Call for Short Articles on Anarchism and Science: Deadline April 1, 2008

***CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! ANARCHISM AND SCIENCE!***

Anarchists have long discussed the role of science in our politics, ranging from arguing that anarchism is the highest stage of science to arguing that science is the root of oppression, hierarchy and authority. What does anarchist science look like in the 21st century, and how would it fight disease, promote the differently-abled and support those with mental illness?

The LV Night Review is the companion publication of Louis Vuitton Night, a bi-monthly variety show, aka: "Denver's Most Pensive Anarchist Variety Show." For more info on the show, check out myspace.com/louisvuittonnight. The LV Night Review is published monthly, so, if you can't make this deadline, don't despair! Just email us to get on the LVN Writer's Email-list and we'll keep you posted on themes down the road. Moreover, if you would like to check out articles from previous topics make your way to anarchyisforeveryone.org!

***DEADLINE***
April 1st, 2008!

***BACKGROUND***
Classical anarchists like Emma Goldman discussed anarchism as a rigorous scientific method, and theorized that authority and oppression were derived from a mystical/un-scientific world view. However, in this day and age, where we've seen the horrors of modern science, from animal testing to the atom bomb, and seen the implementation of science in furthering racism, homophobia and patriarchy, we cannot afford to be so optimistic. In fact, it is completely understandable why many anarchists today view science with contempt and disgust, positing a future where people rely entirely on folk knowledge and common sense to construct our daily living.

But like it or not, modern science is responsible for the survival of millions of people through agricultural advancements, medical technology and even things we might take for granted such as plumbing, heating systems and clean water. Are we as anarchists ready to accept the consequences of throwing out all the scientific achievements of capitalism? Or, is there an intersection between science and anarchism, and what does that intersection look like?

Your submission can address the topic directly or be related in whatever way you see fit! We are especially interested in any anarchist science experiments that people might have and a great scientific diy project would be lovingly appreciated!

***FOCUS QUESTIONS***
*In your opinion, what would an anarchist science look like, and how would it fight disease, promote the differently-abled and support those with mental illness?
*The DIY movement (when not being co-opted by capitalists) has created a foundation for an anarchic-science methodology, but is it enough to provide the medicine and technology necessary for a complete withdrawal from modern science?
*Have any scientific developments/experiments from your experience living in an anarchist co-op? Share them!
*Cyber-punks: love them or leave them?
*How about any personal reflections or stories about a scientific anarchy or anarchic-science? We would love to hear 'em!

***HOW TO SUBMIT***
Simply email submissions to: louisvuittonnight@gmail.com!

***FORMAT***
500-700 words

***WARNING***
We will not edit content in any way, but we will edit all pieces for grammar, spelling and length, if necessary. Also, we generally get more submissions than we can print, at any one time so if your fabulous piece doesn’t make it in the review, we will definitely include it in the online version.

Anarchism & Decadence (5)

Direct Action Decadence
- Carrie Bradshaw, The Queen City of the Plains (and don’t you forget it!)

In our great philosophy of big dreams and bigger hopes, is it too much to ask that anarchists carry themselves with grace and elegance? If I think back to all the time I’ve spent as an anarchist, my fondest memories are the ones where we managed to combine anarchy with the absurdly decadent. The feasts that took three days to prepare, the dance parties in decrepit palaces, champagne in that sketchy-ass hot tub, or the general un-governability of passionate hope (and by passionate hope, I might mean idiotic optimism!). Those times, when against our better judgment, we gambled it all and won!

Anarchists Need Decadence:

Yes it’s true. Anarchism is too wet and wild to turn into another moral caveat or a code of behaviors! Unfortunately, anarchism is stuck in the box of aesthetic dirtiness and homebum soup (and whose to argue with fashion!) but let’s step it up a little! Adventuring doesn’t have to always be macho-macho-manarchy, nothing’s wrong with an elegant adventure - frolicking in a field or something, and by field, I mean free store! Anarchy has a long history of celebrating beauty and artistic freedom, sometimes we just forget it. Decadence forces us to get off our pedestal and frolic in the streets. Basically, no one frolics anymore.

Decadence Needs Anarchy:

Without a pragmatic approach to creating a world without hierarchy and authority, decadence is only another choice of consumption patterns. Yes it’s delightful to appreciate a fine wine and an exquisite cheese, but there’s nothing decadent about indulgence for indulgence’s sake. It’s meaningless, worthless, and in a word, base. Decadence has so much more potential to be thrilling and liberatory, but it needs to be placed in a radical context. Otherwise, instead of a dandy, you’re a yuppie, complicit to a system of strict moral codes and behaviors. There is nothing decadent about playing by the rules, or, for that matter, rules at all, is there?
Direct Action Decadence, a Primer:

1. Anarchist Vomitorium: The Romans created the delightful community building activity of eating, drinking, and fucking until everyone pukes into a trough of flowing water. People, now is the time.

2. DIY Spa: Spa refers to a water-centered medicine, which makes your own diy spa, easy breezy covergirl. Most spa recipes involve hot water and some soothing herbs, and if you are interested, you can always check out a book or two from the library. Give yourself a foot soak! Rub a little olive oil on your tootsies and soak in hot water, with herbs if you so desire. Afterwards, lugubriously rub lotion on feet and put on some cozy socks!

3. Tea Parties: No more f’n potlucks! You can still bring your burned peanut butter lentil mush but we’re drinking tea and champagne and eating cakes, no if ands or buts, just f’n butts!

4. All Night Dance Party: Self-explanatory, but here’s a few words of advice. Food not Bombs turns trash into fine dining, so try turning trashy music into an amazing dance party! Think Latoya, Just Wanna Dance. You absolutely must set the stage! Gone are the days of high school dance parties where everyone awkwardly shuffles around, in full lighting, whilst leering at one another. Eliminate the problem, in this case, light. You will need to either turn-off all the lights, or make a disco ball out of dumpstered cds that have been cut up and glued to a sphereical item, strapped to a slowly rotating motor (probably stolen from a craft store) and illuminated with a flashlight. It’s just got to happen.

5. Sex in Public: Be safe, be courteous, when you RSVP to a party, always be sure to come.

6. Art Swaps: These days plenty of a-political hipsters have these, but they were once an anarchist mainstay, something to look forward to and give you incentive to make something beautiful. You know you have some crappy painting of a deer with a banana in its antler sitting around somewhere, so why not trade it for something worth a damn!

7. Combine them all and see the beauty, touch the magic!

Anarchism & Decadence (4)

The Last Subway Car to Coney Island
- A Conversation between Roxanne Alive and Cookie Orlando
Typed up by Cookie Orlando, NYC

ROXANNE ALIVE:
I was just talking about the party, like…

COOKIE ORLANDO:
So this was on the train?

ROXANNE ALIVE:
It was an 80s dance party on the train. And it was gonna be on the N train going to Coney Island. I wish I still had the flyer because the flyer was so good.

COOKIE ORLANDO:
Did you organize it?

ROXANNE ALIVE:
Yeah. I put it all together. My friend helped me make the flyers. Then we took over the last subway car on the N train, the infamous last subway car on the N train to Coney Island. So we all got onto that subway car, and there’s like complete absurdity because at first we all meet up at the subway and Dave isn’t there. I brought the boom box but Dave was supposed to bring all the music. He had made all these 80s mix CD’s and he was late.

So we were waiting on the subway platform and we were all in taffeta and lace and teased-out hair, plus all the kids who lived at KFC, all the squatter kids are there just like covered in patches and Mohawks and everyone’s just like totally fucking ludicrous looking, just waiting on the subway platform waiting for fucking Dave and we’re playing tag across the subway platform. And finally he shows up at the wrong stop and so we had to take the train to his stop. We finally find him and get on the train, and we’re going to take the train to Coney Island, get out at Coney Island, play skee-ball at the arcade, get back on the train and continue the dance party.

We get to Coney Island. We all pull out of the train and the arcade is closed because it’s winter and it’s midnight! So we get back on the train and we’re like “What the fuck are we gonna do?”

COOKIE ORLANDO:
You could just do the dance party on the boardwalk.

ROXANNE ALIVE:
But it was like cold. It was like January. So we keep dancing on the train. And we’re like hanging upside-down from the bars and everything… We get off at Atlantic Avenue ‘cause we decide we’re gonna go back to Fort Legit, which is like a house that a bunch of kids lived at way out in Brooklyn.

We had to transfer from the N train to the 4 train to get to the house, so we get off at the N platform at Atlantic Avenue, and I’m carrying this huge fucking boom box and wearing fishnets and high heels and tons of taffeta, and I’m carrying a boom box and just blasting lots of really terrible 80s pop music. And we go from the N platform, to the 4 platform, up the stairs, to the top of the 4 platform. There’s like an old lady, MTA workers, all on the platform, and everybody on the platform is into it. The old lady’s into it and the MTA workers are nodding their heads with their arms folded.

And we’re full-on spazzing out and dancing on the platform and I’m just like holding the boom box and having a great time and the fucking cops give me a ticket. And so the police come and they take me away from everybody else with my little boom box. They make me press the stop button on the tape, ‘cause of course it was a tape! Anyway I put down the boom box. I have to go down the stairs with the cops. And this is when I was squatting at the KFC, right? And so of course he wanted any mail we had to confirm our identity as a location. But I also didn’t have any address aside from the address of the KFC, but I couldn’t remember what the address at KFC was ‘cause we all just knew where it was. We knew how to get there by the hole in the fence that we took to the hole in the building that we took to the stairs. But I couldn’t be like “Hey officer, I live right on the other side of Mars Bar, through the hole in the fence behind the car, through the hole in the building. Can you write that on your ticket?”

Of course not! So the cops separate me out and they bring me down the stairwell and they’re asking me where I live. And I had to yell, I was like, “Andy, Andy Soda-Pop, where do we live?” And the cops are like “You’re not allowed to do that. You can’t ask somebody where your address is.” And I’m like “I just don’t remember my address, sorry.” So they write me a ticket with this ludicrous address. And then my friend Mark snatches it out of my hand and she’s like “It’s okay. My parents pay my rent. I’ll just tell them we had a really high energy bill this month.” So she made her parents pay my ticket.

But the best part was, that little old lady on the subway? When the cops took me away, she turned to one of my friends and she said, “If that were my daughter, I’d just kill those cops! What jerks!” This is some 60-year-old lady talking about killing cops on the 4 train platform! So then of course we all get back on the train and as soon as the train doors close, we hit the play button and start the dance party again. Then we got to my friends’ house and it was just this room of red lights and smoke and spilt booze and people making out all over the place and people dancing all over the place until morning. It was absurdly beautiful and it was absolutely amazing.

It also was my going-away party before I went and hitch-hiked around Mexico for a couple of months and the entire time I was gone, I didn’t bring my cell phone and the outgoing message on my voicemail was my friend Andy and my friend Mattie singing really really loud the chorus to some terrible Belinda Carlisle song. It was the most adorable thing in the world.

COOKIE ORLANDO:
I think I may have heard that.
ROXANNE ALIVE:
I’m pretty sure you did.

Anarchism & Decadence (3)

Anarchism & Decadence
- David Tacium, Montréal

If there is a line of continuity between anarchism and decadence, it would have to be read under the common current of romanticism and its notion of the counter-cultural hero, whose losing battle with industrialism has been well charted. Yet I cannot make the link without discomfort, considering the solitary disbelief of the decadent individual in light of the revolutionary dimension of anarchism, its vision of the possibility of a world moving forward into a transformed world where government will be abolished.

What, first of all, is decadence? Is it the primitivism in pop culture today, of which the signs go all the way from piercings to medieval combat? Does it mean getting wasted on ecstasy? It might, but let’s recognize first of all that like anarchy, it is not something which this generation invented. In fact, both currents gained their modern day momentum some 120 years ago (I’m being a bit arbitrary in giving 1890 as a date, but it was certainly a moment of flowering). I’m confident that readers know enough about the origins of anarchism. But what did Decadence mean back then?

Herbert Bahr, a prominent Austrian critique of the time who grappled with the question, was hardly alone in laying emphasis on the aesthetic dimension of experience, to which he added the value of mysticism and close attention to the changing states of the soul. Other-worldly preoccupations, surely. The decadent was one who sought to alter his own life, and at most his immediate surroundings, and to hell with the larger picture. It was the bourgeoios “gentleman” who was prone to decadence. He still is: witness the stereotype of consumer-oriented gay urban male, for instance, whom the American Right is forever damning even while a significant sector of the economy is all too happy to know exists.

It is safe to say that decadence carried a predominantly negative connotation. However, regardless whether the decadent be a hyper-consumer who helps keep the economy afloat or a “burden on society”, it would be reductive to see the decadent simply as a self-indulgent egocentric. This would miss the point that at the same time, there was a strong current of culture critique in embracing decadence, especially as someone like Baudelaire did. For the latter, the decadent figure countered his society’s blind reverence to positivistic progress, machine technology. The radical critique of decadence, in Baudelaire’s thought, is to expose the artificiality of all human endeavor. In embracing decadence, Baudelaire takes a swipe at Charles Fourier and the socialists of 1848, whom he accuses of buying into the ideology of progress, the Western ideal par excellence.

Baudelaire too was once an activist, in his early years (he even mounted the barricades alongside Blanqui in 1848), until nature took over from history as the ultimate reference point and the dandy came to stand for the modern day apache, an underground hero made up of transgression and subversion. In his opposition to the world as it was leaning and not moving, a world which he saw as pure spectacle, he saw the value of reformers like Giuseppe Ferrari not for their belief in progress but for their capacity to observe politics as an aesthetic show lacking internal coherence. Indeed, the first decadents turned the sword the other way, accusing the progress-mongers of being themselves decadent. They were culture critiques first and foremost, using their own decadence as a way of nay-saying a world they meant to refashion.

The decadent project put the individual first , aiming to establish the human person in all his uniqueness and beauty against a society that reduced the human being to a uniform, to a mere fragment of a larger project. It was a society based on privatization that gave its subjects the illusion of freedom while it simultaneously reinforced the value of competition. Precursor of today’s anti-imperialists, Baudelaire discredits the Paris of his time for failing to see outside the box. He takes part in the Romantic discovery of the nobility of the North American native people, who stand for reality, not in spite of but because of the transparency of their artifice, their maquillage, their ritual and the like.

Now, none of this, so far, contradicts the anarchist vision of one like Pierre Kropotkin, whose pamphlet “Anarchist Morality” denounces the straightjacket of contemporary religious, political, legal and social education by positing the basic motive for all human activity as the lust for pleasure. “We recognize the full and complete liberty of the individual; we desire for him plenitude of existence, the free development of all his faculties.”

The decadent project of Baudelaire’s fictional hero Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, was to exaggerate the signs of personal eccentricity in a desperate attempt to imitate a natural style. His successors, such as Huysmans’ Des Esseintes (À rebours), continues the quest by resolutely subverting whatever is taken for natural in the society in which he lives, a determination that leads him to such “bizarre” experiments as the attempt to eat with his anus. Moreover, he justifies his conduct by illustrating all the ways in which nature itself is deviant, perverse, full of deformation, abortion, degeneration. All this is a profound critique of mainstream society’s reduction of nature to a machine that works.

Decadence is bound up directly to sexuality, and Baudelaire was hardly the only among “first” decadents to have understood the power of sex as a medium of cultural critique. In short, the full potential of the human person requires a breaking out of the restrictions of genre. All the ways in which genre is used to manipulate people into remaining obedient political subjects would lead me to write another paper. Conversely, deviance as an expression of revolt has a long tradition, leading to the early modern period with writers like Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet and critics such as Fritz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) develops the notion of a perverse dynamic whereby self-identity is seen for the fragmentary ploy that it is, and abandoned in favor of a fuller being that discovers its interconnectedness and enters the arena of repression and liberation, which is a political realm.

Here is where we can pin-point the important affinity of decadence to anarchism. In this realm, the decadent is not merely “against” in the sense of being opposed to something but also “against” in the sense of being close up , in proximity to, i.e., “up against”. Decadence is a position assumed within normativity – in fact, it is what the “normal” people call those whom they condemn – which enables the decadent to call normativity into question.

Decadence thus offers the possibility of social and indeed political involvement in the very trenches of the contemporary world. The decadent has the chance to make every minute of his life a struggle, not with the enemy but with potential allies. For as Kropotkin says, while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying life, ultimate satisfaction comes with the exuberance of free thought and feeling. He cites Guyau as summing up the whole question of anarchist morality when he says, “We are not enough for ourselves: we have more tears than our own sufferings claim, more capacity for joy than our existence can justify.” The decadent subject summons the full arsenal of human experience, from suffering to wit, in a sublime expression of revolt.

Anarchism & Decadence (2)

Decadence, My Frenemy
- E. Sebastian Snowflake Newyork, Syracuse

Anarchism and the specter of “the anarchist” will always haunt authoritarians on the Right and Left as decadent. We will forever represent to them the corrupting uncontrollable, excesses of sex and violence, perversion and moral breakdown. For some of us, we couldn’t be happier. At least someone’s getting it right, in fear if not in fact!

Decadence can be a marvelous weapon against the cops in your head.

For someone committed to what some anarchists more influenced by individualism critique as outmoded social movement forms of organization, decadence sure brings out the ego and my own! Fashioning our lives as art, playing out our tragedies, following our dreams of excess and pleasure are all incredibly personal and social acts. It’s about recreating yourself, and for we decadent queer anarchists, doing it against our oppression and fucking flaunting it. In decadence, queer anarchism finds its practice to be both individualist and communist. It subverts and bitches out the social and touches the dangerous and beautiful. It is destructive and creative.

Dandyism, tragedy, criminalized sexuality, addiction, excess. In the 1890’s Oscar Wilde disappeared and took the name Sebastian after St Sebastian, who became a queer icon, beautiful and martyred, portrayed in orgasmic death with arrows penetrating. For the 1990’s our decadent children feigning astute skill in angst, rebellion and flannel found ourselves scratching K U R T in our arms after an angelic white trash wanna-be Olympia scenester offered his delicate ending for our consumption with lead arrows. Decadence feels stupid, and contagious.

I can track my path of queer decadence Seattle to Seattle: alterna rebellion coaxed the queer outta me, fagged it up with punk attitude and proudly encouraged me to slack, whack and act like I’m on smack. In the mirror appeared a bi-queer grunge boy who relished confusion. 20 times wittier than Wilde: school sucks, work sucks, fire. Courtney Love, queer core punk, John Waters and trans/queer/feminist theory offered me subversive glittery ammunition against the regime of Natural Order that wanted to kill me as angry fag. Surrounded by the Puritan anti-feminist spectacle of Syracuse STRAIGHT edge hardcore calling for firestorms to eliminate the excessive classes, queer anarchist hedonism felt as good as your cat is lazy and twice as smart as your cat is for sleeping through work. Queer youth fucking attack! Meetings, make-outs, music!

With Seattle, a new world in the US anarchist movement, stumbling from meeting to action drunk with (im)possibility. Dancing in the street. Cops. Despite my attempts to be queer fabulous, I found myself “straightening up” for the movement and to connect with people outside it. Resistance/repression.

Writing this, I realize I’m unfortunately a lot less decadent than before. Syracuse, NY is a cold town and its not just the weather. Workplace conflicts, being alienated from local queer bar scenes, no radical alternative, lingering damage from Syracuse hardcore on queer participation in revolutionary politics have taken their tolls.

There’s so much we want from the anarchist movement that we don’t have. Queer anarchist decadence has to be and is a part of any liberationist social war against all hierarchy and interrelated oppressions. I want a fighting movement capable of theorizing the decadence of this horrible society and able to also build spaces of pleasure and excess that terrify the ruling class with our ferocity and wit. I want styles, affects, dramas produced collectively.

Again, no, Revolutionary Communist Party, I will not go to your creepy meeting at your gross bookstore to get recruited at the same place you threw queers out and sold your program against decadent homos. Bob Avakian looks like a Family Ties extra insultingly trying to be a Castro clone with that hat on his head, which we’d love to take off. And the hat, too!

As queer and otherwise anti-normal anarchists we are decadent to the Right because our sex isn’t organized around reproduction, but also because we threaten and refuse to (re)produce the identities, power relationships, consciousness that imperialist racist hetero-patriarchy necessitates in so many ways. Our “weakness” is our strength.
Authoritarians on the Right and Left analyze the decadence of a given society based upon the extent to which it has become economically “unproductive.” But fuck that - yeah, capitalism can’t fulfill its own goals. But productivity must be destroyed. Queer anarchist decadence is proudly counter-productive.

And what theories describe as “decadence” is in some ways a perpetual feature of oppressive systems on a world and local level; power dynamics are constantly decaying and reinventing themselves through struggle, losing grip of some sectors and gaining control over others, changing to co-opt insurrectionary moments into manageable parts. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy and US Empire thrive on crisis. Systems survive when what appears to be an unarguable decline today becomes a celebration of stability tomorrow, like rock’n’roll and 70’s economic shifts.

And GLBT decadence isn’t necessarily revolutionary. Acceptable notions of white queers men as “progressive,” entertaining, book-smart Dandies justify the ethnic cleansing through white queer gentrification. Settler white supremacy has race-d the Dandy and decadence “white” along with GLBT and queer. Anarchism is not The Answer. In a world of Perez Hilton VH1, John Waters re-makes, and ironic detachment hip, how do we make a revolutionary anarchist decadence that defies recuperation back into the System? How can we queers not fall into its traps - drugs, isolation, self destruction?

I haven’t dug into the theories out there, there’s pieces by Aufheben, International Communist Current, Fifth Estate, Rosa Luxemberg, threads on libcom.org. There’s the Right and fascists crying decadence to prepare for the fall of the Empire. Let’s get on this. Decadent anti-authoritarian promises can be found in the insurrectionary pieces by Alfredo Bonanno, calls for pleasure in feminist struggle by Dorothy Allison, Laura Kipnis, the parties of the Hedonist Liberation Front, the punk subversion of holidays, the regenerated threat of youth, fears of the insatiable Other. Queer anarchists, let’s take this on.

Collapse, rapture, whatever, things are getting interesting when they’re falling apart.

Anarchism & Decadence (1)

Anarchism is Decadence
- Marcoco, Paris

While the glorious history of anarchist struggles nourishes our daily lives and gives us inspiration for our future battles, one question that seems to go unasked is why have anarchist ideas remained so unpopular, despite their obvious attractiveness as both individual and collective liberation? Most anarchists I know would say that capital and the state have collaborated and dedicated incredible time and effort to keeping the anarchists at bay, because they know that these revolutionary ideas spell their end if they were ever to get out of hand.

This idea is pure self-agrandizing fantasy. Except for FDR’s new deal (where there is an argument to be made about an official state policy of ostracizing radicals for fear of their revolutionary potential) there is not a secret homeland security roundtable holding top-level meetings to infiltrate anarchist co-ops. I’m sorry, to believe this is the worst of blind egoism. Anarchists have almost always been unimportant – that is to say uninfluential outside their immediate circles – and they remain so today.

So, I ask again why? Why isn’t anarchism spreading like a virus through the homes of disillusioned suburban youth? I’d humbly like to propose that anarchism as it is widely practiced has developed into the opposite of its central tenants. Instead of encouraging each and every individual to express themselves, to think freely, to develop their own opinions and act upon them as they see fit, anarchism today encourages conformity, ideological orthodoxy and ostracizes anyone who doesn’t tow – and yes, I’ll say it – the party line.

When we look at historical anarchist figures like Oscar Wilde who were supposedly able to combine their radical thoughts with a bourgeois lifestyle, we say that anarchism is not overly rigid, and that within the school of thought there are a variety of positions to be had, more or less extreme, more or less ‘pure’.

But this doesn’t reflect the reality of how anarchism is and has been practiced. Anarchists have shown themselves to be ideological purists, refusing compromise on principle as a form of personal oppression, and refusing discussion as a form of pollution in the movement. This rapidly creates an arms race to the bottom of who can be more radical, and who can ‘out’ other ‘anarchists’ as not really living up to their principles.

Well, wake up people, we live in the triumphantly (and some would say late) capitalistic world of the 21st century, and, I’m sorry, but a couple of anarchist co-ops and squats, food not bombs projects and urban vegetable farms spread thinly around the world are not going to rot away the leviathan from within – regardless of what the cyberpunks say about the networking capacities of the internet. A more apt metaphor would be sprinkling water on a bonfire – if you think that the small centers of resistence we have are going cool this raging capitalist exploitation, you’re underestimating the heat of the fire.

Anarchism is a luxury. It’s already a decadence to have the education and personal liberty to make decisions such as ‘I don’t believe in the system’ and ‘I refuse to participate in the capitalist exploitation of others’. But then to go further – as many anarchists do – and reject anyone’s position not as radical as one’s own, is not only counter-productive, but orthodox in the worst sense of the word. It keeps anarchism a fringe radical movement. It prevents those drops of water from becoming torrents.

If anarchists are to be at all influential in our world. If the ideas of autonomy, egalitarianism and liberty are going to spread, then we’ve got to stop requiring ideological purity of everyone we associate with. If not, we are doomed to remain an uninfluential fringe underclass, dismissed out of hand before we ever open our mouths.

Compromise is a dirty word amongst us hardliners, but those who practice ideological purity are decadent in the worst sense of the word. Decadent like the late Roman empire was: self indulgent and blind to the word around it. Time to take revolution seriously and realize that people who take to the streets are our allies, even if they wear nike shoes, eat meat, and drive SUVs.