💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarcho-happy-in-the-ghetto.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:06:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Happy in the ghetto?
Author: Anarcho
Date: December 10, 2010
Language: en
Topics: student movement, austerity
Source: Retrieved on 1st February 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=470

Anarcho

Happy in the ghetto?

I attended the last of the student demos against the tuition fees

increase on the 9^(th) of December. It was a well attended march, with

students and workers across the country protesting their anger. Many of

the student marchers came straight from their occupations. These were

people protesting against austerity using direct action, something every

anarchist advocates.

Yet, sad to say, I seemed to be the only anarchist actually trying to

spread anarchist ideas by selling our publications (namely, the new

Black Flag). It was a big demo, so perhaps I missed the other anarchists

handing out leaflets, selling Freedom, and otherwise trying to get our

ideas across to those in struggle, those both questioning the system (to

some degree) in both thought and action. However, I do not think so.

Do not get me wrong – there were anarchists there. Numerous libertarian

flags were being waved (there was even a little bloc of them in the

march). However, they seemed to be making absolutely no attempt to get

our ideas across to our fellow protestors. What a wasted opportunity!

We could have been discussing our ideas on direct action, on the need to

spread the actions and occupations; our ideas on mandating and recalling

delegates as a practical alternative to picking rulers every 4 or 5

years who break their pledges and patronise us; how the state exists to

maintain minority rule and the class system; how austerity was not

required but a means to further capitalist interests; how crisis was an

inherent part of capitalism; how there is an alternative to this rotten

system, anarchism.

Instead, well, who knows what the other protestors think of anarchists

and anarchism.

Oh, I know. Anarchists do not like to seem to be too much like “the

Trots.” So selling papers and leafleting are out. Yet trots do other

things – they leave the house, breathe, eat, watch TV, read books, have

sex (even if only with themselves) and a host of other activities which

no anarchist refuses to do just because “the Trots” do them. Why stop at

trying to influence our fellow workers and students? Why produce papers

like Freedom and Black Flag at all in that case? Why produce books?

Websites? Pamphlets? “The Trots” do that as well.

Ironically, for all the contempt about “the Trots,” the sad fact is that

many anarchists are letting them define what they do.

Yet there is a reason why “the Trots” act as they do, they reach people.

And that is the big question. Do we want to get anarchist ideas more

widely known, understood, accepted and acted upon? Or do we do what we

do for our own little ghetto? Are we happy to be a small minority, being

able to wallow in our little circles, secretly happy to be big fish in a

small pond and not have the problems of justifying our nice little

theories in the battle of ideas?

After all, we are working class people who happen to be anarchists. We

have as much right to put our ideas across as another person in a

protest, occupation, union meeting, strike and march. To refuse to do so

is to implicitly embrace vanguardist ideology, to implicitly think we

are “different” from “ordinary working class people.” That this results

in many of us self-ghettoising ourselves rather than, as the Leninists,

treating the class struggle as purely an area of recruitment does not

change the fundamental logic. It is not the rejection of vanguardism, it

is the other side of the same coin.

I have, a long time ago, suggested that the anarchist movement should

co-operate more. Produce local free-sheets, write for and sell Freedom,

have one excellent quarterly class-struggle magazines rather than three

bi-annual ones (two okay, one good one) and an annual theoretical

journal. We can do that – some progress has been made on achieving this

very common-sense suggestion.

We can also, I think, be more active about forthcoming demos and ensure

people have stalls at them, sell papers, produce relevant leaflets, and

so on. I suggested this, and helped do it, for the 15^(th) February 2003

huge anti-war demo, so it is possible.

In short, we need to look outwards.

(Obviously this article does not address the events of the demo itself,

the riot and so forth. Nor does it mention the many anarchists, and

anarchist groups, which do spread their ideas in their workplaces,

communities, struggles and protests. It is not meant to be a full

account of the state of the movement, more a comment on a specific issue

raised by a specific event. Nor does it discuss how to go from riot to

revolution, an issue addressed in this article on the Argentine revolt

against neo-liberalism.)