268 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
decision making, often involving continuous tinkering with varying models of
consensus versus majority vote.
These tendencies of thought and action diverge wildly, yet social movements
around the world draw on them without discrimination.^103 The uprising of the
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación National (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, on New
Year’s Day 1994, which prevented the Mexican government from privatizing land
belonging to indigenous Indians, speaks primarily in an indigenous vocabu-
lary and rejects political classification; it has nonetheless spurred discussion of
its parallels to anarchism.^104 The global justice movement (also called the alter-
globalization movement) of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which challenged the
pro-corporate financial policies of the World Trade Organization, the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, was influenced by anarchist ideas.^105
In 2011, on the heels of riots in Greece and the protests of the Spanish indignados,
the Occupy Wall Street movement birthed encampments in nearly every Ameri-
can city and demanded that the United States reckon with the growing economic
inequality threatening its democracy. Most recently, amid the chaos of the Syrian
civil war and the rise of the Islamic State, a Kurdish-led multiethnic movement
has been attempting to run its own autonomous canton, Rojava (in northern Syr-
ia near the Turkish border), according to the principles of “democratic confeder-
alism,” an ideology of local, decentralized organization inspired by Bookchin.^106
One can certainly debate the wisdom or efficacy of these movements, but they are
clearly a contemporary political phenomenon of some moment.^107 This is perhaps
why Jeffrey Stout, a prominent theorist of “radical democracy,” treats anarchism
as a relevant interlocutor despite his strong philosophical and strategic disagree-
ments with it.^108
Although CrimethInc. might consider a preoccupation with anarchist the-
ory a useless bore, the drive to preserve the element of surprise is nonetheless
precisely what lies behind Landauer’s criticism of state-directed economies and
Buber’s refusal to prescribe blueprints and programs to the young kibbutzniks.
This brings us, however, to one of the tensions in theopolitics. On the one hand,
theopolitics eliminates the possibility of theological justification for any political
order. This is in line with Barthian thinking, in which transcendence cannot jus-
tify immanence. On the other hand, a reader could be forgiven for thinking that
Buber treats anarchism precisely as the form of political order that theopolitics
justifies. The solution to this subtle quandary is the move to emphasize the spon-
taneity and freedom of a future anarchist society. In Paths in Utopia, Buber ap-
provingly cites the reluctance of Proudhon, the first thinker to self-describe as an
anarchist, to contribute another “system” to the pile constructed by Saint-Simon,
Fourier, and their like: “I have no system, I will have none, and I expressly repudi-
ate the suggestion.... My business is to find out the way humanity is going and,
if I can, prepare it.”^109 Buber admires Proudhon’s refusal to declare allegiance to
materialism or idealism: