Murray Bookchin's polemical essay against the increasingly individualist, misanthropic, mystical and anti-organisational trends in US anarchism still holds relevance today, no less in Britain than the States.
Written in the mid-'90s, his emphasis on collective action to achieve meaningful change over the isolation and ineffectiveness of lifestyle politics should be considered by all those tempted to see anarchism as a subculture to join rather than a practice that informs their interaction within (rather than outside of) society. libcom.org 2005
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What can I say - a must read for any contemporary anarchist. You'll benefit of reading it even if you consider yourself a social anarchist.
Anyone knows the exact date when this stuff was written?
i used to have a hard copy of this pamphlet (before my dad decided to throw out all my radical books one day)
it was one of my favorites.......
I am a social anarchist (anarcho communist), yet I am a lifestylist in the sense that I don't sit around complaining about the atrocities of the state -- I organize and LIVE my philosophy, I demand change by being change myself and I consider myself in no way "individualistic".
The point is that it is impossible to 'live' communism in any meaningful sense whilst capitalism exists. Its not like capitalism has an outside that we can drop out into. So even though drop outs will likely never consider themselves 'individualistic', the fact that a subculture is being substituted for collective action (which has the possibility of breaking with capitalist social relations and actually allowing us to 'live' communism through the process of communisation) means that they are posing an individualistic response to collective problems. Its not like non-dropout anarchist communists like myself who have rent and bills to pay and need to work to do that just 'sit around complaining' either, but rather have a different idea of what political action we can and should be taking.
I take a more Godwin-esque stance in that I am skeptical about the effectiveness of collective action. I am an individualist anarchist (with a green anarchist bent), and, similar to Godwin, I believe that the only change can be achieved through the self-eradication of the global economy and consumerist capitalist system which props up and fuels all centralized power structures. And I don't really believe that direct action or collective action, or the Black Flag Anarchists basically synthesizing with Marxist-Leninist totalitarians, will help anything. I really think that simply striving to become independent of centralized power structures and becoming self-sufficient is far more important than direct action whilst living in an authoritarian, consumerist paradigm. One of the primary causes of social stratification and ecological instability is the centralization of people, power, and production, and as long as the global economy and consumerist capitalist system exists, decentralization on a massive scale can never occur. I am proud to be an individualist in a Thoreau sense.
Hm. So I take it you have the resources, time and knowledge to provide all your own food, healthcare, education, housing and cultural needs all on your lonesome, then?
Because otherwise you're going to have to rely on others, and that means either having to sell your labour in return for the money needed for the above (until you're too old to do so, at which point you're reliant on others anyway); or alternatively, engaging in some of this dreaded "collective action" to ensure that you (and they) have access to the things you need.
Either way, you as an "individual" can't really do that much except through interaction with others.
Still, I'm a tad curious. What would this striving involve - are there any particular projects or ideas you have in mind?
I gotta say that this expresses the same sort of political insight as my testicles