Rethinking Foundational Thinkers in Anarchist Strategy

Introduction

Every movement eventually builds a shrine.

At first, it is modest. A dog-eared book passed hand to hand. A photocopied essay that clarifies something you felt but could not name. A thinker who gives language to your rage and your hope. Over time, the shrine hardens. The author becomes an authority. Their early insights are quoted as scripture. Their later revisions are accepted out of loyalty. The movement stops asking questions.

This is how intellectual drift becomes strategic drift.

Anarchist history is filled with foundational thinkers whose early work expanded the horizon of freedom and whose later writing introduced tensions, reversals or even outright repudiations of their former commitments. When a theorist revises their stance, the problem is not that they changed. Growth is natural. The problem emerges when revisionism is smuggled in as continuity, when the past is rewritten to justify the present, and when organisers accept the new orthodoxy without interrogating what has been lost.

If you are serious about collective autonomy, you cannot outsource your judgment to a canon. You must learn to engage foundational thinkers critically, harvesting what deepens self rule while discarding what narrows it. This is not an academic exercise. It is a strategic discipline. Movements that venerate without critique fossilise. Movements that critique without gratitude dissolve.

The thesis is simple: treat every canonical thinker as a field experiment, not a finished temple. Build collective practices that continuously test ideas against anarchist principles and lived organising. In doing so, you protect your movement’s imaginative sovereignty from subtle forms of hierarchy disguised as theory.

The Canon Is a Tool, Not a Throne

Movements need theory. Without it, you are improvising in the dark. But theory can easily mutate into authority. When that happens, the canon stops being a toolbox and becomes a throne.

Anarchism, paradoxically, is not immune to this temptation. A tradition built on the refusal of domination can quietly install intellectual hierarchies. Certain names acquire protective halos. Criticising them feels like betrayal.

This is where strategic confusion begins.

From Insight to Orthodoxy

Early writings by major anarchist thinkers often emerged from intense engagement with struggle. They were attempts to solve problems. How do we organise without leaders? How do we scale mutual aid? How do we confront capitalism without reproducing the state?

These texts were alive because they were embedded in experimentation. They expanded the repertoire of autonomy.

Later works sometimes emerge from a different position. The author is established. The audience expects clarity, systematisation, even certainty. The temptation grows to defend one’s intellectual legacy rather than risk destabilising it. At this stage, revisions can slide into polemics against former allies. Past commitments are reframed as misunderstandings. The canon subtly shifts.

If you are not vigilant, you inherit the entire arc uncritically.

Diachronic Reading as Strategic Practice

One powerful discipline is diachronic reading. Place a thinker’s early and late works side by side. Do not ask which is true. Ask what each does to your capacity for collective self rule.

Does the early text deepen horizontal decision making, mutual aid and decentralisation? Does the later text introduce managerial assumptions, technocratic language or dismissals of anarchist tradition? Trace the logic. Notice the drift.

This is not character assassination. It is strategic archaeology.

Occupy Wall Street offers a parallel lesson. In its early days, the encampment model felt radically open. Leaderless assemblies created an experience of direct democracy that electrified participants. As the movement matured, internal hierarchies and informal power dynamics became more visible. The myth of pure horizontality required revision. Those who refused to examine the contradictions clung to a romanticised narrative. Those who studied the drift learned how to design better assemblies in future waves.

The canon should be treated the same way. It is a record of experiments, not a set of commandments.

When you dethrone the canon, you do not weaken your movement. You liberate it.

Revisionism as Movement Data

When a foundational thinker revises their stance, especially in ways that seem to repudiate earlier anarchist commitments, many organisers feel betrayed. The instinct is either to defend the thinker at all costs or to denounce them entirely.

Both reactions are strategic mistakes.

A shift in theory is data. It reveals tensions inside the movement’s collective understanding.

The Fear of Admitting Error

One recurring pattern in intellectual history is the reluctance to admit past error. Instead of saying, “I was wrong,” some thinkers reframe their history. They claim they were never fully committed to the position they once defended. This rewriting protects personal coherence but distorts collective memory.

For anarchists, this matters deeply. Anarchism is not merely a policy preference. It is a philosophy of autonomy. If a leading theorist begins to portray anarchism as naive or incoherent after decades of contribution, the question is not simply personal. It is structural.

What pressures shaped this evolution? Institutional recognition? Disillusionment with movement failures? A turn toward order after chaos? These are not gossip questions. They are strategic diagnostics.

Underlying Tensions in the Movement

Every revisionist turn points to unresolved contradictions in the movement itself.

For example:

• Can large scale coordination occur without formal hierarchy?
• Is municipal governance a stepping stone to autonomy or a soft form of statecraft?
• Does strategic coherence require centralisation?

When a theorist shifts position, they may be responding to real difficulties encountered in practice. The danger arises when their response is presented as the only viable path, and when it subtly narrows the horizon of autonomy.

Rather than accepting or rejecting the revision wholesale, dissect it. What problem is it trying to solve? Does it solve it by compromising core anarchist principles, or by innovating within them?

Consider the Global Anti Iraq War March of 2003. It mobilised millions across 600 cities. The display of world opinion was massive. Yet it failed to halt the invasion. Some concluded that mass protest was obsolete. Others doubled down on bigger marches. A more strategic reading treats the failure as data. The tactic lacked structural leverage. It revealed the limits of spectacle without sovereignty.

Similarly, a thinker’s later critique of anarchism might reflect frustration with ineffective tactics rather than a genuine refutation of autonomy. Your task is to separate insight from overcorrection.

Revisionism is not heresy. It is a stress fracture. Study it carefully.

Building a Culture of Collective Critique

The most dangerous dogma is the one you do not see. To prevent uncritical adherence to revered thinkers, critique must be institutionalised inside your organising culture.

This is where the idea of a busted halo audit becomes powerful.

The Busted Halo Audit

A busted halo audit is a collective ritual for deflating unearned reverence. It is simple by design.

Select a text that significantly influences your strategy. It might be a canonical anarchist essay, a contemporary theorist’s book, or even your own organisation’s founding manifesto.

Gather your comrades. Read the text with three questions in mind:

1. Does this passage deepen autonomy?
2. Does it strengthen mutual aid and horizontal decision making?
3. Does it smuggle in hierarchy, elitism or fatalism?

Use colour coding if helpful. Green for nourishment. Yellow for ambiguity. Red for hierarchy creep.

The key rule is to defend ideas, not reputations. If a passage turns from green to red after debate, note why. Archive your annotations. Over time, you build a shared map of ideological drift.

This ritual does more than critique a thinker. It trains your collective reflexes. You learn to spot technocratic language. You notice saviour complexes disguised as strategy. You identify nostalgia for order masquerading as pragmatism.

Applying the Audit to Your Own Structures

The most subversive extension of this practice is to turn it inward. Audit your bylaws. Audit your meeting formats. Audit your campaign plans.

Do your decision making processes reproduce informal hierarchies? Are certain voices consistently amplified? Does your strategy rely on charismatic figures more than distributed capacity?

Movements that apply critique only to texts and not to themselves risk becoming living contradictions.

The Quebec Casseroles movement in 2012 demonstrated how creativity can decentralise mobilisation. Nightly pot and pan marches transformed entire neighbourhoods into participants. No central committee orchestrated each sound. The tactic empowered households. It was difficult to co opt because it was embedded in daily life.

Imagine auditing a text for whether it encourages this kind of distributed agency or whether it recentralises initiative in councils, committees or visionary leaders.

A culture of critique is not cynical. It is loving vigilance.

Autonomy as the Non Negotiable Core

Critical engagement with foundational thinkers only works if you are clear about your own non negotiables.

For anarchists, collective autonomy is the axis.

Without clarity here, you drift with every persuasive author.

Define Your Core Indicators

Before you critique others, articulate your core indicators of anarchist integrity. These might include:

• Decentralised decision making with meaningful participation.
• Mutual aid as a primary organising principle.
• Rejection of coercive hierarchy.
• Prefigurative politics, where means align with ends.

These indicators function like a compass. They allow you to assess whether a theoretical shift expands or contracts your commitment to self rule.

For example, if a later work argues for structured municipal governance as the primary vehicle for social transformation, ask: does this model genuinely decentralise power, or does it create a new layer of administration? Does it rely on elections that risk professionalisation? Does it embed accountability mechanisms that prevent consolidation?

Interrogate the design, not just the rhetoric.

Beware Managerial Drift

One subtle danger in movement evolution is managerial drift. After repeated failures, organisers may crave order. The chaos of assemblies, the inefficiency of consensus, the unpredictability of horizontal networks can feel exhausting. A theorist who promises clarity through structure can appear as a saviour.

But order without autonomy is domestication.

Extinction Rebellion’s strategic pivot away from constant disruption illustrates a related lesson. The organisation publicly acknowledged that repeating predictable blockades had lost effectiveness. They did not abandon urgency. They abandoned ritualised tactics. This is innovation in service of principle.

If a thinker’s revision calls for discipline, structure or coordination, the question is not whether these are inherently hierarchical. It is whether they are designed to preserve sovereignty at the base.

Autonomy does not mean chaos. It means that power remains accountable and recallable.

When engaging foundational thinkers, continually ask: does this idea make us more sovereign or more dependent?

Putting Theory Into Practice

Critical engagement must translate into organisational habits. Otherwise, it remains an intellectual hobby.

Here are five concrete steps to institutionalise rigorous yet generative critique:

• Conduct regular canon audits: Every quarter, select one influential text and run a collective busted halo audit. Rotate facilitators to prevent authority from consolidating around a single interpreter.

• Pair early and late works: When studying a foundational thinker, read their early and later writings in tandem. Map points of continuity and divergence. Document how each text aligns with your core indicators of autonomy.

• Create a living annotation archive: Store annotated texts and debate summaries in a shared digital folder. Treat this as part of your organisational memory. Future members inherit not just conclusions but reasoning processes.

• Audit your own strategy documents: Apply the same green yellow red coding to your campaign plans and bylaws. Identify where hierarchy creeps in through convenience or habit.

• Publicly model principled disagreement: When you diverge from a respected thinker, articulate your reasoning clearly and respectfully. Demonstrate that critique is not cancellation but collective refinement.

These practices transform theory from static inheritance into active experimentation.

Conclusion

Foundational thinkers are gifts. They clarify the fog. They name possibilities. They inspire courage. But they are not infallible guardians of the future.

When a theorist revises their stance in ways that seem to distort or dismiss core anarchist principles, you face a choice. You can defend the halo and risk drifting into subtle hierarchy. Or you can risk discomfort and interrogate the shift.

The strategic path is neither blind loyalty nor reactionary rejection. It is disciplined gratitude. Harvest what expands autonomy. Compost what constricts it. Study revisionism as data about unresolved tensions in your movement. Institutionalise critique so that no text, however beloved, escapes examination.

Movements that survive do not merely accumulate theory. They metabolise it. They subject it to collective testing. They refuse to let prestige override principle.

If autonomy is your north star, then every book on your shelf must answer to it.

So look again at the thinker you most admire. Open their earliest and latest works side by side. Where does their arc mirror your own temptations toward order, recognition or control? And what would it take for your movement to choose sovereignty over comfort, even when the canon whispers otherwise?