Anarchist Heretics Fair

Beyond right and Left

At first sight this leaflet (*not online) may appear innocuous a few groups organising a get together outside the stale atmosphere of the "mainstream contemporary anarchist movement.". However the reality is that the organiser is a hard-core national-bolshevik, as he explained in an interview with Wayne John (Sturgeon) of Albion Awake!:

"In the U.K. Anarchy is limited to empty Socialist based groups who have no interest in anything except Class war or industrial relations. In France, Italy and Russia there is a long rich, intellectual heritage in the Anarchy milieu which covers the Futurists, symbolists, Surrealists, Decadents, etc, and a belief in nomadic thought beyond left-right and a synthesis of opposites with dynamic flux. In Russia for e.g. there is a big Anarchist underground and the major personality behind this Tsvetlan Tsvetlov author of 'Anarchy unlimited' has brought this milieu to the great Alexander Dugin the head of the Russian National Bolsheviks."

Other open supporters of Dugin include the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF), an openly antisemitic and racist National Bolshevik organisation in the UK. It has a policy of entryism into other far-right groups. Meanwhile a Christian Anarchists like Wayne John (Sturgeon) tries to appear anti-racist by declaring how pleased he is when Jews become Christian! However he finds it hard to keep up the pretense and moans that "our children grow up apeing imported black rap stars from the USA" (Alternative Green No.21, Autumn 1999)

Simply under the name Wayne John, his 'Christianarchy' article recently appeared in Green Anarchist No.57-58 (Autumn 1999). Whilst making much of their 'disagreements' with Alternative Green (who split from them in 1991), and even denouncing the English National Movement (a former incarnation of the NRF), GA have struggled to maintain some credence in the "mainstream contemporary anarchist movement." This has been despite severe criticism of a series of articles by Steve Booth called "The Irrationalists" which called for bio-chemical and bomb attacks in public places. His blend of existentialist misanthropy is remarkably close to the doctrines of Dugin:

"The national-bolsheviks comprehend the "irrational" not just as "not rational", but as "the aggressive and active destruction of the rational", as fight with the "everyday consciousness" (and the "everyday behaviour"), as submersion into the "new life" element, that is the special magic existence of a "differential human", who has discarded all outer bans and norms."

The Metaphysics of National-Bolshevism

Whether covert or overt, our response is the same:

Smash Anarcho-Fascism

Smash National-Bolshevism

Why I am suspicious of those who launch attacks against supporters of beyond left/right movements:

(1) Real anarchists do not demand that others conform to their personal choice of anarchist philosphy.

(2) Anarcho-Communism is rooted in an industrial aged view of society that has largely been replaced by the information age. It is, in fact, time for alternatives. While some variations on anarchism may not be appealing, the free competition of ideas might provoke a good alternative at some point in the future, so "SMASHING" those with whom you disagree may be counter productive.

(3) Many anarcho-communists seems to be closet Zionists and accuse anyone critical of Israel of being an anti-semite.

Wow, are you clueless. Who do you think manufactures the computers? Have the jobs of US steelworkers and auto workers really been abolished, or have they been moved to cheaper labor markets? Why are vicious attacks being made on unions all over the world if the industrial age is over? Why are class differences in the US becoming more, not less pronounced? Why is China becoming more industrialized (and more powerful) with each passing month if the age of industry is over? Who made the clothes on your back and the shoes on your feet - computers or industrial workers? Who grows much of the agricultural produce in the US - computer nerds in San Jose or industrialized agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley?

Anarcho-Communism does not deal in any realistic way with individual producers of intellectual works. As more and more people IN THIS SOCIETY become producers of intellectual works which are created not in factories but on their own machines in their own homes, anarcho-communism has nothing to offer them in terms of organizaiton of that segment of the working class.

Get a grip.

Anarchism has very heavily influenced the Free Software Movement, and the GNU Public Licence in particular. Legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, self-identifies as a kind of anti-capitalist anarchist. The GPL, aka Copyleft, uses the tools of intellectual property law to create a "viral" kind of IP that serves to destroy the idea of intellectual private property, and simultaneously increase the spread of intellectual wealth in the commons.

If you incorporate GPL code into a product, and distribute it (i.e. sell it) you have to also offer the source code for the product as well.

This would be analagous, in music, to creating a sample, and then stipulating that if you use the sound in your track, that entire track must also be offered using the same terms -- that is, any sounds on the track can be sampled, and each use would stipulate that the same conditions apply to the new track.

As industrialization and the information society expand, the role of intellectual work will increase in value compared to regular industrial and agricultural labor. (Intellectual production is used to increase the productivity of industrial labor.) Anarchist practice, using the tools of intellectual property to create a body of "property-free" IP, is trying to grow a body of intellectual capital that can be shared freely by all, without the encumbrance of private property that deprives the world of its intellectual natural resources.

This body of IP, may, in turn, help to spread the return of other forms of privatized property back to the commons. For example, radio frequencies are the next thing that FSF and others are trying to reclaim from corporations and the FCC (who saw fit to *sell* spectrum rather than lease it).

However, despite this good anarchist work by the FSF, Meyer's criticisms stand. Industrial production has moved to more distant places, closer to the periphery of empire. Free Software has been relatively quiet about the situation faced by countries facing rapid, forced industrialization and privitization by the WB/IMF. The post-industrial society rests on a base of industrial production, and, to assert that industrial issues don't matter simply because Westerners or people at the core of empire don't worry much about it, is counter-revolutionary, and opposed to the principles of anarchism.

At this time, Free Software is still very self-indulgent -- a game for the intellectual petit bourgeois (to riff on Lenin). This, however, will not always be the case. If the body of significant property-free intellectual labor can sustain itself, then, there will be more and more essential software (and hardware) produced outside of the privatized sphere. If we're to believe Marx's historical materialism, then, these two different modes of production will come into conflict, and there will be wars waged around the issue of intellectual labor.

I think it won't be so simple and straightforward...

(No anarcho-communist is a zionist. Neither will they stand for anti-semitism.)

This is unmittigated bullshit. That's why the allegation is unsubstantiated, and not backed up by the citing of a single URL.

Don't you mean segment of the petty bourgeoisie, most of whom grew up in comfortable upper middle class suburbias and are unlikely to become anti-capitalists of any sort?

The information workers are usually classified as members of the petit-bourgeois, but today, are becoming proletarianized. Most sysadmins I've met come from the working class -- albeit, the working class of a wealty country with reformed capitalism. Today, many programmers come from the working class, as well (thanks to Linux). Programming in the future, however, will pay less, due to globalization, and the workers will be working class. Pretty well paid working class, sure, but still working class compared to less globalized workers.

I think the main thing that's kept "information technology" elite/elitist is not the equipment or knowledge (which is pretty cheap), but the way it's used in society.

Except that this guy is producing his own "intellectual works" on his own computer in his own home. I doubt very much that he is employed as a programmer or as anything else. Maybe I'm jumping to unfair conclusions, but I can't help suspecting that the computer and the home were paid for by Mommie and Daddie or by a working spouse/partner. That is the usual kind of person who thinks that the age of the working class vs. the employers is over.