Editor's Introduction

Abstract

I was surprised to open the December 14, 2014, ‘‘Sunday Review’’ section of the New York Times—that arbiter of wisdom both conventional and confortable—and see a column by Mark Bittman on the intersectionality of various radical and reform movements in the United States today. Granted, this was an attempt to link his own pet project, food reform, to the seemingly more urgent issues of the day, but, still, I think he was on the whole correct. We live in a time when politics is anything but conventional, and the massive protest movements of the past months—the boycotts of Wal-Mart and fast food restaurants, the fight for a living wage, and the protests against police violence—are all linked. Indeed, for many young minority people, low-wage work and the threat of police brutality are intertwined aspects of their everyday lived experience. It is clear to me that this is a movement of potentially revolutionary change on many fronts, in the realm both of ‘‘hard’’ politics and ‘‘soft’’ politics, both increasing the minimum wage and accepting marriage equality. If this is a radical moment, it is less clear to me that it is an anarchistic one. The great issues of the day, such as combating income inequality and climate change, and fighting for civil rights for gay people, are in fact seeking greater state regulation over private businesses, energy producers and consumers, local and state governments, and private organizations such as religious groups. Rather, the current movements seem a part of the broad, free-flowing stream of American progressivism, in each case petitioning the federal government for greater protection of civil rights and greater equality before the law and in the marketplace. Nevertheless, anarchism does characterize some aspects of some of these radical movements. That is most obviously the case among the far right in the United States—the idea of an armed populace challenging government diktat is not far from Clastres’ idea of the threat of violence as impediment to the creation of political order. To be fair, elements of anarchism have also been present in movements of the left—in Germany’s Pirate Party, for instance, as well as among the leadership of the Occupy Wall Street movement, most notably the anthropologist David Graeber himself. Beyond that, we all have experienced an anarchistic turn, to adopt the anthropologist’s preferred means of describing paradigmatic change. Thus, the rise of social media networks has provided a technology that exactly mirrors the Reviews in Anthropology, 44:1–4, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2015.1001647