o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

More documents

Recommendations

Info

anarchy 117 Networking embraces a wide range of activities – cultural, political and economic. In 1969, Kingsley Widmer identified networking with the furtherance of rebellious life-styles, institutional subversion and ‘refusing’: challenging the institutional order through radical criticism, ‘the dissident way, the comic resistance, the emphatic difference, the intransigent act’. 51 As John Clark argues, networking has a ‘psychosocial’ dimension. The purpose of waging this kind of struggle is to ‘combat domination’ and ‘self-consciously seek to maintain ... personalistic human relationships’. 52 In the 1970s, Giovanni Baldelli described the process of community networking as the mobilization of ethical capital. Today, many new anarchists draw on the image of the rhizome to capture a similar idea. Some anarchists like this idea because it emphasizes the ecological thrust of their experiments. Thus, the Rhizome collective in Texas is about bicycles, herbalism, edible landscaping, rain catching and ‘sustainability community organizing’. For others, the rhizome is a metaphor for the plurality of the networking process. A debate in New Zealand about the renaming of an anarchist magazine includes an exchange between an activist preferring the title ‘mycorhiza’ (inspired by the ‘symbiotic association of the mycelium of a fungus with the roots of certain plants’) and another who suggests rhizome. The clinching argument is that rhizome is ‘a very good analogy for anarchism’ because ‘it is a non-hierarchical roots system (i.e. anarchist grass roots ...) ... not just a term for something “ecological”’. 53 Networks can be local, regional and even international. The Anarchist Black Cross, set up to help victims of Franco’s oppression, is a network of support groups which assists prisoners all over the world to obtain basic human rights and fight against ‘prisons and the poverty, racism and genocide that accompanies them’. Other tangible examples of networking include the establishment of housing and worker co-operatives, autonomous meeting centres – the Reithalle in Bern is one example – and participation in LET systems (local exchange currency systems). As Carol Ehrlich notes, networking has limitless possibilities: Developing alternative forms of organization means building selfhelp clinics, instead of fights to get one radical on a hospital’s board of directors; it means women’s video groups and newspapers, instead of commercial television and newspapers; living collectives, instead of isolated nuclear families; rape crisis centres; food co-ops;
118 anarchism: a beginner’s guide parent-controlled day-care centres; free schools, printing co-ops; alternative radio groups, and so on. 54 Recently anarchist anti-globalizers have associated community networking with the emergence of alternative economies. They point to the emergence of gift economies, living economies and local currency systems, to land reclamation projects undertaken by groups like Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement and programmes for sustainable and bio-diverse agriculture – for example, EcoVilla in Ecuador, to show how local experiments can provide a real alternative to corporate capitalism. 55 The enthusiasm with which European anarchists have greeted these experiments is often informed by an appreciation of their diversity and by a willingness to avoid automatically slotting them into frameworks of anarchist politics. In other cases, however, anarchists draw back to the anthropological arguments advanced by anarchists like Kropotkin and through the medium of ‘natural anarchy’ treat these experiments as examples of anarchy in action. The disagreement parallels the difference between those who understand the rhizome to describe a principle of organization and those who see it as a particular kind of eco-activity. Either way, there is a tendency within both positions to read anarchy into any network – to prioritize the movement over the goal. Whereas intentional communities seek to develop anarchy in isolation from wider society, networks aim to extend anarchist practices in all areas of social life – in rural and urban, industrial environments. The problem posed by networking is not, as Taylor suggests, how to develop inter-communal relations, but to show that the networks themselves are anarchist in any significant sense. Some anarchists have detected a potential fuzziness in networking theory. Only a year after embracing ‘refusal’ as a form of anarchist protest, Kingsley Widmer wrote in Anarchy: Our sympathy for countering culture should remain this side of the populist murkiness of the protesting young and its unpromising wooziness and passivity. Any critical effort suggests that we won’t get a ‘political end’ without some sort of ‘political means’. Certainly we need a radical change in sensibility, but if it does not include social and political effectiveness it will not end as a change at all. 56 The difficulty to which Widmer points, has manifested itself in political as well as cultural spheres of action. In particular, debates between anarcha-feminists suggest that networking can blunt anarchist ideas rather than extend them. In the late 1960s and ’70s
Page 2 and 3:
anarchism a beginner’s guide
Page 4 and 5:
anarchism a beginner’s guide ruth
Page 6 and 7:
contents Acknowledgements vii intro
Page 8:
acknowledgements A number of people
Page 11 and 12:
2 anarchism: a beginner’s guide a
Page 13 and 14:
4 anarchism: a beginner’s guide r
Page 15 and 16:
6 anarchism: a beginner’s guide a
Page 17 and 18:
8 anarchism: a beginner’s guide w
Page 19 and 20:
10 anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28:
Page 29 and 30:
Page 31 and 32:
Page 33 and 34:
Page 35 and 36:
Page 37 and 38:
Page 39 and 40:
Page 41 and 42:
Page 43 and 44:
Page 45 and 46:
Page 47 and 48:
Page 49 and 50:
Page 51 and 52:
Page 53 and 54:
chapter two anarchist rejections of
Page 55 and 56:
Page 57 and 58:
Page 59 and 60:
Page 61 and 62:
Page 63 and 64:
Page 65 and 66:
Page 67 and 68:
Page 69 and 70:
Page 71 and 72:
Page 73 and 74:
Page 75 and 76: 66 anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Page 95 and 96: chapter three anarchy We have alway
Page 125: 116 anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180:
chapter five concluding remarks Stu
Page 181 and 182:
Page 184 and 185:
index Page numbers in italic denote
Page 186 and 187:
index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
Page 188 and 189:
index 179 and state 30, 45-6, 50, 5
show all

o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?