Anarchists and Autonomists

I can say I know for a fact that I came across anarchism on the internet. I have never actually met any other anarchists.

Hi Cornubian88, so where did I advocate genocide?

And I'm still confused as to how afro-carribean music and anti-nationalism add up to anglo-supremacism.

I'd also be interested to know how big the difference in "cultural" outlook between Cornwall and London is compared to say, Manchester and London.

Please. I'm genuinely interested In how "imagined communities" are ranked.

i have been watching this thread and now will chip in with my thoughts. up in the north of scotland we get a lot of people spouting of about gaelic as a national tongue in the highlands. i am born and bred highlander but gaelic has no interest to me as we dont speak it on the east coast. i find it a load of nonsense in all honesty. we have dual road signs that most people havent a clue how to pronounce. it can get a bit much in all honesty. cornubian is not listening to anyone elses points and quotes "strawman" as an answer to everything. and to spout of anglo supremacist stuff is really laughable. in all honesty you should be looking to other forums rather than libcom to put your nationalistic views across.

It's this bit which people here are having problems with, particularly with regards to Cornish, or Welsh nationalism. As has been said earlier, no-one is against people learning about, assimilating and redistributing older cultures, but that's not the same thing as saying that 'anglo-supremacism' is making a concerted effort to banish them from existence. What's going on is much more an organic process of usage and fashion. In everyday use, it's simply much easier in a country where 99.9% of people speak English - one in four worldwide - to learn that, because you can be understood. And on the whole, the cultural output of a large number of people will tend to bring new ideas to the top and kill off or reboot old or tired ones.

I note you aren't taking on the punk cause and trying to defend it as a culture against the ravages of hip-hop, but why not? There are plenty of punks about, they talk a specific kind of language, have a distinctive tribal dress. In terms of having a cohesive, instantly recognisable cultural output, they're probably significantly more coherent than 'Cornishness' is atm, the main difference being they don't have a geographical space to call 'Punkland' (well, maybe Camden). Yet no-one with any sense is talking about how they've been forcibly assimilated, they were simply superseded by new ideas and cultural fancies which were in fact taken mainly, but not exclusively from the US.

No-one here is saying that people who fancy living in a certain way should be stopped from doing that - and if someone is quite deliberately trying to stop people from living a certain way that's out of order. BUT - and it's a big but - in a giant majority of cases that is not what's happening. In Chiapas, it's not indigenous culture which is being attacked, it's community cohesiveness and solidarity - economic power. The ability of a class to defend itself. That's the basis on which state discrimination should be addressed, not saying 'this is sacred to our culture' but 'fuck what the state wants, we stand together to save each other from impoverishment'.

It actually risks being more divisive under those circumstances to try and hold on to the 'old ways' - look at Native Americans. They've got protected lands, cultural attributes, language etc, but a lot of the younger people actively leave what they see as a non-living culture artificially kept in stasis as the heritage of their forefathers. There's no life to it, it just ends up as a re-enactment thing rather than being a living breathing part of a growing society. Culture has to change, grow and adapt, or it dies.

I don't think that Cornish was outlawed. The scenario of speakers of a language all deciding one day 'that they'd rather speak english then their native languages', isn't how it works in reality.

Wiki explains the process:

What that means is that it is not that they all decide to start speaking English, but that they become bi-lingual, and over a period the balance tips to the dominant language. Generally, this happens because people want the best for their kids, which means them being fluent in the dominant language.

So it comes down to what language you decide to use in the home. Now in our case to teach our children the 'language of their ancestors' would be a little difficult. It would be four languages if we only went back to their grandparents (My wife, and my parents). If we went even a little further back, I know that would increase. My great-grandfather, for, example spoke another language. This is within living memory I can just remember him speaking it, but older people in my fasmily would remember it well.

You seem to have a very different view of languages than I do (I speak three fluently, and cope quite well in another). For you it seems to be a means of identity whereas for me it is a means of communication, something to be used when necessary, and useful, and discarded when not.

A girl I know, Seda, who lives in London is a native English speaker, and struggles very badly in the first language of both her parents, Turkish. Her great grandmother, however, who is still alive, is a native Kurmanji speaker, who struggles in Turkish. Now, this is just what I know. It is highly likely that earlier in her family's history they also swapped languages.

So for many of us there is no such thing as 'a language our ancestors spoke'. They spoke many languages. What it seems to me is that the posters on this thread advocating these small languages, who live in Paris, and California, are trying to manufacture an identity for themselves.

As for me, I speak Turkish in Ankara, Arabic in Damascus, and English in London, occasionally but not often, I also break into another language when talking with older relatives.

Back to the original point though. Cornish speakers aren't being sent to re-education camps. In fact their biggest complaint against the government seems to be that they don't give them quite enough money.

When we talk about forced assimilation you would do well not to destroy your argument by demeaning the real acts of suffering caused to people who were/are being forcibly assimilated to Cornish speakers only getting £80,000 a year off the government.

Devrim

devrim -

Cornish, welsh, scottish, and irish have all been outlawed at various times in British history. In the now, they are not outlawed and may even benefit from government subsidies, but basic government services aren't available in any of them and with the exception of a few gaelic schools in the north of scotland, (and possibly some elsh language schools as well? I'm not sure on this) education for children inthose languages isn't widely available either. the lack of availability is directly traceable to an explicit policy of assimilation by the brittish government, a policy which is not dissimilar to the policies of gocvernements in britaines colonies (canada, autralia, and the usa) towards native peoples. Factors like those have an undeniable impact on the long-term viability of the various languages. Notice I'm not saying that government services should be available only in those languages or even primarily, but i think it's silly for anarchists to condemn people who want to be able to see their kids educated in their native language as irrational nationalists. the same arguments hold true for any number of indiginous north american nations as well. we could even go a step further and say that largely immigrant groups like latinos in america should have the same rights. after all, why should english speaking immigrant populations be given priority over other immigrant populations in access to social services?

you, like me, are the descendant of immigrants. which is why you're able to cite the personal experiences you do about swapping languages. i don't have those kinds of anecdotes because my family has been in the north american settler state for a very long time, i'm a 10th generation american and an 8th generation californian. but as much as this is the only place i can call home, i also know i'll never be native - which is part of why NA's with their calls for a white 'homeland' in north america piss me off so much. it also means that i have to use something other then my geographical location as the basis for my identity and, since i'm not interested in using my skin color, that means that just about hte only things i've got left are my political affiliation (anarchist) and my ethnicity (celt). so am i using my ancestry and the experiences of people in other parts of the world who I'm only remotely tangentially related too as a means of creating identity? sure. I'll own that. anybody who's listened to my music knows that about me. I viscerally identify as a celt. maybe it was all the scottish folk music i listened to as a kid or the stories about robert the bruce or going to the local scottish games (scottish american cultural festivals) every year as a kid. doesn't mean i think celtic identity or scottish american identity are a good basis for organizing, but it's something that's important to me and i have every intention of moving to scotland permanently and leaving the north american settler state behind me once and for all as soon as scotland declares its independence. yes, i know, it's not logical. it's romantic crap. it's a lot of things. but 6 years ago I was doing support work for the American Indian Movement and as I stayed up one night talking to one of the elders in the local movement I asked him what I should do, as a person of european descent, to most effectively support native sovereignty. his answer was to move to europe. it shocked me and hurt me and my immediate gut reaction was 'fuck you old man!' but I kept my mouth shut and I thought about it. and I'm still thinking about it. i even wrote a song about it (http://beltainesfire.com/music/home). and one of these days I'm going to actually do it.

sorry, bit of a tangent there. but now you know more then you wanted to know about me and where I'm coming at these questions from.

Back to the experience of swapping languages over generations: your wiki quote is right on, except that it leaves out one major factor that as anarchists we cannot afford to ignore: social pressure. your situation and mine is not a good analogy for people who find themselves needing to use a new language not because they or their ancestors changed location but because an imperialist settler state (like america, for instance) landed on top of them or because they were conquered and annexed by their larger more powerful neighbor (as is the case of the scots, welsh, and cornish re: england, the basques and catalans re: the castilians, and a whole long list of other small stateless nations that have been forcibly annexed by larger more powerful nation states over the last few centuries. All I'm saying is those people have the right to maintain their community's cohesion and cultural integrity by whatever means they determine to be most effective on a community-by-community basis; as long as those means don't violate the freedom of others around them. most people in most communities will probably end up at least bi-lingual. and there's nothing at all wrong with that.

for the record, the language question isn't one that affects me personally, except in the sense that I grew up in a mostly chicano neighborhood and i think it makes sense for my neighbors to expect social services to be available in the languages that are most relevant to them. (incidentally, statements like that have gotten me a lot of hate mail on my blog from NA's, which is why i thought it was so ironic when people here accused me of covertly being one of them.) of course spanish isn't the language that my neighbors ancestors spoke, but it's the language they speak now and the one that is most commonly used in the community. and it bugs me that public schools treat kids who don't speak english as their primary language as though they were stupid. additionally, as an anarchist trying to organize in this community it behooves me to respect that and not expect everything, or even most things, to be done in english. that doesn't make me a chicano nationalist, (though I've had a lot of friends in MEChA and other chicano nationalist organizations over the years), but it does make me a member of a multilingual community trying to find a respectful way to build where I am.

Saii -

i think we're talking past each other a bit here. I agree with you that divide and conquer is bad. yes it's consistently used everywhere to divide people who should be united. yes, class solidarity is one of our most powerful weapons to combat the 'divide and rule tactics of the ruling class. However, in a place like chiapas, which you brought up, 'class' isn't as relevant since most people are not members of any modern social 'class'. they're subsistence farmers whose economy hasn't been fully integrated with the global capitalist machine. so for them "class" isn't a particularly usefual form of social identity. so it's a good thing it's not the only thing that can provide a valid basis for organizing. incidentally, it's been a great strength of the anarchist movement historically that we've been more flexible then marxists on this issue - marxists in russia denounced peasant organizing because the peasants weren't part of the 'proletariate' - the industrial working class, but makhno and the ukranian militants were less interested in such nitpicking then in organizing and successfully built an army in the ukraine that opposed both the Bolsheviks and the whites. And i'll bet ya a nickel he didn't tell the ukranian peasants he was recruiting to speak russian. I'll even go one further and bet that the fact that it was a ukranian anarchist army and that it opposed efforts by the Bolsheviks to absorb the Ukraine into Russia added to its appeal for the average ukranian peasant.

I'm not saying ukranian anarchism was based on nationalist sentiment, far from; I'm saying that in this context anarchism served as a viable *alternative* to nationalism. a subtle distinction, but a valuable one. so in the ukraine, like in catalonia, anarchism promised to accomplish the same goals that the peasants would have asked of a nationalist movement (the right to be themselves and not be assimilated by a more powerful neighbor), *as well as* providing all of the benefits of a potential anarchist society and none of the drawbacks of statist nationalism. anarchism thus promised the best of all possible worlds and in return won overwhelming support. that's a relevant analysis for organizing in chicano communities and presenting anarchism as an alternative to chicano nationalism. it's also relevant for organizing in native american communities, and in stateless nations around the world. its even relevant in african american communities where black nationalism failed but where anarchism could potentially deliver the same community-level self determination and autonomy that the black panthers and others fought for and failed to achieve, without the authoritarian baggage that the panthers brought to the table. that's (one of) the points that my comrades who organize in APOC have been trying to make for a while now, the core message of post-colonial anarchism.

to return to chiapas: yes chiapas has lots of local groups at can be played off against each other, as is often the case with tribal societies. yes it's a good thing that the zapatistas have managed to bridge those divides and create a community of communities united in resistance. by doing so they've created what is essentially a new 'nation' (an "imagined community" based on common identity) out of lots of smaller ones. It's not a nation that seeks domination or statehood, but one whose only demand is autonomy and the ability for its composite communities to be able to exercise their fundamental right to self determination. if you're down with what the zapatistas are doing (though perhaps - like me - you're not thrilled with the hierarchy of the EZLN) then we're actually in agreement.

one more note...

solidarity across races and culture = good. I'm down. let's build. I don't think anything i've written here would contradict that. but culture is more then a historical homeland and a musical instrument, it's an identity. so we should embrace multiple identities, give people room to be themselves and oppose efforts by the corporate behemoth to assimilate them, and build bridges of solidarity and mutual aid between all the different communities of resistance to work together for common goals: an anarchist world, free of capitalism and nation-states, where everyone has the freedom to be themselves and run their own lives however they see best. and play whatever musical instruments they want while they're at it.

When was Cornish illegal? I would like to see some evidence of this.

Wales

N.Ireland

Scotland

I am a descendent of immigrants in only the same way as anybody is. Persoanlly, I was born in the same house as my father who was born in the same house as his father.

I have sympathy for people who suffer through policies of forced assimilation. In this country it was illegal to speak Kurdish for many years. My father-in-law is a Kurmanji speaker. There were many people who spoke this language, and only this language and under the law could be imprisoned for speaking it in the privacy of their own homes. There is a huge difference from this situation, which continued until 2001, and the Cornish issue where this language has effectivly been dead for nearly two hundred years.

It says it all really.

Devrim

I won't say it's "ok" because i'd be lying if I said it felt right at the time. it was a statement born out of anger, not at me, but at the desperate plight of his people. I can understand that. And I can't deny his right to say it for the same reason that it's not ok for so-called "national anarchists" and other white supremacists to advocate for an all-white"homeland" in north america, australia, etc: because the existence of the north american settler state is based on violence and because the only claim on this land that i have as a member of that settler state (albeit an involuntary one) is the claim of violence and force, a claim that as an anarchist i have to reject. *EDIT* (not that it'd be ok to create a racially exclusive homeland anywhere else either... but their talk about a white homeland in north america is particularly foul.) *END EDIT *

personally, i'd hope that in a post-revolutionary situation some sort of mutually agreeable compromise could be worked out to legitimize the existence of the settler population once the settler state is abolished and native sovereignty restored (since i don't think it's at all practical to expect all the white people in north america to just fuck off and go back to europe) but until there is consent given, we're just squatters in someone else's country.

devrim -

this isn't a discussion about my identity, i explained where I'm coming from because you brought it up, but it's not particularly relevant to the point i was trying to make in my original article, and I think have made convincingly in my replies since (no one has even attempted to refute it, preferring instead to pursue ad-hominin attacks) that incorporating cultural issues and an anti-imperialist anti-colonial analysis can add something positive to an anarchist critique. the example you give of people in kurdistan not being allowed to speak kurmanji until 2001 for fear of State repression is a good example of what I'm talking about. that kind of thing is just plain WRONG and anarchists should be willing to organize around it.

the examples you give re: the availability of primary instruction in the celtic languages is cool, yeah for learning things. but that stuff is only there for the same reason that the 8 hour work day and the weekend are - because people organized and fought for it. And since it's obviously something that people think is important and worth organizing around,. I'd like to see them do that organizing not as nationalists seeking to create new States, but as Anarchists seeking to abolish States.

But this is the problem. There is no white "we", that is a racist fantasy. Similarly, north america is not native american "property". I dont go for this argument that people who are construed as "white" are personally responsible for colonisation, as if that was the case they'd also be personally responsible for inventing the lightbulb. This kind of talk is not consistent with materialist rhetoric about "imagined communities". That you're talking about the "practicality" of displacing millions of people is interesting, as I'd say it would be morally reprehensible.

I'd say the straightforward logical point that its not possible to bring about workers' internationalism around ideological praxis aimed at reifying "imagined communities" is a good response, and a direct one.

I'd also add that nationalism is not "bad" because it can be racist. There have been good examples of explicitly and practically multicultural fascism.

edit-cross post with Joseph K

I, and django, have addressed your points. your response is to say you won't be replying anymore - i hope you stick around, i mean your're challenging my views as much as i'm challenging yours, but i'm not afraid to argue my corner (albeit i'm on 'home turf ' so to speak). you brought up your identity as the explanation for your views, so i thought it was fair game. i'm not trying to have a go, just trying to point out the arbitrary romanticism that underpins both it and this kind of ethnic identification per se.

i'm not saying this example is analagous to your views, but if i were to say, declare myself 'white' and better than 'blacks' would that just be a personal matter, even if i brought it up on a political forum as an explanation for my politics? I expect i'd get called on it.

it might be stupid, and reductionist but it's definitely not fascist. fascism is a militarised form of capitalism characterised by a merger of corporate and state power and usually by strong nationalism and/or ancestor mythology. it certainly doesn't encourage people to identify solely as workers. i have loads of cultural identity - the musical subcultures i'm a part of, the sports i play, the martial arts i do and the pubs clubs and kebab shops i frequent all inform and constitute my identity, as do a myriad other factors. the difference between our positions is twofold - firstly i don't feel any need or see any benefit to an ethnic identification and secondly i don't see culture as a basis for politics, because culture is not a reified 'thing' but a dynamic, living process always being brought into contact with others and always changing as a result.

really? i'd have thought our dispossession is one of the factors that unites disparate workers' experiences accross the globe, and history would suggest wage struggles have historically played a part in international waves of class struggle.

yeah i'm using proletariat to mean all of the dispossessed, those of us without capital in a capitalist world. for emphasis i don't think it's good to build your identity solely on your unchosen relation to capital, but neither to i think ethnic identification has positive possibilites and i emphatically don't think politics is simply about asserting identity.

I think that this is an important point. I think that in many ways what people call culture is the remnants of the culture of the peasantry of the pre-industrial period. However, they are not the living remnants, but carcasses sold for consumption.

Before the industrial revolution travelling for a day would bring you to an area where people's clothes, music, cooking were different from your own. The further you travelled the more this became so. The industrial revolution destroyed this, and it is a world that we can never go back to. The remnants of those cultures is something that is served up on the plate of those who today are hungry for some notion of community however disparate.

That is why in Turkey we have things like 'Anadolu Ateşi', or in Ireland 'Riverdance'. It is not because this type of folk dancing is a real part of people's lives, and culture, but precisely the opposite. These sort of things can only exist because the culture that the derive from is if not dead, certainly dying. It would be impossible to charge people money to go to see a stage show if they were people who actually talk part in these dances themselves.

It was capital that destroyed the pre-industrial cultures, not the communists. To recognise how the situation is today does not imply any moral judgement. The fact is, though, that those cultures have been virtually destroyed. Trying to revive languages that have been dead for a couple of centuries won't change this.

Devrim