Post-Leftist AnarchismA Brief History and Introduction

Preface What is anarchy? we ask to the anarchist, and she replies It is socialism! It is true socialism! It is true and had always been true. Where was it born? Who is the father of anarchy, or better yet, who is the mother? Libertarian socialism, cry the anarchists, all else is bourgeois, and decadent, and luxurious and un-revolutionary. Once the Father of anarchy said unto His children, freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice! And the children blinked.Anarchism has always found itself odd amongst the many competing narratives of the equalist canon. For while Marxism claims greater academic superiority, pedigree and historicity, and the democratic socialists claim greater practicality, efficiency and effectiveness; the anarchists always are seen as the verily utopian, even among such utopists. Who are Goldman, Kropotkin and Bakunin to such larger names as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky? Speak the word communism, and the streets, and the rabble of the cities will clamor to decry the specter of the Soviet Union. Yes, anarchism lives in the specter of it too and anarchists themselves resign to the shadowthe greater tide of which anarchism has been a mere wave. Who are you? we ask the anarchist! We are socialists! We remain socialists! But a truer side of the almighty Left! they cry back. But those are the last disciples of anarchism; we discard it for its limpness. We look to a better, clearer lightto anarchy.IntroductionThe first thought one might have upon hearing the phrase Post-Left Anarchism is perhaps to remark upon the absurdity of such an ostensible oxymoron. Certainly in the canonical texts of anarchist philosophy the essential principles are made indisputably clear; egalitarianism, skepticism against authority and a devotion to social order. In the words of Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism is,the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted (Kropotkin, Anarchism) For Emma Goldman, it is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive, those being Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct... (Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays). These anarchists of the past who we take for its crucial founders, theorists and practitioners were unapologetic in their communist ideals, support of feminism, anti-racism, workers struggle and the emancipation of all peoples from the tyranny of imperialism, nationalism and capitalism--which have historically all been under the banner of leftist activity. It would then seem, of course, that anarchism just is a leftism, another iteration, another more iconoclastic version of the same human drive towards equality and freedom. What, then, could this recent occurrence of post-leftist anarchy, coined at the turn of the 21st century, possibly mean?

Individualism and LeftismThere has always existed a divide in anarchist writing, thought and tradition that must be understood before post-leftism as a contemporary theory can be discussedas it is, to a large extent, a sort of solution to the age old conflict. To this end, I will briefly explicate the nature of this intellectual divide and the main focus of contention that drives this disagreement. There are commonly considered two varieties of anarchists; the individualist and the libertarian socialist. The former is comprised of the anarchist tradition owing pedigree to the likes of Pierre J. Proudhon and Max Stirner, who respectively developed an anarchist mutualism and an anarchist egoism. Proudhon, sometimes thought of as the father of anarchism along with Godwin, was the first political thinker to use the word anarchism to describe his beliefs. While Proudhon coined the popular phrase, Property is theft! and also wrote, Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions Either society must perish, or it must destroy property, he also developed an economic theory which he considered to be a third form of society [as opposed to communism and property], the synthesis of communism and property, [which] we will call liberty (Proudhon, What is Property?). This form of anarchism has taken the name of mutualism, or free market anarchism (not to be confused with the capitalist anarchism of America), that following thinkers such as Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner adopted and further developed. In their difference to the communists and socialists, the individualist anarchist spirit is best described by Voltairine de Cleyre: [Emma Goldman] and I hold many differing views on both Economy and Morals . . . Miss Goldman is a communist; I am an individualist. She wishes to destroy the right of property, I wish to assert it. I make my war upon privilege and authority, whereby the right of property, the true right in that which is proper to the individual, is annihilated. She believes that co-operation would entirely supplant competition; I hold that competition in one form or another will always exist, and that it is highly desirable it should" (Cleyre, The Voltairine Reader). Furthermore, in Stirners greatest work, The Ego and Its Own, he talks of the bondage of individuality to abstract imperatives: What is not supposed to be my concern!First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself! (Stirner, The Ego and His Own). Rather, instead of dedicating ones life, and thereby sacrificing ones will to the altar of anothers, Stirner advocated a strong commitment to no one but ones self as the true spirit of freedom: My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself! (Stirner, The Ego and His Own). In Stirners egoism, we find a parallel to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who called for the dawn of an age of free spirits. Both Stirner and Nietzsche believed in a sort of independence from the herd mentality or from causes, and both thinkers rejected morality as a self-denying abstract value system. In Nietzsches words, Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget "men who are the rule (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil). We will find this particular flavor of anarchism to be radically distinct from the more predominant historical current. The individualist tradition of anarchist thought has always been overshadowed (and sometimes mocked) by the much larger tradition founded by Bakuninthe libertarian socialism that existed as an alternate means of achieving social, political and economic equality. Most commonly known as social anarchism, the broad term encompasses Bakunins anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism as developed by Kropotkin, and the anarcho-syndicalism of Rudolf Rocker. Social anarchism understood the fight for freedom, not through the lens of individual struggle, but rather through achieving social harmony and utmost equality. Social anarchism generally, while appreciative of the individual, viewed the individual as a product of society and believed individual autonomy could only be understood through the lens of a collective human project. To quote Bakunin,Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it (Bakunin, The Philosophy of Bakunin).Kropotkin as well criticized individualist anarchism, and believed that it meant not to permit all members of the community to develop in a normal way, but to permit certain better endowed individuals fully to develop, even at the cost of the happiness and the very existence of the mass of mankind (Kropotkin, Anarchism). Kropotkin saw individualist anarchism at best as an interesting afterthought, unserious and irrelevant to the proper anarchist struggle. He noted that the great bulk of the anarchist working men prefer the anarchist-communist ideas which have gradually evolved out of the anarchist collectivism (Kropotkin, Anarchism). On individualist anarchists themselves, he wrote Those who profess it - they are chiefly intellectuals - soon realize that the individualizationthey so highly praise is not attainable by individual efforts, and either abandon the ranks of the anarchists, and are driven into the liberal individualism of the classical economist or they retire into a sort of Epicurean amoralism, or superman theory, similar to that of Stirner and Nietzsche (Kropotkin, Anarchism). This division here explicated should not cause confusion by implying that individualist anarchists, or egoist anarchists were or are against the end of economic exploitation, or against equality and freedom, but rather that they believed such a thing could only be achieved by the opposite of the Bakuninist sentiment, and the methodologies thereafter. To sum the key differences, social anarchists believed that only through a free society could come about great individuals; whereas individualists saw society as the construct of individuals, free only if its constitutes were free. This basic philosophical problem of which comes first, the individual or society, lies at the foundation of inner tensions among anarchists historically and to the present day. In Goldmans biography Living My Life, a wonderful though small historical example of this tension can be found in her friend and lover Alexander Berkmans relationship to their mutual friend Fedya, A good anarchist, [Berkman] began with deep conviction, is one who lives only for the Cause and gives everything to it. My friend here he indicated Fedya is still too much of abourgeoisto realize that. He is amamenkin sin(mothers spoilt darling), who even accepts money from home. He continued to explain why it was inconsistent for a revolutionary to have anything to do with hisbourgeoisparents or relatives If Id let him, hed spend all his money on useless things beautiful, he calls them (Goldman, Living My Life).We find remarkably similar criticisms against individuality and the beautiful in the present day, most relevantly in the work of contemporary anarchist Murray Bookchin, whose polemics against non-Left anarchists will set off the new era of post-left anarchy.

The Left Today and Murray BookchinIn the second chapter of Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, entitledSocialism from Below: Defining Anarchism, we find a great example of the present day split between individualists and social anarchists. The article defines anarchism in such a way to remove individualists, philosophers and spiritualists from the history of the tradition and make it exclusive to those belonging to the revolutionary socialist, class-struggle-esque, organizational and political side of anarchism. To quote from the article, philosophical anarchism, individualist anarchism, spiritual anarchism fall away There is only one anarchist tradition, and it is rooted in the work of Bakunin and the Alliance... In a number of polemics, Bookchin set out to distinguish the social anarchist tradition from a host of individualist and irrationalist tendencies that have tried to claim the anarchist label, and provided a powerful critique of these currents. Yet Bookchin still referred to these tendencies as lifestyle anarchism, conceding their place in a larger anarchist tradition. This was a mistake. (Walt and Schmidt, Black Flame)This attitude, not entirely different from the one Kropotkin expressed (although Kropotkin would not be anywhere near this level of exclusion), should serve as an exemplar of an exceptionally Left (with a capital L) anarchism, so ardent in its ideology, political grounding and call for socialist class-warfare that it utterly dismisses any sort of anarchist who may approach the sentiment differently. This would include Tolstoy, Stirner and even Proudhon. As this excerpt mentioned, the massive contemporary anarchist Murray Bookchin wrote a long and fiery polemic in which he pinpoints precisely the cause of anarchisms miserable modern-day failings, and it harkens back to the centuries old disagreements between individualist anarchists and social anarchism. Bookchin was born in 1921, before the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution and was alive during times of mass-movements, seriously engaged radical political parties, working class struggle and even later-on became a large figure in the New York Federation of Anarchists while living in Manhattans Lower East Side, the same area Emma Goldman lived and spent most of her early radical activism. Bookchin throughout his life attempted to establish his own organized struggle, and throughout many failures, finally wrote a book to pinpoint the cause of anarchisms decline and many failures: the temptations of lifestyle, comfort, anarchism; an individualist praxis of personal insurrection which does not require or advocate interacting with class-struggle or mass revolutionary action. In Bookchins book, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, he places all forms of anarchist practice not strictly contained in the definition given by Black Flame (leftist, social anarchism) as lifestyle anarchism. For Bookchin, both historical and contemporary iterations of the individualist anarchist tradition was nothing more than Ad hoc adventurism, personal bravura, an aversion to theory oddly akin to the antirational biases of postmodernism, celebrations of theoretical incoherence, a basically apolitical and anti-organizational commitment to imagination, desire, and ecstasy (Bookchin). Bookchin saw anarchist practice descend from mass political organizations seriously threatening the powers that be to nothing more than some quirk of individual lifestyle. He goes on to describe, Indeed, lifestyle anarchism today is finding its principle expression in spray-can graffiti, post-modernist nihilism, anti-rationalism mysticism and personal insurrections The black flag, which revolutionary social anarchists raised in insurrectionary struggles in Ukraine and Spain, now becomes a fashionable sarong for the delectation of chic petty bourgeois (Bookchin). The tragedy that Bookchin here observes is his perception of anarchism in the West declining from something that constantly engaged the capitalist state in revolt to something that would essentially be harmless and a mere fad. For Bookchin, anarchism was once Alexander Berkman, and as it is approaching an ever marching present day, it is becoming like Fedyaspoiled, luxurious, egocentric and bourgeois. Anarchy After LeftismWhere Murray Bookchin saw a decline, contemporary anarchists Jason McQuinn and Bob Black saw evolution. Anarchy After Leftism is a small book authored by Bob Black in direct response to Bookchins critique, that Black saw as an unexpected intervention in an intramural debate which has been going on for at least twenty years between leftist, workerist, organizational, and moralist and an ever more diverse contingent of anarchists who have in one way or another departed from orthodoxy For Bookchin, this modern departure from the anarchism of the past sounded a death knell, whereas Black and McQuinn understand it to be nothing more than an adaptation of anarchism to better suit the present day context. While Blacks book does much in the ways of debunking the arguments made in Bookchins book, it however does not go on to formalize a theory of anarchist thought that removed itself from the leftist tradition that Bookchin is so fond of. Rather, much of Anarchy After Leftism makes the implication that contemporary anarchism has already moved beyond the international Left of the past, with or without knowing it. In fact, the implication goes to say that it was never even truly part of it. Blacks evidence of this was to be found in the words of Bookchin himself, in his younger years after he had abandoned Stalinism for anarchism,Lifestyle wasnt always a dirty word for [Bookchin]. Recalling what was wrong with the Stalinist 30s, hes written: Life-Style?the word was simply unknown. If we were asked by some crazy anarchists how we could hope to change society without changing ourselves, our relations to each other, and our organizational structure, we had one ritualistic answer: After the revolution (Bookchin 1970: 57) It is plain that the goal of revolution today must be the liberation of daily life (Black). In this way, younger Bookchin himself saw that there was something fundamental about anarchism that separated it uniquely and idiosyncratically from the Left. There was some element of anarchism that focused sharply on the development of individual character, individual relationships and real-life changes (changes to lifestyle) that was important beyond the mere scope of organizational structures, ideology and political revolution. Black is recounting a time in Bookchins life, after he had become disillusioned with Marxism, that Bookchin also understood that there was something about social change that could not be achieved with economic and political change aloneand that anarchism in its spirit addressed it most fundamentally. There is some inherently individualistic quality of anarchism that crucially removes it from Leftism proper, and for Black, it existed even at the time of its formulation. Black utilizes a block Kropotkin quote from an address delivered in France to drive this point home, Anarchist Communism maintains that most valuable of all conquestsindividual liberty it does not ask the individual who has rejected god to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of the precedinggod the Community, or to abdicate upon its altar his independence, his will, his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which he formerly made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary, No society is free so long as the individual is not so! (Kropotkin, Anarchism in Socialistic Revolution)Black identifies traditionalistic Leftist anarchism, the anarchism of Murray Bookchin or Black Flame, as precisely Kropotkins god the Community. Here, Black sees that even in social anarchisms proper founding father, there existed that quality of individuality and skepticism against collective society, and all the imposing tendencies of it that threaten the liberty of the personal expression. What Black identifies here is very critical to the sort of Leftist views of Berkman, Bookchin and Black Flameall of whom either implicitly or explicitly desire some sort of sacrifice to give everything to the glorious Cause. If one of the core founders of social anarchism saw a personal and individual iconoclastic element of anarchism, and maintained a sharp skepticism against the collective pressures of god the Community, then surely individuals like Bookchin and the exclusionary sentiments of Black Flame are just flat out wrong in calling individualism bourgeois or un-anarchistic. Rather, there was always something about anarchism, something personal and unique to its individual participants, which separated it from the mainstream political Left. In Emma Goldmans own words, I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it (Goldman, Living My Life). This very same phrase later became reinterpreted by contemporary anarchists and is now often misquoted as, If I cant dance, its not my revolution!Where post-leftist anarchism comes in now with much of the twenty-first century still to come is primarily rooted in the realization that anarchism as it was formulated in the heights of industrial capitalism is outdated and a new formulation is required in order to adapt to a world inextricably distinct from the world of Goldman, Kropotkin and Bakunin. For post-leftist anarchism, the old divides between socialists and individualists has worn out its welcome and post-leftism is here to end the impasse and catch the imaginations of the majority of contemporary anarchists in a similar manner to Bakunins or Kropotkins formulations in the nineteenth century (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy).Anti-OrganizationIn the essay Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind, Jason McQuinn details three primarily points of criticism that he believes are central in the development of the new formulation. The first of these critiques, anti-organization, marks a radical departure from the common anarchist response to achieving anarchist ends: Organize. In a talk contemporary anarchist Noam Chomsky delivered at the Covert Action Quarterly Anniversary Dinner, a question among the audience was: What can individuals do to promote change? Quite in line with his anarcho-syndicalism, Chomsky replied Alone, they cant do anything very much. Which is exactly why every social change in history has come from concerted public action. Chomsky then goes on to detail the hardships of labor in the past and the victories theyve won through organized class struggle entering the political arena. He answers, It also answers your question, that you should do is exactly the kinds of things that will lead the hysteria among privileged and powerful people (Chomsky). In fact, throughout the many times Chomsky has been asked this question, the answer is always tantamount to the same replyOrganize, organize, organize. Not at all uncommon among historical and contemporary anarchist thought, this tactic, often called Platformism, is the philosophical grounding of organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World or the International of Anarchist Federations.McQuinn, along with other writers of post-leftist thought, vehemently disagree with the organizational tactic for many reasonsamong them are its anachronism, its ineffectiveness and its capacity to limit individual and collective freedom. On the first point of contention, McQuinn writes, One of the most troubling problems of the contemporary anarchist milieu has been the frequent fixation on attempts to recreate the struggles of the past as thought nothing significant has changed since 1919, 1936, or at best 1968 (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). This criticism is primarily driven by simple observations of the present day in comparison to the historical contexts in which anarchist canon emerged. For McQuinn, the anarchists of past were directly engaged with an insurrectionary industrial working class in a period of social upheaval, whereas today we find a much more advanced form of capitalism, and a vastly different social attitude against power. Leading into the second disagreement, because the present day context of capitalism has changed so dramatically, any sort of organizationalism akin to the tactics of the past will ultimately result in failure. For McQuinn, it has been a tremendous failure even in its own time: in the worldwide struggles for individual and social freedom, the political left has everywhere proven itself either a fraud or a failure in practice. Wherever the socialist left has been successful in organizing and taking power, it has at best reformed (and rehabilitated) capitalism or at worst instituted new tyrannies, many with murderous policiessome of genocidal proportions (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). Examples of this are abundant, especially in contemporary anarchist writings. In criticizing the Soviet Union under Lenin, Chomsky wrote, On November 3, Lenin announced in a "Draft Decree on Workers' Control" that delegates elected to exercise such control were to be "answerable to the State for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property." As the year ended, Lenin noted that "we passed from workers' control to the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy," which was to "replace, absorb and supersede the machinery of workers' control (Chomsky, The Soviet Union Versus Socialism).Along with works like, The Guillotine At Work: The Leninist Counter-Revolution by Gregory Maximoff, or There Is No Communism In Russia, by Emma Goldman, there exists no shortage of anarchist criticism of socialist and Marxist organizations of being great failures. The present authoritarian and brutal state of countries like North Korea and China, too, would serve as examples of the international Lefts greatest failures and serve as living evidence to McQuinns claims. In criticizing anarchist organizationalism however, McQuinn writes, Part of the problem is that many former leftists tend to misunderstand anarchism only as a form of anti-state leftism, ignoring or downplaying its indelibly individualist foundation as irrelevant to social struggles. Many simply dont understand the huge divide between a self-organizing movement seeking to abolish every form of alienation and a merely political movement seeking to reorganize production in a more egalitarian form (McQuinn, Anarchy After Leftism). The key-word in McQuinns passage here is self-organizing, as it shows precisely the point of his critique. McQuinn clearly is not criticizing organizing in principle, but rather the idea of an Organization which gains independence and existence on the outside of real people, becoming a static political monolith, seeking expansion and preservation for its own sake. Anarchism is more than any sort of anti-state leftism, but a living breathing libertine spirit that is in constant dialogue with individuals who seek self-liberation in cooperation with others. It is a movement that is spontaneous, local and personaland anarchism itself becomes lost when it is alienated to an Organization. In reducing anarchism down to a kind of political party, always looking down and delegating power evenly, McQuinn sees what he calls the reification of revolt. Or rather, the reduction of a complex, living process to a frozen, dead or mechanical collection of objects or actions (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy).This now leads to the final point of disagreement, which is the assertion that organizationalism limits the agency and the importance of individual constituents. The practice of reification of revolt lies in the leftist central stragedy [of] creating mediating organizations between capital & state on the one side and the mass of disaffected, relatively powerless people on the other Their goals are always to crystallize and congeal certain aspects of the more general social revolt into set forms of ideology and congruent forms of activity (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). Formal organizations here take place of the actual peoplewherein the real flesh and blood faces of revolution are replaced with the abstract Organization. This abstract Organization then acts as a mediating party that negotiates the hostility between oppressed and oppressor. In this mediation, a sort of elitism arises where the more involved revolutionaries within the organization become selected for specialized tasks, leading to an official division between leaders and led (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). As the insurrectionary character of revolution and struggle slowly transforms from the real faces of individuals to that of the monolithic Organization, the narrative of revolution and struggle also changes to focus on the plights of the Organization, rather than those matters which are most relevant to real people. The people themselves, in some sense, become alienated and relegated to abstract importance whilst losing their sense of self which is independent of its role in an Organization. In the words of McQuinn, Leftists want to create ideological, strategic and tactical unity through self-discipline (your self-repression) when possible, or organizational discipline when necessary. Either way, you are expected to give up your autonomy to follow their heteronomous path (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). Anti-Ideology and Anti-MoralityHeavily related with the critique of organizationalism is post-leftisms fervent disdain of ideology. Greatly influenced by the postmodern sentiments of Stirner and Nietzsche, the post-leftist critique of ideology is centered on attacking abstract principles and meta-narratives which claim greater importance and identity over insurrectionary individuals. Rather abrasively, a writer for Crimethinc. Ex-Workers Collective wrote a short essay lambasting the ideological fetishism of the left. She writes,Why has the oppressed proletariat not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation? The truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant... They know that your post-Marxist jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control. They know that your infighting, your splinter groups and endless quarrels over ephemeral theories can never effect any real change in the world they experience from day to day. They know that no matter who is in office, what laws are on the books, what "ism"s the intellectuals march under, the content of their lives will remain the same (Nadia C. Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck).The content of this passage is directly related to McQuinns critique of ideology in Post-Left Anarchy, where he identifies ideology as systems of false consciousness in which people no longer see themselves directly as subjects in their relation to their world, [rather], they conceive of themselves in some manner as subordinate to one type or another of abstract entity or entities which are mistaken as the real subjects or actors in their world (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). In relation to Marxist jargon, what McQuinn is saying here is that ideologies like Marxism take individuals and forces upon them a grand narrative and value system, already determined without her consent, as the one correct, set way of understanding and interpreting her struggle. Individuals in the oppressed group are relegated to Proletariat and those in greater positions of command and privilege and interpreted as a single monolithic Bourgeoisie. If anyone is in the Bourgeois category, they are sinful and evil and must be destroyedignoring their personhood and individuality. If anyone is Proletariat, they are the wretched worker, the dispossessed, the rightful rulers of the world, the righteous, the justignoring their personhood and who they really are. Dare I point to Berkman again, in his prison memoirs, when he saw the steel worker as a caricature of the Just Working Classman, as opposed to the real life man. Or when he saw Frick as a symbol of the Capitalist Oppression, as opposed to the real life man. All things in ideology relegate reality to symbols and set interpretations. What is the socialist State for Marxists? It is the necessary transition stage that must exist before communism, never mind its real consequences and the real contexts in which it existsnever mind the real people who exist under it. It is the same for leftist anarchists, just replace the socialist State with the I.W.W. or the CNT. Morality as a religious, cultural and philosophical institution acts in a very similar fashion to ideology. McQuinn writes, Morality is a system of abstract values which are taken out of any context, set in stone and converted into unquestionable beliefs to be applied regardless of a persons actual desires Moralism is the practice of not only reducing living values to reified morals, but of considering oneself better than others because one has subjected oneself to morality (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). Popular anarchist moralities such as the forbidding of using such and such language, or the forbidding of meat consumption, the forbidding of buying certain products, the forbidding of participating in such and such relationships; all take for themselves a greater importance over the insurrectionary subject and the context she exists within. Furthermore, it allows for hierarchical and elitist attitudes whereby those who have found the Truth act self-righteously against those who do not sacrifice their ego to the absolute value system. The living values that McQuinn speak of, as opposed to moral values, are those values which are life-affiriming and self-liberating, relative to free individuals and collectives. Living values change constantly and are discarded when they no longer suit the interests of a free beingthey are temporary and are secondary to living beings. Morality, on the other hand, is first and foremost and demands living beings to sacrifice themselves in adherence to abstract truths.As an ideology grows, it is conceived and presented as if it is an active subject with a being of its own which makes demands of us (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). It is a parallel to Kropotkins God the Community or the Cause with a capital-C. Individuals who see themselves only in their relation to an ideological subject and their role in the ideology, are further alienated from great self-affirmation, self-personhood, self-liberation, self-expression, self-interpretation, joyEmma Goldmans release or dance.Anti-WorkA practical application of post-leftist theory can be found in Bob Blacks essay The Abolition of Work, in which he defends his position that full unemployment is an utmost liberation. This essay sheds light into some defining characteristics of post-left anarchism and the vast meaning of post-left. He writes, When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production... Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if forced (Black, The Abolition of Work). Often in listening to socialists, communists, Marxists and many anarchists, one of the main rhetorical lines is the right of the worker to control their own workplace. All such leftist lines of liberation thought is centered around workers control. When an anarchist criticizes such and such socialism, it is always because there is not enough workers control. Yet, in post-leftist anarchism, Black makes the more radical move to completely eliminate the construct of work itself as being an inherently oppressive fiction. Life will become a game, or rather many games (Black, The Abolition of Work) he says, in reference to his conception of life without workers. The leftist ideologies define individuals as workers, and in turn those individuals can see themselves as nothing but workersas Proletariat, as oppressed, as victim, as enslaved. And this perpetuates the mindset of being enslaved. Rather, for Black, an anarchist society will not be a workers society, and the working class will not be in the saddle, and the workers control of the means of production will become irrelevant. A free being would not see itself as the common worker or define themselves in relation to their role in producing for society. The freedom of the left is merely the freedom of slavish herds, followers eager to be led by syndicates and unions in exchange for better comfort at work, and better rights at work. A post-leftist freedom says to the individual, You are no worker, you deserve far more. Self-TheoryThus far, I have explicated what post-leftism is againstwhat it stands for is in relation with what it is against. In opposition to ideology, organization and morality, post-leftists advocate self-theory, in which the insurrectionary agent rejects the deception of institutionalized value systems in favor of their own value-creating abilities, with respect to their own subjective contexts. On this notion, McQuinn writes, Post-left anarchists reject all ideologies in favor of the individual and communal construction of self-theory. Individual self-theory is theory in which the integral individual-in-context is always the subjective center of perception, understanding and action. Communal self-theory is similarly based on the group as subject, but always with an underlying awareness of the individuals (and their own self-theories) which make up the group or organization (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy).The central and most important figure in post-leftist thought is always the insurrectionary subject in question, and their own self-defined world. By releasing the individual from all external abstract and metaphysical constructs which have held him captivesuch as the idea of being a worker, or being Proletarianthe individual is left with the world as his own to interpret, and his own struggle returned to him. The individual and his own experiences, his own desires, needs and goals, and how he wishes to act in relation to such things, are the center of his liberationnot the fancy abstract goals of a political party, an ideological group or the demands of a fixed morality. This is the crux of a post-leftist freedom, which it claims has always been the crux of an anarchic freedom. ConclusionAs McQuinn writes, Post-left anarchy is not something new and different (McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy). It would be self-contradicting to proclaim itself the One True Anarchism, but rather it claims for itself pedigree throughout all of anarchism. As I have observed in Goldman, the social anarchist of the late 19th century, even then she expressed sentiments similar to post-leftist theory. Both Rudolf Rocker and Emma Goldman were massive admirers of Friedrich Nietzsche, a great influence on post-leftist thought. Post-leftism is not a revolution within anarchism, to turn it on its head and wipe away centuries of thought and actionbut a reminder of its distinctly radical and idiosyncratically libertarian character that has always set it apart from the beast of the international Left.I believe Post-leftism itself is evidence and testament to anarchisms continuous evolution and demonstrates its advantage over rivals of the pastMarxism or state socialism, which remain ever static in theory and practice. It is an important development in anarchist thought and continues to be developed as the infinite march of time continuously takes us into new mysterious peaks, with both its wonders and horrors. That grim future is always upon us, but the human intellect seems to struggle against it always, whether heroically or in vanity is up to interpretation. Yet, if anarchy is to be among that future, to brighten it an ever slight gleam, then it needs to become a philosophy of the futureand delivered unto a better progeny.

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