Still, the mode of being that Occupy swept so many people into with its temporary autonomous zones in public squares nevertheless left them feeling, as it was sometimes said, anarcho-curious. One couldn’t call the Occupy movement an anarchist phenomenon per se though some of its originators were self-conscious and articulate anarchists, most who took part wouldn’t describe their objectives that way. They had participated in an uprising that aspired to organize horizontally, that refused to address its demands to the proper authority, and that, like other concurrent movements around the world, prided itself on the absence of particular leaders. A new generation of radicals had experienced a moment in the limelight and a sense of possibility-and had little clear idea about what to do next. This was the fall of 2012, just after the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. The students took their near unison as an almost incalculable coincidence, though it was no such thing. Then another jumped into the space this created: “Yeah, totally.”īasic agreement about various ideologies and idioms ensued-ableism, gender queerness, Zapatistas, black blocs, borders. “I think I would call myself an anarchist,” one admitted. All of this, along with stories of past trauma, made their way out into the light over the course of our ten-day trip. As they sat on stuffed chairs in the lobby of a lonely hotel near the refugee camp in war-ravaged Jenin, they probed one another’s political tendencies, which were reflected in their ways of dressing and their most recent tattoos.

The first evening of a solidarity bus tour in the West Bank, I listened as a contingent of college students from around the United States made an excellent discovery: they were all, at least kind of, anarchists.

Introduction Anarcho-Curious? or, Anarchist Amnesia

Noam chomsky anarchism book