... Over the past 15 years, anti-war, economic justice and environmental campaigners have increasingly embraced anarchism’s principle of equal distribution of power. Out of this organizing approach has emerged a view of the modern nation-state and its corporate partners as authoritarian and abusive. The growing awareness of the anarchist critique of the state is impressive. It’s what Schneider calls the “negative political philosophy” of anarchism, given that anarchists excel at explaining what they’re against. But what’s even more fascinating is the growing number of activists who now view the state as obsolete.
People have learned about and experienced alternative ways of organizing society. They welcome how these different social arrangements reject monopolies on power, thereby reducing feelings of alienation and powerlessness. Not only are people embracing the anarchist critique of the state and capitalism, they are being drawn toward what Milstein, in her book Anarchism and Its Aspirations, calls a “reconstructive vision.”
Schneider referenced this phenomenon in his Nation article when he wrote that anarchists have “reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us.”
Indeed, large numbers of people are waking up. Poet and essayist Phil Rockstroh recently explained that “we are no longer isolated, enclosed in our alienation, imprisoned by a concretized sense of powerlessness; daylight is beginning to pierce the darkness of our desolate cells.” ...
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