MY
PERSPECTIVES
Above
all, I am an individual who desires to create my life and my relationship to
the world and to other people on my own terms. This is why I am an anarchist.
Therefore, my anarchist perspective is egoist and I take from all perspectives
that I find useful in developing and carrying out my anarchist project.
From individualism, I take the primacy of the freedom of every
individual to determine the conditions of her or his existence in free
association with others as the central aim of revolutionary struggle and also a
recognition of the necessity of individuals to begin to reappropriate life here
and now in revolt against this society to the extent to which they are able.
My perspective is insurrectionist in that it recognizes both the
necessity of the individual to rise up in open revolt against her or his
condition (individual insurrection) and the necessity for a destructive,
subversive rupture on the large scale with the current social order—the rising
of the multitudes of the exploited and excluded classes against their condition
(social insurrection).
Thus, I
recognize the necessity of class analysis and an active critique of the
economy. I see class struggle as the struggle against proletarianization—i.e.,
the struggle against our dispossession of the capacity to determine the
conditions of our existence in terms of our real desires and aspirations. It
manifests on the individual level in the daily acts of sabotage, theft, subversion
and revolt that the exploited carry out to take back a bit of their life and
dignity. The recognition of one’s own struggle in the struggles of others is
what begins to build the solidarity capable of transforming these individual
acts into “the collective struggle for individual realization”, which I see as
the real class struggle.
Since this aim
of freeing every individual to be able to create her or his life as s/he sees
fit requires that everyone have equal access to all that is necessary for this
project of self-realization, it is necessary to destroy the institutions that
prevent this free access. Thus, the destruction of the institutions of property
and of commodity exchange, and consequently of work—that separation of the
activity through which one gets the necessities of existence from life
itself—is a necessary aim of revolutionary struggle. Only in this way can new
social relations based on free association without hierarchy or privilege come
to exist. This is communism as I understand it.
I recognize
that the institutions of domination and exploitation are what constitute
civilization, and, thus, recognize my struggle as one against civilization.
Technological systems—and particularly industrialism—developed as means of
controlling people, and therefore, the struggle against control is the struggle
against such systems. So my perspective incorporates luddism and, in the broad
sense, could be called a green anarchist perspective, though I have no use for
any anti-human rhetoric, and desire to prevent environmental destruction
because a devastated world impoverishes my existence and the existence of all
human beings.
Thus, I see the
dichotomies made between individualism and communism, individual revolt and
class struggle, the struggle against human exploitation and the exploitation of
nature as false dichotomies and feel that those who accept them are
impoverishing their own critique and struggle.