Communes (Re: "post-leftism")

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sun Aug 25 06:49:11 PDT 2002


Brian O. Sheppard x349393:
> ...
> And a lot of the people you will see gravitating to communes and other
> lifestyle insitutions are health food nuts, vegans, faddists, nudists,
> 'bohemian' iconoclasts, avant garde poets, and the like. Many of these
> people call themselves "anarchists," it's true. They have no understanding of class analysis, and
> this is apparent in everything they do. Sam Dolgoff referred to "ox-cart
> anarchists" in a passage I quoted in a previous email. Their ideas
> generally don't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.
> ...

Well, it might be interesting to see some of the scrutiny. Above, you have only derided some communards as too eccentric for your tastes, as if there were some kind of mainstream standard for political radicalism which, say, vegetarians are too deviant to meet. That isn't scrutiny, it's prejudice. It's also completely irrelevant to the discussion, if it's supposed to be a discussion based on experience, evidence, reason and practice. Or at least it is so far; maybe you can show that avant-garde poet vegans cannot be politically effective, but you haven't begun to do that yet. Deriding eccentricity does not seem, in general, like a promising path of theoretical development.

-- Gordon



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