http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com yes, this is what I do for fun Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:31:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I was reading Ian McKay’s interview with Mark Leier, author of the new Bakunin biography Creative Passion, and found this nugget. "This was an activist who fought on the losing side all of his life, yet did not lose his passionate hope, his understanding, that the struggle itself was meaningful, ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/11/28/hope/ There are different orientations towards the political left one can take while doing revolutionary work. Broadly speaking we can break up the left based on how people organize themselves ideologically, or we can find divisions in terms of the role various left actors have in proletarian movements. Seeing these different ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/11/03/appearances-and-illusions-commonality-on-the-left/ I’m going to hazard a historical thesis: that marxism and anarchism, the red and the black, have been superseded by history. I’m speaking here not about subjectivity, how people think about these movements, but objectively, of movements and struggles. My reason is this, objectively speaking the divisions that existed between ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/10/19/the-dissolution-of-the-red-and-the-black/ I’ve decided to try and draw together revolutionary theory about how consciousness develops, since I think there’s actually very little explicit ideas out there beyond people parroting the leninist conception or the spontaneist conception. One hugely overlooked area I’ve found is syndicalist ideas about consciousness. There appears to be debates ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/10/19/the-anarchosyndicalist-contribution-to-the-theory-of-revolutionary-consciousness/ The ultraleft, and particularly the ultraleft which draws from the French tendencies, has been extremely influential on my own thinking about revolution, class, history, and the left. Primarily Dauve has expressed for me processes latent in struggles I’ve participated in and intuitions I’ve had. Being a non-marxist critical of elements ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/10/18/the-french-ultra-left/ I’ve always meant to read Castoriadis, but never gotten around to it. For one thing he was a huge influence on other people I read and take from (Solidarity UK, CLR James, Facing Reality, Glaberman, etc). He also came to reject Marxism, and takes lots of heat from it from ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/08/28/castoriadis/ I just found out about Rawick, a member of Facing Reality and theorist of working class self-organization and black liberation struggles. Here  he discusses worker self activity in struggle, and the problem it posed for the traditional leftist ideas about struggle. I had never heard of any of the lesser ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/08/28/rawick-facing-reality/ Just to show I’m not sectarian… I saw this article and enjoyed it. I like stories about, I like workplace organizing, so combine the too and I’m sold. It doesn’t have the pull of a Stan Weir piece, but an interesting reflection of a militant in struggle (if you can ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/07/24/west-virginia-coal-miners-struggles-a-memoir-of-an-ex-rcp-member/ There is a disconnect between revolutionary theory (and practice) and our experience of everyday life concerning the role that conscious thought and deliberation play in creating action. I’ve been reading the above authors of late, and am going to try and be better about putting my thoughts down as I ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/07/19/freire-holloway-lukacs-and-glaberman-the-problem-of-consciousness/ A comrade translated Huerta Grande, a once seminal and often cited text from 1972 in Uruguay. Below I give a quick and dirty rough history of the uruguayan anarchist movement in the 2nd half of the 20th century in hopes of elaborating some of the context. Huerta Grande is here. ... http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/07/09/huerta-grande/