All kinds of people say they're anarchist these days, from well-off folks in academia, to scroungey ragamuffins going dumpster diving, to pagans doing rituals to earth goddessess, to folks somewhere in the middle of all that.
I just think of myself as an "independent social critic with very strong anarchist sympathies."
That way I don't have to enter some boxing ring and duke it out with gatekeepers to the Holy Domain of True Anarchism, those who insist you must do X-Y-Z to merit the prestigious, honorific label. I voted in the last election. That broke what for many is a serious anarchist commandment: Thou shalt not vote! Oh well, kick me out of the club, then.
On the other hand, I find things that resemble *much* of anarchism in folks like Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, folks who would never, ever say they were say they were anarchists. Sort of like finding hints of anarchism here and there in Nietzsche, another person who would never, ever say he was an anarchist (and even polemicized against them). Or like finding The Cure or Sisters of Mercy to be "goth," when the two bands would never, ever claim that label, and in fact run away from that label, in spite of the fact that, well, they are kinda goth.
-B.
Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> On 12/5/06, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
>> I understand that some people loosely call Albert
an anarchist. He has
>> shown some leanings in that direction. But people
like Chomsky has
>> actually spoken and written at length about his
anarchism. Howard Zinn
>> has said at public appearances that he is "sort of
an anarchist."
>
> "Let me just say I don't really regard myself as an
anarchist thinker.
> I'm a derivative fellow traveller, let's say."
> -- Noam Chomsky, "The Relevance of
Anarcho-Syndicalism" (1976)
>
> When someone calls Chomsky an anarchist, this
quote's maybe in the
> back of my head, but so what? Communication
necessarily simplifies.
> It's approximate, and being uber-precise here is
usually a few decimal
> places too many.