Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 23:39:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] KKA: "The Anarchist Ethic in the Age of the Antiglobalization Movement"


For folks who don't know this is said to be the main
relevant article for discovering the intersections
between insurrectionary anarchism as it is conceived
by Killing King Abacus and poststructuralism as
apparently it uses elements of both Foucault (power as
productive) and Deleuze and Guattari (split between
morality and ethics).

**

The Anarchist Ethic in the Age of the
Anti-Globalization Movement

http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/kka/ethic.html

The question always before anarchists is how to act in
the present moment of struggle against capitalism and
the state. As new forms of social struggles are
becoming more clearly understood, this question
becomes even more important. In order to answer these
questions we have to clarify the relationship between
anarchists and the wider social movement of the
exploited and the nature of that movement itself.
First of all, we need to note that the movement of the
exploited is always in course. There is no use in
anarchists, who wish to destroy capitalism and the
state in their entirety, waiting to act on some future
date, as predicted by an objectivist reading of
capitalism or a determinist understanding of history
as if one were reading the stars. This is the most
secure way of keeping us locked in the present
forever. The revolutionary movement of the exploited
multitude never totally disappears, no matter how
hidden it is. Above all this is a movement to destroy
the separation between us, the exploited, and our
conditions of existence, that which we need to live.
It is a movement of society against the state. We can
see this movement, however incoherent or unconscious,
in the actions of Brazil's peasants who take the land
they need to survive, when the poor steal, or when
someone attacks the state that maintains the system of
exclusion and exploitation. We can see this movement
in the actions of those who attack the machinery that
destroys our very life-giving environment. Within this
current, anarchists are a minority. And, as conscious
anarchists, we don't stand outside the movement,
propagandizing and organizing it; we act with this
current, helping to reanimate and sharpen its
struggles.

It is instructive to look back at the recent history
of this current. In the U.S., beginning in the 1970s,
social movements began to fracture into single-issue
struggles that left the totality of social relations
unchallenged. In many ways, this was reflected in a
shift in the form of imposed social relations, which
occurred in response to the struggles of the 1960s and
early 1970, and is marked by a shift from a Fordist
regime of accumulation (dominated by large factories
and a mediated truce with unions) to a regime of
flexible accumulation (which began to break unions,
dismantle the welfare state, and open borders to the
free flow of capital). This shift is also mirrored by
the academic shift to postmodernist theory, which
privileges the fractured, the floating, and the
flexible. While the growth of single-issue groups
signals the defeat of the anti-capitalist struggles of
the 1960s, over the 1990s we have witnessed a
reconvergence of struggles that are beginning to
challenge capitalism as a totality. Thus the
revolutionary current of the exploited and excluded
has recently reemerged in a cycle of confrontations
that began in the third world and have spread to the
first world of London, Seattle, and Prague, and in the
direct action movement that has, for the most part,
grown out of the radical environmental milieu. In the
spectacular confrontations of the global days of
action, these streams have been converging into a
powerful social force. The key to this reconvergence
is that the new struggles of the 1990s are creating
ways to communicate and link local and particular
struggles without building stifling organizations that
attempt to synthesize all struggle under their
command. Fundamental to this movement is an ethic that
stands against all that separates us from our
conditions of existence and all that separates us from
our power to transform the world and to create social
relations beyond measure—a measure imposed from above.
This ethic is a call for the self-organization of
freedom, the self-valorization of human activity. 

In this article we will outline our understanding of
the ethic of the revolutionary anarchist current of
society that grows out of the movement of the
exploited in general. Then we will turn to the
question of action and organization, looking
critically at the forms of struggle that are appearing
in the recent cycle of social movements and arguing
that informal organization is the best way for
anarchists to organize as a minority within the wider
social movement. By organizing along these lines, we
believe anarchists can sharpen the level of struggle
and develop social relations in practice that are both
antagonistic to capital and the state and begin to
create of new ways of living.


===="The world is the natural setting of and field for all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world and only in the world does he know himself."

— Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945

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