What this suggests is that the key to understanding today’s anti-immigration movement—as well as anti-Obama organizing such as the “tea parties”—is to see it as a “virtuous middle” movement. In other words, these are movements whose members see themselves as a virtuous middle—religious, moral, hardworking, patriotic and truly American—who face the threat of losing their relatively privileged social status. They fear that they are under attack by a bewildering global economy and unscrupulous corporations that are moving their jobs overseas. Even more, they feel they are being attacked by cultural elites—Harvard and Hollywood, the universities and pop culture—who undermine the moral values of this virtuous middle with moral relativism and sexual permissiveness. They also fear that they are under attack by the rabble below them—lazy people who live off public benefits paid for by the virtuous middle’s tax dollars (these folks are often secretly coded as black) and illegal aliens who are flooding the country, stealing jobs and degrading American culture (these folks are often coded as brown). The virtuous middle fears that cultural elites from above and the black and brown rabble from below are conspiring —now with the help of a black president!—to undermine their social status and by extension the moral, political, and economic foundations of America. The fall into Sodom is right behind.
Either we all have the right to choose or none of us has it.
But I am disturbed by an inverse form of state worship I encounter among my fellow skeptics of government power. This is the belief that the only liberty worth caring about is liberty reclaimed from the state; that social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist; that the fight for freedom stops where the reach of government ends. It was tradition, not merely government, that threatened to limit Min’s range of possible lives. To describe the expanded scope of her agency as merely “freedom from state interference” is to deny the extent of what capitalism has achieved in communist China.
I’m going to hazard a historical thesis: that marxism and anarchism, the red and the black, have been superseded by history.
Vote Gary Horvath Ward 14. Cleveland, OH.
Nelson Cintron. Cleveland, OH.
Better know a Marxist/Leninist/Troskyist organization!
It is the duty of revolutionists to defend every conquest of the working class even though it may be distorted by the pressure of hostile forces. Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.
— Leon Trotsky, “Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events”, April 25, 1940 [via]
One of the major disagreements I had with Troskyists (and oh did we have a lot) was whether old positions are worth defending. Sometimes they aren’t, and I think it seriously weakens your position as a radical to bend over backwards defending, you know, the Soviet Union. Not everything the working class does is good, either. They are not a privileged and infallible class. You grow as a person and as a movement by abandoning positions that were poorly thought out or unsuccessful, and pushing forward with new ideas and methods.
Sometimes anarchists are slow learners. Disregarding the famous, definitive and prognostic Marx-Bakunin split in the First International near the end of the 19th century, anarchists overall have continued to cling to the obsolete notion that anarchy is best situated within the otherwise statist Leftist milieu, despite the bourgeois democratic origins of the Left-Right spectrum. Since then communists and Marxists, liberals and conservatives alike have had us right where they want us - and it’s shown in our history. In continuing to view ourselves as Leftists, despite the glaring contradictions in such a stance, we have naturally relegated ourselves to the role of critic within larger movements, and often found ourselves either marching towards goals which stand in direct opposition to our own interests or suckered by counter-revolutionary appeals to anti-fascist or anti-capitalist unity. [via]
Confronting Adamic’s text seventy-five years after the fact demands that readers ask themselves a number of difficult and politically loaded questions: to what extent is our seemingly peaceful labor system already (and always) bound up in the latent violence of capital? The very notion of a post-war labor “peace” conceals the underlying violence upon which that “peace” was brokered. The illusion of labor peace is predicated upon the state’s power to unleash violence against workers should they break their end of the deal. Was the subsumption of the American labor movement under layers of government bureaucracy–in exchange for an end to violence–on the whole a victory for workers? Or has the post-war labor peace been an unequal compromise? Certainly, no unionist is nostalgic for the days when a worker could be shot dead for walking a picket line, but the alternative we have isn’t that great either.
Huzzah, It’s The Top 10 Trotskyist Pickup Lines!
10 “Hey sweet thang, wanna dictate my proletariat?”
9 “My revolutionary Party has a huge, militant membership - wanna lesson in Entryism?”
8 “Is your father a commisar of production and distribution? Because he surely expropriated some bourgeois diamonds for your eyes”
7 “Do you believe in love at first sight? Or do you need to be broken of your false consciousness by the vanguard since without us you’re only capable of trade union consciousness?”
6 “Hey baby, If I said you had a peasantry capable of being led by a tiny working class would you hold it against me?”
5 “Wanna see my bra? It’s a size (Provisional)CC”
4 “Trotsky was all for women’s lib, you know… have you heard of Nadezhda Krupskaya?”
3 “Is that a deflected permanent revolution in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?”
2 “Like my hairstyle? I’ve done it up like a pimp…”
1 “Are you a girl? Please will you talk to me. I promise not to mention Trotsky
— Bunty commenting on What in the hell … :: … is the best lightbulb joke? :: February :: 2008 - StumbleUpon [via]
Despite its ultimate dissolution, Love and Rage did have successes. The first is that it lasted as long as it did…Second, L&R established a legitimate pole within the anarchist movement for supporting national liberation struggles…Third, Love and Rage re-established a pole within the movement for participating in mass struggles and raising revolutionary politics…Finally, L&R also re-established the idea of building an international anarchist organization, as opposed to the cultural and localistic orientations of many groups of the 1980’s…The members of Love and Rage agreed on the points listed above. But this agreement obscured deep differences. These differences were reflected in the fact that in its entire existence, Love and Rage never drafted a comprehensive statement of aims and principles.
The failures of Love and Rage were rooted in these differences. The latter in fact represented a split between those who wanted to address the problems of anarchism from within anarchism and those who wanted to adopt the methods and outlook of authoritarian ideologies; in particular, Marxism and Maoism
I really find more value in discussing why things didn’t work than discussing why they did or why they will. I particularly like when failed federations or collectives take the time to reflect on their failures and write about them.
I am also clearly having a good time reviewing the L&R archives. While I am too young to have been involved in that (seeing as I was .. 12 at the time of its dissolution) I worked with a lot of people who came of age during L&R anarchist organizing, & it brings a lot of perspective to my experiences working with them, as well as our particular infights.
I always found it bizarre how many people with authoritarian political orientations wanted to participate in anarchist organizations. I would think that would be a group in which your recruiting would be particularly unsuccessful.
[W]hen we understand fanaticism in this way, we see that it’s not inherently undemocratic. That what zealotry really is is a critique and a rejection of political moderation - not a rejection of reason, of rationality or anything like that. And, as such, fanaticism and reason can be consistent. And furthermore, it can be consistent with justice and democracy in times when moderation lends support to the enemies of democracy… so at certain points in history perhaps fanaticism is the more democratic option over liberal moderation.
— Joel Olson, quoted in Kansas Bleeding Again
It’s in the context of welfare rights movements that anarchists and other revolutionaries need to enter the discussion more forcefully. We should step up our efforts to help build movements fighting for programs of mutual aid, and to put forward the general vision of a society with free education, free health care, and enough food to go around. But we should never forget as we defend a communal value system that it is capitalism itself and the greed at its core that stands in the way of realizing values of mutual aid. We need to keep movement towards long-term solutions in mind, even while working with groups focused on short-term measures
The problem with welfare isn’t just the belief in the family wage, but the notion that wage-slavery is a natural and irresistable state of affairs. Capitalism creates its own surplus labor pool (the unemployed) in order to keep wages low…Welfare struggles are important to support because they assert a person’s right to decent food and shelter, as well as our responsibility towards one another as human beings. But the kind of ‘mutual aid’ where the well-off give to the poor isn’t enough; the real struggle is against class division itself. But keeping this larger goal in mind doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work with welfare groups or argue for the value of “giving to strangers” while we live in a class society. It is up to us as anarchists and revolutionaries to think and act in a way that doesn’t count on an increase in poverty and despair as the spur of potentially revolutionary social collapse. In this age of anti-social individualism, welfare rights struggles, which shore up values of mutual aid and community, are an important part of the battle against right-wing revolution.
— First Pity Then Punishment: The History of Women and Welfare
There are dozens and dozens of good economic and social reasons that women choose to terminate pregnancies that have nothing to do with expanding their “careers” — which is something not everyone in this country has the privilege to be able to aspire to. Too many women are too often just trying to scrape by, and an unwanted pregnancy (or child) is just going to add additional strain that it’s entirely possible they can’t handle. That’s the whole purpose of the Obama Administration’s purported focus on reducing the economic consequences of child-bearing, not to help women better shape their lucrative careers.
— Some People Underestimate The Economic Impact Of Abortion [via]
anthropophagous
I'm an 23 year old woman in grad school studying Medical Anthropology. I'm from Lansing, MI & currently live in Cleveland, OH. This is just a collection of things I think are neat.
