Christopher Day writes on Wednesday January 22 2003 @ 07:25AM PST: [ reply
| parent ]
A couple points.
The first concerns means and ends. The claim made in this article that
means and ends are the same thing is a common enough point. But its really
not true. To be sure it is important that there be a corellation between
means and ends, but there are good reasons for distinguishing between them.
I want to live in a society in which all decision-making about the things
that effect us will be as democratic and open as possible. I also think it
is important that these values be reflected in the organizations that make
up the movement that brings about that society, because if they aren't they
won't succeed. But the society we live in places constraints on how open
and democratic our organizations can be. The requirement under capitalism
that many of us work ourselves to death to feed and clothe ourselves and
our families puts real limits on our fullest participation in the
democratic life of our organizations. Similarly the repression directed by
the state against our organizing work often makes it impossible for us to
be as open and transparent as we would prefer.
Taking both of these examples its not to difficult to see how insisting on
the identity of means and ends can result in choosing means that sabotage
actually achieving ones ends.
This contradiction is actually one of many that we confront in trying to
make a better world out of the materials available to us in this one. The
direct route is not always the one that leads you where you want to go.
Often the path has twists and turns and you need a sophisticated map and
compass to keep yourself oriented. Without a theoretical grounding that
enables us to understand how contradictions like this function -- a theory
of dialectics -- we can get into situations in which we are simply walking
in circles rather than steadily ascending a spiral staircase.
The second concern is the relationship between individualist varieties of
anarchism and so called anarcho-capitalism. There are definitiely real
differences. But there are also similiarities.
The first is their class character. Like all petty bourgeois ideologies,
individualist anarchism starts of by denying that it even has a class
characater and insists that it transcends such things. Individualist
anarchism, like classical liberalism, accepts the abstraction of the
individual from their social and historical context that is really just an
ideological reflection of the alienated nature of our lives and labor. The
individual as self-contained vessel of pure desires is an ideological
construct with no relationship to reality and is essentially a high
faluting variation on the idea of the individual as consumer.
Individualist anarchists may rhetorically reject important aspects of
capitalism like private property, but they pose no real threat to it. The
elevation of the supposedly subversive character of shop-lifting, for
example, reveals the profound strategic poverty of this perspective.
Private property relations can only be destroyed by the working class and
only if it is well organized. This organization is always experienced as a
threat to the sacred autonomy of individual in the eyes of the petty
bourgeoisie, because rhetoric aside the petty bourgeois notion of the
individual makes no sense except as an owner of property.
The similarities between individualist anarchist visions of a new society
and more classical petty bourgeois fantasies of the Robinson Crusoe variety
is striking. (The common theme of the return to nature in both is consonant
with the denial of the class character of the project.)
Infoshop moderator writes on Wednesday January 22 2003 @ 07:41AM PST: [
reply | parent ]
This comment was removed because it misrepresented itself as being from the
webmaster.
humpage writes on Wednesday January 22 2003 @ 08:48AM PST: [ reply |
parent ]
So then where is Chris Day wrong, Chucko?
Query for Mr. Day writes on Wednesday January 22 2003 @ 10:18AM PST: [
reply | parent ]
My question to Mr. Day is (to use your own logic) wouldn't marxist-leninism
be an "abstraction" from petty bourgeois ideology since it was developed by
members of the petty bourgeoisie within a petty bourgeois philosophical
mind frame?
How does revolutionary marxism "transcend" its boundaries if "individualist
anarchism" in your opinion cleary can't. What is your magic trick?
mj writes on Wednesday January 22 2003 @ 10:50AM PST: [ reply | parent ]
Chuck: Yeah, honestly. I very rarely agree with Chris but at least he
provides developed explanations of his perspective. I don't think that's
something you want to discourage in these parts, right? I mean, if we're
already sitting down at computers and having theoretical discussions most
folks would (sadly) consider fringe, we might as well actually present
complete thoughts and use complete sentences, no? Or is that thingification?
Chris: "steadily ascending a spiral staircase," my ASS. You're separating
"means" from "ends" and issuing a flexible apology for anti-democratic
"means" *in the abstract* by citing a "sophisticated map," a "theory of
dialectics." And which one would that be? Hegel's? Engel's? Adorno's?
Gayatri fucking Spivak's? You're going to need more than a smokescreen of
stock Marx analogies to back bullshit like that up.
(Reaching for literally the closest M presently at hand, opening to page 1
of the Intro: "The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman...belongs
among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades,
which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a
return to a misunderstood natural life...")
Listen buddy, there are a lot of people on this board whose heads you're
not going to be able to talk over with your hack "dialectics" crap. Maybe
some of us think (with Althusser) that Marx did more than simply "invert"
the Hegelian dialectic--he changed its operation as well, to that of a
complex dynamic overdetermined whole. Or maybe some of us think (with Harry
Cleaver) that the movement of the dialectic amounts to the movement of the
(discursive, technical) recuperation of autonomous working-class struggles.
And some of us couldn't care less which analysis is correct because, for
the most part at least, theory isn't going to win shit.
So either you actually say what you mean, or you give concrete examples of
these anti-democratic "means" you support in the abstract (apparently
because they *could, in theory* represent an stage in a greater sequence of
unfoldings of contradictions) and see if they elicit any sympathies from
the anarchists you're trying to win over. I have a lot of similar
reservations to Hodgson's reasoning (I think) but honestly, fuck off with
the Dialectics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, because to tell you
the truth you're making those of us anarchists on this board who do believe
in class struggle and long-term strategy feel pretty embarassed to be on
your side of this issue.
FROM
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/21/7159959
