On Tue, 25 Oct 2011, Mike Beggs wrote:
>> Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has distinguished the two
>> philosophies as follows:
>>
>> "Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about
>> revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse
>> about revolutionary practice."
>
> This is true, but of course it's not the only definition. I know a
> number of very sensible anarchists.
That is absolutely right -- lots of anarchists, including the vast majority of anarchists before 1980, don't fit Graeber's definition at all.
But that's not by accident. Graeber consciously distingishes the "new" anarchists who fit his definition, and all preceding anarchists, who he calls by "old" anarchists, and even "sectarian" anarchists. He groups them the marxist and others that the new anarchists define themselves in distinction against. And he claims, with a fair amount of justification, that the anarchists who animated the most prominent global justice movements in the 90s were almost entirely of the new sort.
If you haven't seen them before, the articles where he makes this (very influential) argument most clearly are
1) His 2002 New Left Review Article entitled "The New Anarchists:"
http://newleftreview.org/A2368
And
20 the 2004 article he wrote with Andre Grubacic entitled "Anarchism, or the Revolutionary Movement of the 21st Century," original published on Z-net:
http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Graeber-Grubacic0106.htm
Both are short, clear and to the point.
Michael