Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
A match does not make a great contribution to the conflagration; it is merely essential. The initial suggestion for OWS came from him.
I'm not an anarchist, and I think most anarchists ultimately restate in various ways the fundamental premise of bourgeois ideology, the "abstract -- isolated -- Individual. BUT in the same scribble in which that phrase occurs Marx noted that idealism provided (or had been providing) more oomph than materialism. We owe OWS and the first real hope in 40 years to the anarchists; they may provide the next boost as well: who can say.
I don't think I overstate their contribution in the least.
What we have on this list, and to a great extent, on pen-l is the political equivalent of a situation pointed out in the only good lines from Masters:
Tic tic their little iambics While Homere and Whitman roared in the pines.
By tic tic I mean every post or journal article which merely points out another bad feature of the (capitalist) world. What are they trying to prove? This morning we have been reminded again on pen-l that the recovery is jobless, with no attempt whatever to indicate what the political significance of that fact is. Of those who have been complaining about Graeber on this list, not one belongs even to a local environmentalist or anti-war group; not a one thinks in terms that people in such groups _have_ to think: what can we _do_ next that might increase the number sitting around this table? And that seems to be representative of all the summer soldiers on the left. ("Left" here meaning mere passive opinion not expressed in collective thought and action.)
Since there are no active anarchist theorists on this list refuting anarchist theory seems nothing but a self-indulgent exercise.
Carrol