We don't take the black flag that seriously. If somebody burned a black flag in front of me, I wouldn't care. Real anarchist politics are measured by what anarchists do, not by the symbols they wave or the fashion they wear. This has always been a quandary for me theoretically and practically. In anarchism, the "movement" shouldn't be the be all, end all, yet you need a way to get your message out. In this regard, flying the black flag is more a method of communicating who we are, as opposed to us saying that we are better than you are, which is what patriotism is all about. Anarchism is internationalist and recognizes that the working class should be united through its diversity.
> you can't get around the fact that in order to build a movement against
> nationalism/capitalism/statism, then you are recreating a new "ism" and a
> new kind of solidarity that reaches across localities. Although it may be
> more encompassing and seem more fluid and contestable than the
> nation-state, its logic is the same. the anarchist flag is a symbol meant
> to unite people all across the world in a struggle against the capitalist
> state and state capitalism. and that is exactly the logic that underpinned
> nationalism:
Sure, but it is a liberatory "ism" that encourages self-management and do-it-yourself politics. The difference is that nationalism wants to unite everybody behind one banner, whereas anarchists want people to liberate themselves. The black flags really aren't that important--they are branding in the communication sense.
> (The nation state) is imagined because the members of even the smallest
> nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even
> hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.
> Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he
> wrote that 'Or l’essence d'une nation est que tons les individus aient
> beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des
> choses.” With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he
> rules that 'Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to
> self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.' The
> drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to
> show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates
> 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and
> 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can
> be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger
> than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these)
> are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their
> falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Javanese
> villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have
> never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically-as
> indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite
> recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction
> 'society.' We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien
> régime as a class; but surely it was imagined this way only very late. To
> the question 'Who is the ‘Comte de X?’ the normal answer would have been,
> not 'a member of the aristocracy,' but 'the lord of X, 'the uncle of the
> Baronne de Y,'or 'a client of the Duc de Z.'
>
> (here, in the passage below, just recall that what lies outside your
> boundaries is the liberal and the insufficiently alienated)
>
> The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them
> encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic
> boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself
> coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a
> day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the
> way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream
> of a wholly Christian planet.
>
> It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which
> Enlightenment and Revolution were destorying the legitamcy of the
> devinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a
> stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal
> religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such
> religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and
> territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God,
> directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.
>
> Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual
> inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always
> conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this
> fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many
> millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such
> limited imaginings.
>
> These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed
> by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history
> (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I
> believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of
> nationalism.
>
> Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
> Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition ed. London and New York: Verso,
> 1991, pp. 5-7.
OK, kelly, it's no fair citing a book that I've always wanted to read but haven't had the time to.
Such is the life of the busy activist and publisher. No time for reading books!
Chuck0