User:Eleanorg/RWR 1.1/Annotations/Post Anarchism Anarchy

ANNOTATION: Post Anarchism Anarchy

Hakim Bey

This short text from 1987 (1) considers the sorry state of the contemporary anarchist movement, offering a series of diagnoses, and a 9-point manifesto for action, in Hakim Bey's trademark provocative style. It considers the question of why so many people have deserted the anarchist movement, and why "genuinely oppressed" groups are so underrepresented within it. His conclusion is that anarchism - marked out as a deathly institution with the spelling "anarchISM" - is "haunted by the legacy of failure & revolutionary masochism… afraid to ask itself, here & now, WHAT ARE MY TRUE DESIRES?" (Bey, p.69).

Anarchism, according to Bey, lacks a concrete program for fulfilling real needs and desires: "Demos, picket-lines & reprints of 19th century classics don't add up to a vital, daring conspiracy of self-liberation" (ibid. p.69). Making reference to the deadening spectacle of US life, he calls for anarchists to take subjectivity seriously and "pick up where the Situationists left off" (ibid. p.70). He concludes the essay with a series of calls to action which echo the Situationist focus on everyday life and rejects the more formal, oppositional tactics associated with leftwing activism. These include cultivating interracial/intercultural relationships, celebrating sexuality, rediscovering mystical practices, and even a Futurist-like demand for an entirely new kind of music. In short, a call for anarchism to be rejected in favor of anarchy.

1. This text was written in the year I was born, and as a reader I am startled and saddened by how relevant this manifesto still is to the anarchism of today.

Bey, H. (2011) 'Post-Anarchism Anarchy' in Post Anarchism: A Reader, by Rouselle, D & Evren, S. (eds) (London: Pluto).