Padkos: Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis

Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis

Thinking and learning an emancipatory praxis requires not only a confrontation with forces and ideologies of the right, but also with those elements in leftist traditions that re-inscribe authoritarian dogmatism, hierarchical power, political exclusion, and contemptuous vanguardism. No ideological orientation guarantees that we're safeguarded against these tendencies – but humanist, autonomist, and anarchist traditions of the left become important resources since they explicitly critique them and, perhaps more importantly, explore practical ways of doing politics against them.

In this edition of Padkos we're sharing a short note on “Christianity and Anarchism” that Mark Butler and Graham Philpott (CLP) recently wrote for our friends at the Anabaptist Network of South Africa (ANISA). We point out that the “anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian” characteristics of Jesus' politics signals “important parallels and resonances” with anarchism.

Also attached is “The New Anarchists”, an earlier piece by David Graeber, one of the leading contemporary U.S.-based anarchist activists and writers who was centrally involved in the “Occupy Wall Street” mobilisations of 2011. Although some key aspects raised in this 2002 piece from the New Left Review get updated and expanded in his recent book, “The Democracy Project” (there's a copy at the CLP office if you'd like to read more), here he connects some of the dots nicely and succinctly.

Remember to join us on Thursday 26 June at this week's Bioscope where we're looking at practical examples of this conscious overlap between ideas and practice, and between the means and the ends of liberatory struggle, in the politics of the Occupy movement that is/was explicitly “anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian”. Come watch 3 short excellent pieces from those struggles:

“New Social Movements Tactics” (6 min);

“Right here all over” (7min); and

“Consensus Direct Democracy” (9min).