“Reading an Anarchist Federation statement is deadening. It is the materialist death-march of politics against life, the patriarchal voice of ‘political reason’ against the wild rebel spirit, of the political against me.”
That’s the view expressed by one Venona Q on the 325 website in response to some anarchist criticism of insurrectionary comrades.
The author goes on: “What is this ‘issuing of statements’ condemning the acts and opinions of others who consider themselves anarchists?
“It is to play the political game of ‘good anarchist’ and ‘bad anarchist’ for the media and the repressive machine of the police. It is to undermine the very meaning of the term ‘anarchy’; a complicated and shifting web of principles, praxis and relationship with the goal of liberation which is not a singular state of being, no more than it is a State.”
And Venona Q concludes: “I began this article by essentially wishing to encourage those of us who call ourselves anarchists to cease mutual condemnation and to assert that actually not one of us has the ‘answer’.
“However, I end by sensing that some of ‘us’ know so little of what it means to be liberated in heart, thought and action, and so little of what class solidarity and struggle really means, that I can only imagine an anarchist society such as appears to be the aim of the Anarchist Federation, would be as fraught with repressions and various prisons as this one.
“That is, unless those who would impose their faceless societies on the rest of us realise their futility.”
I have a great deal of sympathy with Venona Q’s point of view here. Take just one line out of the Anarchist Federation statement: “As Anarchist Communists we strongly criticise individualist and vanguardist tactics that do not come out of a broad-based class struggle movement.”
You can almost hear the sanctimonious nasal whine with which this was delivered. This is not anarchy, it’s just leftism – the same boring cliched old leftism that has failed to set the world alight for far too long now.
Times are dark and desperate and we cannot be held back in ideological straitjackets.
We need new inspiration, new language, new strength to smash this corrupt society and allow a living future to emerge from the ruins.
Everyone can play their part, in whatever way suits them best. However, trying to monopolise the means of our resistance is not only futile but also completely alien to the glorious and untamable upsurge of defiant vitality that is true anarchy.
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