
linking these in writing and action, as indicated in recent debates in geography and
sociology (el-Ojeili 2014, 462; Harvey 2017; Springer 2017). Still, I touch upon some
overlaps and divergences in CAS traditions, in order to better see what anarchism
specifically has to offer.
6
Table 1. *Note that for simplicity internal variations in theory, between theorists, or between theory and practice, have been necessarily downplayed.
Radical agrarian populism
CAS tradition → issue ↓ Orthodox marxism Heterodox/agrarian marxism (RAP) Social anarchism Individualist/insurrectionary anarchism
A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
Unit of inquiry and Economic class conflict Economic class conflict, w / Community, farm household Class, community, and individual Individual and its autonomously defined
intervention (workers/capitalists) intraclass nuances (depending on context) relations
Class and class - class as key to politics - Peasants as differentiated - alternative (non-capitalist) - manifold kinds of ‘class’ based in various - similar to social anarchism but more
differentiation - Peasants as petty already, intersecting market logics of peasant hierarchies critical of Marxist reduction of
bourgeois/ w race, gender, etc class - differences within classes are assumed individuals to members of
commodity - Differentiation happens - Chayanovian/demographic (and also opposed) economic classes
producers but not differentiation - no single class category given primacy
- capitalism causes mechanistically - classes formed via political but capitalism seen as structuring
inevitable action & self- social relations, as in Marxism
differentiation into identification - Differentiation not a key analytical
labor, middle - In practice, RAP movements metric, more concerned with
peasants, and bring different classes formation of class-in-opposition
capitalist farmers together to claim
common political project
class politics (including - Peasants as ‘sack of - Peasants as potential - ‘People of the land’ as - Enthusiasm for proletarians, but also - similar to social anarchism
revolutionary potential potatoes’ – need for revolutionaries progressive (if not peasants and ‘lumpenproletariat’ as - individualist and insurrectionary
of varying classes) class leadership from - recognition of semi- revolutionary) unitary revolutionaries tendencies also emphasize
vanguard proletarian realities class - Not class-reductionist; does not identify enemies ‘within’: critiquing both
- ‘enemy’ = capitalist class, leading to more - Anti-corporate, ostensibly class with political position (e.g. identification among activists with
including aspiring complex class anti-capitalist BUT accepts ‘class traitors’ from upper ‘Left’ social roles and the
middle & upper identities - Its anti-capitalism is relatively class backgrounds; e.g. theorist/ institutionalization of radical
peasant/land - ‘enemy’ = capitalist class; quiet on issues of activists Kropotkin, Bakunin) organizing as limiting prospects
holders, bourgeois (sometimes) state peasantry-based - Opposes any vanguard: any worthwhile for revolutionary change
state enablers capitalism movement is endogenous and
- Lenin and others came to - ‘enemy’ = capitalist class (as autonomous
see peasants as part outsider) and state - ‘enemy’ = capitalist class AND political
of rev. force in enablers and other elites
twentieth century
‘Community’ and the - Individuals seen primarily - Allows for intersectional - moral economies tie - The ‘libertarian’ side of anarchism - similar to social anarchism BUT
individual as members of positionalities (more communities together foregrounds the individual as unit - more so than social anarchist
economic classes attention to gender, - identities as ‘rural’ or ‘peasant’ of inquiry and intervention (as in tendencies, foregrounds the
- community is a near- e.g.) people define Marx’s ‘the free development of individual as unit of inquiry and
meaningless term, - economic class still a key community, including each is the condition of the free intervention
used by RAP to avoid category for analysis shared values like development of all’), but in social
(self) critique autonomy anarchism this is tempered with the
- analyzes communities via - relative lack of attention to understanding that people are only - more so skeptical of ‘community’, even
political economy + internal differentiation individuals-in-community, and ostensibly ‘radical’ ones, as
insights from - shares with anarchism a politically collective action is impositions on individuals
poststructural, preference for ‘the prioritized
ecological, feminist, grassroots’ as space for - equality and liberty not opposed as
anti-colonial traditions politics assumed in liberal & Marxist
traditions; ‘the individual and the
community are continually
negotiated categories’ (Springer
2017, 284)
- differs from liberal individualism in
emphasizing social solidarity and
opposing market relations
- collective action via mutual aid/solidarity
builds community moral economies
Capitalism/socialism and - Need capitalism to lead to - capitalism not a necessary - rhetorically in favor of - non-deterministic notions of ‘progress’ - does not emphasize ‘building new
relation to the state socialism ‘first step’ transition to socialism, (not linked to, and often anti-, world in the shell of the old’ so
- forced agricultural - Gramscian influence: often via developmental industrialization/productivity focus) much as destroying the old world
collectivization / attention to ‘political’ state - against wage labor, state sovereignty, and refusing to feed it
industrialization and ‘civil’ society - socialism must not threaten unjust hierarchies no matter under - ‘communization’ theory, oriented to
- state as essential vehicle - some appreciation for non- (collective?) rights to what name here-and-now lived zones of
for transition to party social land - no need for the state (as it exists) for autonomy
socialism: movements - in practice, state-focused (e.g. transition to socialism, little to no - no need for the state (as it exists) for
‘dictatorship of the - In practice, still assumes a Pink Tide) politics to engagement in state politics transition to socialism, no
proletariat’ (at least, state-based strategy achieve socialism via - socialism as a classless, moneyless, engagement in state politics
before ‘withering for transition to party politics, even if stateless society of egalitarian and - not interested in ‘socialism’, as it
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
away’) socialism rhetorically for autonomous communities broadly rejects totalizing ideas
- strongly influenced by autonomous imposed on anyone
Lenin and Leninist ‘communities’
revolutions
Relation to Antagonistic: materialism Accommodating to / RAP politics absorbed much of Recognizes the key role of discourses in Modern insurrectionary theory directly
poststructuralism’s above discourses; power influenced by (esp. via ‘post-development’ critique politics references postructuralist authors
emphasis on discourses resides in production and developments in political (Escobar) and definition of Poststructuralism as apt philosophy for
and dispersed forms of the state and must be ecology; see Dunlap and peasant as political project; anarchist politics (May 1994)
power wielded to ‘win’ Jakobsen 2020) RAP theorists not as overtly Gives preference to direct/material over
poststructural mediated politics (especially in
insurrectionary trends)
Power analysis: ‘social’ rather than
political focus
7
8 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
Positive and negative theory
Like Marxism, anarchism holds within its classical canon both theories about morally
objectionable conditions in human society (what I call ‘negative’ theories) and what
might be done to correct these (what I call ‘positive’ theories). The antagonistic elements
of anarchist action, largely rooted in negative theory, have sometimes been divorced from
its ‘prefigurative’ elements, rooted in positive theory, especially as proponents of the latter
have sought to distance themselves from anarchism’s violent history. Yet for many theor-
ists and activists, negative and positive are linked.
Western Anarchism’s negative theory starts with its anticapitalism, identifying capitalism
as an evil to be eradicated from human existence. Marx is still the standard bearer regarding
analyses of capitalism. Anarchists have offered economic theories, but these have more
often proposed economic solutions and alternatives (e.g. Knowles 2004), than deepened
or challenged Marx’s critique of capitalism. Alongside their shared critique of capitalism,
anarchism shares with Marxism an opposition to organized religion (which nineteenth
century theorists identified as co-constituting oppressive social conditions with capitalists
and states; see Bakunin 1970). Where anarchism’s negative theory differs from Marxism
(though perhaps not from Marx himself3), or moves beyond Marxism, is its deeper anti-
authoritarianism. Positioning a liberated society against all coercive human social relations,
anarchists considered states by definition built on coercion, and thus were inherently anti-
state. Rather than the vaguely defined ‘withering away of the state’ foretold in a (Marxist)
post-revolutionary period, anarchists have long argued against theories of change that
involve taking state power at any point, and have thus struggled against liberal and
Marxist tendencies to do so. They predict that entry into power will only serve to reproduce
power (CrimethInc 2017; Anarchopac 2019), and have in some cases called for the end of
‘the hegemony of hegemony’ (Day 2005) – seeking no part in coercive political projects
to construct totalizing power of any sort. They have insisted, instead, on a social revolution
beginning here and now, whose goal is the elimination, not adoption, of political power. On
the individualist-insurrectionary side, anarchists have even forgone any association with
‘the Left’, insisting that leftism reproduces a ‘reification and mediation’ of social revolt
that undermines principles of self-organization (McQuinn 2009).
The rejection of political/hegemonic thinking resonates with poststructuralist under-
standing of power and leads in a direction that sees and seeks to combat domination
in myriad forms. Poststructuralist analyses see power as ‘diffuse rather than concentrated,
embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and
constitute[ing] agents rather than being deployed by them (Gaventa 2003, 3)’. Such per-
spectives are found in Escobar’s (1995) pioneering work on (post)development, and influ-
ential CAS scholarship since, and have been argued as resonant with anarchism (May 1994;
Antliff and Hutchens 2007). A similar analysis underpins the ‘total liberation’ framework
3
Indeed, scholars including Marxists like Joel Wainwright (2017; drawing on Karatani 2005) and Terry Eagleton (1999, 55–
56) have noted that Marx exhibited anarchist sensibilities: ‘Marx’s final vision would thus seem somewhat anarchistic: that
of a cooperative commonwealth made up of what he calls “free associations” of workers, who would extend democracy
to the economic sphere while making a reality of it in the political one’. While Marx’s anarchism may be true theoretically
(as Thomas points out in Karl Marx and the Anarchists [1990, 2, 13–14, 21], Marx’s critiques of the state confuse readers
into thinking his disagreements with anarchists were merely tactical), anarchists tend to emphasize praxis over abstract
theory, and would likely dispute any argument placing Marx’s words against statism over his repeated actions to under-
mine anti-statist sections of the global socialist movement (see Eckhardt 2016).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 9
that Pellow (2014) describes based on his research with radical animal and earth liberation
activists. According to Pellow (2014, 18–19), total liberation comprises ‘an ethic of justice
and anti-oppression inclusive of humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems; anarchism;
anticapitalism; and an embrace of direct action tactics’. In practice, total liberation trends
address power as not simply about the state, but as actionable outside it, towards an ever-
enlarging circle of concern, by confronting for instance unequal dominance within move-
ments, anthropocentric speciesism, and the personal internalization of coercive insti-
tutions and practices (‘killing the cop in your head’).
The central contribution of anarchist positive theory is the fusion of means and ends. All
actions to bring about revolutionary change, by this theory, should prefigure ways of
human organization desired in a post-revolutionary world. This is based on a view of
human nature where human misbehaviors are at best the result of stifling structures of
power, or at worst ineradicable but able to be attenuated through social revolution. Con-
trary to strawman critiques, anarchists do not assume a perfect human nature, just as con-
temporary radical agrarian populists do not, contra Brass (2015), assume peasants as
bearing an inherent and positive nature. Consistency of means and ends contributes to
anarchism’s use and promotion of self-organization, mutual aid and solidarity between
actors, and a commitment to flatten all existing hierarchies, thus liberating ‘better’
human natures to emerge and take root. The seeds of future social relations are to be
planted in the imperfect soil of today’s societies.
Anarchism’s practical theory calls for linking personal, communal, economic, and
societal transformation through collective and prefigurative direct action that cultivates
cultural commitment to mutual aid among non-elite communities, and which fully devel-
oped into counter-institutions, can provide a ‘dual power’4 situation that would undermine
existing structures of power. If the ‘social revolution’ was during revolutionary times a call
for complete overthrow of the established order, it also came to represent for Malatesta
(2019) and others a more ‘gradualist’ approach that slowly lays the groundwork for revolu-
tionary change to take place. There is no ‘waiting’ for the revolution, as it happens here-
and-now; there are no shortcuts to revolution by enforcing anarchist ideology through
coercive means, only continuous agitation and organizing among the oppressed classes
(worker, peasant, and lumpenproletariat). More recent theorists have also focused on
the imperative of tackling inequalities within these groups, even if class rule and state
power are major enemies (Dixon 2012), as seen in ‘total liberation’ and in anarchism’s over-
laps with ecological, decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist thought.
Some anarchists have put forward what could be called an ‘agrarian theory of change’.
Generally, such theories have been influenced by historical rural and agricultural commu-
nes (Dolgoff 1974), and ecological concerns, as in the ‘social ecology’ field popularized by
Murray Bookchin (1982) and put into practice recently in the autonomous region of Rojava,
a present-day experiment in overtly agrarian, revolutionary libertarian socialism (see Inter-
nationalist Commune 2018). Kropotkin’s ideas of agrarian socialism via ‘industrial-agricul-
tural villages’ developed in Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899) and The Conquest of
Bread (1892) may be most well-known. Anthropologist Brian Morris (2018, 89–102) distills
4
Lenin, Trotsky, and other Marxist-Leninists originated and promoted the strategy of dual power based on working class
counter-institutions, but as a means towards state power, not (as in anarchism) as a means to replace it. Later libertarian
socialists also turned its use and applicability from revolutionary to non-revolutionary contexts (see DSA-LSC 2019).
10 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
Kropotkin’s agrarian work into four themes: (1) intensive production, cooperatively
managed to continually improve soil health, (2) decentralization of industry and its (3) inte-
gration at a small scale with smaller-scale agriculture, and (4) the democratized combi-
nation of manual and intellectual labor in all work. Kropotkin was inspired by the
productivity of various peasant-driven intensive agricultural systems across Europe, believ-
ing they showed the possibilities of redirecting production towards satisfying the needs of
all, without the underlying conditions of class, money, or a state. In a way, localized food
sovereignty was seen by Kropotkin (though not in these terms) as a precondition for the
kind of classless, moneyless, stateless society of sharing that he and his contemporaries
promoted. There are reflections of Kropotkin’s century old theories in later agrarian popu-
list scholarship, exemplified by van der Ploeg (2008, 2013), whose research approach also
considers agrarian possibilities through fieldwork among diverse global peasantries, and
advocates ecological, cooperative intensification and the prioritization of producer auton-
omy from capital. Kropotkin’s ideas remain helpful and relevant, for example in his advo-
cacy of intensification and diversification of the countryside such that farmwork is
integrated with artisan industrial production and leisure, farmwork therefore becoming
more meaningful and less characterized by drudgery or overwork. In other ways, this clas-
sical theory is dated and would require updating to meaningfully engage contemporary
conditions such as the strong integration of the global food economy, or the real
demands of rural people for complex consumer goods.5
Although anarchism lacks a consistent and well-known ‘agrarian theory of change’, the
elements of such a theory may be pieced together, and might involve: building auton-
omous rural counter-power on a material and social basis; craft and industrial producers
allying with agrarian communes in mutual aid; federation across greater areas to integrate
and socialize (means of) production; direct action against existing concentrations of power
to expropriate the expropriators; all providing conditions for dual power sufficient to over-
throw wage labor and state power. Consequentially, these elements sustain and advance
emancipatory politics and social organization in anticipation of crisis moments and the
eventual decline of business-as-usual (whether from climate change, pandemics, or
war). While less ‘social’ anarchists would dispute the very idea of dual power as an aspira-
tion, many adjacent Left traditions also endorse such elements. Situationists, autonomist
Marxist, council communists, and ‘communization’ theorists like The Invisible Committee
(2009) have shared affinities for non-vanguardist base building activities; most of these
tendencies’ modern manifestations also share a concern for subjectivity formation and
the need for direct rather than mediated action (Clark 2019).6
We might consider anarchism as utopian not because such a theoretically-based agenda is
provably unrealistic, but because anarchism maintains perennial skepticism and thus offers
only an ever-unfinished project. Classical anarchist theorists understood and acknowledged
this (Malatesta 2019, 167–170). As Martin Buber (1949, 43) paraphrased Kropotkin:
when it comes to our real will for a “restructuring” of society, it is not a question of manipulat-
ing an abstract principle but only of the direction of realization willed; of the limits of realiz-
ation possible in this direction in any given circumstances …
5
These latter limitations are paralleled in contemporary critiques of agrarian populism (Bernstein 2014).
6
What democratic self-determination actually looks like forms a central line of difference between these tendencies (Crim-
ethInc 2017) – among differences too numerous to address here.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 11
The idea of directionality rather than purity underlies the least dogmatic of anarchist
theory, even as it maintains utopian aspirations. Monica White, whose 2018 book covers
the cooperative agrarian traditions of African-Americans seeking liberation, emphasizes
this dynamic as well, noting that
autonomy is in fact an ideal and is always a matter of degree … the economic autonomy that
cooperatives seek is a process, a continuum that moves from complete dependence on an
oppressive structure to independence. Arguably, in a global economy, independence is
always partial and is extremely difficult to accomplish; however, progress toward it can be
leveraged for power and self-determination. (11)
Anarchism may be attacked as unrealistically based on an untenable belief in a solidary
human nature, but in practice anarchist theories can be and have been applied in very
practical ways.
Movements
On this more concrete level, it is often underappreciated how wide and how significant
anarchist movements were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
Schmidt’s (2013, 65) assessment of anarchism’s ‘second wave’ (1895–1923), sometimes
seen as its golden age, much was achieved, including
the fostering of a deeply-entrenched tradition of rank-and-file labour militancy and a global
proletarian counter-culture that eschewed bourgeois patronage, the establishment of near-
universal labour protections, such as the eight-hour working day and worker’s compensation,
a substantial contribution to the virtual annihilation of absolute monarchism, and the mount-
ing of the most serious challenge to clerical control of education across the world.
During this period, anarchism also engaged peasants and rural people, whose role in revo-
lutionary politics was largely neglected by Marxist theorists and activists before the 1917
Russian Revolution, based on their interpretation of Marx’s position as anti-peasant. This
neglect underappreciated peasantries, even though Marx himself late in life took the pos-
ition that peasants could be socialist revolutionaries and socialist revolutions could take
place in agrarian societies like Russia (described well by his letter to Vera Zasulich in
1881; see Shanin 2018).7 Anarchism, especially via syndicalism, engaged both industrial
and agrarian workers and was important in anti-colonial struggles (Hirsch and van der
Walt 2010), arguably forming the ‘first and most extensive global transnational social
movement’ (Castañeda and Feu 2019, 2). Even the demonstrably anti-anarchist E.J. Hobs-
bawm (1973, 61) admitted that
in 1905–14 the marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary
movement, the main body of marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary
social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least
much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical
marxism.
Considering its wide social and geographic reach, it is difficult to establish anarchism’s real
political effects, partly because of the difficulty in tracing straightforwardly cause-and-
7
In not seeking to strawman-critique Marxism from its history, we should recognize that peasant involvement in socialist
revolutions through the twentieth century (among other developments) led Marxists by midcentury to less proletarian/
industrial-class centric analyses and proposals (Levien, Watts, and Hairong 2018, 855 ).
12 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
effect in non-linear complex politics, but also because diffuse influence is not the same as
no influence, as Carter (1971, 109–110) concludes in her study of The Political Theory of
Anarchism. Indeed, studies have drawn attention to the relevance of anarchist organizing
to future developments in politics with national significance, including Korea, China,
Mexico, and the United States (respectively, Hwang 2017; Dirlik 1991; Hodges 1995, and
Cornell 2016). The retrospective perception that organized anarchists accomplished
little can be explained in part by the relative dominance of Marxist-nationalist movements
within the Left since the early 1920s, and the fact that these movements established
nation-states inspired by Marxist doctrine. Turn of the century anarchism also included
its ‘propaganda of the deed’ adherents, who among other activities assassinated political
and economic elites and robbed banks (e.g. Abidor 2019). The popular association of anar-
chism with these violent manifestations, combined with anti-anarchist action by capitalists
and socialists with access to state power and widespread anti-communist propaganda, has
also greatly obscured anarchist history and its varied and cumulative impacts.
The second half of the twentieth century saw a relative retreat of overtly anarchist orga-
nizing globally, compared with the many other kinds of social movements that gained
traction. These included revolutionary nationalist types of movements, sometimes
influenced by various forms of Marxism, and movements addressing discrete issues, or
seeking reforms or redress for one or another oppressed sector of society. Still, that era
did see anarchism continue as an overt label taken on by some social actors, as seen in
notable figures from the US ‘New Left’ like Paul Goodman, Erich Fromm, and Noam
Chomsky. Historical research shows that anarchists were influential on, and influenced
by, pivotal midcentury US movements (Cornell 2016; see also Tanenbaum 2016 for the
case of anarcho-feminism). Meanwhile, what Dana Williams (2017) calls ‘anarchist fran-
chise organizations’ (most originating in the US) have spread anarchist theory and practice
globally. Williams’ 2017 book analyzes anarchist movements sociologically, showing how
anarchist-initiated local projects like Food Not Bombs, Needle Exchange, and Homes Not Jails
operate as ‘franchises’: organizing ideas that spread organically and translocally. Often,
these efforts are linked to subcultures like punk music (Donaghey 2013), and in part
due to this link have spread to locations as diverse as Burma, Indonesia, and Brazil.
Anarchism as transnational and cultural forces thus interact with local organizing in
many contexts, including the US, touching people both rural and urban. One notable
and recent US example of this is anarchism’s influence on the Occupy Wall Street move-
ment of 2011 (Bray 2013; Graeber 2013; Hammond 2015), which in turn more broadly
influenced US politics (Stewart 2019). Those arrested protesting Donald Trump’s inaugura-
tion in 2017 included many active anarchist organizers (Jaffe 2017). Recent class struggles,
including teacher strikes in North Carolina and other typically ‘rural’ and ‘conservative’
states and the founding of the first fast food union at Burgerville in Portland, Oregon
were organized in part by the IWW and members of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Federation,
a federation of anarchist groups that develops movement analysis and platforms for
national action. There are also anarchist leanings to the Black Socialists of America,
founded in 2017 (BSA 2019). With a growing following of 77,000 on Twitter, Black Socialists
of America and its politics are not insignificant to the US political context, and not new:
Black anarchism has a lineage of practice and theory from Lucy Parsons to Lorenzo
Kom’Boa Ervin, Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon. Also relevant is the active presence
of indigenous anarchists among a broader resurgence in indigenous organizing and
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 13
visibility, especially after 2016s Standing Rock oil pipeline protest. Such formations include
both social and insurrectionary tendencies, such as community organizer and filmmaker
Klee Benally and once-imprisoned earth liberation activist Rod Coronado (IAF-FAI, n.d.;
Pellow 2014, 140–142; Táala Hooghan 2019). The anarchism-indigeneity overlap also
has a lineage, as in Ward Churchill’s (2003) ‘indigenist’ philosophy that opposed ‘colonial-
ist’ Marxism and showed affinities with anarchist thinking. Indigenous anarchist activist-
thinkers like Aragorn! (2005) have pointed to this overlap, though it is not a simple or
conflict-free one (Barker and Pickerill 2012).
Overt anarchism can also be found in post-disaster solidarity work, such as the
Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, which mobilized post-hurricane Katrina to
provide recovery infrastructure while consciously building non-state political affinities
among those involved (crow 2014), or Occupy Sandy, which emerged out of the decentra-
lized networks developed during Occupy Wall Street. In other disaster responses, it is
rather anarchistic behaviors that manifest without overtly political motivations. In her
2009 study on ‘the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster’, Rebecca Solnit
describes the ‘immediate aftermath of 9/11’ in New York City, as a
moment of mutual aid and altruism but also a moment of participatory democracy … People
decided to do something, banded together – usually with strangers – and made it happen. It
was anarchy in Kropotkin’s sense of self-determination rather than of chaos. It was also typical
of what happens in disaster, when institutions fail and civil society succeeds. It demonstrated
that both the will and the ability to make a vibrant society in the absence of authority can exist,
at least briefly. (226)
Considering the ongoing dispossessions of non-elite people following ‘natural’ disasters,
and the intensification of such processes with ever-increasing extreme climate events,
the role of anarchism in responses to disaster should receive more attention than it
does. Reflecting on the anarchist theory of change described earlier, and on histories of
Rojava, Spain, and Ukraine wherein anarchist(ic) territorial control expanded in times of
state crisis, we might posit that anarchism is instinctually ‘crisis-ready’.
Anarchistic social organization
Human values and actions can overlap with anarchist ethics and principles of human
organization – such as mutual aid, decentralized self-organization, direct democracy, hori-
zontal noncoercive relations, critique of hierarchy, and freedom with equality – even when
such values/actions are not directly traceable to overt anarchism.8 Anarchism’s principles
and theories can be found in specifically rural and agrarian contexts, and in social contexts
surrounding issues of food, land, and the politics of ‘development’. Anarchistic elements to
analyze could include those within interpersonal and community social relations, within
forms of action to push back against unjust power, and as anarchist/ic critiques are
absorbed into existing state/capitalist institutions. Because such incidences are arguably
more common than overt anarchist movements globally, the anarchistic lens may be
8
Likely some would object to an expansion of research on anarchism into anarchistic realms. Lucien van der Walt (2016, 86)
argues that anarchism should not be seen as human impulses or as ‘simple “anti-statism”’, but should instead be seen as a
specific political tradition of the struggling working classes since capitalism’s rise (specifically, libertarian socialism and
anarcho-syndicalism). I disagree that there should be one way to treat anarchism – for research that can take many
tacks, at least. And we gain more by dissecting ‘impure’ forms of politics than by dismissing them as inadequately faithful
to hard or historical definitions.
14 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
the most fruitful area of the three for CAS. It also offers much more theory to chew on, as in
the widely taken up concept of ‘moral economy’ (Thompson 1971; Maghimbi, Kimambo,
and Sugimura 2011; Galt 2013; Carlisle 2015), or James Scott’s (1992) idea that below-the-
radar grassroots ‘infrapolitics’ can be as impactful as overt political action. If anarchistic
responses emerge anywhere where essential, universal human dignity faces impositions
of oppressive authority (Holloway 2013), an attention to how anarchistic practices and
values/ethics can emerge, and their impacts, can help CAS scholars understand the
dynamics of rural continuity and change.
E.P. Thompson, James Scott, and other scholars have analyzed communities, often rural,
and how they secure a subsistence and livelihood through ‘moral economies’ that do not
abide by, and sometimes directly confront, hierarchical and capitalist logics. These
include relations of solidarity in production and reproduction within villages and local com-
munities, but also forms of collective action such as riots that challenge economic structures
via moral claims (Thompson 1966; Randall and Charlesworth 2000). Scott’s first book (1976)
describes the resilient presence of a ‘subsistence ethic’ among Southeast Asian peasantries,
which would not accept community member deprivation due to incursions of capitalist
markets. Scott’s works continued to elaborate the ways peasants manifest moral economies
in negotiation with, but often pitted against, forces of state, capital, and local social hierar-
chies (1985). Along the research journey, Scott developed an appreciation for the reson-
ances with anarchism in the region’s people, resulting in his 2009 The Art of Not Being
Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and 2012s Two Cheers for Anarchism.
Like Graeber’s (2005) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Two Cheers offers ‘fragments’
of theories and directions regarding the use of anarchist ideas in peasant studies. Scott
(2012, xii) lays the groundwork for this paper’s argument; namely that
if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions,
ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured
from almost any other angle. It will also become apparent that anarchist principles are active
in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anar-
chist philosophy.
Scott describes the state as a consummate simplifier and destroyer of vernaculars – verna-
culars being linked to the uniqueness of place-based cultures, and the rebellions generated
by impositions against them (Scott 1998, 2012). Governmental and elite actions and non-
elites’ attitudes towards these action are key factors in the development of rural rebellions,
and such attitudes towards the state can be seen as anarchistic, even if they are not overtly
anarchist. In this way, and in echoes of Wolf (1969), Scott develops a theory of peasants as
‘natural anarchists’. Importantly for CAS at large, Graeber (2005, 45–46) suggests anthropol-
ogy has proven that there is no rupture between prehistoric and modern societies in terms
of human nature and habits. Accordingly, it is nonsensical to approach peasants and indi-
genous people analytically any differently than modern, urbanized people. Peasants
might be ‘natural anarchists’, but so might be other sectors of society. O’Hearn and Grubaçic
(2018) make this clear in the inclusion of solitary confinement prisoners alongside Mexico’s
Zapatistas and Russia’s Cossacks in their study of ‘exilic’ spaces, or spaces of exit from the
capital-state nexus, in which moral economies are foundational. Building on moral
economy approaches, such studies can advance understanding of the possibilities and
limits of both ‘structural’ and ‘geographic’ escape as means to emancipation.
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 15
While anarchism finds resonance in traditional and modern ways of rural and food-
related life, and in critiques that rural people make of the state and capital, it is also impor-
tant to recognize the internal contradiction in moral economy approaches. Anthropology
has shown that there is no ‘noble savage’; indigenous people, rural people, peasants are
still people – contradictory, imperfect. In some cases, they gravitate towards the market,
or enter the state. Graeber and Wengrow (2018) offer synthesized archaeological evidence
showing hunter-gatherer societies shifted internal social relations between egalitarianism
and hierarchy in yearly cycles, indicating the dynamism of non-agricultural societies (as
opposed to conventional narratives that claim hunter-gatherers as inherently egalitarian
and agricultural societies as inherently hierarchical). This non-fixedness of hierarchical
social organization through history might provide comfort (for anarchists) in knowing
that people have fought off state forms for eons (a point also made by Clastres 1989;
Barclay 1996; Scott 2017), but equally it is discomforting in knowing that even ‘prehistoric’
hunter-gatherers have had forms of ritualized authority, indicating a likelihood that hier-
archies will never disappear completely. Graeber and Wengrow also allude to but do
not address the suggestion that generational and gender oppression are perhaps more
fundamental and pernicious forms of human inequality. As such, the anarchist critique
also provides a sobering reminder that family and community are likely the oldest sites
in human social organization for hierarchies and unjust structures. This results in the con-
tradiction that anarchism thus has something to say about all human societies, but it
doesn’t necessarily provide answers regarding what to do about this. Still, anarchistic read-
ings of moral economy provide CAS valuable analytical tools – which, along with anarchist
theory and movement lenses, I next apply to US authoritarian populism.
An anarchist reading of US authoritarian populism
In this section, I address ‘populism’ at large, and the particular relevance of ‘authoritarian
populism’ (hereafter AP) to the US context, showing how an anarchist lens can help better
understand contemporary rural and agrarian politics and the challenges of making eman-
cipatory change. In the case of tackling US AP, the anarchist lens does this by foreground-
ing the ways that state powers and logics underpin AP political projects, even as these
powers are created or reproduced under so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ administrations;
and by emphasizing the complex political identities of non-elite people, and the ways
these can be directed towards either emancipatory or authoritarian directions based on
resentments towards state power and identifications with grassroots, lived moral econom-
ies. Taken together with anarchism’s positive theory and recent scholarship on the limit-
ations of Left populist states, the section’s analysis of existing agrarian and rural
organizing indicates the strategic need to prioritize grassroots social-ideological develop-
ment, in ways that counter forms of Othering while providing for material needs and bol-
stering lived moral economies.
Populism, US rightwing AP, and the inherently authoritarian state
Populism is well known as a slippery and capacious concept in scholarship (Panizza 2005,
1), and has been described variously by research as ‘an ideology, strategy, discourse or pol-
itical logic’ (Moffitt 2016, 5). Laclau’s influential theorizing (2005) contends that populist
16 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
power builds through active identification against a common enemy, resulting in a new
definition of ‘the people’. This certainly overlaps with anarchism, which opposes various
forms of elitist hierarchy and promotes collective action that constructs new identities
and affinities in antagonism. ‘Left’ populism decries elite economic and political power
and seeks expanded justice and democracy, but deviates from anarchism insofar as it
abides Mouffe’s (2018, 39–57) insistence that a Left populist strategy is inherently a
state-focused project rooted in contesting and replacing hegemony (rather than one
that entails a fundamental rupture with the existing liberal state). Grattan (2018) attempts
to combine approaches, appreciating anarchistic, destabilizing, and disruptive forces in
the US lineage of ‘aspirational democratic populism’, but also suggesting the eventual
need to centralize and institutionalize such forces. While anarchism and contemporary
Left populism overlap at times, they maintain fundamentally different orientations
towards states, institutionalization, and hegemony.
Building on the Gramscian Marxist Stuart Hall (1985), we can propose that populism
should be distinguished from movements that pursue ‘popular’ politics, and include anar-
chism only in the latter. As Hall (1985, 118) put it, we can ‘distinguish the genuine mobil-
ization of popular demands and discontents from a “populist” mobilization which, at a
certain point in its trajectory, flips over or is recuperated into a statist-led political leader-
ship’. Populism can be thought of as a political strategy appealing to real or imagined
voting citizen majorities, in order to achieve political-institutional power. In contradistinc-
tion, anarchists prioritize direct forms of action and decision-making, and the primacy
of individuals and communities as decision-makers, over politics of representation
through voting and other means, and against representative institutions and ostensibly
democratic nation-states as actors. From an agrarian anarchist perspective, populist poli-
tics undermine popular politics by leading non-elites toward a fundamentally dysfunc-
tional state politics, which legitimizes an irreformable system that continues to prop up
extractive agriculture, demobilizes movements during moments of state concessions,
and reduces energy and emphasis towards grassroots alternative forms of organizing
and institution building towards autonomy and dual power. And as discussed further
below, (populist) legitimatization of any state power reproduces the foundation upon
which more authoritarian future administrations can act. Anarchist theories easily
predict the slide from Left populism to AP and the betrayal of agrarian movements by
their leaders who gain state power – as seen in Ecuador and Bolivia (Tilzey 2019).
Without claiming Left and Right forms as equivalent, across the spectrum of state politics
we find populist ways of achieving and maintaining political power and authoritarian ways
of wielding power. CAS has more so focused on the problematic of xenophobic, racist, and
gender regressive (i.e. ‘rightwing’) forms of AP (Bello 2018; Scoones et al. 2018; Borras
2020). However, emancipatory politics should be informed by considering populism’s
inherent alienation of collective power into the state, and the state’s inherently authoritar-
ian nature, and thus approach rightwing AP as derivatives of this general pattern. Given
these premises, and the constraints of state/capital capture, which reabsorbs subaltern
agency into the existing hegemony, a Left populist emancipatory strategy (a la Mouffe
2018) constitutes a fool’s errand. I return to these strategic considerations after discussing
US rightwing AP.
The rise of Donald Trump has relied on authoritarian and populist rhetoric (Booth 2017;
Campbell 2017), characterized by islamophobia, racial resentment, and nativism. Trump’s
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 17
words and acts thus continue a longstanding rightwing US tradition of Othering, which
pits some non-elites against ‘Othered’ groups by dehumanizing the latter (Montenegro
de Wit et al. 2019). The electoral success of Trump, via this Othering tradition, can be
traced back to a decades-long rightwing ideological project, which utilized business-
elite-funded think tanks, churches, universities, and media (particularly cable television
news and talk radio), to successfully enroll large numbers of people in a shared ideological
‘common sense’ that involves elements of white supremacy, xenophobia, anticommu-
nism, and free market idealism (Diamond 1995; Berlet and Lyons 2000; Phillips-Fein
2009; Berlet and Sunshine 2019). At a 2018 conference on AP and the rural world,9 partici-
pants from the US noted how the Left had abandoned religion and its institutions
(churches), leaving them to act as grassroots centers for rural rightwing ideological devel-
opment. Similarly, it was noted that talk radio is so widely listened to by many non-elites,
yet is overwhelmingly dominated by rightwing politics. Rightwing ideological projects
have successfully enrolled rural whites who have negative experiences and perceptions
of government, generating resentment at government and undeserving Others
(notably, migrant workers and racialized urbanites) – resentments exacerbated by the ‘hol-
lowing out’ of the rural economy and declining social cohesion over the last half century of
neoliberal policy (Ulrich-Schad and Duncan 2018; Edelman 2019).
In addition to the demonization of Others, the US rightwing’s ideological project also
generated buy-in to a contradictory state power relation that characterizes rightwing
AP, described originally by Hall (1985). Hall’s original analysis of AP discussed the rightwing
surge in British politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to Hall (1985, 117–118),
this surge took up ‘strategic elements of popular opinion’ concerned about the direction of
the existing state, to craft an
“anti-statist” strategy, [which] incidentally, is not one which refuses to operate through the
state; it is one which conceives a more limited state role, and which advances through the
attempt, ideologically, to represent itself as anti-statist, for the purposes of populist
mobilization.
Furthermore, ‘this highly contradictory strategy … [was] “anti-statist” in its ideological self-
representation and highly state-centralist and dirigiste in many of its strategic operations’
(ibid). We can see obvious reflections of this politics in Trump’s anti-state rhetoric on the
campaign trail, and his post-election mobilization of various state powers for the continu-
ity of elite domination and interests. Notably for CAS, this ‘contradictory’ politics also
imprints in decades-long US policy efforts to deregulate agrichemical corporations
while passing ‘Ag-Gag’ laws to prevent organizing efforts against agribusiness harms, or
to remove price floors for commodity crops, while subsidizing corn commodities
through pro-ethanol policies.
Authoritarianism in politics is characterized by coercive force, whether threatened or
used, the ideologies that justify such use of force, the insulation of elite power from
non-elite influence (Bruff 2014, 115), and the active production of citizens ‘indifferent to
veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among
the citizenry’ (Brown 2006, 690). Insofar as states create, maintain, and enforce existing
9
Part of the ‘Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative’ (ERPI); see https://www.iss.nl/en/research/hosted-iss/emancipatory-rural-
politics-initiative.
18 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
hierarchies with coercive force, they are built on and reproduce authoritarian premises and
tactics (Malatesta 2019, 45). Even relatively ‘free’ social democracies rely on prisons, coer-
cive taxation, physical borders and territorial control; and on power lorded over a state’s
denizens by politicians and police. State maintenance of hierarchy continues regardless
of political party: for example, under Democratic US President Barack Obama more undo-
cumented immigrants were deported from the country than under any prior president.10
Under Obama, coercive state functions were exhibited in police violence deployed in 2016
against indigenous anti-fossil fuel pipeline ‘water protectors’ at Standing Rock. Obama also
deepened the government’s commitment to domestic surveillance (utilized against
internal threats from eco-anarchists, indigenous water protectors, and other rural political
actors) and avoided accountability by aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers. Just like
every other US president, Obama continued military attacks on foreign soils, and pro-
moted ecologically destructive economic growth.11 Through the anarchist critique of auth-
ority and hierarchy we might better recognize how (authoritarian) populism is rooted in
existing forms and structures of power, to understand the particular (Trump) as continuity
within a lineage (of statist politics more broadly).
US AP relies (just like states in general) on legal structures as tools of coercion and to
reproduce consent among the governed. It uses ostensibly democratic elections to
achieve and justify its power, but undermines voting rights to consolidate power. It
emphasizes ‘law and order’ when attacking political enemies, and ignores the law when
convenient. AP’s use of coercive violence cannot be seen as only a state enterprise,
however. It also relies on collaboration between state and societal forces (including
non-elite factions), as seen with law enforcement officials and grassroots white suprema-
cists collaborating at Trump rallies and white supremacist gatherings (e.g. Wilson 2017).
As the popular protest chant goes, ‘Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand’ (Anonymous 2018).
Trump’s argument that there were ‘good people’ involved in the violent white supremacist
rally in Charlottesville that killed a counter-protestor, and his pardoning of Arizona Sherriff
Joe Arpaio, who was indicted for racist corruption, remind us how law and discourse are
wielded for statist political projects. The use of laws to enforce hegemony (including a lack
of enforcement of laws against those promoting the hegemonic position) is not limited to
AP, but forms a crucial tactic in the wielding of power when an AP political project is
ascendant or hegemonic.
Rethinking rural positionalities, agrarian movements, and anarchism-informed
emancipatory strategies
The anarchist lens complicates typical and simplified accounts of rural non-elite position-
alities and their resulting (electoral) politics. Importantly, while a state- and election-
focused politics emphasizes the voting habits of individuals and classes, focusing
instead (as anarchism does) on moral economies of everyday life and ideologies
10
As Brown and Getz (2008, 1186) note: ‘Historically, immigration policy has served as a mechanism, not only for managing
labor flow, but for actively producing an “other”, in this case a labor force that can be viewed as undeserving of the rights
and benefits afforded citizen workers and that can be scapegoated during periods of economic downturn’.
11
Though Marxists have a long history of recognizing the state’s incessant push for growth, this has not led to necessarily
anti-state politics (e.g. Saed 2019). This puts eco-anarchist positions, often involving the decentralized solutions sup-
ported by climate resilience theorists, more closely in dialogue with the resonance of ‘degrowth’ thinking within CAS
(Davidson 2009; Gerber 2020).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 19
developed through relationship and lived experience encourages a more nuanced and
hopeful reading of rural political possibilities (Gaventa 2019, 448). At times, so-called ‘con-
servatives’ harbor anti-state ideologies, which the mainstream Left ignores or disparages.
In contrast, the movement ‘Redneck Revolt’ shows that anarchists are mobilizing such
ideologies to oppose authoritarian populism in the rural US. Redneck Revolt evolved
out of local chapters of the ‘John Brown Gun Club’, anarchist-organized anti-racist
spaces for weapons training and mobilization for self-defense and to protect marginalized
groups during demonstrations. Formed in 2016, Redneck Revolt purposefully reaches out
to poor, rural whites, who are often the first recruits to authoritarian populist politics.
Redneck Revolt tables at gun shows, purposefully seeking to counter-recruit from anti-
’big government’ paramilitary formations like the ‘3%ers’ (who often display white nation-
alist leanings), while also supporting counter-protests against white supremacist rallies.
Redneck Revolt’s (n.d.) ‘principles’ indicate their anarchist perspective (emphasis original):
WE STAND AGAINST THE NATION-STATE AND ITS FORCES WHICH PROTECT THE BOSSES AND
THE RICH … we do not seek to merely replace one set of politicians for another. We know that
our answers will always come from a community level, where every person should be allowed
to participate in making the decisions that affect their lives. We believe in community power
and community rights over the rights of any government body.
Redneck Revolt’s very existence indicates CAS should pay attention to explicitly anarchist
movements in the dialectic of AP and emancipatory alternatives, as it represents a struggle
to undermine white supremacy and acceptance of capitalism among non-elite popu-
lations, and to develop a left rural politics in opposition to AP. Rural sociologist Loka
Ashwood is one of the few scholars who has leveraged an anarchist lens on US rural poli-
tics. Ashwood’s book length study (2018a) and article (2018b) look at rural communities in
Georgia dealing with economic and environmental injustices relating to nearby nuclear
power plants. In doing so, she finds that ‘stateless’ and ‘anti-state’ perspectives are
widely held among the rural people she interviewed. One of her main informants,
William, like his black and white Burke Country Neighbors, harbors a deep-seated distrust of
the government. Scholars typically understand politics like Williams’s as conservative, with
complementary variants of social and fiscal. Some call such politics contradictory, resting
on a moral code that violates rural economic interests. Others call such views dead set
against progress, stymied in a culture of poverty that breeds complicity. I offer a counter expla-
nation by taking at face value the state’s historical and still persistent exploitation of rural
people and places in order to centralize profit. (Ashwood 2018a, ix)
Like William, Michel Foucault sees legal doctrines as a tool used by the elite to maintain control
over those on the margins of society. For those excluded from the wealth of for-profit democ-
racy, the deliverance of justice is not abstract. Rather, justice relies on, in Foucault’s descrip-
tion, ‘their own experience, that of the injuries they have suffered, that of the way in which
they have been wronged, in which they have been oppressed.’ For the rebel, the delivery
of justice, rather than being entrusted to the state and its many apparatuses, is carried out
directly by those avenging grievances. For William, retribution for wrongs came through
what I call ‘direct justice,’ not the justice of the state, but the justice of a community respond-
ing outside of bureaucracy to personal oppression. In some senses similar to David Graeber’s
notion of direct democracy, direct justice is determined by the collective moral economy of
the people and delivered accordingly. A justice of anarchy rendered against an oppressive,
for-profit democratic state. (ibid, 151–152)
20 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
Ashwood’s informants included the kind of rural whites who have been effectively
enrolled in national AP politics, who Redneck Revolt has been actively recruiting to anar-
chist politics. Ashwood (2018b, 3–4) argues that there is a ‘lack of genuine stateless rep-
resentation on the political stage … In the meantime, the opportunity grows for the
exploitation of the stateless position by self-titled populists who have elite, pro-state
agendas, but are well versed in stateless rhetoric’. By placing itself in defense of the
state and its (corrupted) political project, Left populist responses may fail to meet
people where they are, and fall on deaf ears.
Importantly, it is not only rural whites who hold negative perceptions of the state and
its support for extractive, unequal relations. Many members of society, in particular those
from groups who have historically been ‘Othered’, exhibit state skepticism. Indigenous,
African-American, and Latinx/migrant histories of attempted genocide by the state, ensla-
vement, and chronic exploitation may all hold relevance for questions of state-orientation
and ‘stateless’ moral economies. According to environmental justice scholars Pellow
(2016) and Pulido (2017), the state is almost always at the center of environmental injus-
tices, and it behooves theorists of social change to take a more skeptical view of the pro-
spects of emancipatory politics via the state. Similar skepticism of the state is found among
‘afro-pessimist’ (Samudzi and Anderson 2018), Black ecosocialist (Akuno 2018), ‘Afrikan
anarchist’ (Meyer and Kersplebedeb 2019) and indigenous scholars and activists (Alfred
2005; Goodyear-Ka’ōpua 2011; Coulthard 2014).
Movements and their participants are to varying degrees ‘faithful’ to anarchist theories.
Some social sectors and movements are directly inspired by anarchist thinking, while
others are simply anarchistic in inclination. In my fieldwork, some US agrarian movement
activists expressed strong doubt about prospects of transformation via state policy,
influenced by experiences growing up in long-neglected farmworker communities.
These same activists sometimes still engaged policy: people’s ideas are dynamic; ideol-
ogies are not neatly bound. Anarchists at times participate in reformist labor organizing,
in ‘social enterprises’ and businesses, and even in electoral and state-focused organizing.
There are negative and positive aspects to this flexibility, but an important lesson for CAS is
that attention to anarchist influence cannot be limited to visibly anarchist organizations,
and must look additionally to anarchistic forms and individual anarchist participation in
wider and diverse social movements. Anarchism can thus improve CAS’s analysis of move-
ments, seeing their internal functioning and external approach in relation to anarchist(ic)
theory and movements. Rather than narrowing the field, anarchism can synergize with
other CAS traditions, as indicated by recent convergence among Marxian and agrarian
populist analysis with anarchist(ic) ideas (see below). In agrarian movement practice, simi-
larly, we find influences from and resonances with all traditions. Rather than claiming anar-
chism as necessarily strategically superior or theoretically thoroughly distinct (or consistent), I
am suggesting simply that anarchism can bolster existing CAS. That said, I do conclude
with anarchism-informed strategic suggestions, based on a short analysis of transnational
and US agrarian movements and existing CAS strategizing vis-à-vis state power.
The transnational agrarian movement La Vía Campesina (LVC) came together in the
early 1990s to horizontally deliberate on common causes, engage in direct action to
counter spaces of political/economic power, and construct principled alternatives, like
‘food sovereignty’, while maintaining relative autonomy from states, funders, and political
parties (Desmarais 2007). Not overtly anarchist, LVC resonates with many anarchist ideas
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 21
and practices. Rather than claiming LVC for one tradition or another, we can simply note
the many traditions at play in it. LVC largely reflects agrarian populist traditions intellec-
tually12 and in mobilization. Radical agrarian populist scholars similarly to anarchists
favor socialism ‘broadly defined’ (Borras 2020, 4), grassroots ideological development –
as in the farmer-to-farmer methods discussed by Val et al. (2019) – and community/
farmer autonomy, central to van der Ploeg’s (2008) argument on peasantries. Still, agrarian
populism also considers how peasants might be inserted into existing markets, how states
might support these economies, and how state revenues can support agroecological tran-
sitions. Prominent LVC members are associated with the rise of rhetorically pro-peasant,
Left populist governments in Latin America. Anarchism’s theories point in a similar direc-
tion to agrarian populism’s emphasis on the grassroots and its ‘solidarity from below’ (Cal-
vário, Desmarais, and Azkarraga 2019), but without the eventuality of state/policy
intervention, and with a clearer rejection of state-reinforced commodity markets as any-
thing emancipatory. With the notable exception of its anticivilizationist trends, anarchism
generally lacks agrarian populism’s anti-urban bias (as critiqued by Bernstein 2010, 122).
Though LVC is rhetorically anti-capitalist, orthodox Marxists like Bernstein tend to see
LVC as too agrarian populist and not Marxist enough.13
Progressive US agrarian movements contain examples that parallel LVC’s organizing
patterns and discourses, combining Marxian critiques of capitalism, agrarian populist
ideologies and practices, and anarchistic elements.14 These movements often align with
anarchism’s grassroots-prefigurative orientation, inspired by communalist visions of
future localized regional food systems, but are diverse and even contradictory regarding
its anti-state critique – sometimes engaging in reformist law-making and attempts to seek
state power. Like LVC and other global agrarian movements, US movements are ambiva-
lent towards the state, and additionally pressed to engage states in times of political
regression.
The US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) attempts to be driven by its grassroots base,
using internal direct democratic processes as its main form of political decision-making in
‘assemblies’ very similar to LVC’s. USFSA is also explicitly anti-capitalist, and more focused
on building movements through gatherings and direct actions than working to make
change through policy. Also based largely in the US, the ‘People’s Agroecology Process’
seeks to develop political analysis and technical skills among diverse communities via a
grassroots-led democratic network which has not directly addressed policy. Though not
explicitly anarchist, this effort matches many of the political leanings of agrarian populism,
but without any governmental affiliations, or agrarian populism’s associated politics of
state developmentalism. National-level groups oriented more towards policy, like the
HEAL Food Alliance, Family Farm Defenders, National Family Farm Coalition, and Rural
12
See the work of Peter Rosset, Annette Desmarais, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, and Phil McMichael as representations of this
tradition.
13
To his credit, Bernstein (2018, 1146) still insists Marxists engage rather than dismiss ‘the most progressive’ agrarian popu-
lism(s). In addition to Bernstein’s perennial focus on differentiation within peasantries – pointing out (2010, 120–122) that
‘any unity of “the people of the land” cannot be assumed’ – he insists that movements should look at historically specific
(class) conditions and build up from there, mirroring anarchism’s attention to intracommunity hierarchy and its hallmark
claim that any useful movement must be built endogenously.
14
It should be noted that these movements are not comparable, in terms of massiveness, or political context. Information in
this section comes mainly from participatory fieldwork among these movements. See usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org,
whyhunger.org/category/blog/towards-a-peoples-agroecology/, healfoodalliance.org, familyfarmers.org, nffc.net and
ruralco.org.
22 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
Coalition, all emphasize bottom-up processes of policy development and internal edu-
cation to support grassroots work. Some leaders from these groups argue structural cri-
tiques that use agrarian populist and Marxist frames of analysis. Other leaders have
proclaimed anarchist affinities in my fieldwork, but continue to address policy as a need
to confront ‘what is there’: opportunities to gain greater state support and threats of
even more regressive policies. That these movements focus on policy should come as
no surprise, given the real threats of state-imposed harm, the mostly unquestioned hege-
mony of liberal-statist thinking, the legacy of environmental movements’ reformist incli-
nations (Pellow 2014, 256), and the realities of nonprofit funding, where funders seek
‘deliverables’ over the kinds of grassroots, base building work prioritized in anarchism.
Considering the (burst) bubble of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 candidacy, US
movements may want to heed lessons from CAS scholarship on failed efforts towards
food sovereignty in Left populist states, and how failures of the Left-in-power can contrib-
ute to surges in AP (Giunta 2014; Andrade 2019; Tilzey 2019).15 CAS scholars have come to
conclusions that share affinities with anarchism, seemingly converging on a deeper pessi-
mism about state-based change, and a valorization of social movement autonomy – long-
standing tenets in theory and practice of anarchism.16 Marxists Vergara-Camus and Kay
(2017, 434) admit that social movements ‘[g]aining access to the state did not end up
yielding more concrete results than building autonomy from below and outside the
state’. Still, their anarchistic suggestions to prevent state political influence on movements
remain focused on improving movements’ relations with political parties, rather than how
or why movements might avoid, subvert, or build alternatives to state politics. The
assumption of state strategies remains. The lost potential of CAS scholarship, unfortu-
nately, is that it mostly dismisses anarchism as purist (or ignores it), even when it is not
in practice, and it assumes rather than investigates the effects of nonstate strategies on
the state. For example, Tilzey (2019) belittles ‘autonomism as a doctrine’, [which]
‘assumes that real change can occur “without taking power”’ and concludes that
(improved) future success relies on movements ‘confronting’ the state. Yet anarchist
theory (like postructuralism) denies that ‘power’ resides straightforwardly or only in
state institutions. And autonomists/anarchists do confront (and thus affect) the state:
directly, indirectly, and as participants in non-anarchist projects. US anarchists confront
states through their substantial involvement in antifascist and prison abolition movements
(Bray 2017), as lawyers defending direct action participants (Pellow 2014, 251), and via
prefigurative direct actions that force state concessions, such as when an anarchist-
inflected occupation of public land generated new food producing space and food sover-
eignty literacy and forced state agencies to co-manage land with local communities and
activists (Roman-Alcalá 2018). More broadly, autonomy-oriented urban farms and coop-
erative food projects directly produce food and build bridges across various anti-oppres-
sive struggles and rural/urban divides, strengthening intersectional analysis and action –
which is sometimes later deployed in addressing state politics (Wilson 2013; Sbicca 2018).
15
Especially considering the relative weakness and lack of autonomy among US agrarian movements compared with global
counterparts, it is questionable how much a Sanders presidency could have accomplished.
16
Admittedly, there remain orthodox Marxists who continue to favor attention to economic structure, class (de)compo-
sition, and class control over the state, over the ideological and grassroots concerns common to anarchism and agrarian
populism (Bernstein 2014; Jessop 2015).
THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 23
In emphasizing ‘politics from below’ to generate agroecological transitions, Giraldo
and McCune (2019, 803) suggest movements should construct ‘their own institutions
and mak[e] use of the State when and only when such use concretely strengthens grass-
roots processes of emancipation, autonomy and self-determination’. The methods of
‘dialogue, local struggles, and leadership building (Giraldo and McCune 2019, 805)’
these authors endorse are the soil anarchists amend and till. Agrarian populism and
Marxism also endorse grassroots-focused methods in theory. In practice, however,
many movements inspired these frameworks end up concentrating effort on electoral
processes and ‘the long march through the institutions’, and in doing so, experience
redirection of energies, demobilization, absorption, and disillusionment (Oikonomakis
2020). Tilzey (2019) and Andrade (2019) demonstrate that active demobilization
efforts and corruption of the Left-in-power can contribute to later resurgent authoritar-
ianism and electoral turns to the right, indicating the strategic miscalculation of fighting
AP with Left populism.
Conclusion
Considering the problems of state power (for ecological and justice-focused political pro-
jects) and the effective ways in which AP has enrolled some non-elites via a contradictory
anti-state ideology, the anarchist lens suggests shifting strategy away from states and
towards ideological development and grassroots capacity. Rather than reproducing the
Right’s successful strategy in total, which would be unrealistic for a less-resourced and
structurally disadvantaged Left (and would involve concentrated effort on taking state
power), an anarchist approach would parallel the Right only in emphasizing social-ideo-
logical development. Rather than an imposition from without, anarchist ideologies
develop (and commitments deepen) through projects – like Redneck Revolt – that use
direct action and mutual aid to provide for material needs, disrupt and oppose injustice,
and bolster moral economies at the grassroots level. Differently from the ways that com-
munity spaces, ideological consent-building, and group identity are leveraged on the
Right, such actions take place among diverse peoples, in ways that counter forms of Other-
ing while building active solidarity. For example, in 2019, a group of anarchist transgender
activists worked with coal miners in Kentucky, supporting the organization of a blockade
of coal trains to demand withheld wages (Korman 2019).
Taking on anarchist insights does not entail a dogmatic refusal to engage the state; it
means expecting disappointing results from leftist government, understanding disillusion-
ment with states and its link to the rightward turn of electorates, and recognizing that any
transition to AP is made possible by existing logics of capitalist state power. Anarchism, as
an insurrectionary and revolution-oriented philosophy, provides few easy answers to real-
politik questions. The rejection of (state) hegemony as an organizing principle to mobilize
social actors behind a political project is bound to leave some theorists and activists unsa-
tisfied. Yet, anarchism challenges some conventional concerns in CAS theorizing and Left
strategizing. For instance, it theoretically challenges agrarian populism’s homogenization
of ‘community’ and Marxism’s overly-economistic analyses of it, while strategically it dis-
putes seeking to ‘solve’ AP via parties or politicians. An anarchist lens recognizes the lea-
dership of Othered groups in existing agrarian change efforts and supports rather than
criticizes their occasionally state-critical perspective. Redneck Revolt’s anarchist approach
24 A. ROMAN-ALCALÁ
urges CAS to not ignore rural white non-elites in developing an emancipatory imagination
in the rural US.
Anarchism makes imperative certain previously underappreciated inquiries, such as
looking into the real anti-state motivations of non-elite people; or the impact of direct
action, dual power institutions, and long-term ideological base-building efforts on state
politics – even when such efforts are not state-oriented. These inquiries parallel political
projects that anarchism promotes: building decentralized capacity (rural and urban, repro-
ductive, productive, and discursive), towards subsistence or socialism, and in anticipation
of societal breakdown; directly attacking infrastructures of oppressive, ecocidal capitalist
extraction; linking communities through prefigurative efforts; and in the processes of hori-
zontal self-organization, countering and undermining the Othering that is key to AP
power. Arguably, the tendency towards Othering is inherent to capitalism (Patel and
Moore 2017); anarchism’s theoretical attention to all hierarchies keeps this tendency in
view, while anarchism’s preferred practices of rooted, place- and culture-based solidarity
and mutual aid undermines it, far more than does majoritarian electoralism. Perhaps
most importantly, what this paper has claimed about CAS – that it needs to recognize
and appreciate anarchist(ic) positions – could be applied to the Left itself: state-focused
reformers are not benefited by ignoring or throwing anarchism and anarchists aside.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank firstly Jun Borras and Julien-François Gerber for their suggestion to
write this paper. Their comments, along with feedback from and conversations with Louis Thiemann,
Gustavo de L.T. Oliveira, Adriana Requena, Shannon Malloy, Maywa Montengro, and four anonymous
reviewers, were crucial to refining the paper. The typing (and intellectual) assistance of Nora Roman,
Jean Yaste, Karina Utter, and Tanamá Varas was also invaluable. Any academic paper on anarchism is
likely to be inadequately anarchist, so I preemptively apologize to anarchists for any deficiencies in
that regard. Lastly, as someone who identifies as an active social movement participant, I would be
remiss if I did not thank all the collaborators in collective action and thinking (too many to list) who
have influenced who I am, why I think about these subjects, and what I think about them.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
Antonio Roman-Alcalá http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9209-8786
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Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, and organizer based in California. He has been
involved in US food movements primarily through urban farming and participatory democratic
network organizing, and his research focuses on collaborative efforts to improve movement effec-
tiveness. His recent projects include co-founding the Agroecology Research-Action Collective and
convening ‘agroecology encounters’.