>Guardian (London) - May 3, 2001
>May Day's lessons for the rootless
I sez:
Naomi Klein again hits the nail on the head, more or less. (I can also envision Ian Murray bobbing his head up and down in agreement). I don't doubt the courage or the ideological commitment of today's "anarchists" of the North, but in late capitalist society, there is no anarchism that is rooted in the practices of everyday life, contra, say Mountain West miners of 100 years ago, or Estremaduran field hands 70 years ago. To have any integrity as praxis, anarchism must be rooted in everyday life, but the everyday life of the advanced capitalist working class is the Taylorized informational and consumer service sectors by day, slogging through gridlock at 6 pm, and NASCAR and Survivor II by night -- mildly discontented resignation to the regime of dreary wage labor and the culture industry spectacle by which anarchists are revolted. So the only solution is to have a permanent counter-spectacle (Quebec City one week, London the next). Or to show solidarity with quasi-anarchist movements where the movement is actually is rooted in everyday life (e.g. Italian anarchists flocking to Chiapas, although despite the hype I don't think the Zaps qualify as anarchists). Now, I can hear ChuckO protesting that anarchists are grounded in community movements, with the infoshops, organizing of squatters, mobilizing against police brutality, break-ins at animal testing labs, vandalizing Monsanto property, etc., etc. All true and all good. But really, just a pimple on the bloated body of late capitalist society. The "average" working class person of Butte, Montana or Lawrence, Massachusetts today knows not thing one about anarchism (except for what the corporate media feeds him or her), where even the most "backwards" working class person of said towns 100 years _had_ to know something about anarchism, probably knew anarchists, whether the opinion was favorable or unfavorable.
What I generally think the "left" (which for me, means a red-green left, an eco-communist left) should be up to, is somehow building a mass constituency for an ultimately necessary transition to a more ecologically rational society (features: 20 hour work week, lower "standard of living," higher quality of life, etc.), that is counterposed to the eco-managerialist reforms the ruling class will favor (i.e., where "less waste" = more efficient commodity production, and "less pollution" = lower health care costs and higher worker productivity) -- if ever it wises up and lines up with the Al Gore types instead of the Dick Cheney ones. We need to show solidarity (moral and material) with the Curitabas of the South, while building a mass constituency for the implementation of Curitabas in the North. The mass constituency part is the important thing, otherwise we'll just have a bunch of WalMart clerks and shoppers who are justifiably pissed at the organic food munchers and electric car drivers of Marin County, a schism readily exploitable by the paleocons, who will have more and more of a reactionary populist mass constituency for their war games.
John Gulick