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).
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.
In NEFAC's `Aims and Principles', it is said that the federation is “an organization of revolutionaries coming from different movements of resistance who identify with the communist tradition within anarchism (1)”. This may raise eyebrows when read by many people as they ask themselves what the hell we mean by that. Anarcho-communists, libertarian communists, communist-anarchists... Is this a contradiction? Was there a secret alliance between Marx and Bakunin, Lenin and Makhno, Mao and Pa kin? Are we Bolsheviks in disguise aiming to subvert anarchism and recruit little soldiers for `The Party' (whichever it is)? Of course not! Let's look at it closer.
What does the word communism really means? Communism is the doctrine that says we should put all means of production and distribution, as well as the socially produced wealth, in common. It's the dream of the abolition of class system and wage slavery, replaced by a worldwide community, without classes. In our opinion, real communism can only aim at the destruction of the State, because the State is the political organization based on the domination and class rule. As long as there is a State, there can be no communism because there is necessarily a system of classes (at least one: bureaucrats!).
I have often wondered why, with millions of people taking part in progressive and labor movements of all kinds, comparatively few accept Anarchism fully as we do. What is better known than the exploitation of labor by capital, the oppression of the individual by the State, to the student the least interested in social matters and to the practical observer of everyday life? Again, if Anarchist propaganda has not yet touched every remote place in all countries, there are numerous localities where it has been carried on for a generation and more, and even there it does not affect more than a certain proportion of the people. As long as I believed in unlimited possibilities of education and agitation, the fact stated was incomprehensible and disappointing to me. Some reasoning and observation led to an explanation satisfactory to me, which I now venture to place before others, cager to hear their opinion with regard to it.
In Boston, as in cities all over the northeast, the housing crisis has intensified. Rents have as much as doubled in the past five years and affordable housing is disappearing at an unprecedented rate as developers buy up investment properties and gentrification encroaches on formerly livable neighborhoods. Evictions have increased by nearly forty percent as well and in a most disgusting turn of events a bill is being discussed in the Massachusetts legislature to allow towns to count prison cells as low-income housing units. But people are fighting back and tenant organizing and solidarity are on the rise.
As an anarchist I decided to become involved with a community group doing work on housing issues and tenant organizing. As a renter, I am dealing with the housing crisis and was interested in connecting the work that I do in my collective with work I would like to do in the larger community, hoping to see how the two would intersect. I thought it would be an opportunity to learn from people who have been organizing for years and have been effective at activating people to improve their own lives. I wanted to see how community-based organizing was working in Boston, knowing that I would probably be the only explicitly anarchist person in the group and also knowing that there are people in the revolutionary anarchist movement who would view the work I was involving myself in as reformist. In this article I will explore both of these themes.
To all the comrades that are in a position of war because they want to reclaim their lives: As many now know, the police entered the home of my mother in the centre of Sanitago where they found two bags with diverse materials for building explosives. Since that moment I have been searched for and pursued by the state and its repressive apparatus. I learned of this by telephone and then hours later learned that the police had gone to the Jhonny Cariqueo Social Centre and Libertarian Library (where I live) under the pretext of finding me and upon not finding me took all the texts, publications and propaganda that they could find. (they must have heard that saying about propaganda being a weapon!).
So I decided to run.
I am not guilty of anything but neither am I innocent... I am simply their enemy.
We know how painful it’s to be separated from our own comrades, and we have no recipes nor lessons to give about the way to take them out the fastest (to take them all out, forgetting the distinction between ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’). The rapid notes that follow are the fruit of several thoughts born out of different experiences lived in Italy, hoping they could be useful to our French comrades.
The Tarnac arrests represent a serious fact, not only as an attack against everybody who already fights, with critics and practices, against the State and the Capital, but also as a tentative of intimidation against all the potential allies of a social war more diffused. Actually, the repression aims at hitting, further than particular acts, the “bad intentions”, playing then a fundamental pedagogical role supposed to drain out of everyone his/her potential disposition to revolt. The invention of “terrorist cells” or “movement” with an identity or another is used to isolate any insurrectional hypothesis from the general existing practices of confrontation (conflicualité) , separating at the same time anyone from his/her rebellious tendencies and his/her own potentialities. The pedagogy of repression is always a pedagogy of fear.
As a result of the terrorist attacks that took place on Tuesday, September 11, over 6,000 people are still missing or confirmed dead. We anarchists stand with the rest of the world in expressing our deep sorrow and disbelief over this devastation which took place in New York City, Washington DC, and rural Pennsylvania. It goes without saying that we are against the deliberate and indiscriminate use of violence as a means to achieve political ends, and firmly believe that terrorist activity runs contrary to our own vision of radical social change.
Although the targets of these recent attacks may be viewed as symbolic centers of global capitalism (World Trade Center), and U.S. militarism (Pentagon), a majority of the victims of these atrocities were ordinary, working class people, and this is indefensible. Our hearts go out to the families and friends of the missing and dead.
In Quebec, and more generally in North America, anarchism and organization have not been coupled well. Indeed, the last serious attempt to build a political anarchist group in North America date's back to the adventure of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation [1].
However, there have been, and there still are, organized anarchists around the world. Generations of activists worked hard on the question of organization, and, for those of us who don't want to reinvent the wheel, it is useful to look at their analysis and proposals. Even if we find good things in `classical' anarchists like Errico Malatesta and Michael Bakunin, we at NEFAC are mainly influenced by a tradition called, for lack of a better word, `platformism'.
One cannot solve abusive or psychopathological behavior through rational means, no matter how much it may be in abusers or psychopaths interest for us to believe so. (As author Lundy Bancroft has noted, “in one important way, an abusive man works like a magician. His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you wont notice where the real action is. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brains in this way so that you wont notice the patterns of logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.”)
Everything is going as per usual. Every morning millions of people drag themselves towards their working place where they will get humiliated, numbed, exploited for the most part of the day. The media blare the words of the bosses, the politicians and specialists through their screens and loudspeakers. People without papers are locked up in asylum camps and deported; others reach their hands out to the places where there is an abundance of money and are promptly convicted for it and locked up in prison.
Everything is as usual. More and more people’s existence is being reduced to calculations: calculating whether there will be enough money to pay the rent; counting down how many hours and days they will still be locked up in the school classes and prisons; overestimating the importance of numbers indicating the state of pollution this planet is in, how many people die at or because of their job, how many refuges die at the borders or the police station; saying to themselves, while holding the law book in their hands, that the prize of revolt is too high. But there are people who break the normal course of things and the accountant existence. People who do not wait any longer for revolting against what destroys them. People who slap their bosses in the face. People who rebel against the guards of their existence and put fire to the prison in which they are locked up. People who do not put down their eyes for a uniform, a costume, a priest’s garb.
During the last two months, the strategy of counterinsurgency developed by the greek state since December has passed to a new phase of totalisation. If we speak of counterinsurgency and not of repression it is because the former in contrast to the latter is not so much a military type intervention, as an integrated political and social technology producing consent, fear and defeatism. It aims not at the immediate annihilation of the insurgents, but at the removal of their living space: the conceptual, affective and cultural plane of the insurgency. This is a preventive strategy whose object is the wealth of possibilities that sprouted out of the insurrectionary event. It is a low intensity warfare, a politico-psychological warfare, in the sense that its goal is the corrosion of the political, social and psychological consistency of the insurgency. The basic principle of counterinsurgency is, on the one hand, to “win hearts and minds”, and, on the other hand, “not to take the fish out of the sea, but to dry the sea where the insurgents swim like fish”. And it does this by “separating and uniting”. Separating the insurgents from their possibilities, separating the insurgents from their political and social affinities, separating the insurgents from each other. And at the same time uniting social discontent with the call of reform, by representing the insurgency as a cause of backwardness, and uniting the forces of repression with wide segments of the population, by presenting the former in as both humane, pro-people and effective.
Fellow Workers,
We come before you as Anarchist Communists to explain our principles. We are aware that the minds of many of you have been poisoned by the lies which all parties have diligently spread about us. But surely the persecutions to which we have been and are subjected by the governing classes of all countries should open the eyes of those who love fair play. Thousands of our comrades are suffering in prison or are driven homeless from one country to the other. Free speech — almost the only part of British liberty that can be of any use to the people — is denied to us in many instances, as the events of the last few years have shown.
The misery around us is increasing year by year. And yet there was never so much talk about labor as there is now, — labor, for the welfare of which all professional politicians profess to work day and night. A very few sincere and honest but impracticable reformers, in company with a multitude of mere quacks, ambitious placehunters, etc., say they are able to benefit labor, if labor will only follow their useless advice. All this does not lessen the misery in the least : look at the unemployed, the victims of hunger and cold, who die every year in the streets of our rich cities, where wealth of every description is stored up.
Robert C. Elliott died in 1981 in the very noon of his scholarship, just after completing his book The Literary Persona. He was the truest of teachers, the kindest of friends. This paper was prepared to be read as the first in a series of lectures at his college of the University of California, San Diego, honoring his memory.
We use the French word lecture, “reading,” to mean reading and speaking aloud, a performance; the French call such a performance not a lecture but a conference. The distinction is interesting. Reading is a silent collaboration of reader and writer, apart; lecturing, a noisy collaboration of lecturer and audience, together. The peculiar patchwork form of this paper is my attempt to make it a “conference,” a performable work, a piece for voices. The time and place, a warm April night in La Jolla in 1982, are past, and the warm and noisy audience must be replaced by the gentle reader; but the first voice is still that of Bob Elliott.
As class struggle anarchists who recognize the importance of a diversity of tactics in order to attack Capital, the State, and oppression in an effective manner, we see the black bloc as an important tool of struggle. Only one tool among many, but an important one nonetheless. However, this by no means implies that we feel it to be in any way above criticism. Indeed, we are very troubled by how black blocs often operate, the manner in which actions are sometimes carried out, and the direction that some black bloc elements seem to want to head in. It is for this reason that we were glad to see the text by our comrades from the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM). Particularly refreshing was the fact that, unlike many other texts critical of the black bloc, this one was clearly written in a comradely, honest, and constructive fashion. This is the only way in which an effective and useful dialogue on the subject can be had, and our response is with the same spirit and intentions in mind. With that said, we do in fact have several important disagreements with the WSM text, and will attempt to clarify some of our positions in this writing.
“I am myself a war” — Georges Bataille
Any inquiry into the nature of Georges Bataille's troublesome relationship with Marxism appears to me to be a matter of banality expressed through the hysterical (or worse, university) discourses inhabited by those who would not dare probe the traumatic nature of Bataille's commitment to sovereignty[1]; in any case, this vexing relationship is by now a matter of common knowledge and it proves useless if one is truly interested in the exploratory and transformative practices associated with philosophical meditation.[2] Likewise, recent attempts to situate Bataille as the to-finally-be-discovered father-figure of a distinctly post-structuralist/post-modernist lineage have not been met by deaf ears nor by idle pens (c.f. Dorfman, 2002);[3] for instance, not long after Bataille's death Tel Quel — an avant-garde literary journal operating out of Paris at the time — had incisively granted Bataille this very appropriate distinction — the irony of which becomes exposed as the occurrence preceded the popularization of structuralist thought itself (Botting & Wilson, 1991: 5-7, esp. pg 6). What remains to be excavated from Bataille's texts, however, is the nature of his commitment to that proud adversary of Marxist thought: anarchism. This venture resolves itself into two interrelated questions: (1) how might a contemporary anarchist read into Bataille's work? and (2) how might Bataille read into traditional anarchism and how might this reading inform contemporary anarchist philosophy? My project embodies the mutual violence of sacrifice and attraction: it implies that I shamefully sacrifice Bataille to the cause of anarchism; however, the result will prove itself quite paradoxical: there may indeed be room for Bataille within the anarchist canon, alongside Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, this canonization requires a movement away from the founding principles of anarchism (some of which are explored in other meditations) toward the embrace of sovereignty and, in the face of a metaphysical principle of such magnitude and generalization that we might only refer to it in the negative form, ontological an-archism (“without rulers”; or an-archy for short); an-archy is comprised of the heterogeneous matter resolved through the negation of an opposing principle: “[heterogeneity] constitutes the first phase of such a study in the sense that the primary determination of heterogeneity defined as non-homogeneous supposes a knowledge of the homogeneity which delineates it by exclusion” (Bataille, 1985b: 140). As the ontological anarchist Hakim Bey (1993 [2009]) has put it: “As we meditate on the nothing we notice that although it cannot be de-fined, nevertheless paradoxically we can say something about it (even if only metaphorically);” what we have to say is that it is a no-thing, equally a no-idea, and in its base materialist and base political form it is an-archy.
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the watt enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Abstract: This article explores the political aspect of Derrida's work, in particular his critique of authority. Derrida employs a series of strategies to expose the antagonisms within Western philosophy, whose structures of presence provide a rational and essentialist foundation for political institutions. Therefore, Derrida's interrogation of the universalist claims of philosophy may be applied to the pretensions of political authority. Moreover, I argue that Derrida's deconstruction of the two paths of `reading' — inversion and subversion — may be applied to the question of revolutionary politics, to show that revolution often culminates in the reaffirmation of authority. Derrida navigates a path between these two strategies, allowing one to formulate philosophical and political strategies that work at the limits of discourse, thereby pointing to an outside. This outside, I argue, is crucial to radical politics because it unmasks the violence and illegitimacy of institutions and laws.
Ted Kaczynski wrote this letter in reply to a Turkish anarchist, Kara, who sent him a series of questions as an interview for her zine. Rather than include Kara's letter, I have quoted only the questions which Kaczynski answered. Spelling and typographical errors, apparently introduced in transcription, have been fixed. Kara's English has been corrected. Section headings have been added.
In the letter, Kaczynski describes his personal motivation for absconding from civilization; he quotes from his journal to explain his motive for seeking its destruction; he asserts the responsibility of technology for civilization; he addresses the idea of non-violence as a value in itself; he rebuts the romanticized vision of primitive society promoted by some primitivists; and he warns against the counter-revolutionary potential of the “Green Anarchist Movement,” which he attributes to the influence of leftist values.
This title is a slightly adapted version of Charles Lermert's title for his book Postmodernism is not what you think (1997). Lemert and I understand that this implies two distinct meanings: first, postmodernism is probably not what you may think it is and, second, it is not primarily something that you think (ibid., 26).
* * *
Postanarchism has not received the amount of attention or sympathy that it deserves from the radical community at large nor has it received anything more than a passing glance from the loose community of anarchist theorists. Part of the reluctance, I suspect, results from the empty spaces occupying the bookshelves of universities, alternative bookstores, and radical lending libraries across the world today, all of which will soon be greeted by new and emerging works on the topic (see, for example, forthcoming works from de Rota, 2008; Immedium Press, 2009; Mümken & Muller, 2008; Rousselle & Evren, 2009) in addition to a humbling stockpile of only three books dedicated explicitly to the subject.[1] However, the reception of postanarchist theory is hindered less by the problems associated with its propaganda than with a fundamental misunderstanding of what postanarchism itself represents coupled with a blatant misrepresentation, on the part of its critics (in particular: Antliff, 2007; Cohn & Wilbur, 2003; Cohn, 2002; Day, 2005; Franks, 2009; Sasha K, 2004; Zabalaza, 2003), of what the postanarchists’ claims have been. This tension has hindered further dialogue and clarification on the key issues that were raised early in the postanarchist writings and has erected a barrier which might only be dislodged through careful and attentive readings into the way in which the debate has played out on both sides, between the postanarchists and their critics; judgement must be reserved on the basis of whether the resulting demarcations are worth retaining or abandoning. This essay should be understood as an attempt to walk through the associated discourses and examine the way in which the debate has played out up until this point.
The theme of this issue can be misleading. Most forms of `anti-globalization protest' currently taking place around the world, especially in the global South, represent a culmination of class struggles; a manifestation of resistance waged by the exploited against their exploiters. We should certainly continue to provide active solidarity for these struggles. However, as a federation, we are interested in moving beyond the symbolic forms of solidarity embodied in reactive “summit-hopping” in favor of developing a more substantive and long-term strategy based around the everyday struggles of the working class in our region.
Anarchists have played a crucial role within the anti-globalization movement, effectively reshaping the debate beyond anti-corporate sentiment to embrace a more fundamental anti-capitalist analysis, and pushing the terms of struggle from polite appeals for reform to militant disruption in the streets. Through our interventions, new social layers of progressive workers and students have been radicalized, and anarchist politics and methods of organizing have been asserted on a mass level.
For six and a half decades Lucy Parsons played a pivotal role in some of the most influential social movements of her time. A fiery speaker, bold social critic, and tireless organizer, Parsons was a prominent figure in radical American political movements from the late 1870s until her death at the age of 89 on March 7th, 1942. Despite playing an important part in such iconic struggles as the movement for the 8-hour day, the defense of the Haymarket martyrs, and the founding of the IWW, Lucy Parsons has been largely ignored by historians of all stripes. Parsons sole biographer, writing in 1976, explained her invisibility thusly: “Lucy Parsons was black, a woman, and working class — three reasons people are often excluded from history.”[1] While this helps explain in part Parsons’ absence from mainstream historiography, it is not entirely satisfying. While other working class black women found their way into academic writing and political iconography with the rise of Black Nationalist movements in the 1960s and 70s and the concurrent proliferation of Black Studies programs at American universities, Lucy Parsons was mostly left behind. Unfortunately, when she has been included in academic writing she has usually not been allowed to speak for herself. Most of the academics that have mentioned Lucy Parsons (generally very briefly) have recast her as they would have preferred her to be, usually as either a reflection of their own politics or as an example of the failures of past movements. The only biography of Parsons, Carolyn Ashbaugh’s Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary, combines misrepresentation with inaccuracy. Ashbaugh nonsensically claims that Parsons was not an anarchist, a fact beyond the point of argument for anyone that has read Lucy Parsons’s work, and she groundlessly claims that Parsons joined the Communist Party towards the end of her life. Sadly, this has allowed every writer after Ashabugh to make the same erroneous claim.
In the past couple of years there has been a growing interest in what some have begun calling “postanarchism” for short; because it is used to describe a very diverse body of thought and because of its perhaps unwarranted temporal implications, even for those within this milieu, it is a term that is more often than not used with a great deal of reticence. But as a term, it is also one which refers to a wave of attempts to try to reinvent anarchism in light of major developments within contemporary radical theory and within the world at large, much of which ultimately began with the Events of May 1968 in Paris, France and the intellectual milieu out of which the insurrection emerged. Indeed, in the preface to Andrew Feenberg's recent book on the events, When Poetry Ruled the Streets, Douglas Kellner points out that poststructuralist theory as it developed in France was not really a rejection of that movement as is sometimes thought, but for the most part was really a continuation of the new forms of thought, critique and action that had erupted in the streets at the time. As he puts it, “the passionate intensity and spirit of critique in many versions of French postmodern theory is a continuation of the spirit of 1968 Baudrillard, Lyotard, Virilio, Derrida, Castoriadis, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and other French theorists associated with postmodern theory were all participants in May 1968. They shared its revolutionary elan and radical aspirations and they attempted to develop new modes of radical thought that carried on in a different historical conjecture the radicalism of the 1960s” (2001, p. xviii).
Throughout my life somebody has always tried to set the boundaries of who and what I will be allowed to be [...]. What is common to these boundary lines is that their most destructive power lies in what I can be persuaded to do to myself — the walls of fear, shame, and guilt I can be encouraged to build in my own mind. [...] I am to hide myself, and hate myself, and never risk exposing what might be true about my life. I have learned through great sorrow that all systems of oppression feed on public silence and private terrorization. [...] For all of us, it is the public expression of desire that is embattled, any deviation from what we are supposed to want and be, how we are supposed to behave.
Dorothy Allison (1995:116-117)
What is now being called “postanarchism” by some thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word, thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the post- prefix applies to its new object as well — implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete. Together, these two senses of the word form a narrative: an aging, spent force (anarchism) is to be saved from obsolescence and irrelevance by being fused with a fresh, vital force (poststructuralism). We would like to question this narrative's assumptions and teleology, but not without some appreciation of what it has to offer.
Because of the frequent mass demonstrations that have been occurring in the past couple of years, a lot of people in the anarchist movement have formed, joined, participated in, or otherwise been involved with an affinity group. In fact, many people have been turned on to anarchist politics after experiencing first hand the efficient and empowering action that can come out of a solid affinity group. Working closely with people that share a mutual trust and respect, as well as a common strategy and vision proves the anarchist method of organizing far better than the most eloquent anarchist thinker. After all, it has its roots in what most of us consider to be the farthest reaching attempt at anarchist social revolution — the Spanish Civil War.
What is of note that relates very closely to then and now is that the anarchist affinity groups of the Spanish Civil War didn't form in the weeks prior to July 1936 — in many cases, they had been around for years. They formed as study groups for self-education; for propaganda purposes — printing and distributing newspapers and pamphlets: they formed as class conscious individuals saw a need for more organization at the grassroots level, more widespread radical education, and a more strategized method of agitation.
