[lbo-talk] OWS Demands working group: jobs for all!

SA s11131978 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 20 17:05:06 PDT 2011


On 10/20/2011 7:35 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:


> First of all, anarchist in this conversation is a floating signifier.
> It means whatever its critics want it to mean. For example, earlier
> today, you posted at your blog that Anarchists themselves have good
> arguments about the problems with Anarchism. I don't think you typed
> that in, uh, good faith at all. Using the words of an anarchist was
> just a way for you to say something about anarchism you wanted to say
> anyway.

Nope. Wrong again.

The cleavage of U.S. anarchism into two broad schools in the last 15 years is a fact generally recognized by anarchists themselves. See Bookchin's "Social Anarchism vs. Lifestyle Anarchism" or Wayne Price's "The Two Main Trends of Anarchism." And although this is unquantifiable, it's clear that the "New School" of anarchism is widely prevalent over the old school among those who identify as anarchists in the OWS milieu.

The great bulk of Doug's or my critiques of "anarchists" would not apply to the old school, but they do apply to the new school. And the old school anarchists, being already deeply immersed in the scene, are indeed the best critics of new school, as I said on the blog.

So anarchism is not a floating signifier. The particular anarchists we're talking about are new school/lifestyle/"reformist"/post-left anarchists. There are very few, say, anarcho-syndicalists among the young people who identify as anarchist today.

You're good at spinning rabelaisian fantasies about jizz, but your arguments are making no sense.

SA



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