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The US anarchist movement is healthy enough and even getting bigger and better than I previously assesed them as. However there is a rather nasty and obvious Grand Canyon of a split between two major ( loudmouthed) factions. Faction one consists of the Plats and 'class-strugggle-anarchists' who appear to want to emulate the dubious 'success' of Leninist means and forms...democratic centralism and top-down workerism primarily. The entire narrative of anarchism since the late sixties - the revolt against work, green anarchy, municipalism, anarcho-feminism, anarchism and the black-revolution, the gay revolt, the backlash against professional activists, the net revolution and all that significant - if incremental - progress has been jettisoned. This faction really boils down to the marxism that you have when yr not having marxism and as such must be considered a significant corruption of the original anarchist 'distro'. It's wide open to colonization by those arch ideological colonizers and that is why so many of these 'recovering' concern-trolls have settled so happily into sites like Anarkismo, Libcom and Nefac type sites. The other faction also rose at the same time as this first sectarian grouping of hyphenated fools. This shit all bubbled to the surface in the mid-to-late 1920's. By contrast with the prolier-than-thou anarcho-Staknovites, many radically inclined revolutionaries immediately realized Lenin was not the answer and that the Bolsheviks had destroyed the village in order to save it. So the answer for them was to become more like anarchists. Now being middle-class bourgeois marxist friendly idiots they didn't really want to identify as anarchists, who at that time still had a violent reputation and were considered fair-game by repressive authoritarians everywhere. With the associated rise of relativism, why not just send the previous 50 years of anarchist struggle - including many hundreds of martyrs - down the old memory hole? Why not just claim that Marxism was really anarchism after all and date this discovery from the late 1920's? Various Marxists tried this and arguably the most succesful was the Situationists. This was because they stirred in some surrealism, some evocative writing and even some rather dashing activity during the events in May in France in 1968. Thus the whole council-communist tradition lives on as a resevoir within the US anarchist movement. I used to think that this was a fairly harmless phenomenon, however the danger must be admitted with ANY recombinant, ideologically imperialistic strain of neo-hegelian philosophy that one day the minority will make a play for the majority. This was a classic Leninist ploy whereby his minority could become the majority overnight. ( Sear Bolshevik and Menshevik and the constituent assembly of 1918 for more on this tactic) Again - I'm basically optimistic about the state of global anarchism in spite of all the present influence of these two trends in the states. I forsee a rise and rise of ' back-to-the-roots', paleo-anarchists and pan-anarchists who will closely study the First International, the hatred of Marx and Engels for all anarchists, what seperates us from all Marxists and why our Left flank must be patrolled and fenced off at least as well as our Right flank continually is. There is anecdotal evidence that my analysis is gaining traction and this may be seen in comments at anarch news sites and weak responses to some of my arguments. An example of the latter could be seen in the crude attempt to downplay the state as our prime revolutionary target - as if recent events hadn't underlined just how critical the state was to propping up exploitive capital! Marxist types are nothing if not masters of misdirection. Having predicted the ultimate crisis for decades when it finally came the best these ' economic genius's' could come up with was nationalization - national socialism is always the Marxists fallback position. For all true anarchists Bakunin defined the revolutionary subject as ' God and the State'. As I said, the state is the weakest link of capitalism - and God must surely be the weakest link of the State. If there was a God it would be necessary to destroy it. When enough anarchists attack the God-State hard enough with all the weapons we can steal then we will bring down this linch-pin of capitalism. Only the anarchists can do this because as we all know most Marxists simply adore the state and worship 'revolutionary' capitalism. But to be revolutionary anarchists is to know how we came to be here - why so many of us were murdered and why its still worth making one more more effort to be free. Unhyphenated, networked, proud and strong - that is the new anarchist I see rising out of the mess that is revolutionary socialism. We're young - they're old ...and thats life. Post a comment in response: |
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