> You say post-leftism "isn't really that new" then a couple of paragraphs
> later say "Post-leftism is about a historical moment i.e. the left after
> the fall of the Soviet Union." That was less than 15 years ago. So which
> is it, new or not?
I'm simply agreeing that there are tendencies in anarchism that are oppositional to Leftism that go back a century. But I'm also arguing that post-Leftism can be used to describe the situation that anarchists and others find themselves after the fall of the Soviet Union.
> Then you say it is a dialogue and not a unified ideology. Fine. If it is a
> dialogue, consider my criticisms of it to be part of that dialogue.
Thank you! Now we are getting somewhere!
> > What really pisses me off about Brian and other
> > anarchist of his ilk, is that they are so preoccupied with lumping the
> > people who talk about Post-Leftism into their little conspiracy containers
> > that they can't see that THEY have a stake in this discussion too.
>
> Far from utilizing my "little conspiracy container" I am discussing this
> with you. You said it's a discussion, a dialogue. That's what I'm doing:
> discussing.
Right. I'll discuss this with you as long as you don't go back to this crap about post-Leftists being synonmous with primitivists.
> It's clearly the product of some people. And when I said it seems like a
> very contrived way to spin a "seminal new idea" out of nothing, I was
> referring to these people. Otherwise, it's hard to make much coherent
> sense from it at all, other than that it intends to express a disavowal for
> authoriarian structures, which much of the left has been doing already
> anyway.
I'm not sure if this IS an attempt to spin a new idea out of the anarchist ether. I think its pretty obvious that the current historical situation is much different than 20 and 50 years ago. There is an ongoing opportunity to re-evaluate anarchism's relationship with the Left, now that the traditional parts of the Left have been discredited and have become irrelevant.
> > Do you understand now?
>
> I understand, but not in the sense that I agree with you.
>
> > Post-leftism is different because it is tied in
> > with the current era. Anarchism has become more popular and M-L-M has benn
> > discredited. The Left is even looking in new directions, i.e. "Empire."
>
> Earlier you said post-leftism - a "dialogue" as you said, and not any
> ideology - is not new. The new direction posed in Empire is much like that
> of post-leftism - vacuous, a lot of nice-sounding words, a lot of
> circumlocution, and evidence of
> the "new, seminal idea" fetish. But, then, the left has been looking "for
> new directions" ever since there was a left.
I've only read parts of Empire, but that is an academic work, so it is going to be vacuous and pompous. It reflects the state of the academic Left, which is very out of touch with social movements and day-to-day activism. There are new directions out there--we've seen some of that in the anarchistic "Net War" practiced by the anti-globalization movement. This is a way of dissenting that is unlike traditional strategies such as party-building and united fronts.
What I've been trying to do since Seattle is to help more people understand how we are doing things differently. I'm not even sure if most activists understand why our movements have been successful lately.
This is the ongoing challenge: to contest and take back control of the narrative from the old guard who tell lies about why we've been successful.
<< Chuck0 >>
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"...ironically, perhaps, the best organised dissenters in the world today are anarchists, who are busily undermining capitalism while the rest of the left is still trying to form committees."
-- Jeremy Hardy, The Guardian (UK)