Engaging directly with the contemporary resurgence and renewal of anarchism, Tomás Ibáñez, in the third chapter of Anarchism is movement, endeavours in part to conceptualise what he calls the “constitutively changeable” nature of the movement.
Binding together thought and action, anarchism develops within mutually sustaining relations between practice guided by and creative of ideas, and ideas generative of and resulting from practice. And to the extent that anarchism in turn develops within a historical context, this same relationship between thought and action is paralleled at the broader level of the movement’s relationship with any particular historical moment: anarchism is made possible (as thought and practice) by the context from which it emerges, while that context is changed by anarchism.
In other words, the anarchist movement’s capacity to surge up anew depends on its renewal and its renewal depends on its capacity to produce the conditions of its resurgence. And it is in this immanent to and fro between idea and practice, and between both and historical setting, that rebellious subjectivities are forged. Should these ties be severed, then anarchism and anarchists will only be found in libraries and museums.
