It's been a year since the launch of this site and we have a bunch of news for you.
People have finished processing of Letters of Insurgents through OCR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition), but the text needs further polishing. Different from our usual practice, we have split the text in 10 parts to encourage the editing by the people who participate to the http://insurgentsummer.org/ initiative. So, if you download and read some chapter, please find the typos and the error and fix them back. (As usual, no registration required, just click on Edit on the bar and go!).
If you want to link to us for Letters, the following links are best: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/topics/Letters_of_Insurgents.html or http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/Sophia_Nachalo_and_Yarostan_Vochek.html. (These are best because they won't change, whereas the link to the individual chapters will be removed at the end of the insurgentsummer.org initiative, when they'll be packed in a single entry).
John Stuart Mill, who knew little about the difference between Anarchism and Socialism, but sympathized with both, as far as he understood them, has left on record the sentiment that the Malthusian theory, long considered the fatal objection to Socialism, might prove the strongest argument in its favor. Being much of that opinion myself, I have long desired Malthus, a writer of whom everybody talks and whom nobody reads, to be more generally understood. His life and character strike me as very irrelevant to his reasonings; but since prejudice always insists on getting them in, and generally tells lies about them, here is the truth. Daniel Malthus was the friend and executor of Rousseau. It need not be said, he was a radical. He was also an author to whom some literary merit is attributed; but he always wrote anonymously. His social grade was that of an English “gentleman,” living on an income derived from some sort of stock. That he was pretty rich, and that he met with financial reverses, may be inferred from the facts that he passed through the University of Cambridge as a student in the most expensive class; but his son, Thomas Robert Malthus, the economist, was sent there on a cheaper plan; at which time we also find that the family, though increased, had moved into a smaller house than that where he was born. Here, during the winter of 1797, the father and son had some arguments about the merits of Political Justice, a book recently published by William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and father-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley). Godwin was an Anarchist of that early unscientific type which preceded Marx and Proudhon. Like his French contemporary, Condorcet, he vaguely enertained those ideas to which Saint Simon about twenty-four years later, gave precision. That prodigious increase of wealth-producing arts which marked the last quarter of the eighteenth century was transforming military into industrial organization. The trades of the soldier, the legislator, the judge, the jailer, the sovereign, and the hangman, would soon be discarded as useless by a generation whom commerce was bringing to understand human solidarity. Commerce itself, by its effect in cheapening the means of life, would be obliged to make way for Communism. The Golden Age, the Paradisiacal State, was not only before, instead of behind us — it was at the door. The courageous optimism which could think so whein the greatest of popular revolutions was, after fearful bloodshed, in the act of transformation into a conquering military despotism, does credit to Godwin's heart, and his imagination; and the elder Malthus was delighted. But the younger pointed out difficulties. In Godwin's Utopia, life was to be maintained so easily that the “struggle for existence” (a phrase used by Malthus) would have ceased; and population, naturally, would increase fast. For things had by no means come to that in the United States, where the settlers were still killing Indians and working negro slaves; where they had fought seven years against a tax, and were in the act of domestic rebellion for cheap whiskey. Yet even in the United States living was so easy, that population, aside from immigration, doubled every twenty-five years. No such rate of increase could possibly continue. As this is a point on which ignorant critics of Malthus continually blunder, we will try to get it clear. The ignorant critics speak about destructive effects of this increase as if these were equally remote with the earth's falling into the sun, or the extinction of the sun itself. But anyone who can use a table of logarithms may convince himself in five minutes that the progeny of one Adam and Eve, doubling every twenty-five years, would pack like oranges in a box, not after geologic aeons, but in a few centuries. Of course no such result is possible. Yet it would evidently happen but that something hinders. What does? Increase of the death-rate. This comes in various forms, all horrible to contemplate. Densely peopled countries, India, China, Egypt, Ireland, are mostly very liable to famine. Those happier in this respect have had dire experience that crowding and pestilence go together. Even where these destroying angels spare to smite for the sins of the people, the mortality of cities, notwithstanding all their opulence and knowledge, is invariably higher than that of the poorer, ruder country. But above all other things, war has been not only a check on over-population, but a proof that even very ignorant people know a check is needed. That they may not starve, cannibals fight and eat each other. Shepherds, indeed, cannot starve while their flocks are fed; for the flocks increase faster than the men.[1] But the flocks must have food as well as the men; and, because they increase faster, they reach the limit beyond which they cannot be supported, sooner. Then the shepherd-peoples also resort to war. They sweep across three continents under the black banner of Mahomet, or, perhaps, they are defeated, and almost annihilated, in a battle like that of Aqua Sextiae, by the richer and more civilized neighbors whose territories they have invaded. Either way, the problem of over-population is solved for some time, so far as they are concerned with it. In agricultural countries, war is less popular. But when a government able to suppress it through a wide region arises, famine takes its place, unless the birth-rate be reduced at the same time. A great object-lesson of the kind had recently been seen in India. The first of her recorded famines on a large scale occurred under Aurungzebe, — the first sovereign who really ruled all India. And observe, this could be attributed to nothing but cessation of war, which, when famine threatened, had previously offered a more hopeful way of dying; for, except cessation of war, there had been no important change in the customs of India to account for so terrible a change in the results. The alternative of war or famine is likewise so generally understood that, though backward agricultural peoples are less pugnacious than the cattle-breeders, war was everywhere, always, the principal fact in their history, till it ended, as war normally does, in extensive conquests like those of the Great Moguls. In the highest state of civilization, where there are important manufactures and extensive commerce, there is less war than anywhere else. But even so typically modern a country as England had been at war fifty years in the preceding hundred, and if we clear our minds of cant about “rights,” “international law,” “the balance of power,” and other diplomatic flimflam, we shall find that the true object of a modern war is a commercial advantage, that nations get ready to fight for a commercial advantage when the pressure of increasing population makes the advantage sufficiently necessary, that increase of the population is the fundamental cause of war, — “teterrima causa belli” — as it always was. Now, Mr. Godwin is witness that war is the cause of government, slavery, serfdom, laws, punishments, unequal distribution of wealth. If, therefore, his Utopia, which is to banish all such things, were established, it could not last, and we should soon have them all back, unless a way be found of checking propagation. But, in truth, too much is conceded in supposing his Utopia established at all. Since men were cannibals, some slow approaches to it have, indeed, been made. The tortoise of industry may be tiring out the hares of lust and plunder; but Mr. Godwin himself shows us that they are a long way ahead of her still; and to imagine them laid asleep by his Arcadian rhetoric is to show ignorance of human nature. All which led Malthus Jr. to another series of reflections. What he called Positive Checks on population — those which increase the death-rate-are inevitable, if propagation goes on at American speed, which, under Utopian conditions, it should surpass. But, generally speaking, it does not go on so fast. There are, then, Checks on population, of a different sort — Preventive — those which diminish the birth-rate. It is evident that there are many checks of this kind — among them vicious practices. But on these, Malthus, a clergyman, had no mercy. He classed them as Positive Checks, — appearing to hold, rather dogmatically, that they restrain increase as much by raising the death-rate as by lowering the birth-rate; nor did he withhold this censure from the least injurious among them, such as those afterwards proposed by the Malthusian Socialist, Robert Owen.[2] The only check which Malthus would admit to be truly Preventive, or Prudential, is continence. This check is, certainly, far from inefficacious. The lowest savages, who graze like apes, know, indeed, nothing about it. But in the stage of hunting nomadism, a young man is not allowed to marry till the cruel rites of barbarian confirmation have proved him fit for his father's trade of war. If he cannot pass, he is good for nothing but a priest; and where priests do not fight (as sometimes they do) the general rule is that they are celibates. Among cattleraising nomads, polygamy prevails; and men who are not smart enough to acquire stock can get no wives. In the agricultural state, and still more the commercial, it is mere commonplace that to marry without the means of supporting a family is imprudent. Thus, from the lowest conditions of man to the highest, we find celibacy increasing uniformly with civilization, except as superstition sometimes intervenes to cause a factitious increase, which, we may suspect of being rather apparent than real. In that increasing celibacy whose causes are economic, much, no doubt, is loose; but much is genuine. It requires some force of character, some foresight, some judgment, to do what Jacob did for Rachel. Yet this is what many young men do in all social states, from the nomadic shepherd's upwards, but increasingly. If the qualities they show be among those which make success in the battle of life, as they very clearly are, has not Godwin's materialistic philosophy confounded effect with cause? Is it not this improvement of habits which has made increase in wealth and knowledge? If the latter fails, as we see it has so far failed, to “substitute the industrial régime for the military,” is not that because the improvement of habits is by no means as general as are some of its superficial effects? A beggar may be made more comfortable in London than a king in Darkest Africa; but there is no making- a fool anything else than a fool, or saving him from being pushed to the worst place among competitors wherever he may happen to live.
Süreyyya Evren is a writer and cultural theorist who lives in Istanbul, Turkey. Internationally, he is best known for his involvement in the Siyahi journal and the devlopment of postanarchist theory.
Over the last ten years, the “Turkish postanarchists” have made quite a name for themselves in certain anarchist circles. At the same time, people don't know much about the ones responsible for this. Can you clear some this up for us? Who is behind the Siyahi journal and other projects?
In the last twelve years, we have been working as an affinity group of people who are interested in similar subjects, theoretical and political stances. We have had three main phases of alternative publishing.
At the outset, after reading Black Flame, it's impossible not to reflect on the massive amount of research that such a work must have entailed. The book is a narrative about anarchism and, with interest in anarchism on the rise worldwide, it could not have come at a better time. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, we need new narratives of the anarchist tradition to understand where we've been. Secondly, Black Flame contains critiques of the ways that “radical” circles contemporarily have too often turned away from the radical class politics that have always defined the socialist movement.
Ironically enough, this is both a major strength of the book, but also, in my opinion, one of its weaknesses. As Schmidt and van der Walt state their case early in the book, “'(c)lass struggle' anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary or communist anarchism, is not a type of anarchism; in our view, it is the only anarchism” (19 — emphasis theirs). This essentially leads to the authors deciding throughout the beginning of the book who the “real” anarchists are and who gets defined out.
In an article in the recent book, We Are an Image from the Future: the Greek Revolt of December 2008, I briefly made a point that a friend convinced me needs to be elaborated. The idea is that of “signals of disorder,” and their importance in spreading rebellion.
As far as Greece is concerned, the argument is that by carrying out attacks — primarily smashings and molotov attacks against banks and police stations, which constitute the most obvious symbols of capitalist exploitation and State violence for Greek society — insurrectionary anarchists created signals of disorder that acted as subversive seeds. Even though most people did not agree with these attacks at the time, they lodged in their consciousness, and at a moment of social rupture, people adopted these forms as their own tools, to express their rage when all the traditionally valid forms of political activity were inadequate.
From September 10-15, the Cascadia Media Alliance hosted a Reclaim the Media Convergence in Seattle. Held during the week of the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), this occasion was an opportunity to protest the corporate-driven policies of the NAB/FCC/NPR triumvirate, as well as to gather for our own grassroots shadow convention. Community media activists for all over North America descended upon Seattle to hear speakers, do workshops, strategize and bounce off each others' creative energy. By the end of the convergence 100 free radio stations had been set up just 2 band widths apart on the FM dial in open defiance of the censorious 3 bandwidth low power FM requirements of the FCC. This rule has in effect created a situation in which LPFM stations are not legally feasible in urban areas like Seattle. The eclectic programming mix of these pirate stations featured everything from guerilla radio broadcasts of the FCC actually battering down the doors of Free Radio Austin, to a satirical piece about Clear Channel by Mark Hosler of Negativland, to a series of 3 minute airplay spots on the subject of “media and democracy.” I was invited to kick off the week's events with a presentation at the Seattle IMC. Focusing on the affinities between anarchism and surrealism in relation to media activism. My talk, upon which the following article is based, consciously avoided the self-congratulatory approach of keynote speakers David Barsamian and Amy Goodman, and instead sought to raise thorny strategic questions for anarchists involved in the media democracy movement.
Dancing at Armageddon by Richard G. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
In sociologist Richard G. Mitchell's Dancing at Armageddon we meet Zillah, dressed in homepatched camouflage, who has come to a weekend retreat with a sheaf of photocopied fliers detailing her vision of localized radical democracy. Sound like a familiar character? Well, you'll never find Zillah at an infoshop or an anti-WTO action. She's on a different FBI list: not an “anarchist” but a “survivalist,” and hence a subject for Mitchell, whose book is subtitled Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times.
Mitchell spent a dozen years mixing with survivalists, alternately feeling revulsion, ridicule, and admiration — and ultimately deciding that however questionable the theories of survivalists may be, their practices can tell us something of the experience of daily life in shrink-wrapped corporate society.
“What is inflated too much will burst into fragments.”
— Ethiopian proverb
“Spiritual zombies no longer hear their inner guide.”
— Alice Walker
In 1986, at the Haymarket anniversary anarchist gathering in Chicago, I landed in a “radical ritual.”
We were told that we would start calling in the directions. They get to West and call in the spirits of water. We are just blocks from Lake Michigan. This body of water has nothing to do with the West because it sits to the East! I point this out and am shushed with comments about “tradition” and “how things are done”. That moment helps define me as an anarcho-disillusionist, brought on by the anarcho-superstitionists who wanted me to accept some important tradition. Years later in Tennessee, I attended rituals as part of other events to be supportive of the larger community of anarcho-freaks. At summer solstice 2002, again the directions are invoked. Again, West is called in as the spirit of water. I think about how badly we need rain — and when it comes, it will be drawn from the South. I stay silent in my objections, but cynically think how out of touch with reality the pagan religion is.
In mid-August, a three year-old lawsuit charging that environmentalist groups were religious extremists comparable to some of the more violent, intolerant, ultra-orthodox Islamic sects collapsed when the attorney failed to meet a re-filing deadline with the U.S. Supreme Court.
The suit had been brought against the Forest Guardians, the Superior Wilderness Action Network, and the U.S. Forest Service by the 125 companies that make up the Associated Contract Loggers (A.C.L.) of northern Minnesota. The loggers were asking for $600,000 in damages and permission to plunder timber from the Superior National Forest.
Lawyers for the A.C.L. argued that deep ecology was actually a religion, and so by extension, environmental groups that espoused its philosophies were cults, and by outlawing timber cutting on so-called “federal land,” the Forest Service was favoring a particular set of religious doctrines and was therefore violating the guarantee of neutrality in matters of religion purportedly vouchsafed in the U.S. Constitution.
In his 2003 polemic Anarchism versus Primitivism, Brian Oliver Sheppard makes the case that primitivism is inherently in contradiction with anarchism.
Much can be inferred from his tone, which is openly mocking. He makes references to how “[u]nfortunately for anarchists, plunging into the primitivist miasma has become necessary,” openly condescending to engage the primitivists at all. But his arguments are mired in absurdities: he mocks primitivists as hypocrites for engaging in technological practices while ignoring the fact that nearly every anarchist of any stripe in capitalist and statist society is not living as she or he preaches.
The core of his argument is that primitivism is authoritarian and therefore irreconcilable with anarchism. But the anarchism he promotes is rather clearly a simplistic and “classical” one, a red anarchism that argues for worker control of a stateless society. He argues that primitivists are stuck in an illusory past that cannot be supported by evidence, yet never acknowledges his complicity in the same behavior; here is a man arguing that anarchism has always been about worker control and communistic ideas, completely ignoring the heterogeneous past and present of anarchism. The individualists, the anarchists-without-adjectives, the mutualists... these people simply never existed, if one is to infer from Brian’s[1] piece.
My question is: why does society persist in destroying its habitat? I have, at different times, believed the answer was a lack of information, faulty technique, or insensibility. Certainly intuitions of the interdependence of all life are an ancient wisdom, perhaps as old as thought itself that is occasionally rediscovered, as it has been by the science of ecology in our own society. At mid-twentieth century there was a widely shared feeling that we needed only to bring businesspeople, cab drivers, homemakers, and politicians together with the right mix of oceanographers, soils experts, or foresters in order to set things right.
In time, even with the attention of the media and a windfall of synthesizers, popularizers, gurus of ecophilosophy, and other champions of ecology, and in spite of some new laws and indications that environmentalism is taking its place as a new turtle on the political log, nothing much has changed. Either I and the other “pessimists” and “doomsayers” were wrong about the human need for other species and about the decline of the planet as a life-support system; or our species is intent on suicide; or there is something we overlooked.
Nearly 2000 years ago, near the beginning of what some fondly call the Christian era, an army came marching across the British Isles. Thousands of soldiers, uniformed and armored in a manner never before seen in that part of the world, sent the tribal peoples fleeing westward and set about establishing fortresses and cities. Britain was now part of the Roman Empire. Civilization had arrived.
It's a pattern which has been repeated all over the world, as recently as 100 years ago in parts of the American West. The tendency of people to cluster together in great cities is hardly new and in many ways understandable. What isn't so clear is why the city-dwellers feel compelled to make the whole planet over in their image.
Whether we look at Britain or the Americas or Australia, we see the same phenomenon: people living a tribal, rural existence that changes slowly if at all for thousands of years until the arrival of foreign interlopers, who, usually with great violence, impose an entirely new way of life within a matter of decades. The common denominator in all of the above examples is that the invaders were white Europeans, but the Chinese have done much the same thing, albeit more gradually, to large parts of Asia.
A historical failure. That could be a blunt but not too unfair summary of the communist movement 154 years after Marx's and Engels's Manifesto.
One interpretation of such a miscarriage canters on the importance or prevalence given to work. From the 1960s onwards, a more and more visible resistance to work, sometimes to the point of open rebellion, has led quite a few revolutionaries to revisit the past from the point of view of work acceptance or rejection. Former social movements are said to have failed because the labourers tried to have labour rule society, i.e. tried to liberate themselves by using the very medium of their enslavement: work. In contrast, true emancipation would be based on the refusal of work, seen as the only effective subversion of bourgeois and bureaucratic domination alike. Only work refusal would have a universal dimension able to transcend quantitative claims, and to put forward a qualitative demand for an altogether different life. The situationists were among the most articulate proponents of this view: “Never work!” [1].
Serious commentators on the labor upheavals of the Depression years seem to agree that disturbances of all kinds, including the wave of sit-down strikes of 1936 and 1937, were caused by the `speed-up' above all. Dissatisfaction among production workers with their new CIO unions set in early, however, mainly because the unions made no efforts to challenge management's right to establish whatever kind of work methods and working conditions they saw fit. The 1945 Trends in Collective Bargaining study noted that “by around 1940” the labor leader had joined the business leader as an object of “widespread cynicism” to the American employee. Later in the 1940s C. Wright Mills, in his The New Men of Power: Amenca's Labor Leaders, described the union's role thusly: “the integration of union with plant means that the union takes over much of the company's personnel work, becoming the discipline agent of the rank-and-flle.”
dark-eyed brother, swarthy
as a nut,
Straight as the needles of the pine his hair, and black as the berries of the bramble bush;
Teeth white as the fleckless foam of the sea;
Limbs long, lean, lithe, muscular as a panther;
Plumb as a tamarack, withy as a willow;
The blood of the chase in his vivid veins;
The instincts of aboriginal ancestors in his soul;
A son of his father with his mother's heart.
Pioneer, frontispiece of civilization;
Woodsman with urbanity; urbanite with the smell of boughs on his clothes;
Sympathetic as a doe; yielding as a mass of moss when need;
Firm as a white oak stump if requisite.
Tough as a hemlock knot; strong as second-growth hickory;
Freedom.
I long for freedom everywhere, I dream of freedom every day, I talk for freedom here and there. And freedom's aye my muse's lay.
Who Truly Live.
Nor lands, nor flocks, nor gold A noble soul bewitch,
And only those who hold
The graces sweet are rich.
Who work and love and give
Of their abundant store Are they who truly live
And get returned much more.
If You Love Me.
O if you love me tell me so And ease my heart of weighty woe And with assurance make it glow.
O if you love me tell me, sweet, A love that's dumb is incomplete And fullest joys thus meet defeat.
O if you love me make me feel That you are helpful, fond and leal, And that I'm needful to your weal.
This essay on the foundations of the authority of the state marks a stage in the development of my concern with problems of political authority and moral autonomy. When I first became deeply interested in the subject, I was quite confident that I could find a satisfactory justification for the traditional democratic doctrine to which I rather unthinkingly gave my allegiance. Indeed, during my first year as a member of the Columbia University Philosophy Department, I taught a course on political philosophy in which I boldly announced that I would formulate and then solve the fundamental problem of political philosophy. I had no trouble formulating the problem — roughly speaking, how the moral autonomy of the individual can be made compatible with the legitimate authority of the state. I also had no trouble refuting a number of supposed solutions which had been put forward by various theorists of the democratic state. But midway through the semester, I was forced to go before my class, crestfallen and very embarrassed, to announce that I had failed to discover the grand solution.
In recent years radical politics has been faced with a number of new challenges, not least of which has been the reemergence of the aggressive, authoritarian state in its new paradigm of security and bio-politics. The ‘war on terror’serves as the latest guise for the aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic polities. Coupled with this has been the hegemony of neo-liberal projects of capitalist globalization, as well as the ideological obscurantism of the so-called Third Way. The profound disillusionment in the wake of the collapse of Communist systems nearly two decades ago has resulted in a political and theoretical vacuum for the radical Left, which has generally been ineffective in countering the rise of the Far Right in Europe, as well as a more insidious ‘creeping conservatism’ whose dark ideological implications we are only just beginning to see unfold.
AAARRRGGGGHHHH, Matey!
I was one of the kids who grew up thinking that pirates were, well, cool as shit. Swashbucklers had evil-looking flags and tattoos, they wore eyepatches, they were fearless bandits, hedonistic drunks, and nationless nomads. No merchant vessel was safe from their ire, and their scorn for laws and the norms of a hierarchical society made it easy to want to emulate them (particularly on Halloweens, when children get to roleplay some of their favorite heroes, villains, freaks, and monstrosities). Given this background, I was excited to pick up a history of piracy since I’ve really never read any — particularly one written with a radical lens.
On this point (that the book is written from a radical perspective), Kuhn (p. 5) is explicit, “While I sincerely hope that this book can arouse the interest of a broad spectrum of readers...it would make little sense to deny that it was written from what has been called a radical perspective.” And from this perspective, he begins his reflections taking issue with two common narratives of pirates, split by ideological readings of pirate histories. That is, more conservative histories would condemn pirates as bandits, common criminals, brutish murderers, and the like. For radical historians, a certain romanticization took place that painted pirates as daring revolutionaries who lived outside the law, abolished the wage system in their communities, and transgressed normative (and hierarchical) assumptions about nation, race, gender, ability, etc.
“It is idiotic that those who have figured things out are forced to wait for the mass of cretins who are blocking the way to evolve. The herd will always be the herd. So let's leave it to stagnate and work on our own emancipation (...) Put your old refrains aside. We have had enough of always sacrificing ourselves for something. The Fatherland, Society and Morality have fallen (...) That's fine, but don't contribute to reviving new entities for us: the Idea, the Revolution, Propaganda, Solidarity; we don't give a damn. What we want is to live, to have the comforts and well-being we have a right to. What we want to accomplish is the development of our individuality in the full sense of the word, in its entirety The individual has a right to all possible well-being, and must try to attain it all the time, by any means...” (Hégot, an illegalist, writing to the anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux in 1903, on behalf of a “small circle” who shared his opinions.)
Max Stirner (pseudonym for an early European Anarchist and Johann Caspar Schmidt) is best known as a central figure in the dissolution of the post-Hegelian philosophical milieu during the years leading up to the Prussian Revolution (and wider revolutionary events) of 1848. Born in 1806, he went to universities in an education system dominated by Hegelianism, studying philosophy, philology and religion — at times in lectures from Hegel himself. After achieving only limited success in his university exams, Stirner taught at a girls' gymnasium[1] in Berlin by day while frequenting coffee houses and wine bars during his off hours. He began associating with die Freien,[2] often at Hippel's wine bar on Friedrichstrasse, where he developed friendships with some of the major members of this rebellious intellectual circle like Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels (with whom he became dutzbruder[3]), and Arnold Ruge.
This book was written in 1977 in the momentum of the revolutionary struggles taking place in Italy at the time, and that situation, now profoundly different, should be borne in mind when reading it today.
The revolutionary movement including the anarchist one was in a developing phase and anything seemed possible, even a generalisation of the armed clash.
But it was necessary to protect oneself from the danger of specialisation and militarisation that a restricted minority of militants intended to impose on the tens of thousands of comrades who were struggling with every possible means against repression and against the State’s attempt — rather weak to tell the truth — to reorganise the management of capital.
“Without justice there can be no love.” — bell hooks
Anarchism can learn a lot from the feminist movement. In many respects it already has. Anarcha-feminists have developed analyses of patriarchy that link it to the state form. We have learned from the slogan that “the personal is political” (e.g. men who espouse equality between all genders should treat the women in their lives with dignity and respect). We have learned that no revolutionary project can be complete while men systematically dominate and exploit women; that socialism is a rather empty goal — even if it is “stateless” — if men's domination of women is left intact.
This essay argues that anarchists can likewise learn from the theory of “intersectionality” that emerged from the feminist movement. Indeed, anarchist conceptions of class struggle have widened as a result of the rise of feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian liberation movements (and, perhaps more contemporarily, the queer movements), disability rights movements, etc. But how do we position ourselves regarding those struggles? What is their relationship to the class struggle that undergirds the fight for socialism? Do we dismiss them as “mere identity politics” that obscure rather than clarify the historic task of the working class? If not, how might anarchists include their concerns in our political theory and work?
“Because those who are too quick to admire and who are suddenly convinced are rarely the salt of the earth”[1]
B. Traven, In The Freest State In The World,
1919, Insomniac Edition, Paris 1995.
In the Golden Age of `actually non-existing socialism' journeys were organised to the countries of the radiant future. Believers were then invited to express their enthusiasm for a reality staged by the lords of the manor. In this way people visited the soviet socialism of the USSR, the Maoist socialism of China, the miniature socialism of Albania, the bearded socialism of Cuba, the Sandinista socialism of Nicaragua, etc. Woe betide those who contested the objective, scientific and unquestionable character of these fabricated realities. Until the day these systems collapsed. People thought they had seen but had seen nothing! Were lessons drawn from this? It would seem not! With a smile slung over their shoulder, people today again go off “to do revolutionary Chiapas” in convoys organist by fellow travelers of the Zapatistas. On a well-signed route, people have to agree to see only what they have to see and to believe in the leader's words. The irrefutable argument hasn't changed one iota: because the imperialist forces are threatening and the people are defense-less, we can only put our trust in commanders. In a world in crisis the demands for the future are revised downwards! People make themselves the advocates of realism — they give in to the essential and side with new oppressive projects.
When the first shots of the Russian Civil War were fired, the anarchists, in common with the other left-wing opposition parties, were faced with a serious dilemma. Which side were they to support? As staunch libertarians, they held no brief for the dictatorial policies of Lenin's government, but the prospect of a White victory seemed even worse. Active opposition to the Soviet regime might tip the balance in favour of the counterrevolutionaries. On the other hand, support for the Bolsheviks might serve to entrench them too deeply to be ousted from power once the danger of reaction had passed. It was a quandary with no simple solutions. After much soul-searching and debate, the anarchists adopted a variety of positions, ranging from active resistance to the Bolsheviks through passive neutrality to eager collaboration. A majority, however, cast their lot with the beleaguered Soviet regime. By August 1919, at the climax of the Civil War, Lenin was impressed with the zeal and courage of the “Soviet anarchists”, as their anti-Bolshevik comrades contemptuously dubbed them, that he counted them among “the most dedicated supporters of Soviet power.”[1]
Contemporary anarchists’ practical attitudes toward technology seem highly ambivalent, even contradictory. Our proverbial antiauthoritarian could pull up genetically modified crops before dawn, report on the action through e-mail lists and websites in the morning, fix her or his community’s wind-powered generator in the afternoon, and work part-time as a programmer after supper. Thus, on the one hand, we find anarchists involved in numerous campaigns and direct actions where the introduction of new technologies is explicitly resisted, from bio- and nanotechnology to technologies of surveillance and warfare. On the other hand, anarchists have been actively using and developing information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as engaging in practical sustainability initiatives that involve their own forms of technological innovation.
Dear friends,
The 25th of October 2009 at 7.50am, whilst taking my dog for a walk, I was surrounded by three members of the LRD, investigation service, I had to go to their office for an interrogation. A special intervention-unit in an armoured car was waiting at the corner, in case I would resist. The fuckers didn’t even let me quietly say good-bye to my daughter who was just leaving for school at that moment. The same service made a house search the day before, confiscated my lap-top and took pictures of political posters and others.
At the office they asked me for my alibi for the night of the 6th on the 7th of October, and a lot of questions about mobile phone numbers and a friend of mine. A witness would have recognized me on pictures as being one of the two persons who put fire to a container that night[1].
Anarchist views on sex can range from the idea that ‘anything goes’ between consenting adults, to the more traditional approaches of what constitutes free love between individuals. One thing these diverse opinions do have in common, however, is the idea of sexual freedom and the opposition to sexual exploitation. Nevertheless, being pro sexual freedom and anti sexual exploitation is open to wide interpretation and can encompass diverse, and sometimes conflicting, analyses from one anarchist to the next.
Within certain historic anarchist traditions (as well as within the left), there has often been a significant strand of ‘puritanism’ towards sex and any activities deemed generally frivolous.
We all know the story about Emma Goldman dancing all night with the blokes at an anarchist social event, then being chastised for behaviour not befitting a revolutionary (we know about her subsequent outrage too). We also know that some sections of the anarchist movement in the Spanish revolution have been accused of similar puritanism, and the idea that anarchist and communist revolutionaries should somehow live their lives like ascetic monks or nuns still, in some quarters, continues to this day.
Since 1945, they want us to believe that the most serene freedom has arisen in our lifetime; now that housewives have access to all the best household appliances, now that almost everyone has the right to vote, now that “freedom” of speech is guaranteed by the democratic institutions, now that we are left with the listing of false choices- between exploiting or being exploited for nothing at all, and without trying to understand why, threatened to be quashed. Our anxiety and our thirst for liberty do not falter, though that is what it’s all about when the State parrots out its ideas of freedom, democratic and industrial progress.
But here and there, the social peace is sometimes weakened, its necessity reappraised, its capacity to become fashionable evacuated in aid of the rage it provokes to who this social peace can not live down the misery of a permanent existence as the prey of the State. Pigs are attacked and hated in some neighbourhoods that civil tranquillity describes as “sensitive”, the social big brothers can not contain the rage of exploited people seeking for meaning, unemployed people do not accept their lives as a nightmare of subsistence, pupils make barricades against forces of law and order while workers threaten to blow up their fucking factories, sans-papier people rebel all over the country by setting fire to their prisons or escaping from police raids, some other people try to make the lives into hell for those who make a profit of deportation and the prison system. More and more mutineers attempt to take revenge on these who benefit from domination.
The advent of a Labour opposition in the House of Commons, the near possibility of that opposition becoming His Majesty's Government, have revived interest in the question of parliamentary action. Bitter plaints at the historic failure of Parliamentary methods are tempered with a faint hope that something may be achieved by parliamentarism. It is forgotten that reform activity means constant trotting round the fool's parade, continuous movement in a vicious circle. Something must be done for expectant mothers, for homeless couples wishing to housekeep, for rent-resisters, something to reform here or there, regardless of the fact that capitalism is a hydra-headed monster, that the reforms needed are as innumerable as the abuses begotten of the capitalist system, and such abuses increase with every modification of capitalist administration, the better to perpetuate the system. Under these circumstances it is necessary to restate the arguments against parliamentary activity, to explain and to prove that parliament was never intended to emancipate the working class from the evils of capitalism, that it never can and never will achieve this result.
We just finished reading your letter, that you wrote to us and all the French comrades. We read it with pleasure, finding in it multiple points we recognize ourselves in. We read it attentively, because it comes from the people who unfortunately have to face, before us and more than us, the repression. However, we must say that it also left a bitter taste and provoked a kind of discomfort.
We want to ask you: who are you talking to? What are you talking about? As your letter is addressed to the French comrades and formulates a precise critique against the “innocent” line of defence of the Tarnac arrestees, we wouldn’t like that in Italy you think “the French comrades” are all busy to collect signatures in the company of leftist wheezy intellectuals, in order to hand over certificates of good behaviour to the competent authorities.
