A look at the shift away from a universal political critique -- from Paris '68, through postmodernist doubts about the possibility of change, to today's network of movements.
Producer: Michael Caplan Uploaded by: George King
This presentation will ground the history of the "new" anarchists in Paris 1968 through the disillusionment of the postmodernists -- doubt about the possibility of change, and as a step both with and away from identity politics. Drawing on Michel Foucault's discussions of biopower and his argument that all future critique must be partial critique grounded in specific times and places, the "new" anarchist method that appears to lack the sort of global critiques that Marxist and other revolutionaries of the past had is actually a specific new method of critique that avoids the limitations of universality of previous generations. This talk will also propose strategic directions, including: understanding universal health care not merely as a liberal end but as a means to radicalize society; the importance of continuing to build a mass movement based on economic and social justice, decentralization, anticapitalism, antiauthoritarianism, a thought-out environmentalism, and globalism "from below" in the form of a workers' international; and the central function that developing independent media will play.
This talk was presented at the third Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, at the Institute for Social Ecology, August 2001.
For further information on the conference, please visit http://www.homemadejam.org/renew/archive/archive.html
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