Anarchoblogs in English

Keir Snow of Liberty and Solidarity wrote recently, in an article on their website(link), that Anarchism is a brand which has been sullied by the mainstream press and the establishment so much over the last century and a half that it is a waste of effort to ‘reclaim’ it. That the time and resources required to alleviate the damage that has been done to the name far out strips the resources available to anarchists in the UK. I disagree with him on a number of key points, I’ll leave aside the oddness of using market speak in political conversation and address his points.

‘Non-leftists’, he claims, when asked to describe what an anarchist is would describe an “insurrectionist, black-clad Molotov thrower”. An image that no doubt he feels would be informed by the summit hopping protests of the late twentieth and early twenty first. Is this however the case? I seriously don’t think so and I wonder if Keir has actually done any research on this or whether he is making a sweeping assumption viewed through lenses already informed by a leftist perspective? It would be interesting to see even the most basic of research on this carried out, even an afternoon out with a questionnaire would be enlightening.

In all my political activity over the last decade and a half I have always been up front about my politics as an anarchist and the only time I have ever had a reaction other than either positive or inquisitive has been from leftists, often even from anarchists who seem afraid of the word. Most people don’t have a preconceived idea of what anarchism is and if they do then they are normally more inquisitive than anything being as the person they are talking to, who has just referred to themselves as an anarchist, is a regular person who wears cardigans and eats cheese and everything.

Keir also claims that on the left anarchists are “widely viewed as being ultra-leftists opposed to organisation”. Whilst this may be true that a large section of the left propagates this misnomer I wonder on reasons for Keir’s use of this term ‘Ultra Left’. It is one often aimed at anarchists and other communists who are suspicious of trade unions in their role in the management of labour and are extremely doubtful of their revolutionary capacity, entrenched as they are in acting as a pressure valve for class tensions. It is not simply anarchists that are ultra left but council communists and autonomous Marxists. I for one am quite happy to be considered ultra left by a left wing that has failed the working class time and again and wasted countless years in the dead end of partyism and pitiful attempts at vanguardism.

The suggestion that to ‘reclaim’ the brand of anarchism would take a massive dedication of resources is also not accurate. If ‘anarchism’ were a company this would be so. Its not, it is a political ideology and a mode of social organisation. The ideology, and the form of organisation, are propagated and promoted through activity at a grass roots level in communities and workplaces. Not through high impact advertising campaigns. The parents fighting to save their school, or the workers on the picket line, don’t learn about anarchists and anarchism through glossy ads or TV commercials. They learn about it when they find out the woman who has gotten out of bed at 5a.m. to be with them at the picket is an anarchist or when the man helping them occupy their primary school happens to be an anarchist. That’s the kind of advertising ad execs have wet dreams over and that is exactly how the brand of anarchism is reclaimed.

He says that should we abandon the name then people fear that our politics would be watered down, diluted somehow. That is not the worry I have with avoiding using the name. The worry I have with disguising our politics is that at some point the people we are working with will find out we have been obfuscating the truth, that we have been lying. This will either make them think we are ashamed of our politics or, worse still, put us in the pigeon hole with politicians and all the other leftist sects who want something from them.

There is a worry as well about not being explicitly anarchist in our organisation. Organisations can easily be saturated with people whose political ideas diverge massively from the original ideology of the organisation. Is an anarchist organisation mostly made up of liberals and/or Trotskyists an anarchist organisation? Not if it has any form of real internal democracy as this will soon mean that the ideology of the organisation begins to reflect the make up of the organisation. We need only look at the ‘politics’ of the SWP and how they have changed over the years with their ‘recruit them all’ policy meaning the party has become suffuse with ‘well meaning liberals’ attracted by the radical rhetoric*. We can see similar with the Climate Camp which hid its anarchist roots so well that the anarchists involved in forming the camp are having to reclaim it from lentil munching Monbiot fans.

To conclude, anarchism and anarchy do not have to be reclaimed nor do they need a publicity campaign to reinvigorate the brand image. The actions we take in our communities and workplaces, putting our money where our mouth is, will do a far better job at dispelling myths and promoting our politics. Obfuscating our politics will only result in us being branded as dishonest or ashamed of our politics.

*Not to imply that the SWP has internal democracy but allowing the party to be swamped by all comers has inevitably leaddown the path of liberalism they are set upon.

Disclaimer-tastic: this is entirely my personal opinion and not necessarily that of any organisation I am a part of.

On Friday the 12th I’m off to Prague for the PCPE (which means I’ll unfortunately miss most of the ASC here in Auburn, though I do plan to drop in on the first day, the 11th).

The PCPE doesn’t actually start until the 19th, but its coinciding with my spring break means I can spend a little extra time, so once I arrive in Prague I’ll be off by train to spend a (frustratingly brief) couple of days in Vienna, thus making this trip doubly Austrian.

I’ve been to Prague before, but this’ll be my first trip to Vienna. I’ve wanted to see Vienna for a long time; even before Mises, Hayek, and Wittgenstein entered my life, it was the city of Die Fledermaus and The Third Man (to pick two rather different visions of the city). When I first started the Austro-Athenian Empire, I’d been to neither Austria nor Athens; by next week I’ll have seen both!

After Vienna, back to marvelous Prague and the PCPE, where I’ll be giving a paper on Platonic Pitfalls for Austro-Libertarians – in which I sadden Rothbardians by venting my heresies on fractional-reserve banking and the productivity theory of wages, but then cheer them up with some anarchy at the end. (Readers of my blog have seen most of this stuff before.)

After that I’ll be staying over a couple of extra days for still more anarchy, i.e. to give a talk on the 23rd at the CEVRO Institute (a college run by a free-market think tank and headed up by libertarian activist Josef Šima, who’s also one of the organizers of the PCPE) on Why Classical Liberals Should Prefer Anarchy Over State Power. (No prepared text, but I’ll probably cover much of the same territory as in my ten objections talk.) I’ll return to the u.s. on the 24th.

• Welcome to Statelessness. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-03-01). Gary Chartier is offering an introductory online course on anarchism under the auspices of the Molinari Institute’s Center for a Stateless Society. Check it out. (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• SWAT Team Endangers Child, Parents Charged With Child Endangerment. The Agitator (2010-03-02). Police are here to keep kids safe: "So smoking pot = 'child endangerment.' Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety. Just so we're clear." (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• “Looters” and Food in an Emergency. Matthew Yglesias (2010-03-02). Disaster Statism Vs. Human Survival and Reclamation of Lost and Abandoned Property (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• NONVIOLENCE. A REVIEW OF MARK KURLANSKY’S 2006 BOOK. www.wendymcelroy.com (2010-03-02). NONVIOLENCE: A REVIEW OF MARK KURLANSKY’S 2006 BOOK BY THAT NAME By Jim Russell (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• HOUSE DEMOCRATS SUPPORT TORTURE. UNDERNEWS (2010-03-02). Keep on Hoping, y'all. (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• t r u t h o u t | Alexander Cockburn | The Bogus Crime Wave. www.truthout.org (2010-03-02). Siege Mentality vs. Empirical Reality (Sin Fronteras Edition): In spite of the constant shrill efforts by Anglo nationalists to cultivate a siege mentality, there actually is no empirical evidence of an immigrant crime wave. When you control for age and state of residence, and when you don't count bogus victimless "offenses" which are directly related to immigration status, young Latin@ men are no more likely to commit violent crimes than young white men. If the undocumented population is significantly undercounted by the census (as many, including the nativist fear-mongers, would generally believe it to be), then the Latin@ crime rate is actually significantly lower than the white crime rate. The American Conservative, of all places (!), has the story. (Via the November Coalition.) (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• School district admits installing covert webcam activation software on student laptops, denies wrongdoing. Boing Boing (2010-03-02). In which Perpetual State of Supervision meets Stasi-statism: "The Superintendant of the Lower Merion School District -- where parents have initiated a class action suit over the covert use of students' laptops to surveil them in school and at home -- has sent a letter to parents with more information about the spying. The school admits that there was spyware installed on students laptops that allowed for remote, covert activation of their webcams, ... They have disabled the system for now and deny that it was misused." Dude, seriously? Of course they were "misused." The thing itself IS the misuse. (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)
• Nolan Klein: an innocent man who died of an untreated medical condition inside Nevada´s prison system. NPW, Nevada Prison Watch (2010-03-02). From the January 12 2010 Meeting of the Board of Prison Commissioners:Tonya Brown stated she had a private autopsy performed on Mr. Klein and passed out the updated death certificate to the Board. She stated had he been properly treated, he would still be alive today and the State of... (Linked Tuesday 2010-03-02.)

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first mention of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left by the Associated Press. (CHT Charles.) Typically for the mainstream press, the story gets something wrong (two things, actually), but it’s still pretty cool.

Charles Johnson’s excellent essay “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” which appeared in the anarchism/minarchism anthology that Tibor Machan and I edited, is now available online.

Read it now, or the statists win.

Gary Chartier is offering an introductory online course on anarchism under the auspices of the Molinari Institute’s Center for a Stateless Society. Check it out.

Are you a libertarian anarchist swept up in Free State Project hype? Can’t get your head around “Free State” being an oxymoron but still want in on all that FSP fun? Don’t sweat it. The FSP isn’t just for minarchists anymore. It’s also ripe for anarchist co-option.

Fertile Ground

Many, if not most, FSP members are minarchists. They get liberty, at least partially. So, in the best case, they’re fertile ground for anarchist outreach and in the worst case they’re statists who will think twice before aggressing against us. Also, these folks have a good bit of spare time in their liberty activism programs. They only vote a couple times per year. Throw in a few big protests and their schedules are wide open for direct action, counter-economics and self-improvement.

Anarchist Projects Well Underway

Some anarchist projects are already well underway. There are rumors of an active agorist culture. Plans for an agoristic marketplace at the Porcupine Festival this summer can be seen on Facebook. Free Keene appears to be populated largely by voluntaryists, agorists, spoonerites and other anarchists. The Alternatives Expo is going on its fourth year of giving the Liberty Forum a run for its money, with non-political, practical and independence-minded presentations available alongside the big-ticket Liberty Forum headliners.

Wanted: Buyers and Sellers

So if you’re a voluntaryist, agorist, Spoonerite, Thoreauvian or any other kind of market anarchist or an-cap, come on up to New Hampshire! The new society is actively forming in the shell of the old. More buyers and sellers are needed. At least, check out the AltExpo and PorcFest!

Photo credit: Moosealope. Photo license.

If you enjoy the Center for a Stateless Society’s commentaries (and if you’re lucky enough to be above water financially), please consider donating to the C4SS first quarter fundraiser, which looks to be falling short. Otherwise you’ll only have half as much anarchy ….

It takes the perspicacity of a Glenn Beck to detect them.