Anarchism and Its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein

Author:Cindy Milstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus
Published: 2010-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Forms of self-Organization

Here’s where we put the icing on the cake: prefigurative forms of self-organization, in all their innovative variety. Fortunately, though, everyone gets to eat the cake. Anarchism’s reconstructive visions practice how to reorganize society. They put direct action into, well, action.

Direct action takes two forms. Its “positive” or proactive form is the power to create. People do things now the way that they want to see them done, increasingly, in the future, without representative and vertical forms of power. They ignore the “higher” powers, and flex their own collective muscles to make and implement decisions over their lives. The “negative” or reactive form of direct action, the power to resist, uses direct means to challenge the bad stuff—for example, a general strike to stop a war. Both types of direct action are useful, of course. They also go hand in hand. Students, faculty, and support staff at a university, for instance, can occupy an administration building to protest budget cuts and at the same time utilize directly democratic processes to self-determine their course of action (which may then embolden the occupiers to want an altogether different form of education). A Cop Watch project can use free and open-source communication technologies, such as pirate radio, as a way for people to directly report on and hinder police abuses, and at the same time develop neighborhood-run media.47 But it’s when people increasingly take charge, instituting and participating in nonhierarchical organization, that they begin to have the power to reshape society, rather than simply the “power” to react against those forces that ultimately have power over them.

We’ve come full circle to the conception of anarchism as aspiring toward free individuals within a free society. We’re fully in the realm of self-determination, self-management, and self-governance, as living realities, even if in embryonic forms. The only way to build such new social relationships and institutions is to birth and nurture them ourselves. Anarchists are always involved in all manner of self-organized projects, both at the subterranean level, operating beneath the surface to craft new bases for social and ecological life, and with a powerfully relevant visibility that reflects commonsense notions of how everyone could live their lives together, and the many inchoate ways we already do.48

Many anarchist projects happen within anarchist circles or are geared toward other anarchists. This allows anarchists to experiment with forms of organizations among relatively like-minded people who are already committed to them. It also facilitates the development of a much-needed self-managed infrastructure to develop ideas, build skills, and mentor future generations of anarchists. For example, the resource listing in the annual Slingshot Organizer—a self-organized project in its own right—reveals the informal global confederation of collectively run anarchist bookstores and infoshops.49 The three groups involved in publishing this book—the Institute for Anarchist Studies, AK Press, and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative—run on internally egalitarian models and are practicing forms of mutual aid in this collaborative book series. 50 Anarchist political organizations, ranging here in North America from the city-based Pittsburgh Organizing

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.