Contortions at First Hand:
James Donald on Noam Chomsky
by Dan Clore
Original version can be found here
Region: Non-specific
Categories
Anarchy in Iraq?
An attempt to explain, after the defeat of Saddam back in 2003) why anarchists are not surprised when states disappear that disorder results. Rather than refute anarchism, such events show that the anarchist analysis of social transformation is correct. Anarchy cannot by given, it is an act of self-liberation (both individually and collectively). Once this is understood, the difference between chaos (disorder) and anarchy (without rulers) becomes clear.
A series of letters discussing whether communist-anarchism is a form of anarchism (it is!) and how private property, not communism, violates liberty. Also discusses the question of people who decide not to become communists in a free society.
Categories
Prospects for revolution
This talk was probably part of a debate at a conference of the Irish anarchist groups (WSM, Organise, Class War) in 1994. We are living in a time of great change for the left. For this century the left has been identified with social-democracy (Labour, WP etc.) who saw socialism as being introduced through a few good men taking getting elected through parliament. Or by Leninists who saw socialism as a few good men being put into power by a revolution. Essentially both were variations on the Marxist conception of socialism. Anarchists who argued that socialism could not be brought about by a few good men but only by the self activity of the working class were dismissed as everything from dreamers to bomb throwers.
What do we say to people in the reformist parties? They can not (and should not) be ignored. We say look at the record of your party in government or to the Workers Party when you supported the 1981 minority Fianna Fail government. Look at what your party stands for. Look at the record of your party in the trade union bureaucracy. Look at the historical role reformist parties have played in other countries. Reformism has had it’s test and failed one hundred times.
Article from 1992 looking at the prospects for a growth in anarchism following the collapse of socialism. The tradition in which the anarchists stand is one that socialists need to identify with. For many on the left this will be a difficult process. They were weaned on a diet of slander when it came to anarchism, either being told that anarchists were police agents or that they were not real socialists at all and wanted a return to feudalism. We must resist the temptation to avoid this problem by going "beyond anarchism". The state has been the Achilles heel of 20th century socialism, it is not an issue to be fudged.
An anarchist analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871, showing how it was influenced by anarchism and what lessons anarchists drew from it. It also discusses the Marxist and Leninist analyses of the Commune, showing how alien Leninism is to the spirit of the Commune and to the genuine Marxist theory of the state.
The nature of the working class to-day is quite different from that of a hundred years ago. In the late 80’s a large part of the left interpreted this as meaning socialism was no longer possible, that the best hope was to form alliances with greens and others in a rainbow coalition which would attempt to limit the worst excesses of capitalism.
Where better to start a look at anarchism then to look at the state of the left as a whole. The organised revolutionary left today is at its weakest for many years. Its not so much a question of the triumph of capitalism however as the failure of the bulk of the ideologies of socialism. The collapse of both labourism and the USSR has left the vast bulk of the left confused and demoralised, either dead, dying or repeating decade old slogans in a state of living death.
We should not create a false choice between anarchism and environmentalism but rather ask what sort of environmental theory and action should anarchists favour on the one hand and on the other explain why any environmentalist should also be a class struggle anarchist. Text of talk from April 1995