The fifth chapter of Tomás Ibáñez’s Anarchism is movement brings the principal argument of the essay to a close. Ibáñez is here concerned to demonstrate the bases upon which the contemporary anarchist resurgence and renewal occurred, bases that also set out the paths for its future development.
The fourth chapter of Tomás Ibáñez’s essay, Anarchism is movement directly engages the debate over the significance of “postanarchism”. Neither tempted by a blind adherence to this current of thought, nor categorically dismissive, Ibáñez attempts to navigate between these extremes, always attentive to the complex relations between theory and practice that have always animated anarchism.
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.
Tomás Ibáñez, not without hesitation and only as a heuristic, employs the term “neoanarchism” to refer to the resurgence and changing nature of the movement in the wake of May 1968, France. But these changes have not been without their critics, so that in what follows, the second chapter of Ibáñez’s essay, Anarchism is movement, he endeavours to both explain and defend what he considers to be the virtues of our new anarchism.
With this post, we (Autonomies) begin the publication of an english language translation of Tomás Ibáñez essay, “Anarchism is movement: Anarchism, neoanarchism and postanarchism” (2014).
I was sad to hear of the passing of Eduardo Colombo, one of the more interesting anarchist writers from the post-World War II era. I included a short piece by Colombo on voting in Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. I also posted on this blog his essay on the state as the paradigm of power, in which he drew on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Pierre Clastres. Here I reproduce a tribute to Colombo by the Spanish anarchist theorist, Tomás Ibáñez. It would be nice to see more of Colombo’s writings translated into English.
Continue reading Eduardo Colombo 1929-2018: A Grand Anarchist Fighter Leaves Us
You might have noticed that apart from our own statements, we also published a lot of texts with different anarchist positions on the “Catalonia issue”. Here is another piece that contributes to the debate about Catalonia.
Tomás Ibáñez on #Catalonia: About Storms and Compasses. Statement from October 11.
Continue reading Tomás Ibáñez on #Catalonia: About Storms and Compasses
Tomás Ibáñez on the general strike of October 3.
Continue reading #Catalonia: Some Certainties. Tomás Ibáñez on the General Strike of October 3
Sceptical views on the Catalonian independence movement of 2017 from Miguel Amorós and Tomás Ibañez, who basically maintain that anarchists who join in the nationalist movement, a movement based on mass psychosis and the “marketing” of illusory identity politics (“the Catalonian people is just as abstract a concept as the Spanish people”), thinking they are taking advantage of an opportunity to advance their cause, are being cynically used as the “popular backdrop for a bad play in which an ordinary redistribution of power is being publicly screened”, and later “will have to be punished for snatching their [the Catalonian ruling class’s] chestnuts out of the fire”.
Continue reading Miguel Amorós and Tomás Ibañez on #Catalonia – September 2017
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