From a las barricadas (02/09/2024).
We share Miguel Amorós’ essay, “What is Anarchism?”, not because we are entirely in agreement with it – that has never been an exclusive criterion of selection for us -, but because of the forcefulness of the argument, because of the need not to ignore the anarchist movement’s history when trying to understand anarchism, as Amorós defends, and because of the absurdity of so expanding the limits of anarchism, that it potentially comes to include everyone and every idea opposed to “excessive” authority.
Yet his insistence on defining anarchism exclusively “as an anti-authoritarian current of revolutionary socialism, the intellectual product of the incipient class struggle typical of capitalist society in the early stages of industrialisation”, as a formerly working class revolutionary theory and practice and the need for it to remain revolutionary today (even with the waning and dissolution of the working class, at least as it existed up until WWII), cuts too deep. And it does so because what Amorós dismisses as non-revolutionary – a “bookish”, purely ideological or theoretical anarchism, which is not anarchism, for him – , begs the question of what anarchist revolution is, for the history of the movement and the broader history of social movements points in no single direction.
To endeavour to divide the real anarchists from the pretenders on the grounds of true revolutionaries versus non-revolutionaries appears to us to risk falling into another intellectual orthodoxy, the very thing that Amorós faults non-revolutionary anarchists with.
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Done and to be done: For a manifesto of positive anarchy
From Lundi Matin, #443 (16/09/2024), we share a text by Maria Kakogianni – a manifesto of anarchy -, which by coincidence comes in the wake of our last post, the article by Miguel Amorós, “What is anarchism?”. The contrast between the two pieces may serve to raise – as we believe it does – further, fundamental questions.
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