The principal thesis of the lectures on the ‘Philosophy of History’ is that a socio-political upheaval of the sort that resulted in the French Revolution was only possible and necessary in countries where the Reformation had failed to carry the day. Hegel states this proposition quite unequivocally. His starting-point is the fact that the French Revolution triggered off a movement in the Latin countries where Catholicism was the prevailing religion. This movement was not brought to a halt and waves of reaction and further revolution followed in relatively quick succession. The source of all this unrest lay, according to Hegel, in the fact that these nations had remained Catholic.
-Lukacs, The Young Hegel
Revolution is a vast project motivated by sweeping ideas. Thus, the reader will no doubt pardon some grand historical ideas being elaborated in this piece, as this is largely unavoidable in revolutionizing reality and in revolutionizing thought. For example, since this is an anarchist study, we can return to our own history, where we see that the division between Marx and Bakunin fell on many lines: personal, political and various other differences. However, very few make the observation that the split between, not the two individuals themselves, but the followers of Marx and Bakunin, largely ran along the lines of Northern and Southern Europe. This divide is effectively that of the Latin, Catholic, Mediterranean world, against that of the Germanic, Protestant, Baltic North. If we think to ourselves today, what are the countries that suffer from austerity, imposed by this Northern world, we find they are largely the same countries of the South, colloquially called the PIGS: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, and occasionally, Ireland, another Catholic country, is thrown in as well. Equally, these Southern nations are those that have the most social unrest, and in recent European history have had the most social turbulence. Thus, the issue certainly merits some attention, and among intellectuals freed from the stultifying school of Marxism, Agamben has recently called for a ‘Latin Empire’ to form against austerity, following the lead of the famous Hegelian, Alexandre Kojève.
What did Agamben mean by this call, which was quickly seized on by everyone as a dangerous heresy? Basically, nothing other than the common-sense observation that Mediterranean nations have more in common with one another than with Nordic countries, and so have a more real affinity with one another than with the Protestant North. Even the Mediterranean lifestyle, with its long nights outside, the famous talking in the Stoas or walking around which gave us the name Stoics and Peripatetics, is impossible in the North, with its wind, rain and snow. Any observer who has visited, either lengthily or at least honestly, countries in both South and North can remark on the clearly visible cultural differences in a casual way. Similarly, simple everyday differences manifest themselves politically: for an illuminating example in line with our opening citation, if we think of the Americas, we find a largely peaceful Protestant North and a revolutionary Catholic South. The only countries with histories of repeated social revolutions and turbulence in this Hemisphere are all in the South. Or for our English readers let us reflect that the only part of the (former) U.K. that has had any serious revolutionism was in Catholic Ireland and this souvenir remains in the still-Catholic parts of Northern Ireland, and more examples could be adduced along these lines.
So starting with these self-evident and uncontroversial observations, I would like to have an anarchist investigation of what all this means for revolutionaries today. This must happen because quite unfortunately anarchists often defer to a Marxism which, because of its materialism, has no capacity to explain these very real spiritual divisions in Europe. The watchword for this investigation will be that of Bakunin, who correctly saw the link between possibilities for making a revolution, and its enemies, namely, God and the State (and not some mythical economy). Bakunin’s basic ideas which he took from his formation in the school of Young Hegelianism, where they were quite common, was to regard the religion and the political life of a nation as intertwined. He did this from the perspective of making revolution. So, famously, in his notes on Germandom compared to the Slavic world, Bakunin found the Slavic world had a deformed and weak state, related to its Orthodox Christianity, compared to the Germanic one. This is why Bakunin thought there was more potential for revolution in Eastern Europe. Now there is a lot of outdated rhetoric in Bakunin’s Pan-Slavism, however bizzarely anarchists often disregard the wealth of insight of one of the founders of their school of thought. Because of his insight into a basic facet of reality and revolutionizing this reality, Bakunin famously predicted the Slavic world and Spain would have great revolutions, as against Marx, who predicated his scheme on England and Germany. And, in the 20th century, the entire Slavic world, because of its weak state formation, was revolutionized. But in an irony of history, it was Marxism that made this Pan-Slavic revolution a reality, not the Anarchism of Bakunin and Makhno, for example. To add even more irony, one could say what really was the ideal of Marxism was most fully realized in the Scandinavian Protestant social model, not in the East. All these twists and turns of history in no way detract from the merit of Bakunin.
To continue the observation, why did Bakunin think there was less chance for revolution in the Protestant Germanic North? What is special about Protestantism as opposed to the other forms of Christianity? First, Protestantism internalizes what previously was external. As the saying goes, Luther got rid of monks and priests to make everyone a monk and a priest. This internalization includes the relation to the state, which previously was regarded as of little importance, since Heaven was believed to be more important than Earth. This is why, as Hegel and Bakunin noted, it is Protestantism that makes for a really strong and durable state, since Protestantism has most clearly divinized the State. This was also why Stirner made a connection between the secret police of the State, and the conscience of the individual believer; the police that tries to know every crime, and the God that knows every sin. This is aptly shown in the history of modern Prussia, most famously: this first Protestant country (in this way divinized) united the rest of Germany around itself in a repressive way, defeated the German Catholic powers of Austria and Bavaria, and then fought with England, another Protestant land, over the issue of world dominance, before coming to its well-known end. For Bakunin to focus on Prussia as objectively counter-revolutionary, the global leader of reaction as first witnessed in 1871, and later at Brest-Litovsk and after 1933, seems to us less anti-Prussian than clear-sighted. Because he had grasped an essential feature of the world, Bakunin’s warnings against Prussian reaction became even more true after his era. It is not the economy that determines everything, as in the inept view shared by English Liberalism and Marxism, but rather the spiritual beliefs that manifest themselves in the world that have a large role to play.
For example, the modern conception of the economy, which we call capitalism, comes from Protestantism, as pointed out quite some time ago by Max Weber, and accepted, in a greater or lesser fashion, by everyone except purist Marxists and neo- classical economists. It has not been so noticed, but Bakunin also says the same thing in an offhand way, as this was a quite obvious connection for prior generations. So in God and the State, he notes, “[Protestantism] is the bourgeois religion par excellence. It accords just as much liberty as is necessary to the bourgeois, and finds a way of reconciling celestial aspirations with the respect which terrestrial conditions demand. Consequently, it is especially in Protestant countries that commerce and industry have been developed.” This being said, I would opt here for the lesser fashion of taking this connection, because my point is to introduce a greater refinement and variety of factors in evaluating the world, in opposition to outdated 19th century economistic crudity, and also there are many fine distinctions which are beyond my capacity to touch on: for example Weber noted that Calvinism defended the cause of the Reformation in wars with comparatively much more zeal than Lutheranism, just as the Calvinist states of Holland and partially the U.K. became the centres of capitalism; equally should we lend more focus to spiritual relations, material finance or technological industrialization as defining capitalism, etc. With this in mind, I admit that there is little of interest in the positive and purely academic definition of the exact recipe for the making of capitalism out of Protestantism. As I stated previously I am more interested in the negative definition of what structures produce a brittle state, and for focusing on the political, not the economic realm. Along these lines, where politics has blurred into enforcing economics, it is not very surprising that the countries today who are enforcing austerity, not with ‘market forces’ but with state repression, are the Protestant U.S.-U.K. and Germany. They have made the game, so naturally they enforce their self-made rules. But because of this belief in the economy, itself a secularized Protestantism, the Protestant lands have in no way escaped typical Christian conceptions and behaviour. Just as was remarked by the Young Hegelians, the secularized state with a still-devout populace is in one sense the perfect completion of Protestantism (notably in the USA). Elsewhere, the guiding hand of God became the invisible hand of economics, which is fitting as Smith was, quite literally, a Protestant moralist before the creation of his Protestant moralistic economic theory.
In this way I claim that the North Protestant lands are more religiously Christian than the South. They appear to have less acknowledged Christian believers, numerous Catholics or Muslims, and the Protestant believers are more divided into sects. But this only comes from an incorrect way of seeing the essence of the religion. Christianity in no way concerned something formal, but rather was concerned almost exclusively with essence. This was emphasized most significantly in Protestantism, in its emphasis on faith, as the inner core, not the outer shell of devotion. Protestantism got rid of the millenia of practices and history associated with Christianity, but the bitter essence remained. Yet this focus on the inner is in fact the essential essence of Christianity, which is essence, not form. After all, Christianity simply stole the Pagan holidays, so we find Jesus’ birthday, which is nowhere mentioned in the Bible, comes to be the day of the Pagan celebration of the winter solstice and the rebirth of the sun, and there is the same astrological connection with his supposed Passion. This becomes even more marked in the minor days of various saints, etc. We have another good example of this inattention to form in various architectural examples, such as the famous Roman temple to Minerva that became Maria-sopra-Minerva, or the Maison Carrée in Nîmes. These were all Classical buildings converted to Christian worship, as there is little attention to form, but the essence put inside the form.
![maria sopra](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717224641im_/https://thebarbarianreview.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/maria-sopra.jpg?w=300&h=225)
In the South we have all the faded forms of Christianity which no one takes so seriously, and which can be hit as they are externalized (e.g. unused Church land or concessions will be taken away- or Mt. Athos will have its designation reversed, renamed as a quarantine zone for the spiritually diseased, which is how it effectively functions). With the Church in the South there is the clear correlate that this Church functions in the modern world as basically a business enterprise. There is a clearer genealogy from the Church to the modern business world, since the Church now functions as a curiously antiquated corporation. But if it functions this way, then clearly this makes it more mundane and less believable as a spiritual expression, and moreover it is more materialized as being a significant force on the side of the reaction. So the enemy is quite visibly God and the State. But the Church alliance with State and economic life means that if things begin to happen to the State and economic life is disrupted, the Church will be taken in by the general wreck. For revolutionaries this would be a positive outcome. While in the North there is not even one formal Church, but the essence of Christianity, this joylessness, this unhappiness, as Nietzsche says, this great “No” to life, is in fact everywhere, and worst of all, is hidden away in the entire tissue of the society. It is even in many radicals, where you find in the North a strong vegan or straightedge scene unlike the South, and I would hope not to have to belabor the connection of these practices with puritanism.
It is much the same with non-violent civil disobedience, a Christian concept stemming from negation of an always-violent life. Moreover with the expansive, typically Protestant way of thinking which is concerned with a unity in thought overriding the real world (as otherworldly ideas of purity override actual life), radicals from Protestant lands with non-existent or feebly- existing radical movements occasionally critique the radical reality in the South on the basis of their abstract concepts that have no correspondence to the real world, the ‘heaven’ of their ideas against the sinful ‘earth’ of an actual movement, with its shortcomings and setbacks.
So there are many things one could, with justice, abstractly critique in Greek Anarchy, or even abstractly critique the entirety of the movement itself, but the point to note is the abstraction, since there is not elsewhere in Europe any comparable Anarchist movement, except in Spain, which is also in the South. In our world things change slowly in an historical sense, and changes are always based, not on abandoning a real movement for a contentless abstraction, but in a certain sense in taking the movement more seriously, and wrestling with the implicit spiritual content of our ideals. In this vein although we are for equality regardless of nations, this is rooted in the problematic pointed out by Aristotle, where we are all equal in potential, but not in actuality, or where the one is a negative criteria, the other must be a positive criteria. Potentially, every country should have a powerful and dynamic Anarchist movement, however, actually, in contemporary reality; only a few do. That they do, is only to be comprehended by thought dealing with reality, not, for example, thought negating reality, saying there should be no national oppression, as a normative claim, and going from here in one bound to the unsupported empirical claim that different nations don’t exist today, because we are all Protestants, workers, or humans. As an example of this type of thinking, famously the Comintern failed in all its attempts to transpose 1917, with a notable case being China in 1927, where they insisted on repeating the Russian model of seizing cities to spread revolution. This was a disaster, and Mao prevailed upon the remaining cadres to take account of Chinese conditions (which in practice, again, meant dishonestly using Bakunin’s program of peasant uprisings and pretending the ideas were Marxist). Rosa Luxemburg, in the midst of the turbulence following the 1918 November Revolution, also wrote an article shortly before her murder, claiming ‘How German is this revolution!’ This is quite strange because it reveals problems with one of the intellectually sharpest of the Marxists, as evidently a revolution in Germany would be forced to have some German characteristics, unless we had the strange a priori notion that all nations must make the same characterless revolution. At any rate, real thought would say that actual differences do exist, and, in order to destroy states, one has to take into account various very real cultural differences, which was the method of Bakunin and hence can be said to belong to anarchism.
Incidentally, I would like to continue a bit along with the idea that Protestantism relates more to thought than other forms of Christianity, and so these countries privilege abstract thought, just as these lands generally produced the big-picture thinkers we deal with today: Hegel, Stirner, Bakunin (at least he was a student in Berlin), Nietszsche, Heidegger, and for the Marxists, Marx, Engels, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School, etc. So, on the other hand, why are there Thatcher and Merkel, multiculturism, meritocratic ideals of the bureaucracy, and government-sponsored recycling in the North? Because the point is not the more classic one of who, specifically, holds power, but that the idea of power is itself being realized, just as this state tries to encompass everything inside its divinized reality: the refugee from Somalia, the post-industrial worker and internet capitalist, the leftist on welfare, the problems of global warming. . . “we are all in this together”, etc. I don’t say that these countries really succeed with these claims in reality, because hypocrisy is a well-known trait of Christians attested to from Antiquity. But that’s not the point — the point is to know that these are the ideas these countries have about themselves. They have idealistic ideas about how their world should work, which comes from their formation in extremely idealistic Christianity. For Northern radicals this leads to the bewildering profusion of, and importance given to, so-called critical theory, nowadays predominantly French or Anglo-American sub-Marxism, which one does not find so much in the South, which has more of a taste for the older classics, so to speak. I would also say here that this is a good thing for the South, since the majority of what is produced today as theory is effectively only a more confused version of things already said long ago. If the perspective of today lies in realizing thought, then perhaps separated thought has reached its zero-point for now, and hence the intellectual productions (e.g. Žižek and Harvey criticizing, or Badiou ignoring, the riots in Athens) are basically of zero value, a proposition I strongly believe many have secretly arrived at, but have been too afraid to say, since Anarchism is supposed to be intellectually inferior to Marxism and its latter-day epigones. But most today would no doubt suspect that this Marxist theory of production that “produced” mainly the disasters which were openly predicted by Stirner and Bakunin, would in truth be the less intellectually valuable of the two sides.
Anyway, to return to our guiding thread, basically we seem to have liberal, rationalized, secular, multicultural, progressive, ‘green’, Northern Europe (with its female Chancellor) confronting backwards, barbaric, traditional Southern Europe. Even reading the newspapers from Protestant countries, and the establishment ones from the South like Kathemerini, this is largely how the Greeks and other Southern peoples are portrayed, in half-colonial terms, as lazy and work-shy, irrational, irresponsible, and so on. Whereas in truth we have a radicalized Christianity in the North being opposed by the memory of past revolutionary struggles, and a chance and the desire to break out of Christianity in the South, because here, Christianity is stuck in its little box, where it slowly fades away into basically irreligious traditional folk festivals, especially when combined with the overtly anti-Christian revolutionism of the past few centuries. Regarding Christian holidays, as noted before, none are really authentically Christian, but random local celebrations or pagan astrological remembrances preserved in the strange and moving forgetful memory of the masses, so they are not really so bad if imbued with a spirit of happiness, since this is the true anti-Christianity. Furthermore the South has already rejected the prior Northern attempt of enforcing joyless, secularized Protestantism in its significant Resistance movements. And in passing, I would like to note that the Resistance famously retreated to the rural regions for guerrilla war, something against Marxist orthodoxy, which focuses on urban workers. The German party, famously, took this urban dictum the most seriously, and never could resist fascism. Whereas the more rural parties from the more rural regions were capable of resisting the technological onslaught that came from the North. Equally, Christianity was largely an urban religion, whereas the rural regions remained true to their traditional faith, well after the advent of the Christian empire. This is where the term comes from, pagan, by association rural dwellers, which eventually became a term of contempt. In going back to its roots Protestantism again established itself most strongly in cities, in Geneva, Amsterdam and London. So austerity today can profitably be conceived of, in large terms, as the ‘city’ of the North lamenting the backwardness of the ‘countryside’ of the South and East. But I think we, as previously with Bakunin, have to question whether this apparently retrograde countryside might not become a great force if linked with revolution?
At any rate, revolution has already proved itself to be, as Hegel saw, a sort of substitute Reformation for the world of external Christian religion. Northern Europe could not make, because it did not need, another of these upheavals, and very quickly, most famously in Scandinavia, Marxism became another sort of Protestant reformism, just as the U.S.-U.K. did not even need Marxism as a real force to make their reforms. The state could be reformed peacefully in Northern Europe, because the Reform obviously established the principle of reform in its political bodies. This is not to say there was no violence in the history of these nations; famously the U.S. was shamefully violent against its labour movement, which is why we celebrate May 1st. Yet it is also true that in Protestant lands, Protestantism established the priority of self-control, and of abstract thought in the religious life. So, the workers and bourgeoisie control themselves to limit excesses, and both sides are capable of thinking about their respective positions, and of reaching this prosaic compromise we call the welfare-state, in a gradual and yet real way: the reality of this reformism was in the ‘labour aristocracy’ of England, for example. The North had violence but few social revolutions, and the few revolutions there were, were all quite confused and relatively feeble, most famously in Germany’s 1918. I would also mention England’s half-revolution of 1640 and 1688, which is the paradigmatic half-way Protestant revolution, provoked only by an unreasoning authority and ending in the compromise of the newly-forged Liberalism. In a loose metaphoric sense, the Protestant state could be thought of as a willow, supple and able to bend in the wind, whereas the external Christian state is more like a rotten oak that perhaps takes too much wind in a storm, and so can break. But as I said before, it is not an abstract and meaningless question of preference in the positive sense, as in which tree does one like, but rather, the negative sense, as one plans to axe a certain type of tree as a destructive wood-cutter.
So the point is that revolution can also go farther, and become not merely a substitute Reformation that has to secularize the state and modernize economic life (the task accomplished by the Marxist bourgeoisie in their countries, basically), but as a movement that finally leaves the terrain of this horrific religion altogether. We are at the period of reversing the Wars of Religion, in a sense. This would make real the call of Agamben for a Mediterranean cultural unit, and it would show that an analysis rooted in thought could comprehend the actual terrain of struggle today, as opposed to an analysis rooted in self-denying, thoughtless thought, Liberalism-Marxism. Then, in the 16th century, it was the poor, underdeveloped North that fought against Charles V and his world monarchy, that had some kind of new and real faith confronting a decadent world. Now it is the Protestant world that is afflicted with an all-too visible decadence, as in the American Way of Life.
So it is the South that can throw down the gauntlet to the current masters of the world, the Northern Protestants, and represent a new spiritual movement developing out of its past revolutions. Only anarchism can provide this impetus for a new struggle, and in the South, as an addition, revolutions have never been exclusively Marxist: 1789, 1848, and 1871, for instance, as well as Spain’s heroic Anarchist tradition. Camus, unobserved, at the end of The Rebel called for the decentralizing, Mediterranean tradition of the Commune of 1871, for Anarchy, just as did Breton as he aged. Similarly, Bakunin’s last attempts at insurrection were in Lyon and Bologna. From this, and numerous other examples, it follows that there is a real tradition, and a real chance, for Anarchy in the South to form a spiritual response to austerity, and to completely leave behind the Christian era. If we return to the beginning of the article, and think of a union of the southern European regions, some claim that Agamben is always reluctant to elaborate practical applications of his ideas, which presumably comes from his formation under the detached older Heidegger. However, Agamben recently said in the closing remarks of his lecture here in Athens, we must begin to think real anarchy. Clearly, the idea of a cultural unit can really only fit as an anarchist, non-state alliance of revolutionary regions, or else it is doomed to be another boring bureaucratic reshuffling of red tape. And finally revolution cannot really be content with being a few tiny states in the South: rather, revolution here would be the most universal of revolutions, belonging to everyone, to humanity, since it would defeat the hitherto most universal civilization, which we have taken to calling ‘capitalism’.
In a practical sense, what can this focus bring us today? In Europe we find three regions: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox. The Protestant lands are all industrialized, serious economies, and supposedly secular, liberalized welfare states. The Catholic and Orthodox lands are less developed, more overtly religious, and their states are more mired in corruption and malfunctioning. As the economists have said, Greece and Portugal, for example, are simply too rural to support modernity. Geographically we think of them as being at the far ends of Europe. This is the South. While, sadly, the East has had the idea of revolution so tarnished by the Marxist debacle that we find a very bleak picture there: Poland and Hungary recently have had deeply conservative governments, harking back nostalgically to the fascist era. In the Protestant North there is too much non-violent pacifism, political reformism, and too much easy wealth to have serious revolutionism. Only in the South do we find the history of revolution still alive in the people, coupled with this externality of government and economy. This is why one can hope for a Southern alliance of Anarchist revolution, an heroic axis of liberty, of the Mediterranean as opposed to the American way of life.
In brief, the only options for the future are barbarism or barbarism. The first is the so-called barbarism of the South, the inattention to debts, money, work, and petty regulations, the laughter and singing of the village celebration, the love of liberty and memory of popular revolutions, the Ψυχή βαθιά (deep soul) of ever-renewed rebellion, this great heart of the proletariat. This is one sense in which we are for barbarism. The second, perhaps a passive or more real barbarism, is the dull Protestantism of the rainy, all-too regulated North, this pettiness, the unhappiness engraved on every face you see passing on the street, the surveillance cameras, the silent cafes with everyone plugged into their own little computerized world. And furthermore, I don’t doubt that the North will condemn revolutionists as criminal barbarians, anarchists, etc. But not so very long ago the South had the culture of the Renaissance, of Velasquez and Cervantes, while these now very respectable Protestant states, Germany, Holland, England, U.S.A, were quite well-known as the lands of fanaticism, piracy, plunder, and criminality. Perhaps this is what these governments still have remained, and it would be better to think of austerity in this regard. If we are forced to choose between these competing spiritual values, then the advantage clearly lies with the South. Even the great figures from the North knew this, in some way. Byron came to fight for Greece, Orwell fought and made his Homage to Catalonia, Anacharsis Cloots and Georg Forster joined 1789, while the admiration of Hegel, Hölderlin, Goethe, Nietzsche and many others for Antiquity and the French Revolution is well known. This, we from Protestant lands can proudly call our own revolutionary- touristic heritage, which remains with us at The Barbarian today in Greece.
In closing, this article is really just an argument for a better analysis that can leave the completely failed model of economics explaining everything, which, as everyone knows, comes only from English economists and later Marxists; anarchism already possesses richer intellectual models in the work of Stirner and Bakunin. As Agamben said very reasonably in a later interview concerning his article on the Latin Empire, “For more than two hundred years, human energies have been focused on economics. Many things indicate that the moment has perhaps arrived for homo sapiens to organize human action afresh, beyond this single dimension.” Certainly, we are arriving at this moment. Of course, a minor danger would be to say economic factors don’t exist at all, which is simply the other side of the mistake made by Smith and Marx, saying economics is the only real thing. Plato and Aristotle, and even Hegel, treat of economic issues, but in their proper place, as rather low on the scale of intellectual and spiritual importance. Thus the point would not be so much the economics of austerity, facts and figures, from which one can prove austerity has been counterproductive and inefficient from an economistic view (incidentally proving that the question of neo-liberalism is in no way one of scientific reason classically considered, but of something like religious belief); more importance lies in the spiritual values and political forms of the North imposing themselves on the South. Then the disconnect between North and South would reveal a gap in which something might happen. We can treat the real totality of life, instead of a minor part of life spuriously called the totality, as with the economy. With this method, one can go from greater degrees of abstraction to lesser to situate ourselves in reality. So, with Greece we find we are in Europe, in an Orthodox country but in the Mediterranean South, in a maritime state, broken up into islands and regions and historically never able to unify itself, and this same modern state was deformed by its cobbled-together character with its various imperial patrons (England, France, Bavaria, Russia, later the U.S.A. etc.), and we have a society that just left Fascist dictatorship in the prior generation, a trait it shares in Europe only with Portugal and Spain. I also think it deserves mention, how curious that supposed materialists never pay attention to real material conditions, since before Marx, with Montesquieu for example, it was quite common to speak of the climate and the geographical surroundings as bearing an influence on societies, just as De Tocqueville ironically remarked that the people needed good weather in order to fight. Surely such conditions, influencing the formation of societies, have an influence on the possibilities of changing societies. After all, it was almost entirely the Kronstadt sailors who decided the revolution in St. Petersburg that began the revolution in Russia, and sailors later mutinied in Germany at the port of Kiel to end WW1. For revolution, that Athens is at heart a maritime city, along with Barcelona, has a not insignificant meaning, related to the emancipating character of the sea that flattens all distinctions. These material conditions, while also not being economic, do have some real role to play in analysing a situation.
Essentially, we should not look for hope from an unreflective economic analysis, where we say that revolution must come from the poorest, or it must come from the richest, which is a contradiction in Marxist thought that reveals some of its numerous intellectual defects (e.g. Marx claimed revolution must come from England, the richest country, but it will be the increasing poverty of English workers that will make the revolution-neither of which happened). Rather we should, with Bakunin, look for contradictions and deformities in the State, informed by religious life, against which we see the political chances, formed by political history. From a quick view, we see that Greece is riddled with these contradictions, and this helps us to explain, not only why Greece has the radical movement that it does, but why it has had the turbulent prior history that contributed to forming today’s movement. In other words: when we begin to follow Agamben’s call, and really think Anarchy, we see that only Anarchism has the intellectual capacity to explain its own presence in the South, just as Anarchism is the only political actor that has the potential force to accomplish an historically unprecedented revolution in the South.
![binet_europe_map_1836](http://web.archive.org./web/20170717224641im_/https://thebarbarianreview.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/binet_europe_map_1836.jpg?w=300&h=121)