Anarchy

Caving in under a dreadful headache, I started looking at some old bookmarks: primitivism.com

How's that for an oxmoronic site name? I suppose they can't all be as accurate as knobsandknockers. Checking out the new additions, I found a rumination by Bob Black about —ism vs. —archy. You've just got to love it.

My considered judgment, after years of scrutiny of, and sometimes harrowing activity in the anarchist milieu, is that anarchists are a main reason - I suspect, a sufficient reason - why anarchy remains an epithet without a prayer of a chance to be realized. Most anarchists are, frankly, incapable of living in an autonomous cooperative manner. A lot of them aren't very bright.

Putting on my forensic rhetorician's hat, I've got to make a call for definitional stasis. The Cambridge Dictionary defines anarchy as "lack of organization and control," so wouldn't his frustration mean that anarchy is what it says it is? Isn't operating in a "cooperative manner" acting with organization and control? At the very least, it implies social control. I do believe that there is such a thing as organized autonomy, weblogs are a great example of that. People develop social networks on there own, choosing how much of there time they wish to dedicate to being "good citizens" within their milieu. It's a sort of self-organizing principle, completely at odds with any notion of anarchy.

I've got to agree with his last statement. Anarchists generally aren't very bright. Declaring an —ism the enemy puts the writer in very good company, though, when it comes to standing in the bushes with the not so bright.