[Shadow_Group] The irresistible charm of global anarchism

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

whats up people.  this is marc, grad student at the umass-amherst labor 
center.  thanks for posting that "are you a manarchist" piece, that's some 
stuff that needs to be said. i wanted to share something i found today and i 
thought was interesting:

(from infoshop.org)

The irresistible charm of global anarchism
By Andrej Grubacic 

I assume that most of the readers are aware by now of what happened during the 
London Social Forum. It is not my intention here to talk about the European 
Social Forum. There are excellent analyses on the web. However, the whole forum 
fiasco needs to be addressed because of the future of this movement that we, 
perhaps too generously, sometimes call the "movement of movements". 

I was re-reading recently one of the classic books on the movements: Anti-
systemic Movements (Arrigghi, Hopkins, Wallerstein). One of the central 
arguments of this wonderful book, written in the eighties, is that the 
movements after the "world revolution of 1968" and after the "collapse of the 
liberal consensus", dismissed the Old Left slogan - "conquer state power and 
then change the world". Authors made an optimistic mistake in their assessment 
that the time of Leninist madness is behind us. 

The Old Left is, I am afraid, a beast which dies slowly. After the "world-
revolution of 1994", and after the "collapse of the neo-liberal consensus", we 
have an archaic socialist sect called the Socialist Workers Party organizing an 
event which is supposed to be one of most exciting manifestations of the new 
global movement - the Social Forum. The very same sect calls the police to 
arrest activists - in an attempt to criminalize part of the movement. Later on, 
after this outrageous precedent, this same sect accuses those who ended up in 
jail of racism! I don't want to waste the time of readers by writing about the 
SWP. Many have already done it. Nobody perhaps better then Peter Waterman ( 
http://voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=341<http://voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=341>). 

What I would like to do, however, is to say is that we should not wait for the 
traditional Leninist vanguardist left to disappear. We have to give this 
process a helping hand. By "Leninism" I mean the political project where the 
proletariat (or the popular masses) have to be energized under the aegis of a 
dedicated group of cadres organized as a party or party-state. This archaic 
nonsense goes by different names in the US: the ISO, the Spartacist League, the 
IAC, and so on and so forth. But it is important to acknowledge that these 
people are not just boring: they could be dangerous too. 

We should start a struggle against the traditional vanguardist ways of doing 
politics. A struggle , that is, for another political project which is the 
articulation of another political praxis. 

It is a struggle that we should globalize. Because horizontals are, indeed, 
everywhere. The old slogan of the traditional Marxist left - to conquer the 
state and then to change the world - is something that we have to push away. 
The responsibility of the revolutionary today is to make the 19th century idea 
of revolution unnecessary. The revolution is not going to come as some great 
apocalyptic event, as an insurrectionary act or moment, but as a very long 
process that has been going on for most of human history - full of strategies 
of flight and evasion as much as dramatic confrontations. The world cannot be 
changed through the state. It has to be made anew. In our context, this would 
imply the obligation to remember the old anarchist idea of "changing the world 
without taking power". 

To insist that another possible world springs from a movement that practices 
what it preaches. In the words of Massimo de Angelis, we should move from 
movement to society: "In other words, we want to move from movement to society 
not so much by persuading people to 'join' our movement, but through a language 
and a political practice that by tracing the connections between diverse 
practices attempts to dissolve the distinctions between inside and outside the 
movement, i.e., actually moves 'from movement to society'. " 

The only mode of organization which would seem appropriate is the one suggested 
by anarchists and, somewhat more recently, by autonomist Marxists: translation 
or circulation of struggles. It means, simply, thinking about organization in 
its most basic sense: the elaboration of cooperation among people in the 
struggle; internal organization by any self-defined group of people in 
struggle. It is the elaboration of a politics of difference that minimizes 
antagonism. 

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the authors of Anti-systemic 
Movements, the book I have mentioned above, we have now entered a period 
of "global anarchy". This is a period of "global anarchic transition" - from 
the existing world-system to a different one. The capitalist world-system is in 
decline. But the final outcome of this transitional chaos is totally uncertain. 

Another world which might be possible will be a consequence of how we act and 
how we struggle today. One of the more immediate problems we face is how to 
find an adequate answer to the failure of historical socialism. This answer is, 
in my view, completely different than the one advocated by professor Callinicos 
and his students. We should welcome the ideas coming from our movements, 
reflecting our organizational practices, our horizontality and our networks. 
This means that we have to look at the organizational forms that this movement 
gives to itself. The unfortunate idea of separation of the ends and means led 
to a divorce between the Leninist "vanguard" and the "another world". 

This is something that we have to refuse today - if we are to create a society 
based on mutual aid, direct democracy and dignity. We have to refuse the 
traditional distinction between revolution, reform and anarchism because the 
question of who controlls the state should not be the focus of our attention. 
Wallerstein is perhaps right in saying that for the the old movements there 
was "no alternative way" but to obtain the state power because they were 
operating within the ambit of the capitalist world-system which was basically 
stable. Today, when the capitalist world-system is in crisis, if we are not to 
renounce our dreams of a genuinely democratic and egalitarian world, we must go 
back to the anarchist idea of "changing the world without taking power". The 
answer to "global anarchy", in other words, is "global anarchism". 



Two complementary pieces to this one are:

"The New Radicalism"
http://www.alternet.org/story/19308/<http://www.alternet.org/story/19308/>

and

"Anarchism, Or The Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-first Century"
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=4796<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=4796>

Also, folks can check out "Seven Essays from We Are Everywhere" which narco 
news published on their site:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1083.html<http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1083.html>

peace,
marc




-- 
"We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; 
there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and 
ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world 
here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."
-Buenaventura Durruti 


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