ALLies on the Airwaves
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
(From Portland ALLy Shawn Wilbur 2009-02-18.)
From Occupied Cascadia, Kyle Burris recently interviewed Portland ALLies Shawn Wilbur and William Gillis for KBOO-FM’s program Radiozine:
Market Anarchism: Government regulation and the financial crisis.
What roll [sic] did government regulation play in the current financial crisis? Is more regulation what we really need? What would a truly free market look like? And is there hope for radical reform, beyond the failed Marxist model?
KBOO’s Kyle Burris speaks to local anarchist activist William Gillis, and historian Shawn Wilbur, about the theory know as Market Anarchism, or Left Libertarianism. They discuss the roll [sic] government plays in the current economy, and also take a historical look at government’s affect on unions and health care in the US.
More information on the subject can be found at the website Invisible Molotov.
— KBOO.fm (2009-02-17): Market Anarchism: Government regulation and the financial crisis.
Congratulations Shawn and William!
An mp3 of the interview is available for download at the KBOO.fm website.
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There are days when I wonder how Will has managed to exist in the Portland anarchist scene for so long without getting his ass kicked, let alone maintaining a semi-prominent position. This is one of them.
Has his ass kicked by thugs? The police? Or by social anarchists/communists/market haters?
The latter. If you translated the prevailing digital rage to analog, it seems likely to happen sooner or later, given his immersion in that environment and the fact that he (now literally) broadcasts his views.
Even if you think that’s being paranoid, you’d still expect him to be marginalized and excluded from involvement in many peoples’ projects. I mean, how does a self-proclaimed (heh) market anarchist who defends Murray Rothbard get invited to join the RNC Welcoming Committee?
When I find myself marginalized it’s very rarely over economics and usually over animal rights / primitivism. Secondarily, it’s over being too much into theory, when everyone knows that theorist = stalinist / lazy bum.
The sort of fervent anti-market hatred that you guys find on the internets just doesn’t exist in real life.
Social Anarchists act like douchebags behind the glow of computer screens about the ancap/ansoc divide because
They’re outraged that folks who they don’t see on the streets, in the cafes and in regular life — who don’t have two hundred years of thick history on the barricades and in the trenches — have the fucking gall to try and position themselves as having equal claim to the banner of anarchism. (Which they see less in terms of specific ideas and more in terms of one contiguous historical social struggle.)
99% of Anarchism today is analysis of interpersonal/identity power structures and 1% hazy leftliberal perceptions that capitalism/technology/”The global system as it is” is teh EVIL. Commodity exchange is alienating… therefore you can’t have markets without oppression.
Show up in real life, keep the majority of your conversations in the boundaries of what you agree with them on — no one like constantly being confronted. Demonstrate that you’re up to date on the interpersonal and knowledgeable about the historical movement (more who helped Durruti rob banks, less who said what). And there shouldn’t be a problem.
Also. Nitpick. I wasn’t ‘invited’ to join the RNC-WC. I was one of the people who founded it.
Lesson: Don’t wait to join other people’s projects.
I don’t have much to add to what William’s said, except to second it: my own experience, in Vegas and elsewhere, is that most of the social anarchists you will encounter offline are either different people, or the same people acting very differently, from the folks you will encounter on, say, InfoShop news comments threats or acting like WikiPedia hall monitors. (And the latter groups are actually a minority of the social anarchists you encounter even in online forums; they just make a majority of the noise.) As a rule, most of the anarchists you’ll meet offline are activistas, and like most activistas, the best thing you can do to keep a productive relationship with them is show up and get to business and do some activist work they respect.
Those who you will have trouble working on this level with are rarely if ever those you have trouble with over their being , but rather over some other issue that’s under broader debate within the anarchist movement (for example, primitivism or gradualist reformism).
I actually do have some problems with the degree to which activistas and activistarianism often dominate the social Anarchist scene offline, but that’s another issue for another day, and I certainly prefer activistarianism (which does, at least, supply a point to the proceedings) to the aimless and pointless rant-n-rave that occurs in the kind of conversations you’re no doubt thinking of.
Oh, hella twinkles on that one.
Actually, now that I come to think of it… interesting, relevant memory:
I actually DID once come to a ‘screaming obscenities in each other’s face and preparing to scrap’ situation with a syndicalist friend of mine which was, incidentally, live on the radio in Minnesota and about market anarchism a good three years ago.
I’d completely forgotten about it, but yeah. To be a dick, my friends played “Solidarity Forever” after he stormed out of the soundstage.