Following yesterday’s rather rambling movie commentaries doubling as quick notes on rewriting the history of the ‘Sixties’ and collective experiments in general…
This past Saturday a bunch of us headed down to good ol’ UC Santa Cruz for a one-day conference on “Anarchism Now”. The speakers were very interesting, and unlike my usual distaste for conferences, I actually enjoyed this one. There were four speakers in the morning session and four in the afternoon, and about an hour and a half to “discuss” following all the 20-minute talks. The discussions left a lot to be desired, mostly because everyone (including me) talked past each other, just blurting out what each of us wanted to communicate, but with very little back and forth or sticking to any particular topic or thread that came earlier.
Partly this was due to the wide range of ideas covered by the speakers (Iain Boal, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Eddie Yuen, John Holloway, Arif Dirlik, Barry Pateman, Carwil James, Roger White) and partly it was due to the fact that we were about 100 people in a room trying to say something meaningful about that elusive and frustrating category called ‘anarchism’; or in several cases, trying NOT to, preferring instead to address the practical behaviors and ideas that get labeled ‘anarchist,’ regardless of self-identification.
Continue reading Anarchism…. when?