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yeah, well the problem with the cnt/ait is basically that their organizational model is still wedded to the situation of the 1920s--in their way, they're just a stuck in a romantic haze of the past as are the wobblies. so in a sense, they're relics. this varies by region, though--so for example in france the cnt is the most prolo-looking of the various anar outfits that you see in demonstrations--they usually come before or after the various haircut anarchists, who are in their own way stuck in the mid-1970s, at that period when punk seemed to matter as a political form. the cnt around barcelona is different. the cnt in the states is a tiny curiousity.
among the more complicated questions that floats around behind all this is what kind of relation to adopt relative to the history of the left--which seems to me largely irrelevant for present conditions, particularly because of the persistence of this idea that the proletariat is necessarily the revolutionary class--and so one way of thinking about this is what relation to marx should be adopted. personally, i think that tradition is cooked. even the critical apparatus is finished--even as it provides ways of orienting what a critical/political theory has to do, the kind of information it has to co-ordinate, the importance of a coherent philosophical position to orient that information, etc. conceptually, i think the way to go is a radicalized form of what was called historical materialism--but this only as a heuristic, something to call it, nothing more. castoriadis was right--the project of a revolutionary theory is to undertake something parallel to what marx undertook, but in a way that takes into account the problems of how marx went about it on the one hand (the conceptual frame) and so develops a new approach to analyzing conditions that obtain now.
but this gets ahead of the questions here, which i think are more generally interesting if detached from the old frameworks and posed again--because the problems that underpin them persist.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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