Comments Elsewhere

Dear Internet anarchist flame-warriors: Even if your dogmatic assertions that “Anarchism has always been X,” or “Anarchism really just means Y” were true, it would not matter — because anarchism had better be full of innovations and experiments, if anarchy is going to be worth anything at all. This is supposed to be a constantly evolving, periodically self-revolutionizing body of thought and social practice, not a fixed litany of traditional unchanging formulas. But that said, your dogmatic assertions that “Anarchism has always been X” or “Anarchism just means Y” are also probably not only false, but really kind of embarrassingly ill-informed, for almost any possible values of X or Y. Anarchists are weird, and we’ve already tried out lots of combinations of ideas, including a lot that you might not have expected, and a lot that you probably should not like at all. The “tradition” is large; it contains multitudes.