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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Thank you for taking the time to write it out. It gives me a lot to think about and some leads to pursue. I've only just run in to the concept of evolutionary Anarchism and it sounds like something worth looking in to the try to understand where current thought lies.
Oh sorry if I mislead you on this but afaik there's not really anything in the discourse about "evolutionary" anarchism or "revisionist" anarchism, I was just using the terms that a Marxist would as shorthand to get the general idea across from a Marxist perspective.
Afaik there really isn't even a term or a conceptual framework within anarchist discourse for this cohort that we've been discussing and I think that speaks to the lack of ideological rigour within anarchism, in the sense that different interpretations of anarchist praxis aren't neatly categorised and defined by their "program" in the way that Marxism has done.
To illustrate the point, I could make a particular argument and you would be able to accuse me of Kautskyism or utopianism, for example, and you'd invoke all of the Marxist critiques of that position by resting on the work of earlier theorist by labelling my position but that is something which I never really saw much of within intra-anarchist discourse and I suspect that it doesn't really exist aside from what has been imported into anarcho-communism, and even then anarcho-communists can be quite eclectic in how they engage with Marxist theory and what they decide to adopt.
I think that's probably why you haven't been able to get a solid response to your question from anarchists - I suspect that there really isn't even that much in the way of a conceptual framework to identify that trend, let alone to speak about it in any detail, unless you happen to find yourself talking to an anarchist theorist who is occupied with critiquing different schools of anarchist thought.
To some extent, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: an unbridgeable divide deals with that issue, or perhaps with its early roots. When I was more involved in anarchist spaces in the early 2000s, people knew about this article, and generally considered lifestyle anarchists to be wankers. But since the rise of social media, it seems like a kind of lifestyle anarchism has become the dominant tendency, with people rejecting not only hierarchical power relations, but any kind of organization that might have any hierarchical structure, like the federations traditionally endorsed by anarchists. And rejecting all authority, even Bakunin's "authority of the bootmaker" (i.e., expertise).
It's a very bad state of affairs, and I think it comes about partly because baby anarchists today learn from word of mouth rather than from books or textfiles, and in particular, from baby anarchists who hardly know more than they do but have social media followings. Kids these days, is what I'm saying. They need to get off of ~~my~~ our lawn.
I think that lifestylists, or at least lifestylism, still copped a lot of flak when I was an anarchist. I still fondly remember my days quoting that Bakunin passage at the lifestylists lol.
Obviously I'm much more sympathetic towards platformism and libertarian municipalism and the like, even today, but it's sad to hear that lifestylism has become the predominant trend in (online) anarchism although I can understand its allure; you don't need to worry about organising or even reading literature or any of the hard work really because you can just reject that out of hand and focus on doing what feels right for you.