‘Listen, Anarchist!’ A personal response to Simon Springer’s ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’

This article offers a critical response to Simon Springer’s ‘Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist’. From a Marxist perspective, the autonomist and anarchist tactics and sentiments that have animated a great deal of political activism over the last few years (in movements like ‘Occupy’) have to be appreciated, analyzed, and supported when appropriate. To the degree that anarchists of one sort or another have raised important issues that are all too frequently ignored or dismissed as irrelevant in mainstream Marxism, dialogue—let us call it mutual aid—rather than confrontation between the two traditions is a far more fruitful way to go. Conversely, Marxism, for all its past faults, has a great deal to offer to the anti-capitalist struggle in which many anarchists are also engaged. Judging from his piece, however, Springer would want no part in such a project. He seems mainly bent on polarizing the relation between anarchism and Marxism as if they are mutually exclusive if not hostile. There is, in my view, no point in that. Honest disagreements should not be a barrier to fertile collaborations in anti-capitalist struggles. So the conclusion I reach is this: let radical geography be just that: radical geography, free of any particular ‘ism’, nothing more, nothing less.