radicalarchives

Revolutionary Anarchist #3 (1973)

radicalarchives — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:49:25 +0000

Seattle’s Revolutionary Anarchist #3 was a tight, action-packed issue that I found in the archives. This July 1973 issue was a “joint publishing project of the Seattle section of the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation and the Revolutionary Anarchist Print Fund, and is edited by David Brown”.

The articles are:

Dan Raphael, “Taking the Left to Task”

Dan Raphael, “Another Letter to the Left”

Black Rose Anarcho-Feminists, “Blood of the Flower: An Anarchist-Feminist Statement”

“Who We Are: An Anarcho-Feminist Manifesto” (from Siren)

“Free Martin Sostre”

Shawn Crowley, “Red and Black Books: An Alternative to That Warehouse Feeling”

Andy Crusciel, “Report On Toronto Anarchist Conference”

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click on the image below to see the PDF of the entire issue

Alvin Gouldner – Marxism, independent intellectuals, and the academy (1973)

radicalarchives — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:38:24 +0000

The most profound indication of this development is to be found in the societal re-mapping sought by Maoism which is laying the groundwork for the elimination of the academic intelligentsia. As Robert Guillain remarks in Le Monde, ‘It is no over-simplification of the massive series of reforms [of the ‘Cultural Revolution’]…to say that their key objective—defined by Chairman Mao himself—is the elimination of the ‘academic intellectual.’ As the intensity of the Red Guard movement subsided, it became increasingly evident that the elimination of the academic intelligentsia was one of the most important items on the agenda of the Cultural Revolution. This effort is resonated in the West by the anti-intellectualism of the bureaucratized lumpen intelligentsia and in the self-hatred of certain gauchiste intellectuals.

…

Marxism, however, was in the beginning the creation of a library-haunting, bookstore-browsing, museum-loving—and hence leisure-possessing—academic intelligentsia of the very sort that Maoism now seeks to excise. It does not matter, of course, that Engels himself had no university training; and it does not matter that Marx never achieved the professorship that, when young, he had coveted; for both were mandarins at heart. They had both assimilated and embodied the culture of the Western university. Marx was the product and possessor of a high European culture who knew his Goethe by heart; who read Aeschylus in the original; who had a boundless respect for Shakespeare, whom he had his daughters memorize; who took pleasure in reading two or three novels at one time, ranking Balzac and Cervantes before other novelists; who, when disturbed, might take refuge in algebra; and who actually wrote an infinitesimal calculus. In a letter to his daughter Laura in 1868 he describes himself as a ‘…machine condemned to devour books…’. When Marx died, on 14 March 1883, he was where one might expect him—at his desk.

Whatever its ultimate destiny and destination, Marxism was originally a creation of the West. Born of European culture, Marxism is simply unthinkable without the complex of institutions that centre on the university, which trains and provides livings for secular intelligentsia. Marx and Engels, and all the epigones of every nationality that follow after them, are unthinkable without the countless books, journals, newspapers, libraries, bookstores, publishing houses, and even Party schools, whose cadres and culture constitute a dense infrastructure at who centre there is the Western university. No university, no intelligentsia, no Marxism.

The gulf between Maoism and Soviet Marxism derives largely from the fact that Soviet Marxism understands and respects this, while Maoism understands but rejects it. Soviet Marxism and Stalinism sought to control the university and to guarantee the loyalty of intellectuals and scientists to Party precepts and leadership; it never sought to stop the university and to eliminate the self-reproduction of the academic intelligentsia, as Maoism has.

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from Alvin W. Gouldner, For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today (NY: Basic Books, 1973), pp 450-52.

Oswald Spengler on anarchists (1918)

radicalarchives — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 01:41:57 +0000

“Truly our future lies on one hand in Prussian conservatism after it has been cleansed of all feudal-agrarian narrowness and on the other in the working people after they have freed themselves from the anarchist-radical masses.”

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cited in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimer and the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK, et. al.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), page 49. He cites Walter Struve, “Oswald Spengler: Caesar and Croesus,” in Elites Against Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 1973), pages 236-37, whose source in turn is apparently a “Letter of December 27, 1918 to Hans Klores” in Briefe 1913–1936, ed. Anton M. Koktanek and Manfred Schroter (Munich 1963), page 115.

This is of particular interest as Spengler has been cited favorably by John Zerzan, Green Anarchy, and Dwight Macdonald, and the neo-Spenglerian historian Arnold Toynbee was a strong influence on Fredy Perlman.

Buck-Morss on Adorno and the Spanish Civil War (1977)

radicalarchives — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:44:45 +0000

“Although Sidney Webb lent his name in support of the Frankfurt Institute when it was forced to emigrate, Adorno seems to have had no contact with him or others in the Fabian Society. He never joined the pacifist movements then so strong in English universities, and one searches his writings in vain for even a mention of the Spanish Civil War.”

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from Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), page 139.

Pernicone on Italian “individualist” anarchists (1993)

radicalarchives — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:21:56 +0000

[Luigi] Galleani, [Pietro] Gori, and the others restored a measure of activism among a militant minority of the rank and file, reestablished a following among workers in several regions, and generally fostered a resurgence of the movement discernible by the end of decade. Unquestionably, they represented the best of the new generation. But the 1880s also produced another element that represented anarchism at its worst, a group of fanatics whose intolerance and fractious behavior operated to the complete detriment of the movement—the so-called individualists.

The individualists were not disciples of Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, John Henry Mackay, or other theorists of individualist anarchism, none of whom were known in Italy until the twentieth century. The Italian individualists of this period were an evolutionary offshoot of the antiorganizationalist current, a spontaneous mutation amounting to a new breed. Although they frequently called themselves anarchist communists, the individualists defied description in standard ideological terms. Basically, they were amoralists who embodied the worst attitudes and propensities of the antiorganizationalist current: egoistic preoccupation with individual autonomy and free initiative; unwavering rejection of organization of any form; isolation from and contempt for the masses; and, in some cases, a strong tendency toward individual acts of violence.

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from Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Oakland & Edinburgh: AK Press, 1993/2009), page 239.

RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: The similarities between the late 19th / early 20th Italian anti-organizationalist anarchists and today’s insurrectionist current has not received the attention it deserves.

Adorno on reactionary arguments against Western culture (1951)

radicalarchives — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 23:54:50 +0000

“Not the least among the tasks now confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive enlightenment.”

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Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (New York: Verso, 1951/2005), section 122 (“Monograms”), page 192.

Also of interest in this line of thought is Adorno’s essay “Spengler After the Decline,” which is available in Prisms, an anthology of Adorno’s essays.

Murray Bookchin: anarchism vs anarcho-syndicalism (1992)

radicalarchives — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:57:57 +0000

“Presyndicalist forms of anarchism were occupied with human liberation, in which the interests of the proletariat were not neglected, to be sure, but were fused in a generalized social interest that spanned a broad horizon of needs, concerns, and problems. Ultimately the satisfaction and resolution of these needs, concerns, and problems could be met only in the commune, not in a part of it, such as the factory, workshop, or farm.”

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in “The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism,” available here.

RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: We’ll stop with the Bookchin after this!!

Murray Bookchin: anarchism is “simply not a social theory” (2002)

radicalarchives — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:46:27 +0000

“By the same token, anarchism – which, I believe, represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action – is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory. Its foremost theorists celebrate its seeming openness to eclecticism and the liberatory effects of “paradox” or even “contradiction,” to use Proudhonian hyperbole. Accordingly, and without prejudice to the earnestness of many anarchistic practices, a case can made that many of the ideas of social and economic reconstruction that in the past have been advanced in the name of “anarchy” were often drawn from Marxism (including my own concept of “post-scarcity,” which understandably infuriated many anarchists who read my essays on the subject). Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization. Anarchism’s idea of self-regulation (auto-nomos) led to a radical celebration of Nietzsche’s all-absorbing will. Indeed the history of this “ideology” is peppered with idiosyncratic acts of defiance that verge on the eccentric, which not surprisingly have attracted many young people and aesthetes.

In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos) – the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare – leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.”

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from “The Communalist Project” which is available online here, where it indicates that the essay was first published in Communalism: International Journal for a Rational Society, 2 (November 2002).

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RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE:

Obviously this piece belongs to Bookchin’s post-anarchist Communalist period. Here, as with the works of many politically-engaged intellectuals, one should be sure to untangle the author’s perceptive historical and philosophical insights from their polemics.

Errico Malatesta: nineteenth-century anarchism impregnated with marxism

radicalarchives — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:31:35 +0000

“Almost all the anarchist literature of the nineteenth century was impregnated with Marxism.”

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cited in Daniel Guerin’s “Marxism and Anarchism,” in David Goodway (ed), For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice (London & NY: Routledge, 1989), p 117.

Albert Meltzer: variants of anarchism dreamed up by professors (1996)

radicalarchives — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:23:55 +0000

“In other words, there were entirely different philosophies referred to as anarchism. It took me a time to find there were two contradictory theories, one working class and revolutionary, the other an offshoot of liberalism. Now there are a great many variants, some dreamed up by the press or professors. When there were only two, some activist anarchists did not see it that way, and thought of the undoubted differences between the two conceptions as different degrees of commitment and action. They were doomed to frustration or else gave up the struggle in despair trying to reconcile the two.”

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from Albert Meltzer, I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels (SF/London/Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996), p 174.

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RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: While I certainly don’t agree that there are two “entirely different philosophies referred to as anarchism” (and if I did, one of them would not be “an offshoot of liberalism”!), I have come to appreciate Meltzer’s insightful wisdom that professors are apt to dream up new variant theories of anarchism.