Not your father’s anarchy
Star News had the most sympathetic, ideology-free description of anarchism I’ve seen in the form of Si Cantwell’s hagiographic piece on the local Be Your Own Hero scene:
Meet your friendly neighborhood anarchists
But I guess that’s the point of A-ism, at least according to its proponents — that it avoid the ideological.
I was taken in too. The BYOH folks have a Really, Really Free Market (rhymes with flea market) at Greenfield Lake near the tennis courts on the last Sunday of every month — so mark your calendars for August 31st. I’m going. There and elsewhere, local anarchists share expertise on bike repair (or just repair your bike for you), serve free food, promote Thoreau-vian self-reliance and in general exemplify the center-less, be your own hero way. BYOHers are also, of course, participants in the local Critical Mass, which is that leaderless, semi-spontaneous gathering of bicycle enthusiasts that’s been surging some here lately.
A mutual friend I ran into today joked that when Trace and his wife Kristin Henry, who’s one of the BYOHs profiled in this story, move away to take up farming and homesteading in earnest, “What will the Star News write about??”
This type of harmless activism might sound ridiculous to certain segments of
society, but I find it refreshing and an inspiration. Anything that
challenges the ideals of capitalism, which is a concept we are brainwashed
to accept as perfect but features flaws we see every day (the growing gap
between rich and poor, reckless and corrupt behavior in the financial
sector, money-driven politics), is okay by me.
Being a post-left radical has never been harmless nor has it been boring or ideologically obsolete. However BYOH is a small piece of modern anarchism, which has attempted to keep itself away from labels that would tend to undermine the goals of community outreach and development.
I know the weight and the history that comes with identifying as an anarchist, and I take it seriously and without apology for anything done in the past under the banner of anti-authoritarianism. As we say, if your heart is free, the ground you are standing on is liberated territory - defend it.
Trace - My point about ideology in the original post wasn’t that
anarchism is not ideological, or that it’s in some way obsolete. I was
trying to say what you are here, and that is that as far I understand
it anarchism makes a point of disassociating itself from any
particular, existing ideology.
But like many things, anarchism becomes ideological (and, inevitably,
labelled) even when it professes to avoid ideological alleys like
“anti-fascism” — that is, to avoid political views as systems of
thinking or understanding, beliefs *as* beliefs.