Carrol wrote:
> A side point. This attitude towards the state does, eventually if not
sooner, cripple anarchist politics. But the empirical fact remains that
anarchists seem better than Marxists in
> _getting something started_.
I agree with this 100%. The anti-gentrification activists I referred to earlier most likely would not refer to themselves as anarchists. Maybe that's the problem!
Although the remnants of the postwar European welfare state are being steadily eroded, I think it has allowed a certain comfortable subcultural niche for radical leftist politics. I have made this point before on Louis Proyect's blog when he gave a history of the Autonomen in Germany and Autonomia in Italy. Basically, the radical extra-parliamentary left in the post-war era was only able to establish some permanent institutional achievements because the ascendancy of Social Democracy (whether in the form of actual SocDem parties, or the Moscow-allied Communist parties) was able to give them some breathing room, some interstices within the system where a radical left could comfortably exist.
Now, with official Social Democracy having become neo-liberal, and with the post-Communist parties becoming openly Social Democratic, there is less breathing space for the radical left.
In Berlin, all the old occupied houses, legalized squats, etc. have been disappearing, or subject to legal disputes with owners. The old squat movement of the 80s is for all intents and purposes dead. There are a few remnants, some very few surviving relics, but in general that era is over. And what is frustrating, is the social milieu around it is unable to develop a bigger picture of historical economic developments that have led to this moment, other than to point the figure at the ominous "gentrification". But they are completely unable to understand that the limited success of the squatters movement was due to a substantial extent to the indulgence of Social Democracy in power. I find it frustrating that the radical left is unable to understand how symbiotic its relationship to the reformist left has been, historically. Their fortunes rise and fall together.
Or to take another recent example, wasn't the Il Manifesto newspaper in Italy having some serious financial trouble recently, to the point where they have ceased publishing a hard copy edition? How much you want to bet this is connected in some way to the near collapse of Rifondazione Comunista?