It takes a lot of guts to declare oneself an anarchist these days, especially after Seattle. Even before Seattle most people associated anarchism, as a political movement, with waving black flags, Molotov cocktails and bombs. Ask someone on the street what anarchists are about and chances are you'll get an answer along the lines of "They just want chaos and to tear everything down." There's little chance that you'll hear that anarchism is a political theory and movement that is anti-statist and means to create a new vision of society.

Nonetheless, if you look at what's gone on with social activism, especially anti-globalization activism, over the past few years, anarchists are at the center of a lot of the action. So, when I see questions for the Left like those raised by our Mr. Morcom and an increase in the numbers and sophistication -- not to mention the international reach -- of the protests we are now witnessing, I tend to dig among the participants for their ideological roots. Thus, reading Social Anarchism, I was looking for lessons we might be able to learn from the Anarchists.

Here is a passage from the essay "An Anarchist Reponse to Seattle: What Shall We Do With Anarchism?" by Rebecca DeWitt which I found quite telling when considering the quandary of the Left:

At one of many protest marches, I overheard a woman yelling at the protesters to either pay for what they were doing or go home. This woman was voicing the reality that we have to pay for free speech. Groups like Global Exchange want the Starbuck's coffee chain to give Central American coffee growers more money for their crops. If they don't then consumers will boycott. This type of activism acceptss the category of consumerism, suggests that we control capitalism with capitalism, and puts the burden of change on the individual no matter what their circumstances are.

When I looked for alternatives, I found little other than proposals dependent upon the state or that assumed the continued existence of the WTO [World Trade Organization.] Consider this statement from Public Citizen: "Our task now is to fight for a global trading system that is democratically accountable and aimed at meeting the needs of people, not simply the world's largest corporations." (Statement by Lori Wallach of Public Citizen) It is uncritically given that a global trading system will meet the needs of the people if only it is democratic. This statement presupposes the acceptance of democracy as it is today: a centralized bureaucratic structure removed from people's control. What most people think of as democracy is a professional body such as the state that, in fact, acts as an intermediary to freedom. When we demand democracy, but not in a way that is explicitly anti-statist, we are calling on the very same body that needs the WTO to carry out trade policies because political control is never given to the people in the first place...

In "conventional" politics, what is described by Ms. DeWitt is called "accepting the debate as framed by the opposition." That's not just a weakness of anarchists, but a general weakness of the Left. Too often we fail to be the framers of the proposition. We take it for granted that what we see is all there is, rather than truly challenging the status quo with an alternative vision of the future. This puts us in the trap of pointing out what is wrong with our society (and thus coming off sounding like a group of whiners) as opposed to presenting a vision of what our society can be like under more rational, sustainable and (we should trumpet it!) better models. The Vision thing.

As we were walking back from the coffee shop, I shared with Howard some of my own feelings about attending the protests at the Bush inaugural, especially my sense that lessons of social activism were not being passed on by we old radicals to the new generation staging many of the anti-globalization protests today. Howard disagreed with some of my points, based on his sense that the Internet was a much more effective organizing tool than any we had had in "our day" and his sense that some lessons can't be passed on, they have be learned first-hand. But he went on to posit the notion that, at least among activists here in the United States, there is the added hurdle presented by the general anti-intellectualism that is inherited from the larger culture. This anti-intellectual streak, he suggested, made it almost anathema for the young to accept any form of "expertise" or "authority," even from their fellow-travelers.

I've given that last a lot of thought, because I hadn't connected American anti-intellectualism with reformist movements here before. Howard's argument immediately resonated for me. It does seem that a lot of the fragmentation and seeming lack of organization on the Left has a lot to do with "Who made you the boss of me?"

This, too, plays into the hands of the standard critiques already being spewed by the Mouthpiece Media. The film footage and the commentary is already honing in on the number of arrests, police officers injured, destruction of property. There's scant chance that you'll see any of the peaceful marches, like the Women's March on Friday, or the discussions and presentations, like that of the woman from Honduras on how 80% of her countrymen are languishing in poverty, most of them women and children and how the FTAA will mean more poverty and suffering for them --- unless you go to places like IndyMedia.org, Alternet.org, or the MediaChannel.org.

The focus of the Mouthpiece Media will, predictably, be on how the "chaos" of the protests "shut down" Quebec, not that the issues involved were important enough to tens of thousands of people from all over the world, and from all walks of life, to take the time to show up and make their dissatisfaction known.

So part of our duty as concerned citizens is to re-shape the debate, to engage the spokespeople for corporatist hegemony and challenge their assumptions. To say, "Hey, wait a minute! Let's talk about what was really going on, not the sideshow." We need to spend less time making pious statements about "deploring the violence" and more time saying, "These are issues which should NOT be decided behind closed doors by people who have nothing to do but profit from the results of their acquiesence without consideration of ecological and human consequences."

That would be a logical first step, becoming more proactive.

The second step should be to present our vision of an alternative future and an alternative means of establishing and implementing a more benign, less autocratic system of trade. Yes, that means we shall have to talk dry economics, but dry economics are what have created the sweat-shops, migrated jobs so that the world's working people are reduced to the serfdom of competing with each other, and despoiled the air, the water and the soil of our world. It's time some people born after the Vietnam war and the Gulf War took part in proposing the economic models, rather than the cadre from World War II.

This second step, of course, means that we have to bring some of our wealth of intellectual allies to bear. We have to talk with them and trust them. We have to work with them on showing alternative models which not only work every bit as good as the status quo, but that would indeed be better for people and the other life forms with which we share this little blue ball.

I believe there is an attractive alternative to the corporate hegemony, Lloyd et alia. My thinking cap is on. Get on board!

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