The Tyranny of the Politically Correct by Keith Preston

Author:Keith Preston [Preston, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: The Tyranny of the Politically Correct
Publisher: Black House Publishing
Published: 2018-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

11

Balkanization and the State of Exception

Keith Preston writes the blog Attack the System, which attempts to tie together both left and right anarchism in a Pan-secessionism against the empire. While I come from a radically different perspective than Keith, I find his critique of the way many left anarchists are militant shock troops of liberalism to be a serious and disturbing critique as well as the Nietzschean critique of modernity to be taken seriously and not softened as it has been in French post-structuralism.

Skepoet: You started out in the libertarian socialist tradition but have moved towards a pan-anarchist movement than includes decentralized nationalists and non-socialists. Could you describe how you left “left” anarchism in its socialist variety?

Keith Preston: I never really renounced “socialist-anarchism.” I’m still interested in schools of thought that fall under that banner like syndicalism and mutualism, and I still very much consider the founding fathers (and mothers!) of classical anarchism to be influences on my thought. But I did abandon the mainstream (if it could be called that) of the socialist-anarchist movement. The reason for that is the left-anarchist milieu in its modern form is simply a youth subculture more interested in lifestyle issues (like veganism and punk music) than in revolutionary politics. And to the degree that these anarchists have any serious political perspective at all, it’s simply a regurgitation of fairly clichéd left-progressive doctrines.

If one listens to what the mainstream anarchists talk about gay rights, global warming, immigrants rights, feminism, anti-racism, animal rights, defending the welfare state, the whole laundry list - they don’t sound much different than what you would hear in the local liberal church parish, or at a Democratic party precinct meeting, or a university humanities course. Eventually, I came to the realization that a serious anti-state movement would need to be grounded in population groups whose core values really do put them at odds with the mainstream political culture. There are plenty of these: the urban underclass and underworld, religious sects whose exotic beliefs get them in trouble with the state, ethnic separatists, pro-gun militias, radical survivalists, drug cultures and sex cultures that are considered deviant or criminal, etc. I’ve been very happy to witness the growth of the anti-civilization movement within the ranks anarchism. What you label “decentralized nationalists” and non-socialists who oppose the state also fall into this category. So it’s not so much about abandoning what I was before as much as building on that and expanding my perspective a bit.

S: Well, these movements have been around since the middle 1990s on my radar, but I have noticed that Occupy movement seems to have pushed these tensions back into the radical milieu, so to speak. What have you noticed in the past year on the ground?

K.P.: I consider Occupy Wall Street to largely be a recycling of the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I am skeptical as to whether it will fare any better than the anti-globalization movement did. From what I have observed

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