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Title: Post-Left Anarchy? Author: Jason McQuinn Language: en Topics: AJODA, post-left Source: Retrieved on February 17th, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/postlefta.htm Notes: This editorial comes from Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. This magazine is available for 5-USD from most newstands, or 6-USD from C.A.L., POB 1313, Lawrence, KS 66044. Make checks payable to C.A.L. Press
There remain large numbers of anarchists who continue to identify
closely with the political left in one form or another. But there are
increasing numbers ready to abandon much of the dead weight associated
with the left tradition. Many pages of this issue are devoted to
beginning a new exploration of what is at stake in considering whether
or not identification with the political left has outworn any benefits
for anarchists.
For most of their existence over roughly the last couple centuries,
consciously anarchist activists, theorists, groups and movements have
consistently inhabited a minority position within the eclectic world of
would-be revolutionaries on the left. In most of the world-defining
insurrections and revolutions during that time-those which had any
significant permanence in their victories-authoritarian rebels were
usually an obvious majority among active revolutionaries. And even when
they werenât, they often gained the upper hand through other means.
Whether they were liberals, social-democrats, nationalists, socialists,
or communists, they remained part of a majority current within the
political left explicitly committed to a whole constellation of
authoritarian positions. Along with an admirable dedication to ideals
like justice and equality, this majority current favors hierarchical
organization, professional (and, too often, cults of) leadership,
dogmatic ideologies (especially notable in its many Marxian variants), a
self-righteous moralism, and a widespread abhorrence for social freedom
and authentic, non-hierarchical community.
Especially after their expulsion from the First International,
anarchists have generally found themselves facing a hard choice. They
could locate their critiques somewhere within the political leftâif only
on its fringes. Or else they could reject the majority opposition
culture in its entirety and take the chance of being isolated and
ignored.
Since many, if not most, anarchist activists have come out of the left
through disillusionment with its authoritarian culture, the option of
clinging to its fringes and adapting its themes in a more libertarian
direction has maintained a steady allure. Anarcho-syndicalism may be the
best example of this kind of left-anarchism. It has allowed anarchists
to use leftist ideologies and methods to work for a leftist vision of
social justice, but with a simultaneous commitment to anarchist themes
like direct action, self-management, and certain (very limited)
libertarian cultural values. Murray Bookchinâs ecological
anarcho-leftism, whether going by the label of libertarian municipalism
or social ecology, is another example. It is distinguished by its
persistent failure to gain much of a foothold anywhere, even in its
favored terrain of Green politics. A further example, the most invisible
(and numerous?) of all types of left-anarchism, is the choice of a great
many anarchists to submerge themselves within leftist organizations that
have little or no commitment to any libertarian values, simply because
they see no possibility of working directly with other anarchists (who
are often similarly hidden, submerged in still other leftist
organizations).
Perhaps itâs time, now that the ruins of the political left continue to
implode, for anarchists to consider stepping out of its steadily
disappearing shadow en masse. In fact, thereâs still a chance, if enough
anarchists can dissociate themselves sufficiently from the myriad
failures, purges and âbetrayalsâ of leftism, that anarchists can finally
stand on their own.
Along with defining themselves in their own terms, anarchists might once
again inspire a new generation of rebels, who this time may be less
willing to compromise their resistance in attempts to maintain a common
front with a political left that has historically opposed the creation
of free community wherever it has appeared. For the evidence is
irrefutable. Libertarian revolutionaries of any type have consistently
been denied a presence in the vast majority of leftist organizations
(from the break in the International on); forced into silence in many of
the left organizations they have been allowed to join (for example, the
anarcho-Bolsheviks); and persecuted, imprisoned, assassinated or
tortured by any leftists who have attained the necessary political power
or organizational resources to do so (examples are legion).
Why has there been such a long history of conflict and enmity between
anarchists and the left? It is because there are two fundamentally
different visions of social change embodied in the range of their
respective critiques and practices (although any particular group or
movement always includes contradictory elements). At its simplest,
anarchists-especially anarchists who identify least with the
leftâcommonly engage in a practice which refuses to set itself up as a
political leadership apart from society, refuses the inevitable
hierarchy and manipulation involved in building mass organizations, and
refuses the hegemony of any single dogmatic ideology. The left, on the
other hand, has most commonly engaged in a substitutive,
representational practice in which mass organizations are subjected to
an elitist leadership of intellectual ideologues and opportunistic
politicians. In this practice the party substitutes itself for the mass
movement, and the party leadership substitutes itself for the party.
In reality, the primary function of the left has historically been to
recuperate every social struggle capable of confronting capital and
state directly, such that at best only an ersatz representation of
victory has ever been achieved, always concealing the public secret of
continuing capital accumulation, continuing wage-slavexy, and continuing
hierarchical, statist politics as usual, but under an insubstantial
rhetoric of resistance and revolution, freedom and social justice.
The bottom-line question is, can anarchists do better outside the
leftâfrom a position of explicit and uncompromising critique, than those
who have chosen to inhabit the left have done from within?
Jason McQuinn, Editor