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.
> > ...
Gordon:
> 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.
Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> What I got from what Brian was saying was that anarchism in general has
> enough theoretical flexibility that it caters to many folks who have
> absolutely no theoretical framework at all, and certainly not one against
> capitalism. Thus there are some in "the movement" who would need to cast
> their lot entirely with the capitalist state if it came right down to it.
Brian seems fixating on deriding eccentrics in banal terms of deviance from some mainstream cultural standard or other; when he gets over it, we will see if he has anything interesting to say. If he is indeed trying to get at the political unreliability of anarchists, we can observe that there are some in any movement who will cast their lot with the established order in a crisis; this is not a characteristic reserved to anarchists, nor is anarchist theory particularly conducive to it -- or at least, no one has shown that it is. Eccentricity and deviance are not, as far as I know, indicators of lack of commitment or predictors of selling out. In fact, they might well be the opposite.
You are quite correct in saying that many anarchists exhibit little or no theoretical development, and this is unfortunate, but there is nothing I can do about it. I like to think that by a perhaps purely intuitive move towards anarchism, they may come in contact with people who have thought and lived things out a bit more, and thereby become better anarchists. The is one of the reasons, as I think I said, to try to provide a living experience and material conditions reflecting one's theoretical aims.
There's also the possibility that some people may not need a lot of theory to do the right, I mean, Left thing.
-- Gordon