09/02/2025
"And what are those core ideas? Skepticism of organization for organization’s sake, with or without a rejection of formal organization. Refusal of the incipient bureaucratism of conformism and centralization while promoting critical thinking. Skepticism toward revolution (however variously understood, but usually as a discrete event, and mostly as shorthand for something else), especially as the teleological repository of amelioration or solution. Principled internationalism. Re-centring the individual – not necessarily in opposition to the collective, but also not automatically subordinate to it – without relying on mawkish humanism and the moralism accompanying it. Explicit rejection of representational politics, which obviously includes all types of democracy. Heavy skepticism of technology and civilization, more generally, especially Green Capitalism. A rejection of the logic of Liberalism, where some alternative to a problem is required to take the critique of the problem seriously."
In 1997, Jason McQuinn published Bob Black’s “Anarchy After Leftism.” The cover boldly declared: A Farewell to the Anarchism That Was! AAL was Bob’s rebuttal to Murray Bookchin’s 1995 “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm,” a scurrilous scattershot attack agai...
