[lbo-talk] On Theorizing the Demand for Demands

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Oct 24 23:06:47 PDT 2011


On Tue, 25 Oct 2011, Mike Beggs wrote:


> I don't think there's much fundamental difference between anarchists
> with a conception of positive freedom and other socialists; they don't
> so much fetishise the state as a big bad evil and recognise that
> political organisation will always be with us, the point is to
> democratise it.

This is precisely why Graeber groups them together, and opposes New anarchists to both -- and why he considers them the real anarchists who are really against the state.


> Here's our friend Murray Bookchin on the matter
> (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/whither.html):

Bookchin was famous for making much the same distinction as Graeber between new and old anarchists 20 years earlier -- except that his preference was exactly the opposie. He thought old anarchism was deep, and that new anarchism was a deterioration into new age experience mongering. But he agreed with Graeber that the new were largely replacing the old when it came to representing the term -- so much so that he stopped calling himself an anarchist in the end because he thought the term now meant things he was against. He started calling himself a "social ecologist" instead -- by which he meant an old style anarchist.

Michael



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