Anarchists and Autonomists

So national-anarchism without biological racism then? Which is exactly what the last lot of national anarchists who came on here advocated. You're on the wrong site.

Your page says you are a Cornish nationalist. Nationalism + anarchism = ?

The last banned anarcho-nationalist said:

Your nationalism is different how?

http://libcom.org/forums/thought/anarcho-fascism-07022008

So you're just a nationalist then. You're even more lost.

Any good third positionist these days will say the same thing. In fact the BNP are all up for cultural diversity, so long as everyone sticks to "their" country.

If you'd bothered to look through the boards you'd see consistently that we communists see nationalism as nothing but the ideology that classes in your "smallest possible unit" of the nation state have something in common. We're internationalists because nationalism is bourgeois muck.

Why should we want to defend minority cultures?

Devrim

I support global monoculture.

Well this is nonsense, anarchists like libertarian marxists see culture as being an organic product created by people accoridng to how their desires and needs fit around whatever social system is in place. The concept of a sngle global culture is the bog standard nationalist bogeyman and usually translates itself as a sort fo crude anti-americanism and favouring small local industries over large corporatioons whther it was whiging about woolworths in the 30's or macdonalds today it ends up being in prettty much the same boat.
Esperanzo was quite a romantic notion, born out of a century dominated by successive world spanning nationalism fuelled wars that by the latter half of the 20th century have threatened to end human civilisation for good, Again esperanzo falls down in the same fashion as arguments for a monoculture, sicne it misses the point that langauage like culture develops organically from peoples practices and needs.

Hence where your anarcho nationalism falls down also; Anarchism is based on the idea that workers control industry through mass assemblies, syndicates and thus decide things democratically through workers councils, equally community activity is regulated democratically through councils of residents in an area and the like. Obviously theres no room in this syetm for imposing one set of national values, whther its small nation nationalism or a global monoculture. A particular restaurants will stay open if people are prepared to work in them and if enough people go to them, particular products would only be produced if there is a perceived demand for them. A church would stay open if enough people went to services to warrant it staying open and so on, afterall if 2 men and their dog are turning up every sunday then its a safe bet to say they can worhsip at a smaller location instead of a massive church which could be turned into a civic ammenity of some description by the local residents council. Where do you imagine your ideas of small nation nationalism or this ridiculous monoculture bogeyman are actually going to fit in wthin this social system of workers councils?

Nope, while no doubt maoist china was shit, its pretty foolish to pretend that tibets decidedly feudal theocracy shouldn;t have been got rid of. Obviously the problem is maoism got rid of one dictatorship a put another in its place, but if a social system is plainly incompatible with anarchism you have to actively get rid of it, whether its the hindu caste system or the fact that tibetan temples had a feudal hold over the country where most were condemned to back breaking poverty.

Oh right so the CNT which had millions of members across spain and was spains biggest political organisation at one time was actually a front for catalonian nationalism, seriously like give me a break.

Anyways the point is that your nationalism is just irrelevant gibberish, i mean seriously are you gong to walk into any fast food joint whether its in London, Truro or Barcelona and tell people that the problem isn't that they;re working tonnes of hours in a low paid job but actually they need an independent nation? Afterall thats the point isn't it because thats what all those peope in all those countries have in common, they all do the same shit job, hence why on this site we see things in class terms because thats where most of us on this planet are united and thats where our material interests lie.

Yes of course a nation or ethnic group has no objective reality like many human phenomena but that doesn't mean they are any less subjectivley important for people. They are imagined communities that objecively have changed over time but communities with values none the less.

What are you proposing? That groups who defined themselves in ethno-national terms and who got in the way of your future society would be fit for the camps?

Insults aside informed by groups such as Unlock Democracy [url=Enter URL here]http://www.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/ [/url] and England Devolve [url=Enter URL here]http://www.devolve.org/[/url] my opinion is that of a decentralist. I do believe that people should be given as much power and responsibility as they can take.

Now if I’m correct, based on the assumptions that human nature is basically good and that given the right conditions people will accept the maximum amount of power/responsibility, what you are proposing is the most radical form of decentralisation possible; this interests me.

To be honest I have read the works of and debated with all manner of fringe elements including third positionists and national anarchists but their proposal of hermetically sealed capsules of ethnic/racial purity (what ever they mean by that) fills me with horror. No group can or should live in isolation and the exchange of people and culture is a source of wonder, innovation and strength. That and as I've said I am a multicultural product as is my son and the city I live in.

Where my Cornish cultural activism would fit into your society then is that given an anarcho-communist society I, along with others, would be free to campaign for the inclusion of Cornish language, sports, music, history etc to be included in the community decided curriculum.

We really differ on the practicalities. I work within given societal/political structures in order to bring power down to the people. I do however think there is much room for syndicalism and I am a keen proponent of industrial democracy.

Just one question though. If an anarcho-communist society developed in central Europe and local community after local community decided, quite democratically, that all Roma should be driven of ‘their’ territory what would be your response?

Yes and like I've said society can be analysed horizontally and vertically. An Indian worker and an Cornish worker have shared problems and of course have equal rights but the political approach should be modified. I would agree in terms of British state nationalism or any state nationalism how ever national liberation that promises to put more power in hands of the people is a different story.

Umm yes I know.

Oh I've got that itchy strawman feeling again............

Music, sports, language, food etc I wouldn't want to force them on any one but I will work to promote and preserve them.

There we go I see the straw man. I agree and have never argued for a racial or ethnic monoculture but where an imagined national community exists at this point in time it is a good unit to which power can be devolved.

You know whenever I hear people using terms like that to direct human activity I get the funny feeling that geneocide is never to far away. Yes I've learned French, I speak English so to me Breton and Cornish are an acceptable lux. But for gods sake do you only do things because they are logical and rational? No fun!

In the 50 odd countries I've been to, including Poland, authentic day to day reality is what I sought and found.

edit-fuck up

Hi JH

I think its important to have a more sophisticated approach to national-anarchism than that they're fascists. Undoubtedly the main movers are third-position fascists, but their terminology is constructed in such a way as to appeal to "multicultural" rhetoric, and we can't overlook that they have precedents inside the "classical" anarchist tradition, Proudhon, Bukunin etc. They're just as likely to talk about linguistic or "cultural" commonalities than racial ones, at least publicly, and disavow many of the features of fascism as a political and economic system. I think its fair to call a nationalist a nationalist, even if they proclaim anarchism at the same time. National Socialism as an ideology is much more specific and established than national-anarchism, but we have to be extremely critical of any and all forms of nationalism because of their essentially reactionary nature.

OK yeah I understand that. Obviously they shoudn't be collapsed into the Falangists.

I'm no expert either, I just believe that anarchism/communism must be strongly anti-nationalist, and nationalism should be strongly countered.

I've seen photos of fash in spain waving black and red flags with falange symbols on. Does it come from the fascists trying to usurp support from the anarchists in the heyday of the CNT? This kind of pragmatic copying is nothing new, and the national anarchists today are trying to steal support from the squatter punks and crimethinc kids by adopting Hakim Bey's ideas and dressing up like black bloc'ers. Its sort of funny in a way.

Actually cornubian you do seem to be a bit confused about where people are coming from here. No-one on this board is against anybody learning or promoting interesting snippets of art/language/music or whatever which they enjoy, or against re-enactments of historic bits and bobs. No-one is against you looking at what your forebears got up to and learning a bit more about it.

But that’s NOT the same as being pro the division of these things up into arbitrary chunks of culture, be that national, regional or otherwise, which somehow ‘belong’ to a certain group of people based on who their great grandfather was or which village they happened to be born in. Culture is a matter of preference and taste, it should not be regarded as a collective thing to be imposed as someone’s ‘heritage’.

My dad likes to fly, it doesn’t mean I have to. He also speaks a slightly different language from me - in a century or two, he'll speak a very different language from those generations.

Go far enough back into 'English', and it becomes unreadable. At what point then, given I wouldn't understand the language, let alone the culture, of ancient Britons, could I point to someone and say 'you're the same as me'?

Jeez you don't like free speach on this board do you?

Where? And if we're going over this again, can I ask why you have a fascist acronym in your email address? You might want to change it.

You're deliberately not engaging with the point. Your argument is that national culture should be respected because its "important" to people, this is meaningless of itself. Anything can be "important" to anyone, it tells you precisely nothing.

Christ, sense of humour plz. How is liking afro-carribean music anglo-supremacism? And if ska is Cornish then that shows just how ludicrous the idea of organising around a shared Cornish "culture" is.

If you think that national identities are immutable and would continue into a system of self-government that deliberately opposes them then you are not being consistent with your earlier remarks, that "nations" have no independent existence. Similarly if you get hot under the collar about being compared to another miniscule group of language enthusiasts because their language is "made up". How are languages not?

We don't think that anarchist communism will just "occur". It will be consciously constructed by the actors in it. So in that sense the people in it will be anarchists, yes. The point is that people aren't passive and outside of "government". Therefore if they were identifing as "Albanians", and were organising around nationalism, they clearly would be something else entirely.

So for treating counter-revolutionaries like counter-revolutionaries, any successful revolution demands organisation, as does any society. So in the case of the Ukrainian revolution, you had an insurrectionary army which could discipline antisocial behaviour, run democratically. We imagine this happening in society too, not by a "world police force" but by a democratic system of control of force.

I think Saii is right in laying out the broad ideological consensus. Generally, we also think that oppressed minorities can organise to defend themselves as minorties, but that if they fail to recognise the flimsiness and constructed nature of these "identities" and how they are a fetter to wider solidarity then they have no revolutionary potential. Discussions around the Zapatistas are often framed in this way. Though this doesnt have much relevence for Cornwall, where your idea of "oppression" seems to be that if every "culture" doesnt "self-govern" then they are in some way "oppressed".

As for national culture being "bad" we've laid that out repreatedly. So one of the many overlapping "cultures" i could be construed into would be that of the North-West of England. I like living there, and theres plenty of things I like about the "culture". There are things I don't like too. But I'd clearly be nuts if i said the people of manchester are oppressed by not self-governing as mancunians. Mancunian nationalism would be another form of parochialism, it would divide workers from each other, it would homogonise identity etc.

But this isnt going anywhere, and is rightfully binned.