Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination: A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination: A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout

 

Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the

Why is there a lag in our publishing activity

First, and not least, we do not get paid or receive any money from doing this, nor did we undermine the project as something quick and simple.  Certainly we would be able to do more if there were more of us doing it, so if you have developed an interest in getting involved let us know.  Sometime horizontal organization is slow and complicated in terms of production.  Each one of us must convince and be convinced of a proposal to do something.  And this we do neither consider a luxury of a problem, quite the opposite we are critical of those who operate under a hierarchy, an authority, and produce.  

Judging by certain polemics it would seem that there are anarchists who spurn any form of organisation; but in fact the many, too many, discussions on this subject, even when obscured by questions of language or poisoned by personal issues, are concerned with the means and not the actual principle of organisation. Thus it happens that when those comrades who sound the most hostile to organisation want to really do something they organise just like the rest of us and often more effectively. The problem, I repeat, is entirely one of means.

Errico Malatesta   October 1927

So it is not only important to us to do something or do it quickly, but to find the acceptable ways to do it.  If we were to develop specialists, hierarchy, authority, to do something, the value of the product would be all lost as we have returned to the state of affairs we are so eager in departing.  So among the other, real life projects we are engaged in, our digital project has fallen back in priority, while we are constantly reexamining what we have done so far and where we want to go with this.  And this must take time.

Why does this take so long?

The initial aim of this blog was to attract interest by other teams and collectives to engage in an organized inquiry of how to develop a set of practical solutions material for developing or enhancing an autonomous community anywhere in the world.  But goals sometimes are either set too high to achieve, or take too long to materialize.  In such cases people who may initially share them may loose interest.  The system has altered our internal clocks to work in the rhythms of industrial machinery.  This has been partly our experience here, which we would like to share without the specifics of who, where, when.  Some of us have grown to cleanse our internal clocks and are more patient in watching change take place in human terms, not in capitalistic industrial rhythms.  Some have not been able to do so and are impatient and try to force things.  While doing so what they are forcing are their ideas on other people who are unable to share them or are unable to commit to a process where those ideas can collide, blend, and evolve into a collective product.