Yeah, I love a lot of anarchist lit and find it fundamentally correct, and personally think it's cool when people are openly anarchist. But it sounds kinda constraining and maybe even ironic to self-identify as one. (I do like to show solidarity with anarchism though.)
One awesome thing about anarchist lit is that it's less alienating. For example, reading Berkman's _ABC of Anarchism_ was the first time I really felt like I grasped capitalism, and it just told me what I already knew. (Accounting for its age of course; the country's a bit different now.)
I thought Hahnel's _ABCs of Political Economy_ was weird for explaining "consciousness" early on. But it's clear now that anarchists (or libertarian socialists, whatever) usually tend not to view people as parts to fit into some system. Rather, a legitimate way to evaluate a system is to ask how suited it is to people. Therefore it only makes sense to get human nature straight while introducing econ.
I even like Zerzan's criticism of math; it's misguided, but I honestly think a sane world has people seriously criticizing such fundamental things. It's probably true that primitivism has an element of insanity, but it's hardly more insane than the institutional schooling which alienates people from things like math and Shakespeare enough, that they either hate or fetishize them.
> 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.
I'm partial to the idea that anarchist principles are already a staple of common life. People join clubs based on mutual interests; people generally do better work for a customer they feel genuine sympathy for rather than out of coercion.
On a free software project I like, a participant wrote a few days ago: "it's been a pleasure to work with so many bright and motivated people in a kind of directed anarchy: towards goals that we mostly shared, even if we differ in the details."
Tayssir