Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 11:00:34 +0200 (SAST)
From: Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: (en) A call for anarchists and other left libertarians


On Sat, 15 Jul 2000, Ilan Shalif wrote:

> Salud comrades
> The upsurge of left libertarian revolutionary ideas and activities
> in the struggle against Globalization and Neoliberalism is drawing
> to us strange "partners". They try to sneak into our e-mail lists
> and organizational activities.
> 
> They try to hide their true nature - a wing of the capitalist ideology.
> 
> When we ban them and refuse to distribute their texts, some
> comrades criticize this act as "authoritarian" and sectarian.
> 
> Many activists did not forget how scum like these stubbed in the back the
> left libertarians in previous revolutions - as they never read about it.
> 
> Following is the link to a section of The Spunk Archive:
> "The struggle against the state and other essays"
> by Nestor Makhno - who started in August 1917 with the
> Ukrainian anarchists the First and only anarchist revolution so far.
> 
> (Drown in blood together with Kronstadt - in 1921, by the Bolsheviks
Trotsky and Lenin.) 

Oh, come on. Lenin and Trotsky and Makhno and Kropotkin and and and ...
have been dead for nearly twice the time that I've been alive.

To now state, as some anarchists in London apparently did prior to
May Day 2000, that Trotskyists should be expelled from discussions
because "they'll shoot us like partridges" in a revolutionary situation is
to ignore the fact that no one - not the anarchists, not the Trots, not
the left-anarcho-situationist-post-syndicalist-revolutionary-collective,
is anywhere near shooting anyone else.

(by the way, I started off my political life as a Green, and then migrated
into a group whose politics were a democratised, less-dogmatic type of 
UK SWP Trotskyism, and now consider myself broadly to be a 'modern-style
communist' who looks to the autonomous Marxist tradition for ideas, while
realising we're just as unlikely to see another France '68 as we are to
see a Russia '17 - just setting down the facts, so that I can classified
and criticised by the book)

I don't have a problem with taking a position that some people shouldn't
post to some mailing lists (e.g. recently the Anarchism-Africa people
decided that the Australian Green Left Weekly updates shouldn't be posted
to their list - which is fine, since GLW had nothing to do with
Anarchism-Africa). On a list like aut-op-sy, which has damn little
traffic, I'm not so worried, since I just delete posts I don't think are
interesting. 

But looking suspiciously at "strange partners", and waving around the
corpse of Nestor Makhno (and his comrades), is letting ideology rule
supreme over common sense. I fully expect that many people with a
background in Leninism and Trotskyism will start investigating autonomist
ideas at the moment. After all, Trotskyism is where many, many people
started off in revolutionary politics (there are still no autonomist
groups in South Africa, and only a handful of syndicalists, who are mostly
centred in two cities - historically the wide range of Trotskyist groups
- some of which used to have membership in the hundreds - have been much
more visible). Many people with a Trotskyist background are investigating
ideas outside of the Trotskyist stream of though - I know this because I
am in contact with a number of such people.

They might subscribe to Aut-Op-Sy. They might post. They might even still
hold on to a lot of their Trotskyist heritage. (Hell, I'm not even sure
which of my ideas come from where - if anyone here has a brain organised
in the form of a political programme, I'd be very surprised) Hopefully the
result of this will be discussion.

Frankly, I don't understand why you don't want this discussion to happen.

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man 
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain 
and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844



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