THE TWILIGHT OF VANGUARDISM\r\n\r\n<\/p>
by David Graeber<\/em>\r\n\r\n<\/p> Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is \r\nover for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian \r\ngroups, it's almost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously \r\nbelieve that their role should be to determine the correct historical \r\nanalysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the \r\none true revolutionary direction. But (rather like the idea of progress \r\nitself, to which it's obviously connected), it seems much easier to \r\nrenounce the principle than to shake the accompanying habits of thought. \r\nVanguardist, even, sectarian attitudes have become deeply ingrained in \r\nacademic radicalism it's hard to say what it would mean to think outside \r\nthem.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p> The depth of the problem first really struck me when I first became \r\nacquainted with the consensus modes of decision-making employed in North \r\nAmerican anarchist and anarchist-inspired political movements, which, in \r\nturn, bore a lot of similarities to the style of political \r\ndecision-making current where I had done my anthropological fieldwork in \r\nrural Madagascar. There's enormous variation among different styles and \r\nforms of consensus but one thing almost all the North American variants \r\nhave in common is that they are organized in conscious opposition to the \r\nstyle of organization and, especially, of debate typical of the \r\nclassical sectarian Marxist group. Where the latter are invariably \r\norganized around some Master Theoretician, who offers a comprehensive \r\nanalysis of the world situation and, often, of human history as a whole, \r\nbut very little theoretical reflection on more immediate questions of \r\norganization and practice, anarchist-inspired groups tend to operate on \r\nthe assumption that no one could, or probably should, ever convert \r\nanother person completely to one's own point of view, that \r\ndecision-making structures are ways of managing diversity, and \r\ntherefore, that one should concentrate instead on maintaining \r\negalitarian process and considering immediate questions of action in the \r\npresent. One of the fundamental principles of political debate, for \r\ninstance, is that one is obliged to give other participants the benefit \r\nof the doubt for honesty and good intentions, whatever else one might \r\nthink of their arguments. In part too this emerges from the style of \r\ndebate consensus decision-making encourages: where voting encourages one \r\nto reduce one's opponents positions to a hostile caricature, or whatever \r\nit takes to defeat them, a consensus process is built on a principle of \r\ncompromise and creativity where one is constantly changing proposals \r\naround until one can come up with something everyone can at least live \r\nwith; therefore, the incentive is always to put the best possible \r\nconstruction on other's arguments.\r\n\r\n<\/p> All this struck home to me because it brought home to me just how much \r\nordinary intellectual practice--the kind of thing I was trained to do at \r\nthe University of Chicago, for example--really does resemble sectarian \r\nmodes of debate. One of the things which had most disturbed me about my \r\ntraining there was precisely the way we were encouraged to read other \r\ntheorists' arguments: that if there were two ways to read a sentence, \r\none of which assumed the author had at least a smidgen of common sense \r\nand the other that he was a complete idiot, the tendency was always to \r\nchose the latter. I had sometimes wondered how this could be reconciled \r\nwith an idea that intellectual practice was, on some ultimate level, a \r\ncommon enterprise in pursuit of truth. The same goes for other \r\nintellectual habits: for example, that of carefully assembling lists of \r\ndifferent \"ways to be wrong\" (usually ending in \"ism\": i.e., \r\nsubjectivism, empiricism, all much like their sectarian parallels: \r\nreformism, left deviationism, hegemonism...) and being willing to listen \r\nto points of view differing from one's own only so long as it took to \r\nfigure out which variety of wrongness to plug them into. Combine this \r\nwith the tendency to treat (often minor) intellectual differences not \r\nonly as tokens of belonging to some imagined \"ism\" but as profound moral \r\nflaws, on the same level as racism or imperialism (and often in fact \r\npartaking of them) then one has an almost exact reproduction of style of \r\nintellectual debate typical of the most ridiculous vanguardist sects.\r\n\r\n<\/p> I still believe that the growing prevalence of these new, and to my mind \r\nfar healthier, modes of discourse among activists will have its effects \r\non the academy but it's hard to deny that so far, the change has been \r\nvery slow in coming.\r\n\r\n<\/p> WHY SO FEW ANARCHISTS IN THE ACADEMY?\r\n\r\n<\/p> One might argue this is because anarchism itself has made such small \r\ninroads into the academy. As a political philosophy, anarchism is going \r\nthrough veritable explosion in recent years. Anarchist or \r\nanarchist-inspired movements are growing everywhere; anarchist \r\nprinciples--autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, mutual \r\naid, direct democracy--have become the basis for organizing within the \r\nglobalization movement and beyond. As Barbara Epstein has recently \r\npointed out, at least in Europe and the Americas, it has by now largely \r\ntaken the place Marxism had in the social movements of the '60s: the \r\ncore revolutionary ideology, it is the source of ideas and inspiration; \r\neven those who do not consider themselves anarchists feel they have to \r\ndefine themselves in relation to it. Yet this has found almost no \r\nreflection in academic discourse. Most academics seem to have only the \r\nvaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss it with the \r\ncrudest stereotypes (\"anarchist organization! but isn't that a \r\ncontradiction in terms?\") In the United States--and I don't think is all \r\nthat different elsewhere--there are thousands of academic Marxists of \r\none sort or another, but hardly anyone who is willing to openly call \r\nherself an anarchist.\r\n\r\n<\/p> I don't think this is just because the academy is behind the times. \r\nMarxism has always had an affinity with the academy that anarchism never \r\nwill. It was, after all was invented by a Ph.D.; and there's always been \r\nsomething about its spirit which fits that of the academy. Anarchism on \r\nthe other hand was never really invented by anyone. True, historians \r\nusually treat it as if it were, constructing the history of anarchism as \r\nif it's basically a creature identical in its nature to Marxism: it was \r\ncreated by specific 19th century thinkers, perhaps Godwin or Stirner, \r\nbut definitely Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, it inspired working-class \r\norganizations, became enmeshed in political struggles... But in fact the \r\nanalogy is rather strained. First of all, the 19th century generally \r\ncredited with inventing anarchism didn't think of themselves as having \r\ninvented anything particularly new. The basic principles of \r\nanarchism--self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid--are as \r\nold as humanity Similarly, the rejection of the state and of all forms \r\nof structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally \r\nmeans \"without rulers\"), even the assumption that all these forms are \r\nsomehow related and reinforce each other, was hardly some startlingly \r\nnew 19th century doctrine. One can find evidence of people making \r\nsimilar arguments throughout history, despite the fact there is every \r\nreason to believe that such opinions were the ones least likely to be \r\nwritten down. We are talking less about a body of theory than about an \r\nattitude, or perhaps a faith: a rejection of certain types of social \r\nrelation, a confidence that certain others are a much better ones on \r\nwhich to build a decent or humane society, a faith that it would be \r\npossible to do so.\r\n\r\n<\/p> One need only compare the historical schools of Marxism, and anarchism, \r\nthen, to see we are dealing with a fundamentally different sort of \r\nthing. Marxist schools have authors. Just as Marxism sprang from the \r\nmind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists, Trotksyites, Gramscians, \r\nAlthusserians... Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades \r\nalmost seamlessly into French professors. Pierre Bourdieu once noted \r\nthat, if the academic field is a game in which scholars strive for \r\ndominance, then you know you have won when other scholars start \r\nwondering how to make an adjective out of your name. It is, presumably, \r\nto preserve the possibility of winning the game that intellectuals \r\ninsist, in discussing each other, on continuing to employ just the sort \r\nof Great Man theories of history they would scoff at in discussing just \r\nabout anything else: Foucault's ideas, like Trotsky's, are never treated \r\nas primarily the products of a certain intellectual milieu, as something \r\nthat emerging from endless conversations and arguments in cafes, \r\nclassrooms, bedrooms, barber shops involving thousands of people inside \r\nand outside the academy (or Party), but always, as if they emerged from \r\na single man's genius. It's not quite either that Marxist politics \r\norganized itself like an academic discipline or become a model for how \r\nradical intellectuals, or increasingly, all intellectuals, treated one \r\nanother; rather, the two developed somewhat in tandem.\r\n\r\n<\/p> Schools of anarchism, in contrast, emerge from some kind of \r\norganizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and \r\nAnarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, \r\nIndividualists, and so on. (Significantly, those few Marxist tendencies \r\nwhich are not named after individuals, like Autonomism or Council \r\nCommunism, are themselves the closest to anarchism.) Anarchists are \r\ndistinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go \r\nabout doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have \r\nspent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never \r\nbeen much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical \r\nquestions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially \r\nrevolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for the \r\npeasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, \r\nthey tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a \r\nmeeting, at what point organization stops being empowering people and \r\nstarts squelching individual freedom. Is \"leadership\" necessarily a bad \r\nthing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What is \r\ndirect action? Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of \r\nstate? When is it okay to break a window?\r\n\r\n<\/p> One might sum it up like this:\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p> 1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about \r\nrevolutionary strategy.\r\n\r\n<\/p> 2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary \r\npractice.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p> Now, this does imply there's a lot of potential complementary between \r\nthe two (and indeed there has been: even Mikhail Bakunin, for all his \r\nendless battles with Marx over practical questions, also personally \r\ntranslated Marx's Capital into Russian.) One could easily imagine a \r\nsystematic division of labor in which Marxists critique the political \r\neconomy, but stay out of organizing, and Anarchists handle the \r\nday-to-day organizing, but defer to the Marxists on questions of \r\nabstract theory; i.e., in which the Marxists explain why the economic \r\ncrash in Argentina occurred and the anarchists deal with what to do \r\nabout it. (I also should point out that I am aware I am being a bit \r\nhypocritical here by indulging in some of the same sort of sectarian \r\nreasoning I'm otherwise critiquing: there are schools of Marxism which \r\nare far more open-minded and tolerant, and democratically organized, \r\nthere are anarchist groups which are insanely sectarian; Bakunin himself \r\nwas hardly a model for democracy by any standards, etc. etc. etc.). But \r\nit also makes it easier to understand why there are so few anarchists in \r\nthe academy. It's not just that anarchism does not lend itself to high \r\ntheory. It's that it is primarily an ethics of practice; and it insists, \r\nbefore anything else, that one's means most be consonant with one's \r\nends; one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; that as \r\nmuch as possible, one must embody the society one wishes to create. This \r\ndoes not square very well with operating within Universities that still \r\nhave an essentially Medieval social structure, presenting papers at \r\nconferences in expensive hotels, and doing intellectual battle in \r\nlanguage no one who hasn't spent at least two or three years in grad \r\nschool would ever hope to be able to understand. At the very least, \r\nthen, it would tend to get one in trouble.\r\n\r\n<\/p> All this does not, of course, mean that anarchist theory is \r\nimpossible--though it does suggest that a single Anarchist High Theory \r\nin the style typical of university radicalism might be rather a \r\ncontradiction in terms. One could imagine a body of theory that presumes \r\nand indeed values a diversity of sometimes incommensurable perspectives \r\nin much the same way that anarchist decision-making process does, but \r\nwhich nonetheless organizes them around an presumption of shared \r\ncommitments. But clearly, it would also have to self-consciously reject \r\nany trace of vanguardism: which leads to the question the role of \r\nrevolution intellectuals is not to form an elite that can arrive at the \r\ncorrect strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow, what \r\nprecisely is it? This is an area where I think anthropology is \r\nparticularly well positioned to help. And not only because most actual, \r\nself-governing communities, non-market economies, and other radical \r\nalternatives have been mainly studied by anthropologists; also, because \r\nthe practice of ethnography provides at least something of a model, an \r\nincipient model, of how non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual \r\npractice might work. Ethnography is about teasing out the hidden \r\nsymbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics that underly certain types of \r\nsocial action; the way people's habits and actions makes sense in ways \r\nthat they are not themselves completely aware of. One obvious role for a \r\nradical intellectual is precisely that: the first thing we need to do is \r\nto look at those who are creating viable alternatives on the group, and \r\ntry to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are \r\n(already) doing.\r\n\r\n<\/p> HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF VANGUARDISM\r\n\r\n<\/p> Untwining social theory from vanguardist habits might seem a \r\nparticularly difficult task because historically, modern social theory \r\nand the idea of the vanguard were born more or less together. On the \r\nother hand, so was the idea of an artistic avant garde (\"avant garde\" is \r\nin fact simply the French word for vanguard), and the relation between \r\nthe three might itself suggest some unexpected possibilities.\r\n\r\n<\/p> The term avant garde was actually coined by Henri de Saint-Simon, the \r\nproduct of a series of essays he wrote at the very end of his life. Like \r\nhis onetime secretary and disciple (and later bitter rival Auguste \r\nComte), Saint-Simon was writing in the wake of the French revolution and \r\nessentially, were asking what had gone wrong: why the transition from a \r\nmedieval, feudal Catholic society to a modern, industrial democratic one \r\nseemed to be creating such enormous violence and social dislocation. The \r\nproblem he concluded was that modern society lacked any force of \r\nideological cohesion that could play the same role as the Medieval \r\nchurch, which gave everyone the sense of having a meaningful place in \r\nthe overall social order. Towards the end of their lives each actually \r\nended up creating his own religion: Saint-Simon's called his the \"New \r\nChristianity\", Comte, the \"New Catholicism\". In the first, artists were \r\nto play the role of the ultimate spiritual leaders; in an imaginary \r\ndialogue with a scientist, he has an artist explaining that in their \r\nrole of imagining possible futures and inspiring the public, they can \r\nplay the role of an \"avant garde\", a \"truly priestly function\" as he \r\nputs it; in his ideal future, artists would hatch the ideas which they \r\nwould then pass on to the scientists and industrialists to put into \r\neffect. Saint-Simon was also perhaps the first to conceive the notion of \r\nthe withering away of the state: once it had become clear that the \r\nauthorities were operating for the good of the public, one would no more \r\nneed force to compel the public to heed their advice than one needed it \r\nto compel patients to take the advice of their doctors. Government would \r\npass away into at most some minor police functions.\r\n\r\n<\/p> Comte, of course, is most famous as the founder of sociology; he \r\ninvented the term to describe what he saw as the master-discipline which \r\ncould both understand and direct society. He ended up taking a \r\ndifferent, far more authoritarian approach: ultimately proposing the \r\nregulation and control of almost all aspects of human life according to \r\nscientific principles, with the role of high priests (effectively, the \r\nvanguard, though he did not actually call them this) in his New \r\nCatholicism being played by the sociologists themselves.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p> It's a particularly fascinating opposition because in the early \r\ntwentieth century, the positions were effectively reversed. Instead of \r\nthe left-wing Saint-Simonians looking to artists for leadership, while \r\nthe right-wing Comtians fancied themselves scientists, we had the \r\nfascist leaders like Hitler and Mussolini who imagined themselves as \r\ngreat artists inspiring the masses, and sculpting society according to \r\ntheir grandiose imaginings, and the Marxist vanguard which claimed the \r\nrole of scientists.\r\n\r\n<\/p> At any rate the Saint Simonians at any rate actively sought to recruit \r\nartists for their various ventures, salons, and utopian communities; \r\nthough they quickly ran into difficulties because so many within \"avant \r\ngarde\" artistic circles preferred the more anarchistic Fourierists, and \r\nlater, one or another branch of outright anarchists. Actually, the \r\nnumber of 19th century artists with anarchist sympathies is quite \r\nstaggering, ranging from Pissaro to Tolstoy or Oscar Wilde, not to \r\nmention almost all early 20th century artists who later became \r\nCommunists, from Malevich to Picasso. Rather than a political vanguard \r\nleading the way to a future society, radical artists almost invariably \r\nsaw themselves as exploring new and less alienated modes of life. The \r\nreally significant development in the 19th century was less to idea of a \r\nvanguard than that of Bohemia (a term first coined by Balzac in 1838): \r\nmarginal communities living in more or less voluntary poverty, seeing \r\nthemselves as dedicated to the pursuit of creative, unalienated forms of \r\nexperience, united by a profound hatred of bourgeois life and everything \r\nit stood for. Ideologically, they were about equally likely to be \r\nproponents of \"art for art's sake\" or social revolutionaries. \r\nContemporary theorists are actually quite divided over how to evaluate \r\ntheir larger significance. Pierre Bourdieu for example insisted that the \r\npromulgation of the idea of \"art for art's sake\", far from being \r\ndepoliticizing, should be considered a significant accomplishment, as \r\nwas any which managed to establish the autonomy of one particular field \r\nof human endeavor from the logic of the market. Colin Campbell on the \r\nother hand argues that insofar as bohemians actually were an avant \r\ngarde, they were really the vanguard of the market itself, or more \r\nprecisely, of consumerism: their actual social function, much though \r\nthey would have loathed to admit it, was to explore new forms of \r\npleasure or aesthetic territory which could be commoditized in the next \r\ngeneration. (One might call this the Tom Franks version of history.) \r\nCampbell also echoes common wisdom that bohemia was almost exclusively \r\ninhabited by the children of the bourgeoisie, who had--temporarily, at \r\nleast--rejecting their families' money and privilege; and who, if they \r\ndid not die young of dissipation, were likely to end up back on the \r\nboard of father's company. This is a claim that has been repeated so \r\noften about activists and revolutionaries over the years that it makes \r\nme, at least, immediately wary: in fact, I strongly suspect that \r\nbohemian circles emerged from the same sort of social conjuncture as \r\nmost current activist circles, and historically, most vanguardist \r\nrevolutionary parties as well: a kind of meeting between certain \r\nelements of (intentionally) downwardly mobile professional classes, in \r\nbroad rejection of bourgeois values, and upwardly mobile children of the \r\nworking class. Though such suspicions can only be confirmed by \r\nhistorical investigation.\r\n\r\n<\/p> In the 19th century idea of the political vanguard was used very widely \r\nand very loosely for anyone seen as exploring the path to a future, free \r\nsociety. Radical newspapers for example often called themselves \"the \r\nAvant Garde\". It was Marx though who began to significantly change the \r\nidea by introducing the notion that the proletariat were the true \r\nrevolutionary class--he didn't actually use the term \"vanguard\" in his \r\nown writing--because they were the one that was the most oppressed, or \r\nas he put it \"negated\" by capitalism, and therefore had the least to \r\nlose by its abolition. In doing so, he ruled out the possibilities that \r\nless alienated enclaves, whether of artists or the sort of artisans and \r\nindependent producers who tended to form the backbone of anarchism, had \r\nanything significant to offer. The results we all know. The idea of a \r\nvanguard party to dedicated to both organizing and providing an \r\nintellectual project for that most-oppressed class chosen as the agent \r\nof history, but also, actually sparking the revolution through their \r\nwillingness to employ violence, was first outlined by Lenin in 1902 in \r\nWhat Is to Be Done?; it has echoed endlessly, to the point where the SDS \r\nin the late '60s could end up locked in furious debates over whether the \r\nBlack Panther Party should be considered the vanguard of The Movement as \r\nthe leaders of its most oppressed element. All this in turn had a \r\ncurious effect on the artistic avant garde who increasingly started to \r\norganize themselves like vanguard parties, beginning with the Dadaists, \r\nFuturists, publishing their own manifestos, communiquŽs, purging one \r\nanother, and otherwise making themselves (sometimes quite intentional) \r\nparodies of revolutionary sects. (Note however that these groups always \r\ndefined themselves, like anarchists, by a certain form of practice \r\nrather than after some heroic founder.) The ultimate fusion came with \r\nthe Surrealists and then finally the Situationist International, which \r\non the one hand was the most systematic in trying to develop a theory of \r\nrevolutionary action according to the spirit of Bohemia, thinking about \r\nwhat it might actually mean to destroy the boundaries between art and \r\nlife, but at the same time, in its own internal organization, displayed \r\na kind of insane sectarianism full of so many splits, purges, and bitter \r\ndenunciations that Guy Debord finally remarked that the only logical \r\nconclusion was for the International to be finally reduced to two \r\nmembers, one of whom would purge the other and then commit suicide. \r\n(Which is actually not too far from what actually ended up happening.)\r\n\r\n<\/p> NON-ALIENATED PRODUCTION\r\n\r\n<\/p> The historical relations between political and artistic avant gardes \r\nhave been explored at length by others. For me though the really \r\nintriguing questions is: why is it that artists have so often been so \r\ndrawn to revolutionary politics to begin with? Because it does seem to \r\nbe the case that, even in times and places when there is next to no \r\nother constituency for revolutionary change, the one place on is most \r\nlikely to find one is among artists, authors, and musicians; even more \r\nso, in fact, that among professional intellectuals. It seems to me the \r\nanswer must have something to do with alienation. There would appear to \r\nbe a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and \r\nthen bringing them into being (individually or collectively)--that is, \r\nthe experience of certain forms of unalienated production--and the \r\nability to imagine social alternatives; particularly, the possibility of \r\na society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity. Which \r\nwould allow us to see the historical shift between seeing the vanguard \r\nas the relatively unalienated artists (or perhaps intellectuals) to \r\nseeing them as the representatives of the \"most oppressed\" in a new \r\nlight. In fact, I would suggest, revolutionary coalitions always tend to \r\nconsist of an alliance between a society's least alienated and its most \r\noppressed. And this is less elitist a formulation than it might sound, \r\nbecause it also seems to be the case that actual revolutions tend to \r\noccur when these two categories come to overlap. That would at any rate \r\nexplain why it almost always seems to be peasants and craftspeople - or \r\nalternately, newly proletarianized former peasants and craftspeople - \r\nwho actually rise up and overthrow capitalist regimes, and not those \r\ninured to generations of wage labor. Finally, I suspect this would also \r\nhelp explain the extraordinary importance of indigenous people's \r\nstruggles in that planetary uprising usually referred to as the \r\n\"anti-globalization\" movement: such people tend to be simultaneously the \r\nvery least alienated and most oppressed people on earth, and once it is \r\ntechnologically possible to include them in revolutionary coalitions, it \r\nis almost inevitable that they should take a leading role.\r\n\r\n<\/p> The role of indigenous peoples in turn leads us back to the role of \r\nethnography as a possible model for the would-be non-vanguardist \r\nrevolutionary intellectual--as well as some of its potential pitfalls. \r\nObviously what I am proposing would only work if it was, ultimately, a \r\nform of auto-ethnography, combined, perhaps, with a certain utopian \r\nextrapolation: a matter of teasing out the tacit logic or principles \r\nunderlying certain forms of radical practice, and then, not only \r\noffering the analysis back to those communities, but using them to \r\nformulate new visions (\"if one applied the same principles as you are \r\napplying to political organization to economics, might it not look \r\nsomething like this?\"...) Here too there are suggestive parallels in the \r\nhistory of radical artistic movements, which became movements precisely \r\nas they became their own critics (and of course the idea of \r\nself-criticism took on a very different, and more ominous, tone within \r\nMarxist politics); there are also intellectuals already trying to do \r\nprecisely this sort of auto-ethnographic work. But I say all this not so \r\nmuch to provide models as to open up a field for discussion, first of \r\nall, by emphasizing that even the notion of vanguardism itself far more \r\nrich in its history, and full of alternative possibilities, than most of \r\nus would ever be given to expect.\r\n\r\n<\/p> Note: This essay was delivered as a keynote address during the \"History \r\nMatters: Social Movements Past, Present, and Future\" conference at the \r\nNew School for Social Research\r\n(http:\/\/www.newschool.edu\/gf\/historymatters for more information)<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is over for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it's almost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction.","numcomment":6,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2003\/06\/61326.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":61338,"heading":"worth a read","article":"\r\nInteresting article. In my favorite anarchist circles vanguardism is the thing to be avoided if it means imagining a key concept will deliver us o'er Jordan. I do appreciate that you distinguish between holding up the singular idea and holding up the field of discussion.\r\n\r\nI think it would be fruitfull if you went into further detail what the range of discussion is, what are the keys of this debate. Also, to qualify the nature of the debate. And finally, to discuss the relationship between the ideas being tossed around and their functionalizable outcomes versus the power contained in creating a consensus. In other words, what has meaning and power, the idea or the agreement on an idea?\r\n\r\n\r\nBut also, what exactly do you mean by the title, the twilight of vanguardism? You don't really seem to be positing a twilight, you seem more to be positing a re-interpretation of the concept.","author":"irpy","parent_id":61326,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-06-02 19:24:18","modified":"2003-06-02 19:24:18","fileurl":""},{"id":61639,"heading":"anarchy? yeah right","article":"not in a million years you fucking scumbag.","author":"Kobe Chief","parent_id":61326,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-06-04 09:28:33","modified":"2003-06-04 09:28:33","fileurl":""},{"id":61713,"heading":""Kobe Chief"","article":"Way to go, "Kobe Chief." Whenever we asinine conservatives have nothing intelligent to say, we can always resort to hurling juvenile insults. It really help demonstrate how simpleminded we are. Great job!!!","author":"Bush Admirer","parent_id":61326,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-06-04 14:52:38","modified":"2003-06-04 14:52:38","fileurl":""},{"id":61714,"heading":""Kobe Chief"","article":"Way to go, "Kobe Chief." Whenever we asinine conservatives have nothing intelligent to say, we can always resort to hurling juvenile insults. It really helps demonstrate how simpleminded we are. Great job!!!","author":"Bush Admirer","parent_id":61326,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-06-04 14:52:43","modified":"2003-06-04 14:52:43","fileurl":""},{"id":62563,"heading":"that's right","article":"hurling insults is all we have.","author":"Kobe Chief","parent_id":61326,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-06-06 15:59:57","modified":"2003-06-06 15:59:57","fileurl":""}]}