Taking Ourselves Seriously Part 2

A talk given at Bluestockings Books in New York, New York on Sunday, October 18, 2009 by members of the Institute for Anarchist Studies with Josh MacPhee, Maia Ramnath, and Joshua Stephens. Anarchism has become a widely espoused organizational practice in radical American communities, but many anarchists seem to revel in the margins and are prone to dismissing their own potential. Join our panelists for a discussion of the long haul of social transformation as we work toward an egalitarian, directly democratic society.

This is the second part of the talk withJosh MacPhee of the IAS . The entire talk can be found at archive.org under "Taking Ourselves Seriously." http://www.archive.org/details/TakingOurselvesSeriously You can learn more about the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) here: http://www.anarchist-studies.org/

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[sabot96]

The reason why you are having problems moving to a larger scale is that the idea of Anarchism can't scale to a world wide scale. It is like asking why can't I scale my individualism to a world wide scale? The reason is you can't find enough people that are the same as you. World wide scale requires conformity to an external system. This negates the entire purpose of anarchism.

[DonVoghano]

You should change name to actual democrats, that would work! :D

[AntiLoquaxx]

The problem is, to someone who isn't aware of anarchist theory, those words have a lot less meaning. They don't represent what they represent to you. So, we also need to explain what they mean to us. Explaining free association does take some time. Not a lot, but maybe more than some people's attention span, especially those immersed in mainstream "western" culture. By talking about it, we can make our catch phrases generally understood, making communication easier, though.

[DeraJa]

I can define my anarchism in one word. free-association. OR voluntary OR individual-sovereignty. quite easy to describe my anarchism.

[TheLeftLibertarian]

The speaker makes some great points. I think one of the biggest problems with anarchism is that it takes so long to explain. People can only see it from a skewed perspective like kids spray-painting walls etc. But we have made some progress with the actual issues. Unfortunately, aside from the issues, we have been completely marginalized.