Arsenal: A Magazine of Anarchist Strategy and
Culture
Fall 2002 #5
$4.00
www.azone.org/arsenalmag
This is a well-written magazine, longer than USA
Today but shorter than say Time Magazine. The two
page articles give readers a taste of some
issues.
We like the first article about "Collectivity and
Purpose," which addresses the plague of
individualism in the anarchist movement. The rest
of the articles are more or less indicative of how
anarchism is in the throes of succumbing to post-
modernism.
The article on schooling by Matt Hern is actually
the best to demonstrate how anarchism without
Marxism has a horrible destiny in front of it.
Karl Marx was only one man, but he occupied such
an intellectual space that we see here in this article
just how hard it is to avoid Marx.
Hern says, "there has to be a way to change this
to make child-rearing a radically democratic
project with community resources allocated by
communities, and with families and kids in charge
of their own education."(p. 9) The rest of the
article is mostly about independent schools that
newly started, their trials and tribulations, but
mostly their successes.
MIM does not want to take anything away from
setting up independent institutions, but the
institutions must be toward a greater end than
"empowerment" of "communities." During the Cold
War, the West held out the example of Yugoslavia
to soften up the "Stalinists" who supported
centralized socialism. Especially in intellectual
circles they cheered about the Tito alternative of
"market socialism" and "decentralized control."
Tito was not an anarchist, but his line on
"communities" ended up being the same as
Liberalism and most self-described anarchism. When
the 1990s generation of Eastern Europe finally
decided to shake everything loose and reconstruct
their institutions, we at MIM consider that they
took a step backward in their "community" oriented
approach which while filled with voting (elections
of the Western approved sort) also came with
community majorities voting for genocide against
other communities--and we hesitate to call those
communities "nationalities," though that's what we
heard them called in the case of Yugoslavia.
The bottom line is that there is no proof anywhere
in the world that emphasis on "decentralization,"
"democracy" (as in voting) and "communities" has
ever produced a peaceful society. All the evidence
from Europe over hundreds of years is exactly the
opposite. Everyone from Hitler to the Ayatollah
Khomeini can win an election. Creating a society
that gets along with others is much more
difficult.
Matt Hern admits that many of the "alternative"
schools are available as a kind of consumerism for
the upper-middle classes. He asks what good are
schools of a certain stay-home kind "if staying at
home with children full-time is only an option for
two-parent, middle-class families, the how
progressive is homeschooling?" (p. 12)
We believe that people like Matt Hern should
separate the joys of teaching from a link to
politics. Teachers do have the daily experience of
setting up organization and teaching things often
where there is otherwise a vacuum. The problem is
that setting up a variety of "alternatives"
encompassing a variety of teachers with various
skills and various consumers is Liberalism. Merely
saying that creating "alternatives" lessens
oppression is a Liberal view, as American as
George Washington.
When this sort of Liberalism intersects with
anarchism it becomes post-modernism. Given the
Liberal assumptions it became unnecessary to Matt
Hern to explain how the issue of exploitation is
connected to education. What we have is a middle-
class utopianism very similar to the kibbutz
movement in I$rael. These sorts of movements know
not their economic underpinnings.
We are not saying to leave a vacuum and not teach.
However, as we said above, that's not a sufficient
approach to liberation overall. Coupled with the
view that "to speak of resisting globalization is
to speak of resisting centralization" (p. 14)
Hern's education views amount to saying that this
or that local approach is as good as another, the
facile relativism underlying much Liberalism and
all post-modernism.
The value of Marxism is that it finds certain
questions unavoidable. What teachers should be
teaching is 1) what is exploitation 2) how can we
measure it by looking at labor conditions 3) how
does it manifest itself 4) how other countries and
communities will feel if there is exploitation of
their community by one's own community or nation
5) what can be done about it.
Typically anarchists avoid these questions as
having no centrality. Often we hear people avoid
them by attacking the messenger instead of the
message. Yet Marx is either right or wrong that
exploitation leads to war and he is either right
or wrong that there has to be a centralized
authority to calculate and set right injustices of
one locality against another. It either works that
way or it does not. The question cannot be made to
go away.
"The Wretched of the Rails" is another interesting
piece, but again it ends up with no underlying
scientific view of how society works. We only have
offered various perspectives, the perspective of
the homeless man living in a subway car for example.
It's easy to see how anarchism deprives itself of
radicalism in this case, because it celebrates a
reform in France that gave some people use of
subway cars to live in. "It was filthy, this is
true. But it was a lot of fun! The idea that it
would all come to an end was just intolerable."
(p. 25) So here we have anarchism glorify yet
one more "alternative" lifestyle--this time living
in a central government approved subway car.
To our mind, it degrades the word "anarchism" to boil
it down to this kind of Liberalism. Certainly we
agree about how society represses all the wrong things
and creates "hang-ups" where there should be none, but we
would be far from calling that a whole political
ideology.
Cindy Milstein offers us that sexual liberalism in
the Netherlands is a good thing and that
anarchism's contribution to the world is to create
new fads every so often. (Obviously it's our use
of the word "fad." For Milstein it's a "new
frontier" every time--within the
capitalist context no less.) She correctly attacks the
Dutch fascists for adopting queer leaders who
nonetheless seek immigration controls, but now she
asks for a fad to attack immigration controls.
Perhaps the real problem is not a lack of clever cultural fad
for that particular problem but leaders who tell people
that guys with guns, sticks and dogs at borders are only a
cultural problem.
Butch Lee correctly attempts to resist a lot of
idealist, lumpen and post-modernist influences in
"Would You Shoplift 'Days of War, Nights of
Love?'" The effort required only proves that this
milieu is going down for the count. The anarchist
activists just are not going to make the effort to
understand what Butch Lee is struggling against
and if they do, it will only be to add that Butch
Lee's perspective is no better than any other or
that it might work in one "community."
The article bringing post-modernism closest to the
surface for those who will not follow these arguments
to their end is "Saving Private Power" by Micky Z.
Just as the reactionaries such as Le Pen have spent the last few
years in an historical revisionism project that says
that Hitler was better than Stalin, our anarchists
including Sakai and post-modernists oblige them by revising all
received wisdom on World War II. Now they quote various
nihilist-idealists like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (who
actually participated in World War II and has since lost
his mind).
A simple and steady commitment to materialism
would resolve our anarchists' problems with post-modernism.
If somebody is going to say World War II was bad, then it
is upon that persyn to show how with the forces available
at the time it could have come out better--not by wishing those
forces more advanced than they were at the time either.
Otherwise, whether they know it or not, the critics become
responsible for a worse outcome than what really happened
in World War II.