Submitted by subrosa in AnarchistFAQ
Because the others have too many problems.
My usual preliminary doubts: In what I'm trying to say here I will once again annoy you with my own anarchism. The words I use, the points of critique I'm offering, the references I make, they all stem from my own "becoming anarchist" over the past couple years.
purpose
With some version of "the medium is the message" in mind I want to point out potential problems with writing an FAQ.
The very idea that there can be "an anarchist FAQ" assumes a certain coherency, consensus, shared history, shared vocabulary, and a sort of accessibility — that I'm afraid "we" don't have. We don't have an anarchism-in-general that knows its own basics, nor one that can account for the various splits, divisions and developments in "the movement". The frame is necessarily narrowing, the content decidedly colored. In Iain McKay's version, in red.
Does anyone really need the same in raddle-green, to be weaponized and used as a recruitment tool for "the good anarchism" just the same? Does anyone gain anything from a 'screenshot' of currently existing attitudes/approaches of some anarchists? Doesn't seem unlikely that we would be conserving our own obstacles and ambiguities, as much as we would help rid/clarify others.
I think we have to consider that an anarchist FAQ is, and can only be, an expression of 'red' anarchisms. (Who else would already know about how an anarchist society works? Who else would have digestible answers? Who else would pride themselves in being mainstream anarchism? Who else can rely on a general familiarity with lefty, activist talking points?) The anarchisms that I'm into produce problematics that render a good amount of actually asked questions kind of meaningless.
The anarchisms I value have a way of making things more complicated.
Anarchists must say what only anarchists can say.
And there's gotta be a more elegant approach than answering questions we would like to be asked.
words
Words and concepts like mutual aid, direct action, praxis, workerism, leftism, etc., are most useful and meaningful in contexts they quite often don't share — and putting them together and appropriating them for specific uses is an exercise in "constructing an anarchism". Which is a difficult enough task for any one of us, as individuals. I appreciate the anarchist tendency to explain shit, but if the idea is to make it a collective effort we'll need to sharpen our synthesist skills and figure out what our differences have in common.
An example that comes to mind: For what I'm up to I'd rather move past the praxis/theory split and leave the word in 'German' contexts — leave it to those who are drawn to Hegel, Stirner and Marx.
This point, by the way, is why the activist insult against theory/critique people has always aggravated me. I try to give the activist crowd the benefit of the doubt that they do truly believe in the political practice they are part of “in the streets” and are not just using regular people as cover for their desire to see the glittering rain of a window pane. (The least they can do is realize that a vigorous internal conversation is a verb and not “doing nothing” but whatever.)
This is not to say that "praxis" can't be useful in certain contexts. Just that it probably wouldn't show up in my own (imaginary) FAQ. The 'split' is only interesting to me as a way to compare and explore different relations between the two.
One way to recognize margarine-words is repetition: they are used a lot, functioning as code words or passwords, their appropriateness assumed, never shown.
To cut my own point short, and with a bit of irony, I wanna suggest that our writings tend to get a bit too oily for the task at hand.
...
Admittedly it doesn't feel quite right to badly critique a just-begun-effort like this without even contributing. And maybe what I'm struggling with is more personal than I'm suggesting here.
What all this boils down to is really a call for synthesis, for more clarity and preparedness, a push for a more 'untimely' anarchist FAQ — one that isn't just a survey of our current ideas. As useful as raddle's 101 stuff can be, I don't think it translates well to an FAQ that can present an alternative to the existing one. I think it's easy to underestimate what the task demands.
ziq wrote (edited )
I originally wanted to call it Anarchy in the 21st Century or Modern Anarchy and just have it be like 5000 words to introduce people briefly to maybe 50 basic points of anarchy without it being steeped in spite for non workerists and anyone else who doesn't follow the syndie program.
The current faq having a monopoly on introducing anarchy to noobs is doing too much damage to go unchallenged.