negations

New York has a rich history of revolutionary struggle. Sometimes you need to dig through dusty archives to find traces of it and other times you just need to walk down the street. The plaque depicted above, located at 208 East 13th Street, is a clear instance of the latter.

According to the Village Voice, Bruce Kayton’s Radical Walking Tours is responsible for the plaque. Kayton is also the author of Radical Walking Tours of New York City, which is a well-researched and well-written guide through Manhattan’s leftwing landmarks. He also leads informative and entertaining tours of various city neighborhoods, although apparently he has suspended them for the time being.

The photograph below offers a broader view of 208 East 13th Street. I have highlighted the plaque with a small black circle.

(From Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, spring, 2001)

by Chuck Morse

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy
by Russell Jacoby. 240 pp, New York, Basic Books, 2000

The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere
by Carl Boggs, 310 pp, New York: Guilford, 2000

There is no doubt that the thinkers and activists who shaped the anarchist tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries expanded our sense of social possibilities in ways that still seem vital today. Even now, at the beginning of the 21st century, it is hard not to be inspired by Proudhon’s polemical wit, Kropotkin’s generous radicalism, or the deep social reconstruction carried out by the Spanish anarchists.

But there is also no doubt that circumstances have changed radically since their time. A contemporary anarchism must be much broader than the old thinkers and activists imagined and we must contend with new barriers to the creation of an egalitarian, cooperative, and decentralized society. We would be ill-advised – to put it mildly – to try to build a movement on the works of a Proudhon or a Kropotkin (etc), but we can and should emulate their example by fighting the forces that hinder the realization of existing liberatory potentials.

Fortunately there is a vast literature that can help us in this task. Although we will often be disappointed by the lack of radicalism or absence of nerve in much of it, there are nonetheless many works that can help us build an anarchist critique for today. The two books I review here have instructive contributions as well as shortcomings. They are Carl Boggs’s The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere and Russell Jacoby’s The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy.
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“I pondered how men fight and lose the battle and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men fight for what they meant under another name.” ~ William Morris, The Dream of John Ball

Murray Bookchin, my dear friend and mentor, died at approximately 1:20 AM on July 30, 2006. Although he and I had some important differences at the time of his death, I never ceased to love him nor to feel tremendous gratitude for all the support, guidance, and insight that he gave me.

I traveled to Burlington, Vermont to participate in the memorial service held for Bookchin on August 13. I made the trip with Yvonne Liu (my compañera) and Michael Diamond, our mutual friend.
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Interview by Chuck Morse

Una resistencia amplia y popular se opuso a las dictaduras militares que estrangulaban a América Latina en los ‘70. Activistas de distintas tendencias políticas las combatieron, organizada y espontáneamente, y sus esfuerzos sin lugar a dudas salvaron muchas vidas y aceleraron el derrumbe de esos regímenes brutales.

Si bien algunas de sus contribuciones fueron celebradas en libros, artículos y películas, importantes aspectos de la resistencia nunca han sido estudiados. En particular, la oposición anarquista a las dictaduras -que existieron en Argentina, Brasil, Chile y Uruguay- ha sido casi totalmente marginada de los estudios históricos.

La siguiente entrevista repara de algún modo esa omisión. Cuenta la historia de Resistencia Libertaria, una organización clandestina anarquista fundada antes de que los militares argentinos tomaran el poder en 1976.

Resistencia Libertaria (RL) era activa en los movimientos estudiantil, laboral y barrial y también tenía un ala militar con la que defendió y financió sus actividades. En su mejor momento, tenía entre 100 y 130 miembros [1] y una red mucho mayor de simpatizantes. La organización fue diezmada en 1978 y el 80 % de sus miembros pereció en los campos de concentración y las cámaras de tortura de la dictadura.

RL mantuvo la larga tradición del anarquismo argentino y asimismo lo transformó de cara a las nuevas condiciones a las que se confrontaban los activistas en los ‘70. Las experiencias de RL -sobre las que hasta ahora no hay documentación ni en castellano ni en inglés- marcan un capítulo importante en la historia de la resistencia a la última dictadura argentina y en el anarquismo de posguerra en general.

Fernando López

Si bien The New Formulation suele limitarse a reseñas de libros, se espera que los lectores aceptarán esta pequeña transgresión de nuestra línea normal de publicación.

Esta entrevista se hizo en español por teléfono el 13 de octubre de 2002 con Fernando López, uno de los pocos miembros sobrevivientes de RL. Se puede tener más información sobre López mirando la parte sobre nuestros colaboradores.

~ Chuck Morse
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One of the more significant writers to emerge out of the Latin American left in recent years–Uruguayan journalist Raul Zibechi–has just released a new book: Dispersar el poder: los movimientos como poderes antiestatales (trans.: Fragmenting power: social movements as anti-statist powers). It studies contemporary resistance movements in Bolivia, specifically the practice of a communitarian, anti-statist politics in the city of El Alto.

Zibechi is best known for his Genealogía de la revuelta: Argentina, la sociedad en movimiento (trans.: Genealogy of the Revolt: Argentina, Society in Movement), which analyzes the origins of the new social movements that exploded onto the horizon in Argentina in December, 2001. He has also published works on the Zapatistas, on social movements and autonomy, and on contemporary student activism. Unfortunately, none of his books have been translated into English

It is surprising that Latin America has not produced more anti-authoritarian writers of late, given that a veritable wave of anti-statist movements has swept the region. We can only hope that others will follow in Zibechi’s footsteps.