>the difference is the element of charismatic authority. anarchists
>don't have that, yet.
Slavoj begs to differ. From my forthcoming interview with the Sage of Ljubljana in Punk Planet:
>Lots of Punk Planet readers have been influenced by anarchism, and
>in general, anarchism plays a big role in American radical politics
>and countercultures. Do you have any thoughts on this influence?
> I certainly can understand where the appeal of anarchism lies. My
>problem with anarchism all around -- though I am quite aware of
>contradictory ambiguous nature of Marx's relationsship with
>anarchism -- I think at one point Marx was right when he drew
>attention to how usually anarchists who are officially preaching "no
>state no power" in order to realize their goals they usually form
>their own society which obeys the most authoritarian rules. My first
>problem with anarchism is always, "Yeah yeah yeah I agree with your
>goals but tell me how you are organized." For me, the tragedy of
>anarchism is that you end up having an authoritarian secret society
>trying to achieve anarchist goals. The second point is that again I
>understand the attraction of anarchism, but I have problems with how
>anarchism is appropriate to today's problems. I think if anything we
>need more global organization. I think that the left should disrupt
>this equation that more global organization means more totalitarian
>control.
>
>When you speak of a global organization, are you thinking of some
>kind of global state, or do you have nonstate organizations in mind?
> I don't have any prejudices here whatever. For example, a lot of
>leftwingers dismissed talk of universal human rights as just another
>tool of American imperialism, to exert pressure on Third World
>countries or other countries where they don't like the political
>regime, so you can bomb them. But it's not so simple. As we all
>know, following the same logic, Pinochet was arrested. Even if he
>was set free, this provoked a tremendous psychological change in
>Chile. When he left Chile, he was a universally feared grey
>eminence. He returned as an old man inventing stupid excuses of whom
>nobody was afraid. It's well worth, instead of dismissing the rules,
>to play the game. One should at least strategically support the idea
>of some kind of international court and then try to put it to a more
>progressive use. Americans are already aware of it. A few months
>ago, when the Senate was still under Republican control, Senate
>adopted a measure prohibiting any international court to have any
>jurisdiction over American citizens. You know they weren't talking
>about some Third World anti-imperialist court. They were talking
>about the Hague court, which is dominated by Western Europeans. The
>same goes for many of these international agencies. I think we
>should take it all. If it's outside the domain of state power, OK.
>But even sometimes if it's part of state power. I think the left
>should overcome this primordial fear of state power, that because
>it's some form of control that it's bad.
>
>You describe the internal structure of anarchist groups as being
>authoritarian. The model popular with younger activists today is
>explicitly anti-hierarchical and consensus-oriented. Do you think
>there's something furtively authoritarian about such apparently
>freewheeling structures?
> Absolutely. And I'm not bluffing here, I'm talking from personal
>experience. Maybe my experience is too narrow, but it's not limited
>to some mysterious Balkan region. I have contacts in England,
>France, Germany, and more -- and all the time, beneath the mask of
>this consensus, there was one person accepted by some unwritten
>rules as the secret master. The totalitarianism was absolute in the
>sense that people pretended that they were equal, but they all
>obeyed him. The catch was that it was prohibited to state clearly
>that he was the boss. You had to fake some kind equality, the real
>state of affairs couldn't be articulated. Which is why I'm deeply
>distrustful of this "let's just coordinate this in an egalitarian
>fashion." I'm more of a pessimist. In order to safeguard this
>equality, you have a more sinister figure of the master, who puts
>pressure on the others to safeguard the purity of the of the
>nonhierarchic principle. This is not just theory. I would be happy
>to hear of groups that are not caught in this strange dialectic.