Andrea Perin
A daily challenge
I find it hard sometimes to live as an anarchist.
I do not speak of organizational situations where the activity takes place between people who share ideals and passions, where the action is frequently accompanied by a reflection on the meaning: in those moments the undeniable difficulty of continuing care is combined with knowledge of the construction of a very rewarding growth path. They are often situations that arise as antagonistic to capitalist society, they are different and are contrasted as a social model and organization, often at risk of becoming isolated, sometimes they choose, sometimes in danger of becoming self-referential.
My effort is materialized when "only" in the midst of life's daily work and relationships, in contact with people of different views, often in situations where the libertarian thought has never been exercised. In these cases, I have my difficulties. The meaning of my work is connected with the research, often individual, who can conduct the exercise, however, shared practices in the contexts anarchists.
I refuse to be an anarchist only within the boundaries of my fellow men, to make a living in the shelter of sharing close. I want to slipping into the daily comparison of those who are different from me, in situations where the anarchist thought (often still a reality other than your current one) has never expressed or compared, in the swamp where the hierarchy of relations is given for granted. I would also be able to keep these cases in a specific autonomous and recognizable.
In a nutshell, is the fact that I am an anarchist, who has values and practices are often not shared by this society, what makes me different from others? Better? Or worse, or indifferent?
It is a daily challenge, where the error can be a tool for growth and doubt provide the opportunity for review and refinement of certainties. The comparison may leave contamination hybridization, even at the risk of discovering that maybe not everything "works" as expected, that anarchy does not know what to say. But also the opportunity to ensure that anarchist ideas, although not recognized as such, have their effect and are useful to change the company outside of protected environments.
It can happen to me in my work, for example. I am concerned with the design of exhibitions and museums, organizations that are inherently authoritarian, where a class of specialists decide what and how to show the historical and artistic heritage to the potential audience, and choose what to communicate. From their inception, museums are intimately linked to the theme of identity, another argument often slip. Yet they have a significant role because they offer potentially anyone to contact and knowledge assets otherwise outside of personal experience, often the preserve of only the ruling class. In the folds of these institutions, often in agreement with those anarchist is not (almost all for the truth) is often unable to work in a different way to communicate, to increase the role of the visitor, offering autonomy and respect for those who is not a specialist.
Another area where I compare myself, this time for fun, is that food and cooking, traditional material on the margins of political considerations, but which have become hot topics, and serious - or at least they are often treated with seriousness and serious in places - which are assigned the expression of values and meanings.
Eating is definitely an individual act, bound to the tastes and personal possibilities. But usually corresponds to choice and greater choice and shared, which are often a specific response in the economy and culture (taste it to know), and express collective needs are capable of intervening in social dynamics.
Cleared the field from the concept of food as a class devoted to hedonistic act without concern, the power is now widely recognized as a potentially act ethically. Topics such as self-production, organic farming and zero kilometer, the boycott of industrial production have become conscious action policies, and the choice of vegetarian and vegan, it contains a concept of tolerance, not violence and exploitation of other lives, which is many more explicitly conjugated libertarian thought. There are avowedly anarchist food production (eg Urupia wines) and groups that see themselves as fair trade movement, the holiday menu prepared by the clubs are now paying attention to the origin and gastronomy.
Not to mention, in practice, where the cuisine "traditional" turn into a shorthand for a political discourse of identity, location, and conservative approach towards disenchanted recipes encoded (often stored by notaries) and an eye of respect for the traditions New citizens from around the world, are certainly a libertarian approach to sharing and willingness to change and construction of the tastes and knowledge.
 Andrea Perin
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Andrea Staid
Read the anarchists
“Uri Gordon has made us look at the anarchist movement with new eyes. He lights up and makes us question our basic beliefs, he puts his finger right on our most painful dilemmas, and opens new perspectives and understanding of choice.'’’.
Starhawk
author of “Truth or Dare and “reti di potere”
 The book recommended (Anarchy Alive!, Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Pluto Press, 2008) in this issue is unfortunately not yet published in Italian, but for those who read English is easily retrievable on the Internet. To Uri Gordon anarchism and politics are at the heart of the most vibrant and radical social movements today. From the occupations of the social centers for community gardens to acts of sabotage. Among the libertarian anarchist groups and networks is becoming more and more an ethos of direct action and non-hierarchical organization.
Anarchy Alive! is a fascinating, in-depth look on the practice and theory of contemporary anarchism. Uri Gordon is based on seven years of experience as an activist and on interviews, debates and a wide selection of recent literature to explore the cultures, activities and training programs of the explosive anti-authoritarian movement of today.
Anarchy Alive! also addresses some of the hot debates of the contemporary movement, using a theory based on the practice of provocatively reshape anarchist discussions of leadership, violence, technology and nationalism. This is a good text that I recommend to those looking for an informed and critical eye on 'anarchism, a force seen as mature and dynamic, not dogmatic in the era of globalization.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Cap.1 - What moves the motion?
Anarchism as a political culture
Chapter 2 - Reloaded Anarchism:
convergence of networks and policy content
Chapter 3 - Power and Anarchy
Ch.4 - Bombs Peace, Love and Gasoline:
Anarchism and Violence Revisited
Ch.5 - Luddites, hackers, and gardeners:
Anarchism and the politics of technology
Ch.6 - Country: Anarchy and the joint struggle in Israel / Palestine
To buy the book:
http://anarchyalive.com.
Andrea Staid
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Davide Pisani
Do not denigrate our nature!
I am sending you a comment to the piece “open and hybrid thoughts” published in “A” 359 (February 2011). A bit off topic but I hope there may be still useful.
To say that man is an animal "biologically deficient" does not make sense. I'd like to know who is this and how to quantify the failure Remotti human biology.
The very fact that everyone is alive means that we are "biologically inadequate." In fact, our biological capacities allow us to survive very well, from Papua in New York to Greenland.
A little 'healthy materialism would be helpful.
The culture exists only as a result of the exceptional ability of an organ (the result of biological evolution) that all human beings possess, even if not everyone uses. The organ I am talking about is generally referred to as the brain. Without a brain structured like that of humans (and in part as that of other primates - Pan Gender-) there is no possibility of communication and culture.
You can not get correct results if you start from false assumptions.
Within the libertarian culture has developed an anti-human anti-libertarian way, it's time to dispel. Humans are animals just like they are rats, cockroaches and sponges. And the history of the human lineage exactly like rosemary, mushroom, the tapeworm, amoeba, bacteria and unicellular type Vibrio cholerae, goes back about 3.8 billion years since life appears once and we are all more or less cousins on this rock we call Earth.
 This implies that:
- The line that led to the human being has a long history and certainly if our ancestors were biologically "inferior" would not be here today.
- We (humans) are not more evolved than other organisms
- We (humans) are not less evolved than other organisms.
- Like the rat, the tapeworm and the sequoia, we humans are adapted to our environment (Earth).
- Just like the ant, the sequoia, the tapeworm and the whale we (humans) use resources and change our environment.
- The way in which we alter our environment is no less natural than that the fox or wolf or ol'elefante halobatteri to use and modify the environment.
- The evolution usually act on "mosaic" the human line is under selection (natural) and fortune (or misfortune - depending on your point of view) our knowledge this has resulted in a brain with higher processing capacity than other animals . The chameleon medical or grass were found under different selective pressures, and starting from different organismic structures have developed different capabilities that allow it (just like the human brain in the case) to survive in their environment.
What is true is that, as for our good fortune (or misfortune) the action was selective environment, in the case of humans, the origin of a brain with high processing capacity (higher than in other animals), rather than source of a long tongue and sticky (as in the case of the chameleon), we humans have the ability to change the environment in a more drastic environmental changes and these have, over the last century, compromised and put at risk the existing ecosystems.
Let us be clear, we risk not to remove life from the planet, this is megalomania as there are lots of organisms that tolerate lethal conditions for us (eg Deinococcus radiodurans - a radiation-tolerant, or all of those iron-breathing bacteria - you've got it right iron - and eat natural gas - methane is you got it - etc ... which are not products of genetic testing but crazy bodies that have existed on the planet, much as we do, from 3.8 billion years) but I digress ...
I said, the brain, this amazing organ that allows us to process information and produce thought, this makes the difference between us and other animals. But if this does not mean status difference (since we are all related, from bacteria to humans by blood relationships more or less distant), implies that we humans, with a brain, we should use it, and try to preserve the planet, this Humanity should be for me Nova!
Do not denigrate our nature, please do not denigrate humanity, which is something very inhuman, such as missing Camillo Berneri ah!
Best wishes.
Davide Pisani
The National University of Ireland Kildare (Irlanda)
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Andrea Guidantoni
From the individual
Dear Andrea,
I find sincerely agree with your thoughts (“open and hybrid thoughts” published in “A” 359 (February 2011), but I am even more convinced that the anarchist project, revealed in my view, a tunnel with no way output (I apologize for my lack of confidence in the human) is not standing still on a reliable basis. That is why anarchism needs to be studied, designed and finally implemented in various forms, in endless forms I guess.
The basis of anarchism must begin with the individual, even before the community, since, as we agree, anarchism is utopian collective that probably will never find place in this world. So we must start from a different project, a project that is so established by the individual in their daily lives, but that does not lead foreignness by the company. It should be an anarchist in civil society, that's all. Need to come to a compromise essential, indeed inevitable, to bring anarchism in the world.
It should be from a third type of anarchism, which stems from anarchism and cultural lands in the political anarchism is the spirit, the category in which the spirit is free to travel without boundaries. I speak of anarchism that escapes from the can, which does not surrender in front of the thinkable.
Probably, however, this will not remain that I am talking about utopia.
Andrea Guidantoni
Andrea Staid
Two Answers
First of all thank in no particular order Davide Pisani, Andrea Guidantoni, Fiammetta Bonfigli, Andrea Perin Andrea Breda and for helping to animate this book on anarchism.
I would like to point out the statement not mine but Remotti Francis (Director of the Department of Anthropology, Archaeological and Historical-Territorial University of Turin and President of the Center for African Studies (CSA), led the Italian Ethnological Mission in Equatorial Africa from 1979 2004), which states that man is biologically deficient.
Of course I agree with David Pisani that the production of culture, which creates man, is due to the brain, so I think there was a misunderstanding in the use of terms. The man needs to define connections and alternatives that organize and give a direction to the infinite complexity of reality. A necessity due to the fact that the just man is an animal biologically deficient. "Entrusted to her biological capacities alone, would know hardly survive. His own physical survival - it seems - requires, and immediately, the intervention of culture "(F. Remotti, Against Identity, p.12).
The biological theory of the incompleteness of man - the theory introduced in the humanities and social sciences by A. Gehlen, "inevitably leads to a striking charge assigned to culture" (op cit. P.. 13), but no less important has another implication, which concerns the "social nature of thought and emotion" (op cit . P.. 13): "a large part of man (his thoughts, his emotions, feelings, inclinations) is socially constructed.
From the beginning, man has to be built, should be immediately put his hand to training because of "lack" of his biological nature. But precisely because these constructions occur in social settings, which vary in time and space, they can not but have a local character "(op cit. P.. 16);" complete cultural self, the human being does not become a any man, but a particular kind of man, culturally defined "(op cit. p. 17)..
These few lines to explain why in my article I used a quote by anthropologist Francesco Remotti.
I want to stress that it is far from my way of seeing a vision of anti-human (referred D. Pisani) was possible in a contemporary anarchism and its daily practices of subversion.
I wanted to say stealing the words of Marshall Sahlins that "human nature is a big mistake Western" nature of homo sapiens is his culture, even its culture, the man cosruisce culturally through its interaction with other human beings . Overturning the authoritarian and hierarchical relationships between humans and nonhumans, we act on this interaction and we begin to change towards a world of free and equal.
Andrea Staid |
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