Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 01:03 PM CST

I\'d like to comment on the charge of the supposed call for \"militarization\" of the social struggle. I believe that this is a mis-representation of the real call being put out, which is: the co-ordination and emphasis on strategic and tactical militant organisation in carrying out the social struggle. They are two very different things, which I will explain.

To begin with, while Kropotkin did support the first world war because he saw Germany as the \"greater evil\" that would be even harder to defeat than western democracy, he was not widely supported in this view. Some of the most prominent anarchist-communists of the time, including Berkman and Malatesta, vehemently opposed any support for either side. Individuals within the struggle may have lapses in judgment, but anarchism [and more specifically anarchist-communism] held firm in its opposition to imperialist wars.

To the charge that there is an attempt to militarizing the social struggle, i would contend that the article is mis-representing the propositions regarding the social struggle, especially those from the Barricada publication which have come under intense scrutiny from lifestylists.

Militarization is a process of imposing a regimented military discipline, and as anarchists we are opposed to this. We are opposed because the means of it betrays the ends, and it makes our struggle less effective [if not impotent]. This article dishonestly infers that somehow a state of \"militarization\" is creeping into the anarchist movement, and says that evidence can be found in talk of \"strategy\" and \"tactics\".

Indeed, it is clear that both strategy and tactics not only are seperate concepts from militarization, but they are both needed in all stages of the struggle. It is as if the author is implying that we can have a social struggle within analyzing how we conduct it [strategy] and using that analyzation to further our ability to practically conduct it [tactics]. Such is not only a dishonest claim, but one that shows a complete ignorance on the author\'s part of the history of anarchist social struggle, past and present.

This same zine trashed the Barricada call for better and more efficient organisation by making such erroneus claims as to say that anarchism\'s goal is the \"subversion of existence\", and other such nonsense, completely anti-thetical to the history, theory, and practice of anarchism. It is no surprise this article is again attacking a staple of anarchist organisation.

What is the anarchist organisation under debate? It is the delegate and direct democracy system. We recognize, as anarchists, that everyone cannot do everything. I am not a dentist, but i require the services of a dentist. When we talk of the \"division of labour\", and how to deal with it, we don\'t say \"everyone should be a dentist\" or \"we need to abolish dentistry\". Rather, we say the community will regulate the production and distribution of products and services, and each dentist will be accountable to the community for their actions and vice versa. How are they to be accountable? through the two staples of anarchist organisation: delegate and direct democracy, which go hand in hand.

What is being proposed by Barricada and other publications is that anarchists organise themselves along these lines, delegate and direct democracy, in building more cohesive networks that can better conduct the class struggle. The idea is that since our movement has grown somewhat, it is at a point where it can sustain the existence of more regionalized struggle. It is because we realize that isolated struggles that are not co-ordinated are doomed to failure, taht we seek to regionalise and federalise our struggles so they gain a more collective and social character, giving more expression to the individual by this method.

Quite simply, we want a more organised anarchist struggle that uses the principles of delegate and direct democracy, seeing as they are what produces an effective struggle. We saw this in the Ukraine, we saw it in Spain, and we\'re seeing it emerge in Argentina.

Essentially, wilfulf disobedience is saying that these pillars of anarchist theory and practice are somehow against the principles of anarchism. It is an Orwellian attempt at re-defining anarchism, and one that should be opposed by revolutionaries.

The anarchist call is not towards militarization, but towards organising our struggle to more effectively combat militarization!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 01:17 PM CST

Some quick additions to what i posted earlier:

The article claims that we are fighting against \"quantification\", an abstract concept given it\'s context. But let us confront this fallacy head on. We are struggling for freedom because we can quantify [compare amounts of distribution] our social position relative to those of the ruling class. Indeed, struggling against such an abstract, timeless, and scientific concept such as \"quantification\" is folly. It is like struggling against \"time\", \"distance\", or \"direction\". They are concepts and principles that exist with our without our consent.

To be more specific about forms of anarchist organisation, I would like to emphasize that the anarchist struggle is an anti-militarist one, and that the seeds of the new society are found in the theoretical and practical realization of that struggle: through delegate and direct democract.

Let\'s take the Spanish Civil War form of organisation. Anarchists created militias, in which there were no officer corps and leaders of formations were elected through delegate democracy, accountable through direct democracy, and the cohesive fighting ability was maintained through self-discipline, with a complete lack of any form of physical violence to force people to fight [a deserter would live with his shame in abandoning the anti-fascist struggle, that was punishment enough].

We are not in this struggle for \"armed joy\", and neither were the tens of thousands of anarchists who formed militias during the civil war/revolution. We recognize that the very act of persuing our objectives militarily is no cause for \"armed joy\". We are not joyful about having to kill or to employ violence to be free. This is a disgusting, heartless and lifestylist concept, and it should be opposed.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 03:41 PM CST

Thank you, Bakunin... you said what i was thinking better than i ever could have.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 04:33 PM CST

Hey, Bakunin, take an enema or something. Can you drop the name-calling and stick to the arguments you have against this article? Thank you.

By the way, not all anarchists agree with you about the question of organization. If anything, the anarchist movement has grown in the last 5 years because we avoided the leftist habit of building organizations. Instead we have networks and small projects, which enables us to focus on building anarchist alternatives and challenging the capitalists and state through social struggles.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 05:19 PM CST

Word, I agree with Chuck. Though bakunin does have valid points when s/he argues, s/he always says the same things about something being either lifestylist or that green anarchy is by definition fascist and racist. (aren\'t you going to write something about that B?)

What exactly do you mean by lifestylist? If it\'s the bookchinist sense, then i still don\'t think this qualifies as lifestylist.

Willful Disobedience emphasize a revolutionary life project that involves revolting against the social order not some bohemian subculture. Check this website and read the first part for the full deal.
http://msnhomepages.talkcity.com/ProjectPl/willfuldisobedience/

That\'s my add in to the sub argument

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 05:25 PM CST

huh? I dont think your correct there. Blaming the resurgence of the anarchist movement at least in the united states on smaller, loose type organizational structures doesnt make any sense. COnsidering for the past 40 years we have had small, loose structures around and there was no boom of anarchist activity. Also it seems as more anarchists spring up, more different forms of organization do also, everything from networks to federations. Personally i think if we want to build a movement, whether it be loose knit or not we need to be out in the public doing things. Not always doing things \"underground\" or whatever. It seems to me that out of anything, that has helped the movement over the past few years. And the organizations that we create in the process should reflect the communitys we live in and the best way to exist within them. I agree with you that outdated leftist models of organization are pointless. Id also generally agree that federations that just exist for the hell of it arent too helpful, and can take away from the important community organizing that has to be done.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 06:56 PM CST

Name several big anarchist organizations in the United States. There aren\'t any. The closest thing is NEFAC, which is a federation of local groups that has many network characteristics. Anarchists in the United States are not currently involved in building large anarchist organizations. They aren\'t doing anything similar to what the socialists and communists always try to do, for good reasons.

There are many problems with large organizations, but I\'m not going to elaborateon this right now. One of the big problems with large radical organizations is that they become a fat, easy target for the state. Another problem is that organizations tend to become about maintaining themselves. Look at the ISO, for example. Much of their activity is oriented around organization-building. Many of the activities they are engaged in are educational, in other words, events designed to recruit. An example of this in the U.S. anarchist movement was Love and Rage, which called itself a \"revolutionary anarchist\" federation (later called itself a network). It was a curious mixture of anarchism and Trotskyism, since many of its \"leaders\" hadn\'t totally divorced themselves from their authoritarian background. It was no surprise to many of us that when L&R folded, several of these closet authoritarians announced that they were no longer anarchists. A federation is supposed to be created by local groups that already exist. L&R was trying to create local groups from the top down, which just isn\'t anarchism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 09:15 PM CST

On Armed Joy, you are taking a pot shot at insurrectionaries here and well I guess I have to defend us.

First I think you misinterpret Armed Joy by taking it out of context but also I don\'t believe that Bonanno meant to fetishize armed struggle. Armed Joy (the text) puts emphasis on getting active and taking part in the struggle not out of some moralistic duty to \"the cause\", but from your own desires to be free and reappropriate your life in the process.

The joy that Bonanno describes is the joy in fighting back against that which is enslaving us, not the joy in killing for killing\'s sake etc. Often people described the very festive atmosphere of various insurrections including Spain, May \'68 in Paris etc. (Note that I am not trying to idealize insurrections but they definitely have their festive qualities but of course their horrible qualities as well i.e. death and misery).

I\'ll email the author and see what he has to say in response.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 09:29 PM CST

Ok, just to clear a few things up...

To start with, i\'d like to challenge the contention that building organisations is a \"leftist habit\", as Chuck puts it. For starters, building social organisations has been part of anarchist theory since day #1. Every succesful anarchist social revolution has been carried out under the auspices of organisations. In fact, there\'s an interesting corelation between a) the size of the organisations membership and b) their success in carrying out a social revolution. I\'m not saying that membership is everything, but it is a decisive factor in a truly revolutionary organisation.

I\'d like to challenge anyone to show how organisation is somehow not part of anarchist theory and practice, as a core principle. It goes right back to Bakunin calling for Federations [and every anarchist since calling for free federations, of different sorts, since]. Organisation is key to our success, and every anarchist realizes this. the approximately 2.5 million members of the CNT/FAI during the spanish civil war realized this. I\'m not even saying organisations are perfect: they aren\'t. They are flawed and make mistakes just like people do, but organisations are an integral part of anarchism, like it or not.

Also, this use of the word \"leftist\" troubles me. It seems that the currents of the anarchist movement that arise genuinely from anarchism - ie, all those currents that come from the socialist roots which formed anarchism - are continually being denounced as \"leftist\". I think what this is implying [correct me if im wrong] that being a socialist is a bad thing. Make no mistake: anarchism is opposed to state socialism, but anarchism is *libertarian socialist* in character.

Also, attacking genuine anarchist movements, theories, organisations etc. as \"leftist\" seems to be a bit of a slander [again, correct me if im wrong] against anarchism, by saying that it is somehow associated with the parliamentary \"left\" and therefore embraces electoral politics. This would be a fallacy, if the case.

I\'d also like to talk about anarchist organisations that exist today. In north america, which is not exactly on the verge of revolution [the ruling class is strongest there than possibly anywhere else in the world], anarchist organisations are generally less popular than in countries where there are more brutal, opressive conditions that force people to see past the media coercion of the state. For example, two organisations in Brazil fighting the state are the Libertarian Youth and Women\'s Action. And in Argentina, there is the Organisation of Libertarian Socialists.

In North America, we have a few large organisations. Three of these, probably the largest, took part in the anarchist conference in Puetro Alegro, Brazil. They are: NEFAC, the IWW, and CLAC. CLAC is Canadian, and NEFAC and the IWW exist both in Canada and the US [the IWW in other countries as well, notably Australia]. They are by no means mass organisations yet, although they represent the collective efforts of many, many anarchist militants.

There are also other smaller organisations, like the various anarchist collectives in the pacific north west, the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, the Black Star Federation in California, and organisations like ARA and FNB that are more or less anarchist in nature.

Now, when there were less of these developed organisations in North America, the movement was actually a lot less effective and smaller. There seems to be a bit of a correlation between mass organisations and the activity of movements.

To the charges against the Love and Rage Federation, it\'s true that L&R was not even wholly an anarchist organisation. There have been many great critiques of why L&R came apart, but I believe they were never a \"revolutionary anarchist\" federation as they contended. This is in part because they had many marxists, and there was a general lack of knowledge about anarchist theory and practice, the history of the movement, etc. among many of the members. These factors combined to create a situation that was fundamentally untenable.

As for the charge that organisations become like the ISO, etc., this is simply BS. the ISO are lame and concerned with self-perpetuation because they are dogmatic trotskyists who lack a coherent program and a revolutionary critique of society that has ever produced a succesful social movement anywhere in history. I think the failure of the trots to do anything is recognized universally, by non-anarchist and anarchist groups alike.

As anarchists, we must continually push for the federalisation and co-ordination of our individual and group struggles, for the education of our comrades in anarchist history, theory, and practice, and for the constant re-evaluation of our tactics and strategy. Each anarchist organisation must strive towards delveoping a truly revolutionary and *libertarian* socialist [anarchist] program!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, February 17 2002 @ 10:51 PM CST

Bakunin,

You\'re basically saying that anyone who critiques the militarization of the anarchist movement is a \"lifestylist\". This is a baseless accusation and pretty much meaningless. What exactly does \"lifestylist\" mean anyway? I think it\'s just a term Bookchin invented to tar anyone who didn\'t agree with him. It\'s just a label that automatically discredits someone, instead of actually discussing the content of their ideas.

Too many anarchists think in terms of \"winning\" the battle against the capitalists and the state, of \"victory\" and of having the better weapons (both ideological and physical). There\'s a big problem with this, because it dilutes anarchist principles. Tactics come first, principles second.

People forget that they are *anarchists* first and foremost, and concentrate primarily on tactics, eficiency, and beating the enemy. There\'s a good discussion of this in Gilles Dauve\'s \"When Insurrections Die\" in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Dauve writes: \"To imagine a proletarian front facing off against a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone\'s power, occupying their territory).\" I still wonder why anarchists continue to insist on using the slogan \"By any means necessary\", which seems more appropriate for Marxist-Leninist or fascist movements.

Willful Disobedience is NOT, like you claim, opposed to organization. They are for informal organization as oposed to formal organization (membership, dues, resolutions, secretariats, democratic organization, etc.) I disagree with their stance, but I try not to attribute things to anarchists that they never said in the first place.

When WD say \"subversion of existence\" they mean a complete social transformation. Getting involved in community organizing and projects that help to fulfill people\'s real needs, talking to neighbors, co-workers, colleagues, starting up projects like Homes Not Jails that break into abandoned buildings, fix the place up and help people to find new homes, all these things that create a dual power to capitalism and the state could be seen as \"subverting\" the current system, and creating alternative ways to live, to associate with people, to interact.

Organization: the most important question is, what is it for? What does it do? It\'s a mistake to try and form an anarchist collective BEFORE you have any idea of what you\'d like to do with it. It makes more sense to work on a specific project and THEN organize an anarchist collective with the core people in your project who share your particular views. I like what Malatesta has to say about this: \"Organisation, [...] is an unavoidable fact which involves everyone, whether in human society in general or in any grouping of people joined by a common aim.\" What he was saying was that organization *develops FROM* specific projects (like a Critical Mass bike ride, community garden, micropower radio station, Surveillance Camera Players, etc. etc.) and not the other way around. Federations like NEFAC didn

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 01:03 AM CST

I agree with what your saying chuck. I just dont think it correlates with the anarchist movement growing. I really doubt that if the iso was not around, there would be thousands of authoritarian leftist youth roaming the streets.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 04:57 AM CST

While some fetish organization, some fetish anti-organizationalism too. We need to think in terms of what will further the movement and make us more effective (towards the process of revolutionary change, and within anarchist princibles). I thinks it\'s well stated that as anarchists we want to build from the bottom up and start from real work in our communities, wrokplaces, schools, etc.

Why the stigma to creating organizations of anarchists or mass organizations organized from the bottom up(such as tenant unions, radical worker unions, etc)? Without moving towards more coordination and greater organization we will not be effective, peroid. If we are not effective then we are anarchists and revolutionaries in name only, if we are not willing to what it takes to win (within anarchist princibles for the nitpicky) then why not just give up and be reformists?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 11:16 AM CST

I don\'t have time right now, Bakunin, to explore how out of touch your arguments are, but I suggest reading some recent anarchist theory about organization. I suggest that you read the Rand report on Netwars or anything that documents how networked resistance helped build the current anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements. Yes, there are small anarchist organizations in this network, like NEFAC and CLAC and the ACC in Washington, DC. However, you miss my point. The objective of these organizations is not build a bigger organization, or some kind of mass national party or big ole anarchist group. The membership growth of these organizations is a result of them being engaged in social struggles apart from increasing the size of the group. I guess this is a hard concept to grasp for many leftists, since they have struggled to grow their groups for many years. People don\'t join your group because it has the correct \"line\" or politics, they join because your group is doing something that they want to support.

You confuse this discussion by including ARA and FNB chapters as organizations. They are organizations in a small sense, but they are also affinity groups in bigger networks. CLAC is a local group and the IWW is not an anarchist organization.

Please read Marc SIlverstein\'s comments, because he puts it much more poetically and concise than I can. Marc is correct about these organizational questions, which anarchists ignore at th expense of their own marginalization. We have good evidence now of how to grow anarchist activity on the international, national, and local levels. Anarchists have repeated the mistakes of the Left for so damn long, in that they tried to start organizations first and then hope that recruiting would gain new members. This is putting the cart before the horse. Like Marc writes, NEFAC developed organically out of an existing network of anarcho-communists in a geographical region. Unlike Love and Rage, nobody started up NEFAC with the idea of organizing local chapters from the bigger organization. NEFAC is doing that now, to some extent, but they have reached a stage where their local affiliates have some history of working together.

I\'ve been an anarchist for over 15 years and I\'ve seen many cases where well-intentioned anarchists started anarchist groups and then wondered why nobody joined. Perhaps there is a place for an explicitly anarchist group, but it is best left to come about organically after some time spent on other activities on the local level.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 11:33 AM CST

To quickly clear some misconceptions up:

CLAC is local but a mass organisation in its own right in it\'s locality [i\'ve conversed with many CLAC militants, some are anarchists and some are not, but it an organisation with an anarchist character]. the IWW is certainly not explicitly anarchist, which is one of my problems with it [even though im a member]. However, the IWW does have a very large concentration of anarchist militants in it\'s rank, probably even a majority. As for NEFAC, yes they did come out of an existing network of miltiants. That\'s the point.

You don\'t form organisations to merely try and recruit people, you form them to carry out social change. People will join your organisation if it is truly active and revolutionary in character. So this idea that organisations merely exist to \"get people\" into them is complete nonsense. Anarchist organisations exist to carry out a social struggle, and the very act of carrying out that struggle educates people along the way, who in turn join the organisation.

The vast majority of the world\'s anarchists are in anarchist federations of either anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-communist nature [in essence, a \"class struggle\" nature]. There are a variety of different approaches to federation, but three are the main ones: The Federated Syndical approach, the Synthesis Federation, and the Platformist Federation.

The simple fact is that organising federations is an integral part of anarchism. Networks in and of themselves are the groundwork for the construct of mass organisations. If you\'re going to attack organisation, why not attack every anarchist since Bakunin? they\'ve all supported organisations. What do you think the FAI was in the spanish civil war?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 11:52 AM CST

Marc Silverstein,

When I use the term \"lifestylist\", I am actually using Bookchin\'s definition, which is this: anyone who denies the inherent socialist character of anarchism [as stated by bakunin and every major anarchist theoretician and revolutionary since] and yet still claims to uphold \"anarchism\" in the aspect of the persuit of liberty only.

This definition is a lot different than the one you gave. I disagree strongly with most of what Bookchin had to write, and i thought his Municipalism was a perversion at best. No wonder it hasn\'t exactly gained wide acceptance within the anarchist movement.

However, his attack on lifestylism [as i have defined it above] was accepted in virtually all quarters of the movement. It was a genuine attack on a genuinely reformist tendency within the anarchist movement, and a lot of essays echoing the contention [whether or not they agree with bookchin in entirety, most like myself don\'t] have come out before and since.

Another problem is this concept that our \"tactics\" and \"principles\" are somehow opposed to each other. They aren\'t! I must thank you for your Malatesta qoute, because it demonstrates in a great way the anarcho-communist ideal of organisation. Mass organisations do not spring up out of the idea to form one in and of itself. They form of smaller groups that have built their strength fighting for individual or a series of issues within their communities. It is when the greater character of those issues can be realized - the class war - that large mass organisations start to form from these smaller issues. This idea of organising is completely opposed to that utilized by lifestylists [essentially, this means a-caps, a-primitivists, etc...].

While I agree that the slogan \"by any means necessary\" is completely inappropriate and inconsistent with anarchist practice [since the means that we use to build the new society within the shell of the old dictate how the ends will turn up], I do not think that slogan was utilized by the spanish revolutionaries.

In fact, the spanish revolutionaries believed that they could not form a \"People\'s Army\" as the state communists wished, and that they had to build a unified war effort based upon the militias, which were \"democratic\" [in an anarchist, not capitalist sense] in nature and had direct ties to the revolution being waged at the same time as the war.

As for the contention that the idea of taking land, etc, was \"burgeoise\" or somehow anti-proletarian, this is complete garbage. The revolution the anarchists were making was directly tied to the land they held. They needed to hold on to land so that the collectives and federations that were formed from groups of collectives could have a stable agricultural base. They needed to make sure that the industrial collectives also had a protected, stable base. If they didn\'t fight a war based on holding territory, there could have been no anarchist-communist society in Aragon, because the collectives would have no security.

This contention that using militias in warfare is somehow against anarchist principles is a lifestylist concept. IE- it is a concept that ignores the socialist aspect of anarchism, from which anarchism was derived. \"liberty without socialism is injustice and privlege\" - Bakunin. The fact of the matter is, the Spanish Revolution failed for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the entire world was against them, and three fascist armies [two of which later brought the rest of the world almost to it\'s knees] were fighting against a front that was internally divided between anarchists and communists. It is no surprise that the CNT made crucial mistakes during this period, and some reformist tendencies were allowed to develop in panic.

You seem to get this notion that im disagreeing with your stance on forming organisations, but it\'s clear from what i\'ve written that i\'m not. Organisation *do* have to be based on the local struggles inherent within the community. These struggles then have to be developed in co-ordination with other struggles [organising into federations] with the realization that in order to accomplish their aims, they need to overthrow the ruling class and implement anarchism. There is a point where merely struggling for these issues while ignoring the larger social question becomes a futile effort. Both must be carried forward.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 11:54 AM CST

Bakunin, you are starting to get it, but are still jumping to the wrong conclusions. Please read Marc\'s comments. We aren\'t attacking anarchist history, which would be silly, but simply are pointing out that things are being done differently now for good reasons. Anarchist federations are all nice and sweet, but they aren\'t the answer for every type of anarchist organizing.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 01:37 PM CST

Actually, Bakunin, the anarchist movement pretty much rejected Bakunin\'s lame arguments about \"lifestylism.\" There have been a few shrill voices who are concerned about this nonexistant anarchist bogeyman, but everybody else has better things to do. It\'s hard to say that Bookchin even made a coherent argument about what \"lifestylism\" is in his view. I read SALA and I came away with the understanding that lifestylism, according to Bookchin, is a conspiracy of his critics to discredit his work.

This is not lifestylism as many anarchists understand it, which is used to describe people who dress in some anarchist fashion and don\'t practice anarchist politics.

In my early years as an anarchist, I greatly appreciated Bookchin\'s early works. Social Anarchism or Lifetsyle Anarchism was a big disappointment for me, especially when it became evident that Bookchin was advancing an argument against his critics, which included several former social anarchist comrades. It was pretty obvious to me that there was nothing to Bookchin\'s argument about lifestylism. His chapter in that book on guns, on the other hand, was quite excellent.

I think I just figured out who you are, Bakunin.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 02:36 PM CST

While it\'s true that part of SALA is devoted to an attack on Bookchin\'s lifestylist critics [as the topic divulges], what I was trying to get at was that the critique of lifestylism [as i\'ve defined it earlier] goes beyond Bookchin. It existed before him, and exists after him.

To say that anarchism has had a major break from the federative system of organisation is a dillusion at best. the vast majority of the world\'s anarchist movements are organised into federations. The revolutionary programs drafted for today utilize the same *principles* as the ones outlined a long time ago. One of those principles is the federative principle.

Against, lifestylists don\'t like the federative principle because it is socialist in nature. It rejects the idea that you can have liberty without socialism, or vice versa. you *cannot* carry out a succesful class struggle without a federative organisation. It has never been done before, and I sincerely doubt it ever will be.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 02:54 PM CST

To the list of excellent works already suggested (\"Armded Joy\", \"When Insurrections Die\"), I would like to add Michael Seidman\'s \"Workers Against Work\" which details quite nicely the failings of the CNT/FAI. Among them were its syndicalist style of organization which, delegation or not, degenerated into representation and then into even less democratic forms quite quickly as the supposedly flat structure of the CNT became quite pyramidal with the need to reconcile the sloth-like nature of democratic decision-making that utilized delegates and the conservative nature of such a large organization was reconciled with the fast moving situation on the ground (guess which won? The blasphemous joining of the government is a hint). The fact is that the main lesson of the Spanish revolution is how not to have a revolution and how not to build a revolutionary organization - that is, if your goal is actually carrying out revolution. As anarchists, we need to stop fetishizing our defeats.

It turns out that the real workers struggle has always been against the mediation of both government and union, and WAW illustrates this quite well. Large sections of the workers in the CNT were opposed to the CNT\'s goals and really were rebelling against the alienation of the industrial system, demanding less work, more control of it and an end to the Fordism and Taylorism that, interestingly, both the CNT and the fascists supported. And, like all formal organizations, the CNT recorgnized the threat to its power this represented and responded accordingly, dishing out all sorts of penalties on rebellious workers. This is a lesson to which we ought to pay careful attention.

I am disturbed by the conservative tone of \"Bakunin\", who seems all about, as Bob Black said once, \"venerat[ing] their victimized forebears with a morbid devotion which occasions suspicion that the anarchists, like everybody else, think the only good anarchist is a dead one.\" NEFAC, as well, troubles me in this respect with their near rabid defense of all things anarchist and 19th century (except the individualists, of course). Well, in case neither they nor \"Bakunin\" noticed, things are quite different now and, well, those revolutions failed. I do not enjoy seeing the role of anarchist as conservative played out like this.

Our role, as anarchists, is to carefully examine our history, look at its flaws and evaluate it in the context of the current situation. Has strict and formalized organization led to social revolution? No. Are these types of organizations subject to the stame critique of power that political parties and states are? Yes. If we want a revolution that has a chance to survive, perhaps it\'s best to look around society and see what kinds of informal organization is already there and encourage and support those. Our revolution today is not going to look like the Spanish Revolution of \'36 (except, hopefully, in the anti-work character of the working class). Those organizations, if they were ever relevant (and history suggests that they were not), are dinosaurs now.

Our role is not to force the working class into organizing along the lines of some anarchists tired concepts of organization. American workers have rejected both revolutionary unionism and its reformist counterpart. Let\'s not herd them back in. The political repression by the CNT on dissenters among the rank and file alone ought to caution against that.

As a short aside, I also recommend David F. Noble\'s \"Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism\". Despite its name, it is a great history of workers autonomous, anti-organizational struggles within unions. This is a history we ought to be paying careful attention to because it\'s still being made all around us. It\'s just a little harder to see for those who rely on the Leftist habit of only recognizing revolt when its caged within parties, unions or federations.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 03:20 PM CST

It\'s completely fucking ridiculous to suggest that anarchism, or anarchists, are \"against work\". Where do you get this from?! One of the premises of anarchism is that the means of production and distribution are communalized.

Most of this doesn\'t even warrant an answer, especially the slander of the CNT/FAI [to which i have already spoken].

Almost all anarchist literature, especially that arising out of period of actual anarchist insurrection [Ukraine and Spain] calls those who shirk their work \"social parasites\".

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 03:22 PM CST

You are sounding like one of those socialists who make increasingly esoteric arguments. Yes, there are many anarchist federations around the world, but that isn\'t the only way that anarchists are organized. The anarchists in the United States organize in a much different fashion. In fact, I owuld bet that there are more anarchists who aren\'t in federations, than there are those in federations.

If you are arguing that federations are the only way that legimate anarchists can organize, then you are making an argument that verges on authoritarianism. Anarchists have always been skeptical of the \"one true way\" to do things. In fact, anarchists are very anti-ideological, which explains their skepticism about \'organizationalism.\'

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 03:28 PM CST

Well put. One of the things that puzzles me is the inability of people involved in radical labor organizing to take these facts into consideration. What will it take to get them to see this paradigm shift? Why do so many of them hold onto organizational ideas which simply don\'t work? When are they going to develop an anarchist critique of their organizations?

Just because something has been done historically by anarchists, doesn\'t mean that it is right.

At least there is a move afoot in some radical labor circles to rethink the received dogma on work, labor and capitalism of the past century. The authonomist Marxists are writing some interesting books and articles and some of the IWW comrades are starting to understand.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 03:34 PM CST

Bakunin, I suspect that you are more of a traditional communist than you are an anarchist. The choice of your alias is especially revealing--a 19th century male anarchist thinker. Anarchism and anarchists have always been against work. Hell, the IWW has a long anti-work tradition. Have you ever listened to any old IWW songs? \"Halleluyah, I\'m a bum\" and so on?

Anarchism is against social alienation, hierarchy, capitalism, and so on. It\'s for people having conrol of their lives. If given the chance, people seek to avoid work (wage slavery) whenever and whereever possible. If you have a factory that is run on anarchist terms, you will still have people who don\'t want to work. Why? Because most work is alienating. What anarchist seek to create is a world where the shitwork is bearable and where people don\'t have to engage in any alienating work.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 04:18 PM CST

> Almost all anarchist literature, especially
> that arising out of period of actual
> anarchist insurrection [Ukraine and Spain]
> calls those who shirk their work \"social
> parasites\".

If I\'m not mistaken, that was usually in reference to the bosses, not the unemployed underclass.

And once again, I\'m an anarcho-syndicalist who vehemently hates employment. I love doing stuff, accomplishing things, and getting shit done, but I have employment, which implies heirarchy, force, and wage slavery.
A lot of it is semantics. I consider work to be something that will continue once we\'ve fired our boss. However, employment will end. A lot of greens that I talk to consider my definition of work to be play, and my definition of employment to be work.

In the end, it\'s just all semantics.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 05:04 PM CST

The wobbly\'s themselves were not \"against work\", and any such claim is ridiculous and ignorant of their history. The fact is, in any social system, you need to work to survive.

Chuck seems to be slandering my comments on organisation. I did not say that Federations were the only way to organise, and im disgusted it was even implied i did. i DID say that federations of free and mutually cooperative groups or others fedrations, etc, were an essential anarchist principle regarding carrying out the class war. THe idea being while organising in non-federative terms can be great for many issues, it cannot [and has never] take on capitalism itself, because it lack the coordination and communication between anarchists necessary to accelerate the social struggle to a broader struggle.

Thus while we may start a collective, or a network of collectives, for some goal such as \"propaganda work\" or \"anti-poverty organising\", we need to form federations to translate that into anti-capitalist organising.

Also, the stab at me being a state communist is malicious slander at best. Bakunin was an anarchist, a founder of anarchism in many respects, and to bash him for being a \"white male\" is absurd. Anarchism [as it exists today] in fact came out of a predominantly \"white\" environment [europe], and the skin pigmentation and gender of an anarchist has no bearing on whether or not they are an anarchist.

Bakunin publicly fought Marx in the First International, where Marx took control and destroyed the organisation, rather than let it turn into an anarchist one. The idea that my nick, Bakunin, or my defense of anarchism suggests im a \"communist\" is ridiculous.

btw, the mention of burgeois being \'social parasites\' is in line with what i was saying. The idea being that being \"against work\" was a burgeois idea, since only they could have the luxury of regusing to support themselves or their community. Thus the primitivist idea of being \"against work\" is also burgeois [to use archaic terminology].

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 06:04 PM CST

This is getting a little boring but here are my final thoughts.

1.Armed Joy and Bonanno cannot be considered lifestylist in the bookchinist sense. Read the damn thing, it talks about the \"desire for communism.\" So it doesn\'t ignore the socialist aspect of anarchy at all. Willful Disobedience doesn\'t qualify either, it stresses communism as well.

So basically you dont even use lifestylist in the sense that you proport to mean it in. You throw it around like capitalists throw around the word terrorist.

2. You are presenting an over idealized view of the CNT and FAI. Not everyone in the CNT was a militant, i.e. the Treintistas (the 30 more moderate leaders) that did not want a revolution and werent really anarchists. There have also been many critiques of the FAI being vanguardist, whether or not you agree it has been put out there and not just by \'lifestylists\' or bourgy people.

3. Anti-work: I know even bringing this name up is a horrible idea, but Bob Black (yes that so called lifestylist) wrote Abolition of Work, which many people value as a good stance. I am anti-work and I think its a lot of post \'68 anarcho types picking up the anti-work message. I have not read Workers Against Work but mean to very soon.

Being anti-work calls for a change in relations where people really choose what they want to do by finding something that can fulfill their needs and desires, not just producing because the collective demands it so or because others deem it necessary.

Too often people forget that anarchy is about the freedom of the individual within a socialist context.

Well I am done with this cause it isn\'t going anywhere. I dont see Bakunin changing his/her mind and I know s/he wont change my mind either.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 07:24 PM CST

Things are much different today than they were in 1936, and there\'s no point clinging on to old antiquated concepts that have no relevance anymore. Just because Bakunin said something over a century ago doesn\'t make it true. We should judge tactics and strategy by how effective they are in achieving our goals (as long as they don\'t contradict anarchist principles), not by whether anarchist orthodoxy says it\'s OK or not.

Like Chuck0 said, we\'re not trying to compete with the Trots by building bigger organizations; we do things differently. That\'s why in recent years anarchism is looking more attractive to people than the authoritarian left parties. They\'re boring and sterile and moribund and cling on to their holy scriptures. Anarchist organizing is much more fluid. If something works, go with it. If it doesn\'t, then it\'s not worth it. Federation works in some cases, in other cases small networks work better. There\'s no over-arching organizational practice that works in all cases. We have to be able to experiment, to be creative, to constantly re-evalute our tactics and strategy in light of our current situation and we should try things that are new, bold and exciting. Look at the present situation in Argentina. Popular assemblies and experiments in direct democracy are springing up all over the place. Instead of trying to fit these organizational forms on to a Manichean bed, we should, as Necrotic State put it

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 08:22 PM CST

I think we are in agreement about federations being an anarchist method of organizing, which goes back many, many years. However, I think it would behoove you to read what anarchists have been writing about organization in the past decade.

Bukunin writes: \"Thus while we may start a collective, or a network of collectives, for some goal such a \"propaganda work\" or \"anti-poverty organising\", we need to form federations to translate that into anti-capitalist organising.\" I have to ask: Why? How does an anti-poverty group benefit from being part of a federation?

Yes, the IWW doesn\'t have an anti-work line (which I think it should have, to catch up with the times), but you miss my point.The culture of IWW history is full of an anti-work sensibility. This is what made it appealing to so many people.

Your finaly paragraph about social parasites shows that you are woefully misinformed about the anti-work position and primitivitism. The anti-work tendency isn\'t saying that people shouldn\'t do basic work to support themselves and their community, such as food production, housing construction, or whatever a community and the individual deem necessary. The anti-work position is against *alienating* work, a subset of which is commonly known as wage slavery. There is a difference between alienated work and work that is necessary to life. Growing food is not alienating work, working in a factory or office is.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 18 2002 @ 09:22 PM CST

Oh, I

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 19 2002 @ 03:24 PM CST

One thing I think you are overlooking, Bakunin, is that the rank and file revolt against the CNT very much refutes your argument about alienation. The fact is that those workers were revolting against the imposition of the factory system (Taylorism, Fordism, Stakhnovism - production models endorsed by all official parties in the civil war, from Stalinists to the Fascists to the CNT), as I previously mentioned. In this sense the Revolution was another case in which the genuine sentiment of the poor and working classes were not represented by any official organization. Their revolt came out of the alienation inherent in some ways of doing work, namely assembly-line work. Their example shows that it doesn\'t matter who owns the means of production - if I am doing repetitive, unchallenging work that I cannot control, then I am alienated. Alienation is about more than the ownership of the physical production plant - it\'s also about the methods in which that work is done. Under the above mentioned factory systems (and these are necessitated by - not independent of - industrialism, it should be remembered) work is divided into menial and repetitive tasks for efficiency\'s sake, not for the edification of the worker. Therefore, it doesn\'t matter whether I am electing my factory foreman because the work I am doing is still menial and unengaging. That\'s not to say that relation to property is unimportant, it\'s merely to point out that it\'s not the whole solution. Your choice of name is a particularly ironic one because Marx would have agreed very much with your prescription for ending alienation. But, then, anarchists aren\'t marxists, so why would you expect our solution to this problem to be the same?

The inability of most syndicalists and anarcho-communists to recognize this will doom them (and their federations)to irrelevancy in the eyes of workers who, in the end, don\'t want to collectivize - much less federate - their jobs at circle K. They want to burn them, or at least to abandon them. They don\'t want a general strike because that presumes a return to work. Just like a boycott presumes renewed consumption. A free society must recognize that the struggle for freedom goes beyond merely who owns what. Collectivize what\'s worth keeping and burn the rest. That\'s something even the real Bakunin could understand.

In fact what we saw from the CNT during the Revolution was very state-like. In some areas of Spain everything was in the hands of the CNT, from the factories to the housing to the stores. That meant that if you stepped out of line or rocked the boat too much (for instance, by refusing to work the increased hours demanded by the CNT\'s leadership or by stupidly thinking that the revolution meant you could take a day off from work if you felt like it), you were harshly disciplined, up to being kicked out of the union which meant, since the CNT controlled everything, losing access to housing, food and other vital resources. And if you went beyond that then there were always the CNT forced labor camps to straighten you out. But, instead of pushing the social revolution, the CNT\'s leadership fell into the trap of turning towards anti-fascism. This makes sense if we view the CNT not as the romantic ultra-democratic revolutionary union of myth, but rather as the pyramidal, formalized organization it was, with all the self-preservation interests and power concerns that accompany it. Because of this, it\'s probably better to liken the CNT\'s stand on collectivization to State rather than libertarian communism. While all property was technically in the hands of the workers, it was through the CNT, which was not democratically responsive to the rank and file.

Which brings us to the critique of delegation, another syndicalist and anarcho-communist sacred cow. They never think to actually look and see how or whether this type of organization works or not, it\'s just repeated, mantra-like, as if the mere utterance of it were enough to bring capitalism to its knees. Well, in fact, delegation does work, on the small scale. In groups that are able to reach consensus or to be directly accountable, it works all right. But when we start talking about larger groups, it quickly devolves first into representation and then into majority rule and pure authoritarianism. By the time the CNT reached its much-tauted 2.5 million members (most of whom were not anarchists - but that\'s for another discussion), it was a completely undemocratic organization. The vast majority of workers were not able to attend the conferences at which decisions were made. Delegates were unable to adequately act as delegates when they were speaking for so many workers, most of whom were not able to voice their opinions. Because of that the delegates, supposedly occupying mere facillitating roles, became leaders. And this phenomenon is not limited to the CNT. I have a friend who is high up, er excuse me, a non-hierarchical delegate with decision-making authority, within the IWW. He has similar concerns about his ability to fulfill his role as a delegate. There are just too many perspectives to reconcile. It becomes representation, of which anarchists have always had a strong critique. The IWW, in its heyday, had similar problems.

But there are further problems with centering decisions around the factory or workplace. What of those who don\'t work there? In the Spanish Revolution, many women were entirely left out because the syndicalist vision shifted economic decisions from the managers to the union (and sometimes it didn\'t even do that) but kept it centered around the factory. But what voice then did women have when it came to production, when the majority of them were in the home raising children? Syndicalism could not answer this question because it was rooted within the industrial system, where men dominated. Therefore, if we want true democracy, we must abandon the industrial system and reorientate economic decision-making around the community; The scale of industrial production is too vast and the limitations too great to ever allow for genuine democracy or for a world that looks like anything other than a carbon copy of this one.

But the real point about work, with regard to the CNT is actually one stated by our \"Bakunin\" himself/herself. It is true that the CNT was not anti-work. The rank and file, however, were a different story - that was the source of conflict. And that\'s also a critique of power and representation that all anarchists ought to be able to apply. Somehow some anarchists seem to fail to apply it to the CNT (an organization, let\'s not forget, that required the FAI, and then the Friends of Durutti, to keep it true to anarchist \"principles\") even though the signs are plainly there to see.

On that point, I have to also disagree with our Bakunin on the point about anti-work being bourgeois. Anti-work isn\'t bourgeois because workers have always struggled to resist control and regimentation. And they continue to do so. If I refuse to be exploited by capitalism in a workplace, some or all of the time, that doesn\'t mean I am not producing. Nor does it mean that I am not supporting my community. Relying on the mere presence of people within the capitalist system of production as a barometer of productivity is flawed and differs little from the way capitalist economists measure it. Isn\'t it precisely this perspective that causes the \"shadow work\" that women often do in society to go uncounted, unnoticed and unvalued? Do we, as anarchists, refuse to count child-raising because it is not wage-labor? What of gardening? Is that not productive or beneficial to society? The problem with anarcho-communism and syndicalism is that they are very much rooted within the industrial system, which is itself very rooted in capitalism. In that sense they are reactionary. Perhaps broadening our view of anarchy, as is possible by incorporating the primitivist critique of society, will reveal new paths and identify older trends in humanity, especially since industrialism is nearly dead in America for most workers who, rather than slaving away in factories making things, instead sit in office chairs shuffling paper, talking on phones or sell consumer goods produced through automated production for artificially created needs. And even those who do produce things, like construction workers and farmers, build office buildings and stadiums, and grow genetically modified food for export or transport over vast distances. Neither represents real needs and instead serves specific interests who I think we can all name without much effort.

The syndicalist and anarcho-communist critique, worships efficiency yet when prodded to explain exactly why that should be a value is at a loss. A post-capitalist world would not value efficiency in most work. There would be so little left that it would not be necessary. What\'s the hurry, anyhow, once we\'re only producing 10 percent as much stuff? Efficiency is a capitalist value that derives very much from the discipline requirements of the factory system, which also requires the artificiality of the 8 hour work day, 40 hour workweek and graveyard shift.

The Luddites, who are a great example (though by no means the only example) of unalienated workers resisting the imposition of the industrial system, had a work day much like what I imagine most post-work being like. They owned their own looms, and they gardened and hunted on the commons. That meant they worked when they wanted to, how they wanted to, decided what was done with the product and took breaks when they wanted to. Gradually, the commons were fenced off, automated looms were first developed and then imposed by capitalists in order to deskill and thus devalue the work of the hosiers, and the factories were set up. Unable to feed themselves and with their wages undercut, the workers were herded into the factories or into a newly emerging category: unemployment. Recognizing their enemy, the automated looms and the factories, they formed affinity groups and attacked and destroyed them.

But that was only the most visible form of worker resistance to industrialism. Taking long weekends, slacking, sabotage, spontaneous strikes and walk-outs, drinking on the job and many other tactics were all utilized, not because those workers were bourgeios slackers who wanted to avoid productive labor, but because they were struggling against the imposition of the factory system - against the imposition of work.

The same thing was happening in Spain during and before the Revolution. Spain was a late developer in terms of industry. Workers were being similarly herded into the inhumane factory system and that\'s why they resisted all sides, CNT, fascist and Stalinist within the factories - to them they were all identical. And even a cursory examination of their stated goals and policies within the factories reveals this much. I really don\'t know why an anarchist would want so vehemently to defend it.

The fact remains that federation and delegation are tactics, and not necessarily exclusively anarchist ones. These should not be confused with anarchy which is, at its most basic definition, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anti-state and anti-hierarchy. From that we must discuss ways to get there and methods of organizing that will support such a society. But to elevate delegation and federation to requirements, or principles, of anarchy is to give them too much weight and to create the kind of rigidity that will guarantee failure. We will use them when they are necessary, but they should probably be avoided the rest of the time. A broad-based, un-organized rebellion against capitalism is possible. And it\'s also the least likely to be co-opted or to suffer the failings of large-scale groups with regards to decision-making. I sincerely doubt that there will be only one kind of anarchy after the revolution, any more than there is one kind of anarchy now. However, I do think that there are ways to get there and ways not to. Large scale federation and anarcho-syndicalism have had their day. They failed. Time to rethink some things. That doesn\'t mean we\'re not anarchist anymore.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 19 2002 @ 11:22 AM CST

The whole notion of being against \"alienating\" work is vague. The Anarchist critique of certain types of work under captialism is that they are derived from what\'s efficient in terms of exploiting people, rather than what\'s an efficient use a member of the community\'s time in serving the community [and the community serving the member]. Essentially, \"wage slavery\" isn\'t a sub-category of \"alienating work\", it is under an anarchist critique a direct cause of many relations under capitalism, and is caused itself by the existence of private property, etc.

Many things in life \"alienate\" people from one another, and certainly capitalism is built on maintaining that alienation so people don\'t realize how screwed over they are and rise up against the system. The point is, anarchism is not opposed to work, anarchism is opposed to work that is done in the service of a master, rather than for the beneifit of a community that is run in an anarchist fashion [ie, delegate and direct democracy, federalised with other communities, etc.].

As for this contention of Marc\'s in the following qoute, i\'d like to examine it in detail:

\"and there\'s no point clinging on to old antiquated concepts that have no relevance anymore. Just because Bakunin said something over a century ago doesn\'t make it true. We should judge tactics and strategy by how effective they are in achieving our goals (as long as they don\'t contradict anarchist principles), not by whether anarchist orthodoxy says it\'s OK or not.\"

Interestingly enough, those \"antiquated concepts\" are the principles upon which anarchism was founded [indeed, the contention is that Liberty and Socailism are two such concepts]. The ignorance of this statement is our \"goals\" and \"principles\" he talks of are laid out by just those \"antiquated concepts\"!. How ironic. Then he goes on to call those same \"goals\" and \"principles\" .. \"orthodoxy\", implying a rigid dogma. He\'s right in the implication that anarchists stick to their principles [namely liberty and socialism], but this charge of \"orthodoxy\" seems to be nothing but a bit of slander, trying to compare the founding principles of anarchism with religious ones [in some cases, this isn\'t too far off the mark, but that\'s a philosophical arguement].

In essence, Marc is trying to say that his principles are something other than anarchist ones, which are very clear in practice. He is trying to say that he has invented \"new\" anarchist principles, and that the \"old\" ones are no longer relevent.

My response is that the \"old\" principles of anarchism are timeless. They are principles that do not change. The context is what changes, adn the context now is a lot different from the context a century ago, but our principles remain the same. Our *application* of those principles changes with the context, and this is how our strategy and tactics chang. But our principles do NOT change. It is clear Marc\'s principles are something different than anarchist principles, which he himself has stated are \"antiquated\". Whatever these new principles, they cannot be anarchist, since anarchism cannot be two things at once!

As for Kame\'s mention of reformist elements in teh CNT, It\'s correct that the treintista faction were incredibly reformist. It\'s one of the reasons they were expelled from the CNT [some members of the then-treintista faction were then re-admitted at the Saragossa congress]. There are many more critiques you can make of the reformism of the CNT, but at it\'s core it was a revolutionary working class organisation. Hell, the least you could do is bash the four \"anarchists\" who accepted positions as ministers in the Valencia government!

The charges against the beloved FAI are, of course, bullshit. And it\'s no wonder that they are not presented in a documented manner. Far from being vanguardist, the FAI was the heart and soul of anarchism in spain, and had deep roots among the industrial working class and the peasents. In fact, the FAI was what we call a \"Synthesis Federation\", which means a Federation of Anarchists that adopts anarchists of differing views and unites them in common struggle.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 19 2002 @ 04:42 PM CST

I think this whole discussion around the issue of \"work,\" is a great example of precisely why anarchists need a strong historical grounding (i.e read and familiarize yourselves with Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Rocker, Santillan, etc.)

From what I\'m reading in this thread, everybody here is, naturally, opposed to *Wage Slavery.* That is *work* under capitalist conditions. After the revolution, we will still be working for the good of society (one would hope), but we will not be wage slaves.

Against Capitalism and Wage Slavery
For Revolution and Anarcho-Communism

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 19 2002 @ 08:29 PM CST

I agree with the critique of the anarcho-syndicalist vision as outlined by Necrotic State in the previous post. They had no critique of the industrial system and their vision of social reconstruction excluded non-workers from the decision-making process. (but this is not true of the anarcho-communists, who were oriented toward the community before the work place).

However, it is not correct to imply CNT somehow lacked rank and file support. Whatever internal debates and struggles they had, they CNT had enormous popular rank and file support. This cannot be denied without someone implying that its million members (at the highpoint) were somehow unintelligent dupes.

Although I largely share Necrotic State

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2002 @ 12:05 AM CST

Um, Fred, when us anti-work types are talking about work, we mean the \"alienated labor\" variety. We aren\'t talking about basic labor that is required to keep people alive. I believe that Danceswithcarp once made a distinction between these two types on the anarchy-list. He called one \"work\" and the other \"wirk.\" I forget which word he was using for which variety.

I don\'t understand what you mean about the anti-work position being ahistorical. There is long history of resistance to WORK (wirk?), including, as Nectrotic State pointed out, the Luddites.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2002 @ 03:02 AM CST

With all due respect, all this white-washing of history around the Luddites has gone way to far, and now every nut case who thinks that we should all live in trees and scavenge for food because that would be such a wonderful, \"unalientated\" life cites them as key examples in their nonsensical arguments. So lets get something straight - the Luddites were tradesmen whose livelihoods were being taken away by factories which were able to make the same goods faster and cheaper than before. They were not rapid primitivists who hated machines simply because they were machines. They feared losing their businesses, as their trades were becoming obsolete. They were certainly not \"anti-work\" in any sense of the word, since they were fighting to maintain their existing working conditions. If anything, it can be seen as an uprising by the petty bourgeoisie in reaction to their absorption into the proletariat.

Work which primitivists such as \"Necrotic State\" claim to be necessarily \"alienating\" is only alienating because it is deprived of any social meaning. The same is true for any form of wage labor, and so it is not the fact that work is done in a factory which makes it alienating, but the fact that one does not directly control one\'s workplace or product which makes such work alienating. The same is true for neighborhoods under modern capitalism; they are alienating - but they are alienating because the social life has been drained from them to fuel the expansion of capitalism into every facet of our lives. So instead of looking to our neighborhoods and our workplaces for social interaction, self-esteem, and excersing decision making power, we as working class people are forced to turn to negative outlets for our needs as social creatures.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2002 @ 03:25 AM CST

I\'m sorry Chuck, maybe in your neck of the woods the idea of lifestylism means people who dress like crusty punks but aren\'t anarchists, but where I am from everyone uses the term to mean anyone who views anarchism as either a purely personal revolution, or views anarchism through an misanthropic lens - in other words, primitivists and anarcho-individualists who talk about ridiculous things like \"subverting existence\" and how there should only be 4 million human being allowed to live on the Earth.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2002 @ 03:30 AM CST

On point number 1: I\'m sorry, but Willful Disobedience certainly qualifies as lifestylist as it prioritizes the personal effects of revolution to the detriment of social goals of revolution. In other words, rather than discuss the class struggle and social revolution (two central tenets of any class struggle or social anarchism) W.D. speaks only of \"subverting existence\" and reshaping personal relationships. We are supposed to believe that if we shake everyone\'s hand on the way down the street, then our revolution is at hand. I\'m sorry, but any \"anarchist\" who ignores the fact that class relations are what define capitalism, which is that system we are supposed to be struggling against, simply isn\'t an anarchist; they should get over it, and head back to the Green Party.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2002 @ 10:05 AM CST

Actually, I\'m not a primitivist. So often when people dare to make the critique of work or technology they are dismissed by others with that label. Because I\'m not a primitivist, I recognize the Luddites as a good example for all the reasons you listed. They were not hunter/gathering primtivists. That\'s right. That\'s why they are a good example of the kind of alienation that derives from the factory system as well as a good example of how goods can be produced without it and how productive labor can be done in much less alienated ways. If the Luddites would have seized the factories, their alienation would not have stopped - and that\'s my point. It was the machines themselves that were the source of their misery, they said so themselves and acted accordingly. Yes, they were being deskilled and driven out of meaningful work that they controlled. That\'s the point - and that\'s the basic critique of the industrial system. If their beef had been only with the capitalists, and not with the technology, then their rage would have been so directed. Instead it was not. It was clearly aimed at the machines themselves and, when they did focus it on capitalists, it was usually to force them to refuse to introduce the machines into their factories. While I do believe that no matter how the community benefits, assembly-line or \"do you want fries with that\" work will always be alienating, I certainly am not arguing for a return to foraging nor for a rejection of all technology. I don\'t care what meaning society is imposing on my work (\"social meaning\"), if it\'s boring, repetitive and stupid, I\'m probably not going to want to do it - at least not for long. Nor should any human be forced to. All work should be under the control of the worker and should be a healthy mix of challenging and rote work (that is, as little rote work as possible). This seems to me to be a basic anarchist critique that I\'ve even seen classical anarchists make (Alexander Berkman, for instance), so I\'m not sure why there\'s all this opposition to it. I almost put a disclaimer because I know how some dogmatic and conservative anarchists react to these kinds of critiques, but I chose not to.

Again, I think this disclaimer is only necessary because some of the left-leaning anarchists are unable to conceptualize outside their tired old framework. I am not advocating a return to the Luddite life, but merely pointing to it as an example of a much-less alienated way of doing things from which we might want to draw some lessons (even the idea of a \"return\" presumes a linear, all-or-nothing progression of technology, which simply is not true - no one presumes we would all start wearing 18th century English fashions just because we are considering the way the Luddites did their work, do they?). Many anarchists fail to grasp the technology critique and assume that, in questioning it one automatically must assume an oppositional position to all of it. Well, the fact remains that technology is not a monolith (hence my Luddite example) that must be either taken or left as a whole. The fact that they were skilled tradesmen supports my argument because of this. Too many anarchists are stuck in this sort of black and white thinking that, if it were allowed to remain the dominant anarchist mode of thinking, would surely lead to yet another defeat for us (although, thankfully, I don\'t think it is the dominant one these days). The same is true with work. Just because one critizes work doesn\'t mean one is opposed to productive labor. I would hope by now that these points would be self-evident, but unfortunately, many leftist-influenced anarchists continue to need remedial courses.

Feel free to contact me through email for further discussion, as this thread seems to be getting tired.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2002 @ 12:52 PM CST

Revolt, Have you actually read WD? How about the article \"FROM PROLETARIAN TO INDIVIDUAL: Toward an Anarchist Understanding of Class\" http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/vb/wd12prol.html which discusses class in some detail? WD does not ignore class at all; this just shows you can\'t read, you don\'t want to have an honest understanding, or you didn\'t read WD. Try a little honest argumentation by actually dealing with what WD says instead of just misrepresenting it. And to suggest that WD says we should all just shake hands as the revolution is laughable.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 21 2002 @ 09:29 PM CST

ok, to reclaim the insurrectionist name Bakunin for a moment. If anyone even reads this far down teh god damned page.
I was thinking about the fascist movment today, it

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 22 2002 @ 12:05 AM CST

it was always my impression that anarchists in imperialist countries were more likely to not be in/ argue against federations..cuz there ass was not as on the line, and there really is no need to organize.

where places like brazil, poland, argentina, etc. all see developed federations...cuz there ass IS on the line and they can\'t afford to fuck around.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, February 23 2002 @ 12:40 AM CST

This is name calling. Calling Necrotic State a primitivist is sloppy thinking. Those of us who bring up the Luddites aren\'t automatically primitivists! The Luddites were rejecting a way of life that would have been more alienating. This is anti-work, perhaps on a gut level, but it is resistance to wage slavery nonetheless.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, February 23 2002 @ 12:45 AM CST

Very well said. I guess we\'ll just have to put up with the few dogmatic left anarchists who won\'t listen to any anarchist arguments that stray from their own narrow vision of what anarchism means. As far as i\'m concerned, this narrow-minded dogmatism is one of the more annoying problems afflicting North American anarchism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 25 2002 @ 02:30 PM CST

I think Bakunin and chucko both have excellent points though i tend to agree with bakunin.

Obviously starting federations and big organizations is pointless if there is no base to support it and i dont think anyone is arguing for that. but clearly if everyone hear and anarchists in general see the social revolution as a coming(all be it in the future)
reality and not some abstract idea that we dont really believe will happen ( and I dont think most do)
then for an entire society to be based around libertarian ideas there will need to have incredible organization.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 27 2002 @ 10:00 PM CST

As with all great debates, I find myself torn between sides, as both are essentually right. I agree with Bakunin\'s call for organization within the movement, and disagree vehemetly with the article\'s(anyone remember the article?) assertion that if enough people rise up in arms, it will be enough. This idea is overtly wasteful. It seems to me that we have to concentrate our efforts on things that will make a positive change in our situation, and this necessitates at least some form of organization. To make a useless and undoubtably bad metaphor, you can bring a wall down by throwing enough rocks at it, but you\'ll have to break a lot of perfectly good rocks. However, I find that I disagree just as heartilly with Bakunin\'s ideas on the type of organization needed, and, call me lifestylist until your blue in the face, that Anarchy is inherantly Socialist. It is inherantly social,in that it seeks to create social institutions, but it isn\'t necassarily Socialist. There are similarities, I\'ll grant you, but to say that one necesitates the other is to say that they are the same, which they are most definitly not. As to the question of federations, I definitly like Chuck0 and and Marc\'s ideas on a dynamic, evolutionary method of organization. It makes sense that we abandon (or at least partially abandon) the methods that obviously didn\'t work in the past in favor of ones that will work in the current state of the world, and abandon those when they become outmoded and archaic. The only problem I forsee with this system is meshing the various organizations once the revolution comes, since, let\'s face it, for Anarchy to work it would have to be more ore less global.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, March 05 2002 @ 01:49 PM CST

You guys are all nuts. Anarchists must eat the weed to get such screwed up ideas. You should all go to africa and hang onto the trees and eat fruit with the other apes.

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