- Re: Does it include the all-important topic: 'How to make anarchism actually work in a mass, industrial Archived Message
Posted by johnlilburne
on December 19, 2019, 11:35 pm, in reply to "Re: Does it include the all-important topic: 'How to make anarchism actually work in a mass, industrial"
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Black makes a distinction between anarchism and anarchy, but does not really go into it. I like the distinction. Anarchism is an ideology and like any ideology it can take an authoritarian turn. Anarchy is more to do with process, an ongoing dialectical process between the individual and society, anarchising if you like, someone which is never finally resolved. This would happen even if we got rid of the coercive power of the state, oppressing the individual. I agree with John Zerzan when he says: Many languages start out rich in verbs, but are gradually undone by the more common imperialism of the noun. This parallels the movement to a steadily more reified world, focusing on objects and goals at the expense of process. Abstract nouns like 'anarchism' are doubly oppressive. Modern society is dominated by abstractions at the expense of lived experience, process. We need to recover the verb. Modern physics is more about process and relationships than about 'things'. Biology seems to be following suit. I like this quote: Instead of thinking of processes as belonging to things, we should think of things as being derived from processes. This does not mean that things do not exist, even less that thing-concepts cannot be extremely useful or illuminating. What it does imply is that things cannot be regarded as the basic building blocks of reality. What we identify as things are no more than transient patterns of stability in the surrounding flux, temporary eddies in the continuous flow of process. Everything Flows (Page 13). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition. We need to put things in their place, especially reified concepts like 'anarchism'. |