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ANARCHISM TODAY ANARCHISM TODAY RANDALL AMSTER Foreword by John Clark 0 PRAEGER AN IMPRINT OF ABC-CLIO, llC Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England Copyright 2012 by Randall Amster All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amster, Randall. Anarchism today I Randall Amster ; foreword by john Clark. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-39872-8 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN 978-0-313-39873-5 (ebook) 1. Anarchism. I. Title. HX833.A47 2012 335'.83-dc23 2011046778 ISBN: 978-0-313-39872-8 EISBN: 978-0-313-39873-5 16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper oo: Manufactured in the United States of America For Arlo, a shining star, and Zeno, a natural-born anarchist ... Contents Foreword by John Clark IX Preface X Ill Acknowledgments xvn Introduction: The Resurgence of Anarchism XIX 1 Contemporary Anarchist Thought 1 2 Anarchism in Action 23 3 The Violence Question 43 4 Anarchist Ecologies 63 5 "Do It Yourself"-Together 87 6 From the Local to the Global 119 7 Assessing Anarchism's Impact 145 Conclusion: Anarchism as Future Vision 165 Notes 177 Bibliography 207 Index 225 Foreword he best political works are those that are rooted most deeply in the truths of experience, maintaining their connection with the demands ofT the real lives of people and communities. Randall Amster's Anarchism Today is one of those works. I firstmet Randall in September of 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. My friend Leenie Halbert had just opened up her house as a center for relief activities. Volunteers-a spirited collection of anarchists, greens, friends, and neighbors-had spontaneously gathered, inspired in part by the anarchist-influenced Common Ground Collective that had organized a week before. Randall and a group of wonderful student vol­ unteers from Prescott College appeared, and they immediately became an integral part of our small community. Sometimes, in a period of severe crisis and great trauma, the desire for a better world is vividly awakened. Sometimes, it impels people to begin to create that better world, here and now, in the midst of the crisis. This is what Rebecca Solnit writes about beautifully in her excellent book A Paradise Built in Hell. 1 It seems to me that this was very much what occurred in our little solidarity community. I think that we had the good fortune, in those difficult times, to experience vividly some of the most basic things that anarchist community is all about. A reporter from the New York daily Newsday wrote an article entitled "On a Street Named Desire" about our work.2 He described our group as "people who believe in do-it-yourself action within small groups," who wanted to "feed the hungry and bring water to the thirsty, to fixthe bro­ ken homes of the neighbors and to offer a sense of community in their deserted streets." As Leenie explained it, "I just wanted to bring love back to my neighborhood." x Foreword To me, all this expresses perfectly the spirit of anarchism, a spirit that is also conveyed eloquently in Randall Amster's book. He says, at one point, in a wonderfully revealing passage, "I truly love anarchism in the same way that I love humankind." I find this to be very moving and inspiring. What is our political practice really about? We are fortunate, indeed, if we can say that it is above all a way of loving people, and loving the earth. Ideally, this is what our life's work should be about. This is the meaning of "right livelihood," and it also describes the goal of an anar­ chist community. Certain transformative experiences have the potential to become the models by which to judge the rest of our lives. We can come to learn that an anarchist life means, at least in part, overcoming the devastating and demoralizing instrumentalization of our lives by the system of domina­ tion. One of our great musical geniuses, Dr. John, wrote a famous song entitled "Right Place, Wrong Time." We all know the experience. To live an anarchist life means that, at least part of the time, as in our experience "On A Street Named Desire," we can have a sense of being in exactly the right place, doing exactly the right thing, at exactly the right time. And it means looking forward to, and striving for, a day when this is what every­ one's everyday life will be like. Strangely, many discussions of anarchism, including some of the most technically competent ones, fail to focus on what is most basic, most meaningful, and most compelling about anarchism. A great strength of Randall's book is that he continually brings us back to these basics. He reminds the reader that anarchism is not a collection of abstract hypothe­ ses about the state or other theoretical questions, but rather "a sensibility, a way of being in the world, an ethos, a vision, a cosmology." It's an all­ encompassing mode of thought and practice. It's a way of experiencing the world and living in the world, and specifically, a way of being­ together in the world and being-together with the world. Randall gets exactly to the point in proclaiming that anarchism is about "reclaiming our essential humanity" and "our innate conviviality." Anarchism is not, contrary to a common criticism, a naive belief in the "essential goodness" of everyone. However, it is a belief that as malleable as human beings may be, there are certain realities rooted deeply in our evolutionary heritage and our social history upon which we can draw in our pursuit of a world of mutual aid and solidarity. Tibetans call this res­ ervoir of goodness Lha, the beneficent spirit within each person. Many other traditions have similar concepts. But contemporary researchers such as Michael Tomasello have also demonstrated, in experiments showing that infants and young children exhibit spontaneous altruism, Foreword xi that these realities are empirically verifiable.3 There is a material basis for solidarity! It has been popular recently to describe anarchist projects as "prefig­ urative," a term that is often explained by using the Gandhian injunction (perhaps never actually uttered by Gandhi) to "be the change you want to see." But despite all the talk about pre-figuring,for anarchists the "be" is always more important than the "pre." As Randall stresses again and again in this book, anarchism is above all about realizing the free commu­ nity here and now. As he notes, "Anarchy is everywhere." This has always been a major theme in anarchist thought, from Reclus's and Kropotkin's classic works on the ubiquity of mutual aid in human history and nature to Colin Ward's recent accounts of "anarchy in action." In Anarchism Today, we find several long lists of a multitude of forms of anarchist organization that are going on right now. These lists convey an idea of the vast scope of anarchist activity, as well as of the very spe­ cific ways in which a new world really is being created within the shell of the old. There is no need to repeat the lists, since you are about to read the book. The important thing to note is that they depict the development of a many-sided project of social transformation. Randall shows that contemporary anarchism is a very practical effort that takes on (to sum­ marize brieflya vast project) the creation of a new ethos, a new counter­ ideology, a new social imaginary, and new forms of organization, all of which add up a new world of free, cooperative communities. This relates to another of Randall's pervasive themes. He rightly places enormous emphasis on the importance of direct action in anarchism. A major issue in contemporary left theory has been the "Problem of the Act. " This preoccupation is a reaction to the decline of truly radical and revolutionary left movements across the globe, as well as to the seeming lack of any will to fundamentally challenge the system of domination. In the context of a demoralized and immobilized left, we can only conclude, as this book attests to, that contemporary anarchism is where the action is-where the potential for "the Act" really lies-today. Randall conveys very well the fact that the contemporary anarchist milieu is unusual in being to a great degree the locus of "spaces of hope." We might say more anarchistically that it generates very vital, concrete, and localized places of hope. It is a community that still has a sense of the possible and is in the process of making the possible actual. Finally, Randall signals something absolutely crucial about anarchism when he notes that "both our fulfillment and our salvation" depend on our creating the new world of free community and solidarity. In an age of disastrously disruptive climate change and of the looming catastrophe xii Foreword of the Sixth Great Mass Extinction in the history of life on earth, talk of survival is not misplaced.
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