> Shucks, I don't know if my ideas are worth a whole _ism_, much
> less one qualified by a four-syllable adjective. As I said
> in some other message, anything we (the anarchists) do has
> got to be interstitial or marginal, that is, incremental.
> We've got to sneak up on the system, because if we're proceeding
> on the principles of non-violence, autonomy, and _satyagraha_,
> which I think are common-sense requirements for anarchism, we
> can't just put armies in the field or pull off coups d'etat
> or win elections, or any other war act: War is the State,
> just as the State is war. The primary thing, at this point
> in history, is to get rid of or at least weaken the gross,
> violent, obvious forms of coercion, like the class war, the
> race war, the sex war, the imperial war, and the war war,
> meanwhile building up noncoercive relations, associations and
> activities -- I would call them institutions -- which people
> can join and thus deprive Capital and its attendant midget
> feudal and fascist dwarfs of support. (No offense meant to
> actual non-fascist dwarfs.) At some time in the future, if
> anarchists make any progress, they can start dealing with
> subtler and more ambiguous modes of coercion.
>
> At this point the great difficulty seems to be to convince
> people that eliminating coercion even in its most overt forms
> is desirable, much less possible. If you look back over the
> conversation around this issue for the last few days, you'll
> see more than one person on this list positively _clinging_
> to the idea that anarchism means no more airplanes or in fact
> any form of advanced technology, for them a keen deprivation.
> And this is a leftist mailing list -- you can imagine what
> you'd get from a broader, less enlightened (heh) audience.
> That's why I keep asking just _who_ is to be coerced; to
> take a look at the faces of the targets, the victims. It
> might be that someone will say, No, I don't want to do this.
> I'm going to put down the gun. If they follow out the logic
> of that idea, they'll be moving towards anarchism.
>
> -- Gordon
Sounds more like pacifism to me. Should we love our enemies, too? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20020820/39948d1b/attachment.htm>