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Anarchism and global ethics

Alex Prichard

Introduction
In this chapter, my aim is to clear some ground for thinking about global ethics from an anar-
chist point of view.With one or two exceptions (Falk 1978, 2010; Gabay 2008; Prichard 2013;
Weiss 1975), anarchism has had no voice in academic debates about the means and ends of
global justice, even though broad swaths of the global justice movement is today at least anar-
chistic in political orientation (Epstein 2001; Graeber 2013).1 This relative absence in academic
circles is almost certainly partly due to the association of anarchy with the theory of the state
of nature in International Relations (IR) and political theory, as well as general misconceptions
about anarchism as an ideology.
In relation to the former, Thomas Nagel’s view is fairly typical. For him, ‘the path from
anarchy to justice must go through injustice’ (Nagel 2005, 147). Following a broadly secular
theodicy, of the sort we see in thinkers from Hobbes to Kant and beyond, our human failings are
the means through which we have to negotiate a philosophical and epochal shift from barbarism
to civility. This association of anarchy with barbarism is typical, but a defnitional choice that
betrays a number of Eurocentric biases, from the association of anti-state, anti-proprietarian and
anti-sedentary social orders with backwardness (Jahn 2000; Krasner 2011; Scott 2009), to phi-
losophies of history that presumed that the success of European civilization would necessarily
emerge out of confict with the uncivilized rest (Behnke 2008; Keene 2002). Bringing state-like
order to the former, and resolving the latter in similar fashion, is at the heart of variations of the
‘domestic analogy’, replete within a range of world state theories to this day (e.g.,Albert, Harste,
and Patomäki 2012).
However, there are other ways of understanding the concept of anarchy, and these can be
found in the anarchist tradition, better remembered on the street than in the academy, con-
sequently rarely discussed in political theory or IR, let alone global ethics. This conceptual
recovery is underway elsewhere and promises to revive debate around a central but remarkably
uncontested concept in political science as well as IR (Alker 1996; Havercroft and Prichard
2017; Prichard 2016). In this chapter I want to set out how the concept of anarchy, as used by
anarchists, might help reshape how we approach global ethics.

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To do this, I have structured the chapter in three parts. In part one, I reclaim the concept of
anarchy, central to anarchist politics, from the mainstream IR usage. In particular, I wish to show
how, with an anarchist infection, the concept of anarchy becomes radical and emancipatory in
anarchist hands. In part two, I deploy this reformulation of the concept of anarchy to engage
standard questions in the study of global ethics. In part three, I consider three objections, from
the left, to this anarchist praxis: frst, that contemporary anarchism is an individualist protest
movement not a coherent politics; second, that the anarchist rejection of the state makes it
democratically illegitimate; and fnally, that anarchist anti-representationalism makes it practi-
cally useless in a globalized world. Each of these is connected and presents a powerful objection
to anarchism. Responding to these criticisms is central to underpinning the ethical credentials
of anarchism. I conclude by making the case for an anarchist theory of anarchy to help reorient
thinking about global ethics.

Anarchy and global ethics: From International Relations to anarchism

To think about ethics from an anarchist point of view demands we reclaim the concept of
anarchy from mainstream and normative IR theory. After all, if anarchists are not defenders of
anarchy, then the moniker is a misnomer at the very least.The problem is that in IR, thinking
ethically about world politics, or thinking about ethics in world politics, has generally started
from a rejection of anarchy.Typically, anarchy is understood as synonymous with a state of nature
and the antithesis of the social contract, something which the modern state releases us from. In
much hackneyed realist IR theory, the key reference point is Hobbes, though this association has
recently and rightly been overturned (Armitage 2013; Christov 2016; Grewal 2016).
Late-twentieth-century IR theory presents the international system as an anarchy. Anarchy
emerges out of the material scarcity and threats that arises from the co-action of sovereign states,
themselves having resolved the problem of anarchy within. In this secondary realm of a well-
ordered commonwealth, anarchy imposes limits and conditions on state behaviour instead. In
the strongest articulations of this view, anarchy forces us to act with a tragic disregard for ethics.
This presumption of anarchy is also central to the positivist approach to world politics, which
takes anarchy as one of three analytical starting points (the others being rationality and state
actorness), and from this reasons that the methods of IR can be value free on the basis of this
prior empirical/conceptual assumption about world politics (e.g., Kydd 2015, 2). But this view
of the world cannot be value free, precisely because the description of the state and of anarchy
is always already a moral normative claim about how we ought to organize. Anarchy is not an
empirical feature of the world. Rather it is a theoretical idea, a concept that involves a com-
plex set of normative assumptions about how we ought to live (see Prichard 2016 for more).
In other words, positivist IR is only possible on the basis that the prior assumptions about the
normative and ethical foundations of world politics have already been settled, which they have
not, of course.
More progressivist readings of world politics, however, do not differ substantially from this
general tendency. English School theorists and neo-Kantian critical theorists, many of whom are
cosmopolitans too (e.g., Linklater 1998), foresee a future beyond the state, or envision a system
of global governance with features more or less like a world state (see, e.g., Held 1995; for an
important set of criticisms from within the cosmopolitan tradition see Brown 2012). Marxist
and liberal readings of history are most common here, seeing anarchy as either a frst step, or a
stepping stone to a better world beyond.
If we are to develop an anarchist ethics for IR, then we need to rethink the moral value of the
concept of anarchy.There is some precedent here, but it is hardly anarchist. For example, Hedley

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Bull (1977), Kenneth Waltz (1962, 1979) and Mervyn Frost (2009), have each sought to dem-
onstrate the virtues of anarchy for guaranteeing the freedom of peoples in international politics
(for a good discussion, see Lechner 2017).All three defend an understanding of the international
community of states as one structured around the prior normative value of sovereignty.Anarchy
is a virtue precisely because it permits and formalizes the structural and normative framework
for different conceptions of the good to be pursued within sovereign states without interference
from outside.
Bull draws from Burke and H.L.A. Hart, Waltz draws on Durkheim and Kant, and Frost
from Hegel and Nozick. All three share a liberal vision of anarchy as consecrating a zone of
non-interference within states, which provides the basis for pursuing the good and grounding
ethical claims against others. There is no question that these conceptions of the good defend
particular, parochial, European accounts of the good.This led Bull to famously prefer order over
justice, most tellingly in his rejection of the anti-Apartheid campaign in South Africa. For Waltz,
the pressures of self-help forced development, which led to functional differentiation and thus
the moral autonomy of political community.This led him to defend nuclear proliferation on the
basis that modernization and development was an inevitable by-product of developing nuclear
weapons (Waltz 1990).
Frost argues that there are two anarchies in contemporary international politics, not one,
with an anarchy of civil society overlaying the anarchical society of states.The UN Declaration
of Human Rights transforms the world’s population into rights holders against their states.
While this is a development on the statism of Bull and Waltz, the two anarchies are mutually
reinforcing. Moreover, they are reinforcing of a very specifc type of political subjectivity, one
premised on the possession of rights in one’s self, and the right to alienate those rights, whether
for employment or to the state.
There is then, in IR, a small but important tradition of thinking about ethics from within the
conceptual discourse of anarchy. But this is a highly contentious and contested set of debates and
of course no less ideological than any anarchist alternative (Freeden 1996; Prichard 2017). And
yet, these ideologies of anarchy have proceeded with no engagement with anarchism whatsoever.
Anarchism, arguably the only political philosophy of anarchy, emerged in the mid-nineteenth
century at precisely the time the modern nation-state was born (Prichard 2013). Anarchists
rejected the centralizing and dominating institutional forms the modern state took, and the
commodifcation of work and society that emerged as a consequence of the rise of capitalism
and the transformation of chattel slavery into wage slavery. For anarchists, the functional integra-
tion promised by Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, and later Durkheim and others, argued
for the hierarchical submission of individuals to an unaccountable scientifc elite within a deter-
mined hierarchical state. In Comte’s fantastic utopia, a legion of Priest Scientists was destined to
rule, and total obedience to them was demanded by the providential unfurling of history that
led them to the pinnacle of society.This philosophy was only slightly more insane than the pre-
vailing ideas about monarchy, the rights of the emerging bourgeoisie, or Europe more generally.
Anarchists were primarily anti-capitalist who rejected the idea of private property.The estab-
lishment of private property, much like state sovereignty, developed out of the logic and prac-
tice of slavery (Proudhon 1994). Under slavery and colonialism, property was held directly in
another. Under sovereignty and private property regimes, title had to be alienable, frst to the
state, then to the capitalist.The conceit then was that the demand for self-ownership prefaced
the need for this to be alienated such that title in the self and other things could be com-
modifed and exchanged. As Antony Anghie (2005) has shown, the mandate system of colonial
administration in the nineteenth century was a testing ground for developing these theories of
sovereignty, a development anarchists saw taking place within the emerging nation states too,

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usually to the detriment of innumerable minority ethnic and cultural groups (Holland 2010).
Likewise, the development of a system of alienable property in the self was central to the devel-
opment of wage labour and liberal conceptions of rights (Bakunin 1964, 187; Proudhon 1994.
Cf. Gourevitch 2011).
Nineteenth-century anarchists drew on the republican tradition to conceptualize personality
and freedom differently, and in so doing developed an alternative theory of anarchy.The primary
focus was freedom from domination and oppression, rather than freedom as independence.
Slavery was a paradigm case of unfreedom, where one’s actions could be arbitrarily curtailed
because there was no constitutional provision restricting the actions of the powerful.Anarchists
rejected the idea that states could decide the terms of this constitutional provision unilaterally
and without participation from the masses, and argued that universal suffrage would merely
embed this oligarchic tendency rather than curtail it (cf. Michels 1968). For anarchists, to be
a fully free individual meant to be an active and undominated participant in society, with the
opportunity for full participation in collectively deliberating and taking the decisions likely to
affect you and your family or associates. This form of radical democracy was labelled anarchy
or anarchism, precisely because it rejected any fnal point of authority, not because anarchists
demanded a voluntarist society without rules (Graeber 2013; Maekelbergh 2009).
Active participation was impossible, anarchists argued, within the structure of the modern
state and capitalism, hence the demand to break both up into an infnite plurality of parts, then
re-federating them according to a principle of subsidiarity and horizontality. In relation to
property, this meant the negotiation and commutation of title, such that property met com-
mutative (negotiated) ends rather than individual or collective desires alone, for example via
worker, producer, or property cooperatives.This negotiated title stands in stark contrast to pri-
vate title, and the notion that democracy might be participatory contrasts quite starkly with the
representative system that dominates mainstream institutions. But we need to see anarchy as a
normative principle too, because in so far as defending this plurality demanded an institutional
framework that would defend this variety, the benchmark was anarchy, that is the absence of a
fnal point of authority. Only in systems in which fnality was absent, and subsidiarity defended,
could freedom to change and reject the terms of association be guaranteed.
This brief summary no doubt leaves many unanswered questions. But the point I wish to
drive home here, is that traditional associations of anarchy with freedom defend an account of
freedom that is associated with property in the self, in others, or other things, and defend anar-
chy as the structural form within which this account of freedom is best preserved, with all its
attendant statist inequalities.This account of anarchy is predicated on a conception of rights that
are derived from one’s autonomy and self-ownership.Anarchists reject this account of rights and
property in favour of infnite and plural agreements, where ‘the political centre is everywhere,
the circumference nowhere’, as Proudhon put it (1865, 182). In the next section I explore the
implications of this notion of anarchy in relation to three key problems in contemporary global
ethics: global governance, capitalism and the proper scope of our moral identifcation with
others.

The problems of global justice revisited

What is justice?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s extensive analysis of the historical sociology of justice are both the
earliest and most extensive in the anarchist canon (Prichard 2013, chapter 4; see also Kropotkin
1992), and needless to say almost entirely ignored by both anarchists and moral philosophers

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more generally. Proudhon’s conception of justice also emerged out of the European republican
tradition, specifcally the work of Rousseau, but also Kant and Michelet, and further back still,
to the writings of Aristotle. In short, Proudhon sought to historicize the virtues, and the primary
virtue, for Proudhon, was justice. In his two-hundred-page, four-volume Magnum opus, De la
Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église (or On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church), frst
published in 1858, Proudhon made the case that justice was immanent to society, and to talk
in terms of immanence made one ‘a true anarchist’ (Proudhon 1988, 637). By this, Proudhon
meant that struggles over conceptions of the good, and the realization of the virtues of justice,
took place in concrete historical contexts, and were constitutive of them. So far, so hermeneutic,
but Proudhon also claimed that our conceptions of right and wrong were natural, in so far as
they were felt in our gut or conscience, and that these feelings were trans historical and univer-
sally felt, an innate sense of right and wrong that had to be socially mediated (cf. Smith 2002).
However, he also claimed that women had innate natures that set them apart from men both
in terms of physical strength and also intellectual ability, and that their natural place was in the
private domain, while men were made for the public.
Proudhon’s sexism still requires systematic engagement and rebuttal in the English language
literature, but the point I want to take from Proudhon is that he sought to derive justice from
both an innate sense of right and wrong, which was always shaped by and manifested in concrete
historical circumstances. Unlike Kant who believed our passions to be ‘pathological’ and reason
the only palliative, and Charles Fourier, who believed that reason was the ‘ffth wheel on the
cart’, and our passions to be the basis of a psychology of freedom, Proudhon saw the antinomy
between reason and conscience to be a constitutive and generative antinomy of morality (de
Lubac 1948). By this he meant that it was in the balancing of reason and conscience, in a social
and material context, that justice was to be found. As a consequence, not only were there no
transcendent grounds for justice, there was no telos to the history of right either. Rather, our
innate conceptions of justice, whatever they might be, were re-shaped in social contexts, and
were only one of many lenses through which we would engage concrete historical wrongs.
Justice, by this conception was always immanent to society.
In his writings on European constitutionalism and on war and peace, Proudhon argued
against the idea that there was a necessary telos to right. One example of this is war.The ‘moral
phenomenology of war’ (Proudhon 1998) showed us that not only is right central to the pur-
suit of war, but that war pervades the iconography of justice too: in exceptionally brief terms,
consider that the ancients understood the wars between the gods to defne nature; justice is a set
of scales and a sword; we fght for what is right; wars are fought to defend social values and to
consecrate new ones. But the pursuit of war always and everywhere undermined or contravened
these virtues, and the history of mid- to late-nineteenth-century industrialization suggested to
Proudhon that future wars would be decidedly barbaric.
What we fnd in contemporary anarchist praxis is not so far removed from what Proudhon
championed. From the anarchist perspective, the virtues are conceptions of the good that need
to be practiced in order to be actualized, with the good prefgured in context, not an outcome
or a transcendent value (Franks 2010). In other words right does not exist independently of
human agency.There are no transcendent benchmarks for the good, whether deontological or
utilitarian. Anarchists use the concept of prefguration to theorize this (Gordon 2018; van de
Sande 2015). For anarchists, means are ends in the making. In other words, you cannot divorce
the good from our actions that bring it into being.Thus, actions which are contrary to our con-
ception of the good, are unlikely to issue in virtuous outcomes (see Franks and Wilson 2010).
So, to sum up this frst part, justice is immanent to society, so those institutions and concep-
tions of the good that are totalizing and a priori are by defnition illegitimate, because they close

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down the plurality of conceptions of the good and the possibility of their future emergence.
Anarchy is a normative value precisely because it is permissive of multiple conceptions of the
good, and it is critical because it can show where existing institutions limit this. It is also com-
munitarian in so far as it valorizes historical communities, but cosmopolitan in so far as it is
post-statist.

Do our obligations to others cross borders and generations?

What I have argued about the source and context for justice would suggest a deeply commu-
nitarian account of ethics, one in which immediate communities of belief are the only viable
locus of justice, where appeals to the good are relative, offering no grounds for cross-cultural
critique, since it is within community that we can realize conceptions of the good.Traditionally,
and ironically, this communitarianism is confated with statism, the argument being that shared
institutions, like those of the modern state, are the only ones capable of galvanizing a political
community.The converse argument is that our political institutions are secondary to our shared
moral equivalence as individuals, and that a cosmopolitan ethics undergirds a more expansive
conception of the good. By this latter argument, the institutions of the nation-state are barriers
to realizing the good.
This framing is problematic for anarchists for three reasons. First, the institutions of the
nation-state have historically been built and defended on the basis that they restrict the abil-
ity of the people to change the laws. For example, both liberal and republican accounts of
constitutional democracy presuppose and entrench capitalism, putting anti-capitalism beyond
constitutional politics (Gill and Cutler 2014). Second, while some anarchists believed that a
protean cultural identity was given in races, most now argue that nationalism and other forms of
cultural identity are the products of political power, not its precondition. In other words, peoples
are made, they do not await discovery (Breuilly 1993; Prichard 2010).Third, while cosmopoli-
tans tend towards post-statist ends, the tendency is to universalize liberal values and political
economy. This is not only a form of cultural imperialism; it is also a form of socio-economic
imperialism (Springer 2011;Tully 2007).
But clearly, some institutions are better than others, and not all forms of identity are racial.
So, for example, revolutionary syndicalist labour unions are both internationalist and federal in
character, the Confédération Nationale du Travail in France, or the Confederaćion Nacional
del Trabajo in Spain, for example. These have historically acted as a crucible for shared values
and ethos, and anti-capitalist practices beyond and below the state. Likewise, one’s identity as a
worker is also a highly signifcant basis for association, which has historically galvanized anarchist
labour agitators globally (Berry and Bantman 2010; Levy 2010).This is not to say that anarchists
do not consider themselves citizens of the world, many probably do, but this universalism usually
corresponds with a defence of their most immediate community in the name of a wider, perhaps
global ethic.The point is that the state is not the institutional framing for thinking about ethics
in world politics and so in many respects, the typical binary between communitarian national-
ism and cosmopolitianism drops away.We are left with a more complex and plural conception
of political community, one in which anarchy retains a central place, since there is no fnal point
of moral identifcation, and the spurious nature of the initial binary is exposed.

What is the proper institutional arrangement for realizing the good?

The simple answer for anarchists is that there is no ideal institution for realizing the good. Society
changes, as do our conceptions of the good. The problem is that while modern capitalism is

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able to adapt to the changed nature of political community, democratic constitutionalism has
not. Even where there has been a hugely participatory constitutional redraft, such as in Iceland,
which was prompted in part by the catastrophic failings of capitalism, enacting this new consti-
tution has met a conservative brick wall (Landemore 2015).The ability of the demos to change
the conditions of its own association remain severely curtailed by the very thing that is supposed
to guarantee their own freedoms (for more, see Loughlin and Walker 2007).
Anarchists have taken a twin strategy to counter constitutional politics.The frst is to criti-
cize existing institutional arrangements, and the second to propose the foundations for radical
alternatives. The latter strategy shows anarchists to be inveterate experimenters. But as for the
frst, anarchists have spent the past thirty years engaging the injustices of global capitalism, but
their arguments are not often read as treaties in global ethics. For example, Noam Chomsky’s
engagement with the post-1945 US imperial order are premised on the simple moral truism of
reciprocity, that is, what’s permissible for the United States is also permissible for other states, and
vice versa, or that we ought to live by the values we expect others to live by (Chomsky 2004).As
I have shown earlier, the ethical theory underpinning this conception of moral reciprocity dates
back at least to Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments (2002) and we fnd a re-articulation
of it in Proudhon’s writings, particularly his theory of mutualism and reciprocity.
Contrast this with Singer’s approach to moral duty: if you can, and it will increase happiness
overall, you should. For anarchists, the alternative might be understood as follows: if all parties
want something to go ahead, then it should, and the institutional barriers to that ought to be
the objects of refexive critique.
Our duties are not determined independent of context, but rather emerge from it.The most
pervasive in recent anarchist writings revolves around questions of climate change and ecologi-
cal collapse. Here, it is argued that the modern state and capitalism, synonyms for centraliza-
tion and consumerism, have led to the destruction of the ecosphere and the narrowing of the
meaning of human fourishing to identity politics and consumption choices (Bookchin 1986).
Communities of fate, whether transnational solidarity networks, ranging from the World Social
Forum to Greenpeace, or solidarity with survivors of natural disasters such as in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina (Crow 2011), face innumerable barriers to the effective change they require,
most notably the state and capitalism.
There have been multiple alternatives.The point to make is that while anarchists have cel-
ebrated the diversity of human communities, they have been less concerned with the proper
form of human community and more with the institutions and practices through which it
might be realized. Central here has been direct democracy and/or anti-representational politics,
horizontalism and prefguration.These key concepts manifest in concrete terms, and with obvi-
ous caveats, in the municipalist and ecologically oriented direct democracy of Murray Bookchin
(1986), in the topless federalism of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, in the multiple affnity
groups, communes and other myriad cooperative living experiments that strengthen our com-
munities from the ground up. None of these has a monopoly on the good, nor are they per-
fect. That is not the point. Rather they are contextually specifc intentional communities that
respond to real need, collectively, directly and horizontally. It is the way that they are constituted
that defnes them, more so perhaps than their raison d’être, and it is this commitment to horizon-
tality, prefguration and forms of direct democracy and consensus, that are perhaps the defning
institutional features of all anarchist(ic) groups.
As Magda Egoumenides (2014) has shown in her outstanding book, the anarchists have
developed powerful tools of critique of modern institutions and robust ethical standards against
which all institutions can be evaluated, even anarchist ones.The point that Egoumenides makes
is that no institution is immune from the anarchist critique and in the face of such critique, these

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institutions must justify themselves. While in many instances, anarchists would defend general
values such as freedom as non-domination for example (Pettit 1997), they would disagree with
the argument that the modern state lives up to this standard.Anarchism is a demanding ideology
and established institutions carry the burden of proof that they meet anarchist objections. No
such debate has ever taken place in either political science or IR, let alone global ethics.

How should we understand the problem of distributive justice?

It is worth noting that anarchism and socialism in the mid-nineteenth century developed pri-
marily as a critique of the church, not of capitalism as such. The latter did not develop into
an object of study until much later in the century.The early anarchists and social reformers of
Europe were therefore as much, if not more interested in the moral arguments for distributions
of wealth than they were in what we now understand as strictly ‘economic’ or material ones.
The signifcance of this is that anarchism has throughout its history offered a moral critique of
capitalism that was almost completely absent in most mainstream, if no less revolutionary left
wing praxis (see Choat 2016; Franks 2012).
The contrast is quite easy to illustrate in simple terms. Where liberal accounts of distribu-
tive justice prioritize rights and legal means, republican and Marxist ones focus on political and
institutional ones.The former presupposes the obligations of subjects to the law, the latter of the
law to subjects. The former seeks an equality of opportunity under the law, the latter is more
concerned with an equality of outcome. Both presuppose a distributing centre that is mandated
in some way (by law or by demos).
Anarchists take a different path: commutation or exchange relations (Simon 1987). By this
commutative account, distributive justice is achieved through negotiation and agreement (for an
interesting application of this theory, see Walsh and Johnson 2016). Multiple relations of com-
mutation, of agreement, can be reached between individuals and groups, and consecrated by
pacts, contracts or agreements.This commitment to foedus or pacts is what Proudhon took to be
the basis of the federative theory (Proudhon 1979).
This approach to economic equity can be seen in a range of different experiments, from
the global cooperative movement, to syndicalism, to traditional gift economies (Graeber 2002,
2004, 2011), each of which builds community by addressing material inequality. Clive Gabay
has argued that this impulse has a cosmopolitan dimension in so far as micro exchange rela-
tions always overspill their localism and have macro implications (Gabay 2008). For exam-
ple, giving to address need, or in order to satisfy a moral imperative, without due attention
to the means through which aid is distributed, or managed, can do more harm than good.
Understanding aid relations as exchange relations demands also an engagement with the lived
practices across that chain, which invariably demands a cosmopolitan sensibility, even if the
good must always be negotiated. Reconciling community with cosmopolis, through processes
of equal exchange that empower and build solidarity in this way, is an anarchist ethic because
it aims to prefgure horizontality, participation and the good within social practices.The rela-
tions of solidarity that underpin pacts such as these are designed to fulfl immediate need and
build a global political economy from below (Falk 1997; Knowles 2004; Shannon, Nocella
and Asimakopoulos 2012).
Taking commutation and equal exchange seriously forces us to admit that there are no a
priori foundations for justice, but also helps us see the conceit at the heart of much global ethics.
Theories of distributive justice tend to presuppose a hierarchy of institutions that are empow-
ered to resolve problems. This, from the anarchist point of view, exacerbates the problem. The
solution cannot presuppose the moral claim of a central distributing institution, whether that is

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the state or a commitment to private property.The tautology is clear when both of the following
are held to be true at once: what is moral is determined by institution X; without institution X,
morality is impossible. Independently these are empirical claims and might be assessed as such,
but in moral philosophy they are generally held together and a priori, hence the problem.
To conclude this section, it is worth remarking that none of these three questions can be
asked and answered in isolation from the other: each implies the other and numerous others.
Rather, the point I am trying to make here is that there is no unique or Archimedean vantage
point from which to adjudicate on the pressing questions of global ethics. This contingency
and contextualism is not a regrettable irritation, it is fundamentally the generative motor of the
problem of ethics itself.This context is also of such a highly complex and irreducible nature as to
make it anarchic at its epistemological core. Defending anarchy is thus to defend the possibility
of contingent, emergent and unpredictable outcomes, to defend the infnite ways in which we
might realize the good in contingent communities, and to be open to an ontological anarchy, a
fuid and emergent becoming.

Contesting anarchism
It is an increasingly small portion of the left who today would reject these anti-capitalist and
anti-statist arguments completely. Rather, the rejection of anarchist politics on the left relates to
the legitimacy of anarchist populism, the limits of anarchist practice, and the problem of scaling
anarchy (see, e.g., Srnicek and Williams 2015).These criticisms go to the heart of an anarchist
account of global ethics, as I will show, and answering them is central to the future of anarchism
as a global ethics.The frst is a tactical critique: what are the limits of protest politics and affnity
groups? The second is a strategic critique: can anarchists afford to shun the established institu-
tions of global power? The third is a philosophical critique of anarchist anti-representationalism:
if not everyone can always be present, what are the legitimate grounds for an anarchist politics
that aspires to be universal?
The Occupy Wall Street movement was arguably the most identifably anarchist global
movement for social justice in recent times (Bray 2013; Graeber 2013; Schneider 2013). Indeed,
its anarchist credentials were as forcefully pressed by those who sought to criticize it, as those
who sought to claim it as their own.
For critics, the horizontalism and consensus decision making at the heart of anarchist politics
and the Occupy movement is predicated on a misplaced individualism, an individualism which
is effusive and generative but essentially reactionary rather than proactive. The presupposition
that each individual has a veto in consensus decision making, and that each individual brings
with them a personal politics of identity or political grievance, means that the horizontality at
the heart of the anarchistic Occupy Wall Street movement will forever render it a protest politics
and nothing more. Individualism and a refusal to generate collective demands, is fundamentally
at odds with the collectivism necessary to galvanize a political movement that can affect the
changes the socialist ethics of anarchism demands (Dean 2016).
This critique is important to consider but it misses the central element of the Occupy move-
ment almost completely. Not only does anarchism correctly foreground the individual both
morally and politically, but so too, the means through which this takes place, which is deeply
political. As I will discuss further below, individuality is not given, but created through the
community that precedes it. But to make that process of self-realization democratic it must be
participatory and non-dominating. We cannot lose the individual in a crowd, as Dean (2016)
would like, nor should we crowd source the general will. Rather, conscious direct participation
and the tacit right of veto demands a political process that respects the dignity of each individual.

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The alternative is anti-individualist, and the history of the communist left is hardly a glowing
endorsement of this (Courtois 1999).
Organizational criticisms of Occupy miss the protest for the politics. The anarchists of
Occupy developed highly sophisticated institutional and decision-making mechanisms, that
were horizontal and sensitive to the power asymmetries that intersected within the move-
ment. These included spokes councils, progressive stacks, the General Assembly and a vast
number of committees, each designed to counter material, racial, gendered and cultural
power asymmetries. Each of these institutions checked one another but also acted as the
vehicle for developing a plural collective consciousness within an open, horizontal and par-
ticipatory political institution. This anarchy at the heart of the institutional framework of
Occupy was prefgurative of the anarchy to come, ensuring no single institution or collective
voice was the fnal word, and rather than confating the collective with the crowd, it rather
disaggregated and institutionalized a plural consciousness. It was not the occupations them-
selves that were signifcant, but the attempt to develop a new means of organizing politically,
which has arguably come to dominate the non-mainstream left (Maiguashca, Dean and
Keith 2016).
The second critique of anarchist politics is the following: how can anarchists make a claim
to the legitimacy of their activities and claims, when they have refused to speak on behalf
of, let alone gain the formal support of, a recognizable public constituency? Far from being
legitimate then, the exponential rise of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), of grassroots
community activism and global civil society is evidence, critics argue, of the de-politicization
and the de-legitimization of politics, for refusing to engage with the established institutions of
the modern state. Moreover, and compounding this, the prevalence of either a universalist ethic
of cosmopolitanism, or a poststructuralist suspicion of ethics tout court within the current anti-
globalization movement, makes it increasingly diffcult to ground an ethical critique of anything
at all (Bickerton, Cunliff and Gourevitch 2006; Chandler 2004a, 2004b).The response, for these
authors, is the revitalization of the nation-state, currently being hollowed out by neoliberalism,
cosmopolitanism and anarchism, with a clear ethics aligned with democratically agreed political
interests that can galvanize a new political subject.
Building constituencies and developing a counter political economy is no doubt a key
aspiration of the anarchist left too. But there is a problem with the notion of political subjec-
tivity implied by this account of constituency, and that is that it totalizes it, thereby making
each conception of the people exclusionary. But this notion of a singular public is itself a chi-
mera. Political subjectivity is indeterminate at its core, evoked or conjured epistemically, not
objectively identifable.While the attempt to reify or essentialize community for the purposes
of politics may be expedient, it is hardly ethical if one such identity is taken to dominate the
others, arbitrarily or otherwise. If what we value is the endless potential for becoming implied
in a humanist or post-humanist politics, then anarchy of identity is also central here (Rossdale
2015).
Finally, drilling down further, how can anarchists scale their advances in terms of a new
anarchist sensibility on the left, to develop a non-representational mass movement? Direct
democracy is a privilege of scale and access. In other words, it is more likely you will be able
to participate directly in the small gatherings you are able to reach and have your voice heard.
Large ones, or those at an inaccessible distance, will demand resources not available to most. In
large gatherings, not everyone has the confdence to speak, while not everyone has the same
resources to facilitate attendance. This is compounded in places like the World Social Forum,
where mass gatherings often require inter-continental travel, and language and public speaking
skills that many people lack. Anti-representational politics will cede this discursive ground to

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non-anarchists, while the privileging of presence will discount the legitimate claims of millions
that cannot attend, but are happy to be represented by others (Teivainen 2016).
This critique goes to the heart of the other two, and is one that anarchists will have to
negotiate in order to avoid the trappings of elitism, vanguardism and the totalization of political
subjectivity. Put in other words, can we fnd ways of representing the views of others that are
not dominating? The simple answer is no.The more complex answer is we must try.The process
of vocalizing, of writing and of communicating is itself a process of translation, in which my
thought is imprecisely, stumblingly, made into something else. Self-expression, let alone com-
munication with others’ demands, is always mediated, with meaning translated and retranslated,
into new vernaculars.We do not have direct unmediated access to anything.As this process wid-
ens, with multiple interlocutors, meaning becomes more and more diffcult to manage and to
transmit.The process of translation itself is often mediated by tools, like computers, megaphones
or instant messaging, but also via non-verbal communication. Representation is thus given in
communication and translation is inevitable (Cohn 2006; Coleman 2015).
But all acts of representation take place in epistemic communities, as well as material ones.
These communities are themselves constituted by these processes of representation and com-
munication.Whatever the distances or the modes of mediation, it is the process of communal
retranslation in the name of the community that gives meaning to this cacophony. This does
not undermine the anarchist critique of the state and modern society, it reinforces it and its pal-
liative alternative. It is through maximizing participation and fattening social hierarchies that
representation can be open and dialogical but also of value to communities.An anarchist politics
cannot avoid representation, but it has the ethical tools, practices and institutional experiences
to make representation anarchist again.

Conclusion: Anarchy revisited

The account I have given here of the relation of anarchy to global ethics differs quite dra-
matically from that offered by Thomas Nagel at the outset. The state cannot deliver us from
anarchy—anarchy is our lot, both epistemically and ontologically, let alone what happens in
International Relations. But this is no cause for dismay.Anarchy is also the crucible and bench-
mark of justice itself. This anarchy as absence of fnality is the antithesis of much we take for
granted in modern politics and ethics, particularly on the left, but also on the right. Sovereignty
and private property, in so far as both are predicated on dominium, are antithetical to anarchy as
I have described it here, and so unethical.
This alternative is predicated upon, or issues in an idea of justice as immanent to both the
individual and society, with the antinomy between them constitutive of the phenomenology of
justice. It sees political community as more immediate, but ethics as more expansive than pos-
sible through the institutions of modern liberal society. Anarchy, from this perspective, signifes
the absence of fnality, whether of authority, of identity, or of justice.This anti-transcendentalist
promise at the heart of an anarchist ethics suggests open, plural conceptions of the good, and of
the proper institutional framework through which it might be realized.To that end, the praxis
of prefguration, participation and horizontality are key.

Note
1 What passes as anarchism in contemporary political theory and ethics, philosophical anarchism and/or
libertarianism is not really anarchism at all. I do not have the space to set out the terms of this debate
here and will simply say that it has been done perfectly well elsewhere (see, e.g., Egoumenides 2014;
Jun 2017; McLaughlin 2010).

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