AJODA (Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed) is a magazine I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemies. Interviews with Kaczynski, Zerzan, and other luddite-leaning left loons regularly appear in it. Yet, in the same magazine, after portraying Kaczynski sympathetically, it sympathizes, as in the article below, with those who wish to escape the "authoritarian culture of the left"? You mean, from people who might want to blow people up, like Kazcynski did?
The non-authoritarian streak of the left is ignored, and, as usual, only the top-down party structures are equated with "leftism." Or do the authors believe that many of the fine anti-authoritarian struggles of the past against various form of oppression, were waged by the right? Or mayeb the authors simply haven't read any basic labor, feminist,anti-racist history?
Brian
On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Tom Wheeler wrote:
> From: "Chuck Munson" <chuck at tao.ca>
> > Oh brother! Just read the Anarchist FAQ:
> >
> > http://www.infoshop.org/faq/
>
> Or check out the following from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
> http://www.anarchymag.org/51/arm_desires.html
> Common perspectives on ourselves, our world and social change
>
> http://www.anarchymag.org/48/after_leftism.html
> Post-Left Anarchy?
>
> There remain large numbers of anarchists who continue to identify closely
> with the political left in one form or another. But there are increasing
> numbers ready to abandon much of the dead weight associated with the left
> tradition. Many pages of this issue are devoted to beginning a new
> exploration of what is at stake in considering whether or not identification
> with the political left has outworn any benefits for anarchists.
>
> For most of their existence over roughly the last couple centuries,
> consciously anarchist activists, theorists, groups and movements have
> consistently inhabited a minority position within the eclectic world of
> would-be revolutionaries on the left. In most of the world-defining
> insurrections and revolutions during that time-those which had any
> significant permanence in their victories-authoritarian rebels were usually
> an obvious majority among active revolutionaries. And even when they
> weren't, they often gained the upper hand through other means. Whether they
> were liberals, social-democrats, nationalists, socialists, or communists,
> they remained part of a majority current within the political left
> explicitly committed to a whole constellation of authoritarian positions.
> Along with an admirable dedication to ideals like justice and equality, this
> majority current favors hierarchical organization, professional (and, too
> often, cults of) leadership, dogmatic ideologies (especially notable in its
> many Marxian variants), a self-righteous moralism, and a widespread
> abhorrence for social freedom and authentic, non-hierarchical community.
>
> Especially after their expulsion from the First International, anarchists
> have generally found themselves facing a hard choice. They could locate
> their critiques somewhere within the political left-if only on its fringes.
> Or else they could reject the majority opposition culture in its entirety
> and take the chance of being isolated and ignored.
>
> Since many, if not most, anarchist activists have come out of the left
> through disillusionment with its authoritarian culture, the option of
> clinging to its fringes and adapting its themes in a more libertarian
> direction has maintained a steady allure. Anarcho-syndicalism may be the
> best example of this kind of left-anarchism. It has allowed anarchists to
> use leftist ideologies and methods to work for a leftist vision of social
> justice, but with a simultaneous commitment to anarchist themes like direct
> action, self-management, and certain (very limited) libertarian cultural
> values. Murray Bookchin's ecological anarcho-leftism, whether going by the
> label of libertarian municipalism or social ecology, is another example. It
> is distinguished by its persistent failure to gain much of a foothold
> anywhere, even in its favored terrain of Green politics. A further example,
> the most invisible (and numerous?) of all types of left-anarchism, is the
> choice of a great many anarchists to submerge themselves within leftist
> organizations that have little or no commitment to any libertarian values,
> simply because they see no possibility of working directly with other
> anarchists (who are often similarly hidden, submerged in still other leftist
> organizations).
>
> Perhaps it's time, now that the ruins of the political left continue to
> implode, for anarchists to consider stepping out of its steadily
> disappearing shadow en masse. In fact, there's still a chance, if enough
> anarchists can dissociate themselves sufficiently from the myriad failures,
> purges and "betrayals" of leftism, that anarchists can finally stand on
> their own.
>
> Along with defining themselves in their own terms, anarchists might once
> again inspire a new generation of rebels, who this time may be less willing
> to compromise their resistance in attempts to maintain a common front with a
> political left that has historically opposed the creation of free community
> wherever it has appeared. For the evidence is irrefutable. Libertarian
> revolutionaries of any type have consistently been denied a presence in the
> vast majority of leftist organizations (from the break in the International
> on); forced into silence in many of the left organizations they have been
> allowed to join (for example, the anarcho-Bolsheviks); and persecuted,
> imprisoned, assassinated or tortured by any leftists who have attained the
> necessary political power or organizational resources to do so (examples are
> legion).
>
> Why has there been such a long history of conflict and enmity between
> anarchists and the left? It is because there are two fundamentally different
> visions of social change embodied in the range of their respective critiques
> and practices (although any particular group or movement always includes
> contradictory elements). At its simplest, anarchists-especially anarchists
> who identify least with the left-commonly engage in a practice which refuses
> to set itself up as a political leadership apart from society, refuses the
> inevitable hierarchy and manipulation involved in building mass
> organizations, and refuses the hegemony of any single dogmatic ideology. The
> left, on the other hand, has most commonly engaged in a substitutive,
> representational practice in which mass organizations are subjected to an
> elitist leadership of intellectual ideologues and opportunistic politicians.
> In this practice the party substitutes itself for the mass movement, and the
> party leadership substitutes itself for the party. In reality, the primary
> function of the left has historically been to recuperate every social
> struggle capable of confronting capital and state directly, such that at
> best only an ersatz representation of victory has ever been achieved, always
> concealing the public secret of continuing capital accumulation, continuing
> wage-slavery, and continuing hierarchical, statist politics as usual, but
> under an insubstantial rhetoric of resistance and revolution, freedom and
> social justice.
>
> The bottom-line question is, can anarchists do better outside the left-from
> a position of explicit and uncompromising critique, than those who have
> chosen to inhabit the left have done from within?
>
> Jason McQuinn, Editor
>