Living Spirit of Revolt

Žiga Vodovnik

Description

“The great contribution of Žiga Vodovnik is that his writing rescues anarchism from its dogma, its rigidity, its isolation from the majority of the human race. He reveals the natural anarchism of our everyday lives, and in doing so, enlarges the possibilities for a truly human society, in which our imaginations, our compassion, can have full play.” —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, from the Introduction

At the end of the nineteenth century, the network of anarchist collectives represented the first-ever global antisystemic movement and the very center of revolutionary tumult. In this groundbreaking and magisterial work, Žiga Vodovnik establishes that anarchism today is not only the most revolutionary current but, for the first time in history, the only one left. According to the author, many contemporary theoretical reflections on anarchism marginalize or neglect to mention the relevance of the anarchy of everyday life. Given this myopic (mis)conception of its essence, we are still searching for anarchism in places where the chances of actually finding it are the smallest.

Sujets

• Transcendentalism
• Future
• Praxis
• Transformation

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868623
• Langue: English

Extrait

P RAISE FOR A L IVING S PIRIT OF R EVOLT
"The great contribution of iga Vodovnik is that his writing rescues anarchism from its dogma, its rigidity, its isolation from the majority of the human race. He reveals the natural anarchism of our everyday lives, and in doing so, enlarges the possibilities for a truly human society, in which our imaginations, our compassion, can have full play."
Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, from the Introduction
"Like Marx’s old mole, the instinct for freedom keeps burrowing, and periodically breaks through to the light of day in novel and exciting forms. That is happening again right now in many parts of the world, often inspired by, and revitalizing, the anarchist tradition that is examined in Vodovnik’s book. A Living Spirit of Revolt is a deeply informed and thoughtful work, which offers us very timely and instructive lessons."
Noam Chomsky, MIT
" iga Vodovnik’s A Living Sprit of Revolt is an original and brilliant exploration of the great tapestry of theory and praxis that belongs in the anarchist tradition and its contemporary forms. For the first time he makes a striking case that the Transcendentalists and their intellectual cousins belong firmly in this tradition. No library of contemporary or historical radicalism can be without it."
James C. Scott, professor of political science and anthropology, Yale University
" iga Vodovnik has made a fresh and original contribution to our understanding of anarchism, by unearthing its importance for the New England Transcendentalists and their impact on radical politics in America. A Living Spirit of Revolt is interesting, relevant, and is sure to be widely read and enjoyed."
Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive: Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory
"This book with its felicitous title is an important and essential work, honest, painstaking, and intelligent. Unlike so many political scientists, iga Vodovnik understands anarchism. It is unlikely that anyone can read A Living Spirit of Revolt without gaining a wholly new perspective on the history and future of the anarchist movement. In a period that promises to spawn exciting transformations and occupations of politics, this brilliant work offers a degree of real understanding, and therefore cannot be too much commended."
Andrej Grubacic, author of Don’t Mourn Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia and coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History

A Living Sprit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism
iga Vodovnik
© PM Press 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover design by John Yates
Layout by Jonathan Rowland
ISBN: 978-1-60486-523-3
LCCN: 2012913632
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
This book was financially supported by the Slovenian Book Agency.
Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Ana Vodovnik (1944–2010), and my friend Howard Zinn (1922–2010). In a way, they are both responsible for this book.
Contents
A Fresh Look at Anarchism by Howard Zinn
Preface
1. Lectori Benevolo Salutem!
2. Perceptions and Conceptions of Anarchism
3. Ontology of Anarchism
4. A Brief Genealogy of Anarchist Thought
5. Currents of Anarchism
6. The Forgotten Current of Anarchism: New England Transcendentalism
7. Transcendentalism and the American Anarchist Tradition
8. Transcendentalism as an Inspiration and Aspiration
9. The Anatomy of Revolt
References
Index
A F RESH L OOK AT A NARCHISM
I T IS TIME TO BREATHE SOME CLEAN, REFRESHING AIR INTO THE stale, nonsense-filled discussions of anarchism which have occupied the attention of people on all sides of the political spectrum right, left, center. This is what iga Vodovnik sets out to do in his original and imaginative analysis of anarchism.
Anarchism deserves to be liberated from all the ideological debris it has accumulated for over a hundred years. Anarchism, properly cleansed of myth and pretense, has never been more needed than in our time, when every system, every culture, has been corrupted by the profit motive or the hubris of leaders, and has led the people of the earth into a morass of injustice and violence.
The word anarchy still unsettles most people in the Western world; it suggests disorder, violence, uncertainty. We have good reasons for fearing those conditions, because we have been living with them for a long time, not in anarchist societies but in exactly those societies most fearful of anarchy the powerful nation-states of modern times. At no time in human history has there been such social chaos. Millions starving, or in prisons, or in mental institutions. Inner turmoil to the point of large-scale alienation, confusion, unhappiness. Outer turmoil symbolized by huge armies, stores of nerve gas, and stockpiles of hydrogen bombs. Wherever men, women, and children are even a bit conscious of the world outside their local borders, they have been living with the ultimate uncertainty: whether or not the human race itself will survive into the next generation. It is these conditions that the anarchists have wanted to end: to bring a kind of order to the world for the first time. We have never listened to them carefully, except through the hearing aids supplied by the guardians of disorder.
The institution of capitalism, anarchists believe, is destructive, irrational, inhumane. It feeds ravenously on the immense resources of the earth, and then churns out (this is its achievement it is an immense stupid churn) huge quantities of products. Those products have only an accidental relationship to what is most needed by people, because the organizers and distributors of goods care not about human need; they are great business enterprises motivated only by profit. Therefore, bombs, guns, office buildings, and deodorants take priority over food, homes, and recreation areas. Is there anything closer to "anarchy" (in the common use of the word, meaning confusion) than the incredibly wild and wasteful economic system in America?
It was both ironic and appropriate that anarchism should arise as a philosophy and guide to action exactly in that period the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when capitalism, professing to enrich the world, kept so many in poverty, when nationalism, professing to unify people around a common identity, instead unified them in violence and war against other nations, when imperialism, professing to bring freedom and civilization to "backward" societies, brought them exploitation, repression, death.
What has modern civilization, with its "rule of law," its giant industrial enterprises, its "representative democracy," brought? Nuclear missiles already aimed and ready for the destruction of the world, and populations of a mind to accept this madness. Civilization has failed on two counts: it has perverted the natural resources of the earth, which have capacity to make our lives joyful, and also the natural resources of people, which have potential for genius and love.
It seems that revolutionary changes are needed in the sense of profound transformations of our work processes, or decision-making arrangements, our sex and family relations, our thought and culture toward a humane society. But this kind of revolution changing our minds as well as institutions cannot be accomplished by customary methods: neither by military action to overthrow governments, as some tradition-bound radicals suggest, nor by that slow process of electoral reform, which traditional liberals urge on us.
As I have already written elsewhere, the state of the world today reflects the limitations of both those methods. The anarchist rather sees revolutionary change as something immediate, something we must do now, where we are, where we live, where we work. It means starting this moment to do away with authoritarian, cruel relationships between men and women, between parents and children, between one kind of worker and another kind. Such revolutionary action cannot be crushed like an armed uprising. It takes place in everyday life, in the tiny crannies where the powerful but clumsy hands of state power cannot easily reach. It is not centralized and isolated, so that it cannot be wiped out by the rich, the police, the military. It takes place in a hundred thousand places at once, in families, on streets, in neighborhoods, in places of work. It is a revolution of the whole culture. Squelched in one place, it springs up in another, until it is everywhere. Such a revolution is an art. That is, it requires the courage not only of resistance, but of imagination.
However, the anarchist movements that flourished in Europe, Latin America, and the United States barely survived the First World War, and with the Bolshevik Revolution, the radical spirit was taken over by the world Communist movement, which then smothered it in state capitalism, bureaucracy, and dictatorship, exactly those concentrations of power which anarchists had always opposed. Today, there are small anarchist groups here and there, in the United States, in Europe, in Latin America, which put out publications with tiny circulations, which hold meetings with a handful of people, and these tiny groups sometimes split into tinier factions, arguing over obscure theoretical or tactical issues.
Nevertheless, the need for a true radica