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Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train
- smacktoward 8y ago> The closer I got to New York, stands of pine trees gave way to warehouses, vast troughs of commerce where tractor-trailers lined up to feed. A few miles past the Joyce Kilmer Service Area... Either God or the state of New Jersey appears to have a pretty dark sense of humor.
- false-mirror 8y agoThis was a really well written piece. I was expecting a typical caricature of anarchism, but was pleasantly surprised. It is interesting how much history is forgotten in the US left
- omegaworks 8y agowhy snipe the left when your statement broadly applies?
- sewercake 8y agoI didn't take OPs comment as a 'snipe' -- America has a relatively weak left wing political base / history. Most of the canonical left wing thinkers, events, and successes have occurred outside of America, so it's always nice (and a little surprising) to hear about little tidbits of history like this.
- mempko 8y agoThis isn't true at all. The USA has a strong left-wing history and events. These are forgotten in America but remembered by the rest of the world. It's just that nowhere has this history been more "erased" than in the USA. The rest of the world remembers. - An example is May 1st, international workers day which was inspired by the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago. - Another example is the Republican party! which was started by Socialists in Wisconsin. - Or the fact that Abraham Lincoln corresponded with Marx (most Americans read Marx at the time) and one of his army generals distributed the communist manifesto to the public during the civil war. - The writings of Thomas Paine were incredibly popular in the USA and abroad. - Russian Anarchists like Tolstoy was inspired by American Quackers, who later inspired Gandhi. - Influential thinkers like Chomsky and David Graeber are alive and American. The connections are deep!
- ultrarunner 8y agoWhile there were a few midwestern socialists that joined on the newly formed (past tense, at this point) Republican Party, it was very much committed to limited governmental intervention. The idea that there are socialist ideas at the bedrock of the Republican Party is misleading. Those are a much later development. Read Tolstoy. He was chiefly inspired by the Quakers' nonviolence. In reality, the Quakers themselves were a heavily Republican group (insofar as they identified with government force at all). While there are left-wing inspired (and somewhat developmental) incidents throughout US history, I wouldn't characterize the situation as either "strong" or "erased." On the contrary, the U.S. has accepted many people fleeing from failed or failing socialist states, which may affect the local popular understanding of true left-wing ideology.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DFHippie 8y agoThere are still American Quakers. Though there have been many schisms, they are not now a heavily Republican group by any stretch. They were when Lincoln was in office, of course, but party identification underwent a well-known realignment over the past 150 years, so if 19th century Quakers are who you have in mind, this is more a misleading than an enlightening observation. Full disclosure: I grew up Quaker. The Quakers I knew were more like this fellow than Herbert Hoover or Nixon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Morrison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Morrison
- drb91 8y agoI would interpret left here in opposition to liberals, which have been much stronger since Clinton came to power. See: Century of the Self.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- omegaworks 8y agoIt's a mistake to conflate leftism and liberalism. The parent poster should have made themselves clearer and avoided cheap shots. My point stands. The case that history has been forgotten by the left, in particular, is not made by false-mirror nor the article in question. It is implied that the left has some unique amnesia. For what purpose, we are left to speculate.
- joe_the_user 8y agoThe article is fair in describing anarchists are 1910-20 as a multifaceted group. The article is unfair in implying that anarchists of today are not this (certainly not all anarchists focus on fighting neo-Nazis and not all who fight neo-Nazis are anarchists). I think you can find just about anything visible in 1910 today as well (for good and ill). The emphases are different and scale is different but that's about it.
- Iv 8y agoTo be fair, anyone claiming to be an anarchist and not strongly opposed to neo-nazis would be in a weird ideological spot. Historically, anarchists have always fought authoritarianism. Anarchism often seems vague as an ideology because its foundation is not an ideal, but the rejection of the values that are at the core of the fascist ethos.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y agoI'm an Anarchist. I hate neo-nazis (or any kind of Nazis really), though that doesn't mean that I hate the left any less than I hate a neo-/Nazi. In fact I despise (hate is a strong word, feeling sorry is more accurate) anyone, stupid enough to align themselves with any form of organized politics and power structures. Depending on how hard core you are you probably be forced to run against the law in most places (or in the more fucked up places you might even be labeled a terrorist). These labels (Anarchist, Atheist) aren't helpful. They are designed usually to demonize an outside group. Also if I were to gather with other Anarchists even it's just to play chess it's probably no longer Anarchism but some form of grass-roots political movement. The point of anarchism is not taking part like the Jawari or Andaman people, or the hill tribes in South East Asia. see also James C. Scott: "The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia" https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf
- LifeLiverTransp 8y agoOr the family-clans in somalia?
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago"...Steltonites didn’t hide their radicalism, raising a red fag on the water tower (which angry locals climbed up and tore down)..." I... assume this is a typo? I had to reread a few times.
- brooklyn_ashey 8y agoand... why not a black flag anyway?
- jhbadger 8y agoBefore the Soviet Union, "red" didn't mean exclusively Communist. Many left-wing groups used red flags.
- johannes1234321 8y agoAnd it still do - lot's of social democratic parties over Europe use red. I.e. UK Labour Party or German SPD. Typically lighter red than communist groups.
- drb91 8y agoThe PSL and DSA also use red heavily.
- icebraining 8y agoMany anarchist groups use the black+red diagonal flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#Bisected_flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#Bisected_f...
- Iv 8y agoAnarchists used the socialist red flag most of the time. They switched to black flags when red flags became forbidden in protests e.g. in France after the repression of the Commune. They used a loophole there: they said that this was not a political symbol but a sign of sorrow and commemoration. Later on, communists and anarchists would part ways, mostly during the Russian revolutions even though some diverged earlier. But make no mistake, there is very little ambiguity in most historical anarchist movements: their ideals are socialists. The reason why a lot of them they rejected communism was not because of their socialist ideals, but because of the policies they implemented in practice, that were very authoritarian. Anarchists were very early considered political opponents by USSR. Censorship for instance is totally incompatible with anarchism.
- wyclif 8y agoI'm conservative politically, but there's a lot to be said, I think, about the written work of the smarter anarchists and those of a similar philosophy on the continental old Left. I'm thinking of, say, Debord and Castoriadis.
- ralusek 8y ago"Anarchism" is a completely useless term. On the surface level, it would appear to mean "the absence of a state," and therefore effectively take the form of anarcho-capitalism. In practice, however, most people that actually identify as anarchist are far left authoritarian socialists who cannot help but dance around whatever conception of a state they've described as being anything but. The utility of the term "anarchy" to mean "a nonexistent state" is actually an incredibly useful label, as the next closest approximation to that definition is probably the equally loaded "libertarian," so it's very unfortunate that it's effectively made to be synonymous with "radical socialism" in practice. We already have a descriptor for that: radical socialism. Why can't anarchy just mean the absence of a collective mandate?
- claudiawerner 8y ago"Anarchy" as a word for what social anarchists mean (collective means of production, abolition of capital) is what it originally meant - so did "libertarian". Even Rothbard admits that the term was co-opted by "anarcho"capitalists, and it does not mean anarchy at all for them. Anarchy means "without rule", not merely "without the state". Please read up on the history of anarchism. Further, it's worth learning how capitalism without the state cannot exist in any meaningful sense. There are plenty of anarchist authors you can read on this point.
- 0815test 8y agoI don't think the "abolition of capital" is something that many anarchists would find desirable, outside of anarcho-primitivism. The computer or device you're using to post this comment is capital. And the thing about anarcho-primitivism is that it's at least a consistent approach to having "collective means of production" and the like, because collective, informal decision making (without any "ruler"-like figures) only scales to groups as large as a forager band or tribe, the largest of which are about 150 members. Any larger than that, and you start to get powerful chieftains and "big men" engaging in recognizable forms of politics to manage and expand their power.
- 8y ago