Adding to Eric's analysis, which I largely agree with, I also think that there have been some changes within the broad terrain of subcultural anarchism itself.
1. In the last few years, there seems to be a larger engagement on the part of anarchists in practical labor politics, either in the form of established trades or in the form of the IWW. (The IWW has moved from a history club to a set of organizations trying to do practical organizing work, often in small, service oriented shops.) I think this work makes one have to think in much more conventional political terms. You're organizing long term campaigns, rather than engaging spectacle politics.
2. There are, in fact, informal structures of institutional memory in subcultural anarchism. There is a fairly substantial amount of critical analysis of the methods and techniques of the anti-globalization protests put together by subcultural anarchists. This isn't stuff aligned with the Dean/Henwood line of critique, but presents critiques of problematic forms of horizontal organizing, and offering ways of reforming them. Maybe to put it more simply, there are a lot of folks who have been involved in processes like this, and have some better ideas on how they should be organized. (which don't reject the basic framework.)
robert wood
>
> What I say is likely to be only semi-coherent (made more so by a
> couple of drinks), and maybe trivial, but it started from noticing
> that lots of anarchist luminaries had been (there seems to have been a
> turn in the last few days) very skeptical and even critical of OWS,
> and mostly for the same reasons that nonanarchists have been: it's
> lack of political direction, analysis, and tactics. That reminded me
> that despite anarchists' sometimes thinking otherwise, their ideas
> about politics and protests are in the first instance ideological,
> even if they are more likely than other leftists to base theirs on
> positive (creative) impulses. For instance, the affinity group, the
> anarchist base unit of politics, is based on the shared, articulated
> political concerns of a group of people. But OWS and its initial
> movements were totally, sometimes comically, free of any such
> articulated positions. You could argue that is was completely free of
> politics altogether, but even if you don't think that, you have to
> admit it was free of ideological specificity. So anarchists were
> confronted with this thing that was, for lack of a better terms,
> purely affective and negative (as opposed to ideological and
> creative): it was a felt wrong by people who didn't seem to have much
> of an idea of why and how they were wronged and who was wronging them.
> It didn't have a program, and even though anarchists usually have more
> minimal ones than others, they still have them.
>
> Also: OWS alters anarchists' position in mass movements. During the
> alterglobo days, anarchists, particularly black bloc, were able to
> perform their disruptive tactics but still the protests had some sort
> of form because the more "responsible" participants sharpened the
> antagonisms and defined the targets. (Despite constant liberal/left
> bitching, this worked the other way too: protests became events, and
> not just dreary labor, largely because of anarchists and black blocs.)
> But OWS has been mostly free of responsible organization; it's been
> almost cartoonishly anarchist. In confronting anarchism with itself
> (to overstate it just a bit), OWS seems to have forced anarchists to
> rethink and reformulate questions about organization and ideology but
> also its relation to mass politics and mass movements.
>
> Anyway, those are preliminary thoughts of a nascent movement based on
> not much evidence.
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