4 responses to “Chomsky on What is Anarchism?”

1. Here is the thing about anarchism. Often slated as anti-intellectual, or lacking a rigorous account of political economy, anarchism isn’t essentially about the theorisation of abstractions but the reflection on and elaboration of a diversity of tactics. Ideological discontinuities among anarchists more often than not, although not at all times, comes down to a disagreement over tactics and the deployment of forms. This even counts for the debates around building specific assemblages. Looking at the accelerationist manifesto, I’m sure you could read a large swathe of it as if it were written by a federalist anarchist (and perhaps this is why Mark Fisher exempts the UK’s Solidarity Federation from his critique of neoanarchism, and why the Anarchist Federation should also be considered exempt).

   • interesting have they been doing something akin to case-studies to compare & contrast differing attempts that they have made at re-assembling?

2. Damn, you asked that a long time ago. There have been case-studies in the sense of reports back on successful actions. As far as I get it, the AFED and SOLFED have come closer together over the years to the point where it has become a running joke as to when they will fuse into one organisation. The distinction essentially seems to boil down to SOLFED having a workplace emphasis in most of its organising (as an anarchosyndicalist organisation) and AFED a more community oriented focus (as an anarcho-communist organisation). The lolz here is that anarchosyndicalists also tend to think of themselves as communists and anarcho-communists often say they’re syndicalists in the workplace. At any rate I don’t think that work of re-assembling is going on in institutional terms but that it is constantly going on in terms of membership of these groups being cross-collaborative on extra-organisational campaigns and in sharing tactics.

   • no rush to these things, glad to hear people are gearing in and grinding it out much harder with 3D flesh and blood people than on the page/screen, would be nice to have an ethnographer or two in the mix to come up with something like open-source platforms from the tactics and even thick accounts of the failures so we don’t keep starting over from scratch.