February 10 - Anarchy in the USA
Escape Empire Anarchist Event Series presents:
A talk and discussion with Cindy Milstein:
Anarchy in the USA: The Love-Hate Relationship with Presidential Elections
Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008 at 5:00 pm
At the Brian MacKenzie Infoshop
1426 9th Street NW, Washington DC 20001
dcinfoshop@mutualaid.org or 202-986-0681
A free event — donations encouraged to benefit the Insitute for Anarchist Studies.
Nearly as early as Hillary or Obama, anarchists were hot on the campaign trail. Plans to resist the 2008 U.S. presidential elections were afoot in 2006.
As German Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer once observed in relation to “anarchist assassination politics” that they “proceed from the intentions of a small group… following the example of the big political parties. …What they are trying to say is: ‘We are also political.’ …[Yet] these anarchists are not anarchic enough.” His comments apply to electoralism too: being political is the right impulse, but the tactic(s) and indeed the focus are wrong. Certainly, in the United States, presidential elections represent rare moments when many people “participate.”
But why the anarchist fascination with something that’s far from anything we’d recognize as politics? And why, if we choose to engage, do anarchists frequently use strategies that mirror statist and/or liberal forms, or are simply unimaginative? Perhaps, in zeroing in on presidential elections, we aren’t anarchic enough either.
Cindy Milstein is an anarchist activist and educator from Vermont. She has been involved with the Institute for Social Ecology, and is currently a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference. She is also a collective member of the all-volunteer Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont.