
From Autonomies
August 28, 2025
by Christian Ferrer
One
In every city in the world, no matter how small, there is at least one person who calls themselves an anarchist. This solitary and unusual presence must conceal a meaning that transcends the order of politics, just as the triumphant dispersal of seeds is not limited to a mere struggle for the survival of a botanical lineage. Perhaps the “psychic” evolution of political species corresponds to the wisdom of seminal sprinkling in nature. In like manner, anarchist ideas were never oriented according to the intensive methods of ideological-partisan “planting”: they already spread following the inorganic undulations of the plebeian grass. A doctrine constructed in the mid-nineteenth century managed to spread from a rather flimsy base, no more than a handful of people settled in Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, until it became known in almost every inhabited corner on earth. Thus, anarchism can be considered, after Christian evangelisation and capitalist expansion, the most successful migratory experience in world history. Perhaps this is the reason why the word “anarchy,” ancient and resonant, is still here, despite the dire predictions that declared the end of libertarian history. To mention anarchism implies a kind of “miracle of the word”, a linguistic resonance almost equivalent to waking up alive each new day. That the anarchist ideal has appeared in history can also be considered a miracle, a gift of politics, politics being, in turn, a gift of the human imagination. Undoubtedly, the persistence of that word is sustained by its critical power, in which both panic and consolation reside, both derived from the “gritty” style and the desire for urgency characteristic of anarchists: their biographies have always taken on the contours of hot coals. But the anarchist idea also survives because the meanings it absorbs condense the human malaise caused by hierarchy. However, for most people, anarchism, as political knowledge and as a community project, has been transformed into a mystery; not necessarily as something unknown or unknowable, but something similar to a mystery: incomprehensible, inaudible, invisible.
There is no reason to believe that the historical emergence of anarchism in the 19th century was a necessary event. Working class ideologies, socialism, and social democracy were inevitable fruits germinated in the jungle of industrial life. But anarchism was not: its presence was an unexpected event, and it is possible to speculate that it might never have appeared in society. I know this assumption is useless, since anarchism did indeed exist, and any professional historian would know how to scatter causal flags on the map of the evolution of working class ideas and leftist politics. But the uchronia that this speculation implies is not idle. Political facets of anarchism were present in Marxist proclamations, in liberal ideas, in the community-building of the first labour unions. Why did this troublesome guest make its abrupt and notorious appearance, lodging itself like a splinter among the political ideas of its time? Was anarchism a typographical error in the political textbook of modernity? Is the mystery of this political anomaly directly proportional to the mystery of the existence of hierarchy? Error or gift, the fact is that at certain moments, broad sectors of the population trusted and placed in anarchism the key to understanding the secret of hierarchical power and, at the same time, held it as an ideal for its dissolution.
Every era secretes a kind of “political unconscious,” a blind spot and buried centre of gravity that cannot be thought of by a people, and the languages ??that attempt to penetrate that zone are treated as blasphemous, jaundiced, or exogenous. Anarchism was the splinter, the irritant of that zone, the modern invention that the community itself, obscurely, needed in order to provisionally understand the enigma of power. Every nation and every community experience poses almost insoluble questions to its inhabitants. For this very reason, in every city, certain spaces and rituals are distributed in order to make its discomforts and enigmas provisionally understandable. Thus, brothels, churches, football stadiums, and movie theatres host the questions posed by desire, the creation of the world, war, and daydreams. Anarchism embraced the ultimate questions associated with power; it was the crater of politics from which radical responses to the problem flowed, the crossroads of ideas and practices where the drama of freedom was condensed. The fact that, in its language and behaviour, sincerity consummated a solid and unique link with politics granted this movement of ideas a unique power, which has now been forever taken away from Marxism-Leninism and democratic republicanism, forced into continuous negotiations between ends and means. The irreducibility of conduct and the non-negotiability of conviction were the moral qualities that guaranteed the popular imagination’s trust in union leaders or certain exemplary men, even when those who called themselves anarchists were a demographic minority in the political field. This demographic determination explains why the lives of anarchists have been as important as their ideas. Every anarchist’s life was proof that a portion of the promised freedom existed on earth.
Hierarchy appears to millions as a verticality, immemorial like a pyramid and perennial like a god; something a little less than indestructible. But the history of every people is the history of its existential possibilities, and the sporadic reappearance of the question of anarchism – that is, of the question of hierarchical power – perhaps means that the radical possibility remains open, and that through it, what is repressed in the political order returns. Anarchism would then be a floating moral substance that intermittently attracts the refractory energies of the population. It operates as a rare phenomenon, like an eclipse, an attractor of the gaze that needs to understand the existence of power separate from the community. It could be said that anarchism doesn’t exist: it’s an insistence.
Two
Every word is evoked as a museum object, but it is also savoured like a fruit freshly plucked from its branch. In the act of naming, a sonic balance makes it possible for the routine ossification of words to reveal an encouraging remnant. Anarchism, which has long sought this balance, now debates with itself over being treated as a thematic remnant by historicist palaeontology and its desire to remain a branch of ethics (a possible collective morality) and a vital political philosophy. Resolving this tension requires identifying its “cultural drama”, made up of paradoxes and eddies, which was particularly evident in historical situations of extreme danger or when this idea began to fall from synchrony with its time.
The struggle to expand the scope of freedom, a myth, a rallying cry and affective emblem that mobilised the emotional energies of millions of people, was the passion of the 19th century. At the end of that century, the myth of freedom split in three directions, guided by communism, reformism, and anarchism. When that political passion was victoriously “captured” by Marxism and attached to all of the imagery and machinery we have known under the name of communism or its various parallel offshoots, not only was a model of political action and formatting of the “militant” deployed, but also a historic triumph that would simultaneously usher in – albeit inadvertently by its followers – its “cultural drama”: the liberticidal crystallisation of an idea in a despotic-national mould first, and then imperial mould. Decades later, the left’s long uncritical subordination to the Soviet model has cost it dearly. The obsession with efficiency and centralism, the opportunistic relationship between means and ends, the silence in the face of the intolerable, are historical burdens so heavy that not even a saint or a titan could lift them. It will be very difficult for a belief in the “Soviet” model of revolution to be reborn, and slowly the self-proclaimed Marxist parties are becoming apostate groups or sects on the verge of extinction. Their languages ??and symbols creak and disperse, perhaps forever.
The cultural drama of social democratic reformism also derives, in part, curiously or sadly, from its success as a substitute for the “maximalist” path of social transformation. The expectations placed on reformist parties were enormous in most Western countries between the First World War and 1991, the year of the end of the communist regime in the Soviet Union. The “genius” of reformism lay in its ability to become an effective mediator between the powerful and the “losers” and to humanise that same relationship. But over time, social democracy ceased to represent an advance relative to conservative political culture and became an ideal for managing the state of affairs in Western democracies. The “updating” of conservative parties, the disappearance of the “Soviet cosmos,” and the renewed rise of capitalism in the last two decades has rendered it incapable of differentiating itself from the right, beyond ritual moral whinnies. Its cultural drama consists of the fact that “reform” is being carried out by forces that have traditionally been considered right-wing, especially when the changes are carried out by centre-left leaders. With the monopoly on transformation lost in late capitalism, and with reforms comparatively meagre in relation to the current, stark construction of the world, the cultural cycle of reformism is beginning to narrow dramatically. It is now a morality of the rearguard.
Communism always seemed like a river current that was heading impetuously toward its natural outlet: the post-historical ocean that unifies humanity. For its critics, that river was filthy, irremediably polluted, but even to them, the current seemed unstoppable. And yet, that river dried up, as if an overpowering sun had liquefied it in a single instant. All that remains is the empty mould of its bed. And the grooves that remain there and the accumulated undertow are already being numbered and classified by historians and exhibition curators. As for hydrographical metaphors, anarchism would not be represented by the river, but by the geyser, as well as by the flash flood, the alluvium, the underground river, the inundation, the waterspout tornado, the breaking wave, the head of a storm. All unexpected and disordered natural phenomena, yet endowed with a singular and unrepeatable power. This diadem of fluids already warns us of its drama, the drama of its failure to reconcile its disruptive power and its weak subsequent persistence, its ability to stir and mobilise the social unrest of an era and its inability to organise it, its pugnacious tradition of harassing the politics of domination and its difficulty in amplifying its system of ideas. The word “anarchism” still enjoys a resounding, though focused, political prestige (having escaped the taint attached to Marxism, since their mutual biographies diverged long ago). This prestige – somewhat equivocal – is tinged with a dark colour, which many young people perceive as a lyrical aura. The dark connects anarchism with violence and plebeian Jacobinism; the lyrical, with the desire for purity and intransigence.
But there are almost no anarchists, or else their voices lack audibility. Perhaps there have never been very many, if one accepts that the definition of an anarchist assumes a “strong” identity, strenuous activism with minimal returns, and a demanding ethic. Historical circumstances have never been favourable to them, but they have still managed to establish themselves as ethical-political “counterweights”, compensation for a kind of curse called “hierarchy”. Perhaps the world is still hospitable because these kinds of counterweights exist. If only automatic, mechanical, and resigned behaviours occurred in a city, it would be uninhabitable. Anarchism, an anomalous thought, represents “the shadow” of politics, the unassimilable. And the anarchist, being improbable, even existing in almost insignificant demographic numbers, assumes the destiny of exercising a kind of radial influence, which often goes unnoticed and at other times is condensed into a spectacular act. This is a destiny and a condemnation, because the anarchist is not allowed to establish easy or quick negotiations with current social life, and it is precisely this difficulty that at some point in their existence causes the anarchist to suffer their ideal as a spell from which they do not know how to free themselves. That influence aims at the dissolution of the old psychological, political, and spiritual regime of domination. To achieve this, anarchism has resorted to an arsenal that only occasionally – and not substantially – can be adopted by other political movements: parodic humour, anticlerical temperament, irreducible attitudes of personal autonomy, insolent behaviour, the drive for political action as a countervailing force; accompanied, in turn, by a theory that radicalises the critique of power to limits unknown before the modern era. Its imagery of contestation and its critical impulse are fuelled by a gigantic confidence in the creative capacities of political animals once they are freed from a centralist, concentric, and vertical geometry.
The dissolution of the Soviet world and the crisis of Marxist thought seemed to grant anarchism the opportunity to emerge from the catacombs. However, the fall of “Sovietism” swept away the entire socialist spectrum, including anarchism, for even it was part “of the family” of the communist imaginary affected by the collapse; it was one of the now loosened pieces of the ensemble. The fall of the “Iron Curtain,” celebrated in the media as if it were the guillotining of a monarch, opened geopolitical floodgates but also closed emancipatory traditions; not only the worst, but also the best of them. With the collapse of the Soviet order, a space for prophetic messages of salvific significance was closing. And a biblical tone always resonated in the anarchist voice. For its prophets, the bourgeois order was equivalent to Babylon. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was not history that was coming to an end, but perhaps the 19th century. It was clear that Marxist, anarchist, and even strictly liberal doctrines were liquefying and evaporating from the history of the present. We were witnessing the swan song of humanism. One of its consequences is the erasure of social memory, that is, of the languages ??and symbols that conveyed the modern emancipatory project and the human anthropology that corresponded to it. At the same time, classical politics, linked to the representation of interests (liberal version), the articulation of antagonisms (reformist version), or the social struggle against absolutism and the bourgeois order (left and anarchism), is weakening and losing its legitimacy. Politics, on a global scale, has long operated according to the organisational model of the mafia, which is already the founding metaphor of a new world, and this is true in all institutional orders, from trade unions to universities, from businesses to municipal administrations. Either one is included in the sphere of interests of a particular mafia or one is left helpless to limits that only correspond to the beginning of the industrial revolution. This may be the destiny we face as soon as we cross the threshold of the third millennium.
Since every state needs to manage the emotional energy of collective memory, the methods of control and shaping historical narratives become strategic issues of the first order. The deterioration of social memory has been caused, to some extent, by technological changes, especially by the articulation between powers and the media instruments of knowledge transmission. A perhaps more active cause lies in the disappearance of urban subjectivities that were the product of a popular mould not linked to the culture of the dominant classes. This was “plebeian culture,” which in Argentina for half a century has been dominated by the Peronist imaginary. Throughout this century, the old popular culture (a mixture of working class imaginary and “folk” anthropology) metamorphosed into mass culture, which slowly but surely transformed the way the memory of social struggles was archived and transmitted. And when the history of these struggles recedes, the population cannot but base its actions on foundations as instantaneous as they are shaky. For its part, the fate of the passion for freedom is uncertain in permissive societies, such as the Western ones today, where “libertarianism” becomes a demand adaptable to the offerings of a market of “emotional” products, from psychotherapy to the pornographic industry, from the production of behaviour-harmonising pharmacopoeias to the promises of the biotechnology industry. The latter in particular reveals certain social symptoms of the present: the transubstantiation of flesh in cloning stills, the technological enhancement of organs, silicone injectable into the body as a vaccine against social rejection. The “aesthetic-technological model” unfolds like a dream that seeks to appease a malaise that, for its part, is anything but superficial. In flexible economies, in countries that have shattered the collective idea of ??the nation, with inhabitants who can barely project themselves into the future, condemned to minor idolatries, to resorting to currency as a common ground, to making bets that are not sustained by each individual’s talent, the collective experience becomes harsh, cruel, empty, and, at times, delirious. Each person is alone with their body, that which, finally, sustains them. “Cosmetic anxiety” reveals the weight we carry, the effort we make to exist. But it also reveals that the “art of living against domination”, at which anarchism excelled, is suspended, because needs are no longer connected with the memory of previous social struggles. If the destiny of the era were to follow this course, a force similar to that of the flood would collapse the bridges of history.
Three
Autocracy and hunger were the irritants of “social unrest” in modernity. They are no longer so, or at least, they are not active to the same extent that images of suffering accustomed us to imagine them.[1] The fate of libertarian politics must therefore be different in an era marked by permissiveness in matters of behaviour, by a notable institutional capacity to recover refractory inventions, or at least by an inexhaustible capacity to “negotiate” them, and in which people are either disoriented or endowed with a cynical perception of social life. To imagine the forms of struggle of the near future, it would be necessary to identify not only the rumour of social unrest in our time, but also to turn our gaze toward the existential transformations of the century. The last memory of social struggles transmitted to the present day has been that of the youth rebellions of the 1960s, especially their dimensions associated with subjective mutations and urban electronic music. This memory is almost entirely transmitted by the media and pasteurised to make it adaptable to the entertainment industries. It is evident that the model of hunger is not what informs current generations in the West. Political unrest, however, in order to unfold, needs to converge with new ways of living, with existential counterweights. Each era contributes to the history of human dissent with a “counterweight,” individual or collective, that balances despotism and subjugation. The “libertarian” counterweight has deployed organisational and emotional inventions throughout its more than century-long history. And just as the Greeks invented the concept and theatre, and the early Christians the ideal of brotherhood, so too did the anarchists invent their own: the affinity group.
The anarchist defence of individual autonomy questioned the tradition of ecclesiastical or state heteronomy, but the existential foundation that allowed for its deployment depended not on an idea or a technique but on its articulation with social practices that necessarily pre-existed libertarian doctrines. For Marx—as for those steeped in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition—the factory and the world of work provided an excellent cement for a new society. But another existential humus was the foundation on which the anarchist affinity group was grafted. This anthropological space was already beginning to germinate in the 19th century, and anarchists were the first to perceive its silent expansion. Before the labour union-anarchism alliance was firmly established (and ever since the first groups of sympathisers with “the idea” were organised in the wide circle that Bakunin’s compass drew from Spain to Bessarabia), the group practice in which people bonded “by affinity” gave anarchism a distinctive feature, distancing it from the concentric vertical centrality typical of democratic or Marxist political parties, a model that fit into the traditional political imaginary. Affinity not only guaranteed horizontal reciprocity but, more importantly, promoted the trust and mutual understanding of the intellectual and emotional worlds of each member. This group condition allowed for a better understanding of the completeness of each other’s personality. Where does the ideal of affinity groups come from? Perhaps from the tradition of revolutionary clubs prior to the French Revolution, or from the “literary salons” that flourished in the 18th century, and certainly from the long period of clandestine activity experienced by the Carbonari groups of the 19th century, a condition soon inherited by anarchism; in short, from the tradition of “self-defence” and “conspiracy.” Also, perhaps, from Masonic customs and rituals, to which Bakunin was attached, as he was a member of an Italian section of Freemasonry. Consider, for example, the importance of the tavern (or pub) in the constitution of class sociability at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or the public café in the construction of liberal public opinion in the last century, or—for the suffragettes—the salons that fostered a new social role for women in the middle of the last century, or the reading groups among Spanish peasants at the beginning of the last century, or, currently, the practice of exchanging “fanzines” by school-age adolescents in public squares or at rock concerts. Thus, practices of affinity are not the prerogative of the “militant location” but rather the possible outpouring of affective experiences shared by the community.
Affinity is the social foundation of anarchism, but a broader horizon embraces the anthropological space that is favourable to it and that has always been called “friendship”. Various genealogical lines converge in the modern development of friendship, as we know it today. To the classical Greek ideal is added that of revolutionary fraternity. Both insisted on positional equality and the need to “care for one another”. During the 20th century, friendship began to transcend interpersonal relationships and became a social practice that shifted into emotional, political, and economic spaces previously occupied by the traditional family. It is a protection against the elements to which capitalism subjects the population. Friendship involves mutual aid: economic, psychological, restorative, even advisory, and – eventually – political, thus becoming the tonic and founding network of today’s sociability. We must add the friendship between women and women, and between men and women, to which the cultural transformations of this century, combined with the disappearance of the “home” as a mandatory economic space, have been fostered as never before. We must also add the friendship between homosexuals and women, once sustained in secrecy and the ghetto and now openly exposed; perhaps also the friendship between former partners. All of these forms of friendship were almost insignificant in the 19th century, or else their scope was very limited. Much more than space travel or the Internet, these emotional formats are the great innovations that must be placed in the inventory of the 20th century.
Four
Anarchism has been the historical counterweight to domination. But it has not been the only one: social democracy, populism, Marxism, feminism, and even liberalism also claim that position. But anarchism constituted itself as the starkest of all political autopsies and the most demanding of all proposals to overcome the status quo in the 19th century. Precisely because it chose such a vertiginous angle of observation, anarchism also became – imperceptibly, at first, for its own founding fathers – a tragic knowledge. For discovering that hierarchy is a historical constant, an ontological weight, and such an imposing psychic rootedness, leads to the assumption that challenging it is equivalent to renouncing an Olympian god. Anarchists are aware of their own conceptual and political excess. They suspect that their ideal was born unnaturally, that it could have been aborted, that the collective imagination might not have needed it. And anarchism, which has gone through many lunar phases in its history (the Carbonari, messianic, insurrectionary, anarcho-syndicalist, sectarian, sixties-libertarian, punk, and environmentalist phases), today needs to promote a myth of freedom that is “revelatory” of social unrest and that provides a good part of the population with an impulse of rejection, just as the blasphemous and exonerating challenge drove the anarchists against the Church. If “my beautiful word” is to continue, that is, anarchism, it is because it can itself become a password for collective hope and for social struggles freed from the burden of authoritarian models. The mystery of hierarchy would then yield its opacity to a political revelation.
Christian Ferrer, “Misterio y jerarquía: Sobre lo inasimilable del anarquismo”, Cabezas de tormenta: Ensayos sobre lo ingobernable. Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza ed., 2004.
[1] In our age of expanding autocracy and political domination, of mass incarcera
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