File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_1999/anarchy-list.9912, message 726


Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 04:51:14 -0800 (PST)
From: Jamal Hannah <jah-AT-iww.org>
Subject: A Marxist Attacks Anarchism: Uses the Usual Slanders


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 21:22:39 +0000
From: Fabian Tompsett <blissett-AT-unpopular.demon.co.uk>
To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: AUT: Anarchism and Autonomism

>On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, anton monti wrote:
>
>> Do you know something about how this movement born and develop?. I know.
>> I know also something about the struggles in order to preserve the autonomy
>> of the movements against marxist-leninist, trotzkist and anarchist and all
>> this sad militants who try to stop or to led the irrefrenaible dance of
>> freedom and hope.


Jamal Hannah replied
>Anarchism has more in common with autonomism than with marxism-leninism
>and trotskyism. It is sectarian and dogmatic to attack anarchism this way.

Anarchism functions in different ways. On one level it is a rhetorical form
embracing a range of minority political viewpoints each demanding the
liberty to express themselves in the market place of political ideologies.
Often people drawn into struggle declare themselves as anarchists because
they want to shed the constraints of a socialisation were all oppositional
currents have been ironed out of the social fabric which they are a part
of. - i.e. there is no radical or revolutionary current directly in their
lives. (Where there are, young people are less likely to drwan to
anarchism).

        However as people develop their politics, some drop out all
together, others develop a more precise viewpoint and others remain
'anarchists'. As is common with many anarchists, on the one hand you want
to defend brand -AT- anarchism from sectarian attack, at the same time as
pretending -AT-narchism is so diffuse that it has no ideology (whereas it is a
cornucopia of ideologies). Likewise as soon as the founding Fathers of
-AT-narchism are criticised, we are told that some anarchists don't like them
anyway. Yet they continually pop up as icons of the history of -AT-narchism.
Let us be clear, Bakunin with his 'invisible Dictatorship' was just
authoritarian as Engels with his 'On Authority'. This is merely a
difference in style. As for Proudhon he clearly has more in common with
nazism than Leninism. Indeed much of his work is so embarassing that
anarchists like Benjamin Tucker did not bother to translate it all. Whilst
English workers faced destitution rather than work with confederate cotton,
Proudhon was arguing for support of the confederacy. He was an anti-semite
and white supremacists who idealised the soldier above any other
profession.

The fact of the matter is that most -AT-narchists know as little about
-AT-narchism as they do about Marxism. -AT-narchism does not foster an inquiring
mentality but a smug complacency whereby the -AT-narchist can imagine
themselves as part of a moral elite which has raised itself above the mass
through an ill conceived notion of personal enlightenment. Of course many
-AT-narchist militants are not happy with this, and indeed start to transgress
the boundaries of -AT-narchism before breaking with it. What this means is
recognising that freedom does not have any social substance, but that the
search to realise desires is as much constrained by the nature of those
desires as by any external constraints, that such desires are fomented in
the individual by the nexus of social relations which surrounds them - i.e.
class, gender, race, location etc. etc.

>Anarchists do not try to "stop" or "lead" the movement for freedom and
>hope... we try to help it along, but not control it.

>Anarchists are now being discussed in major US news magazines like TIME
>and Newsweek, so obviously they did something right. (At the WTO
>Conference)

As the media use the term 'anarchist' to describe anyone or current who is
ready to use illegal means to realise a political goal rather than going
through the 'proper channels' it is hard to see how your views are
justified. Indeed anarchists try to "constitute themsleves as" rather than
"stop" or "lead" a movement which they like to see in terms as being
centred on "freedom" or as in your case also "hope". the opposition to the
WTO encompasses people from the full range of the political spectrum, and
is part of a more general political process which is currently unfurling
internationally. The fact that only choose to respond that it is "sectarian
and dogmatic to attack anarchism this way" when anyone criticises -AT-narchism
perhaps expresses the weakness in viewpoint more thananything else.


Leutha Blissett



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