> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>> [As I just said, the anarchist-libertarian faction is trying to block the adoption of this by the OWS general assembly.]
> Okay, let me ask explicitly: what's wrong with being against full
> employment as a demand? Jobs (little "j") fucking suck and cause as
> much misery, stress, and death as lack of jobs. Why demand that? Talk
> about desiring your own repression.
>
> And yes, there are other proposals out there that are both better and
> just as realistic,* universal social wage, for instance. I mean, if
> we're making demands, let's really make some fucking demands.
I want to use this post to respond to this whole thread - or at least some of the people on the thread.
Eric and others: you're just misunderstanding this "anarchist" position. The type of anarchism that the two panelists represent, and that David Graeber represents, is just as much against the "other proposals" you refer to (for some form of social wage) as they are against jobs programs. They do not want to demand that the state do anything to make people's lives better; nor do they want workers to self-organize if that organization will depend on recognition from the state.
Shag, you wrote somewhere that Natasha wants social change but that she *also* wants the process of getting there to reflect the desired type of society. No, she doesn't want social change as you think of it. For her, the act of prefiguring the desired society in one's own behavior *is* the social change she seeks. Wage labor should be "abolished" through the voluntary opting out of workers.
I know that seems hard to swallow. I get the sense that a lot of people here are so excited by OWS that they're unwilling to believe that an appreciable fraction of the people in it hold views so much at variance with their own, so they just assume that behind the rhetoric there must be a left politics that they could conceivably get behind. But in these cases, there isn't.
Did you know that within the parts of the anarchist world that these people come from, there's a growing movement to embrace the label "post-left anarchism"? Look it up, man.
SA