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Letter from Josh MacPhee: Support the IAS

Posted on January 26th, 2010 in AK Allies, AK Authors!

The Institute for Anarchist Studies recently sent out another request for support. This one was written by AK author Josh MacPhee. It’s worth reprinting here, not simply because the IAS deserves as much support as it can get, but because Josh’s letter itself raises some good questions. It insists that anarchists ask ourselves some hard questions…and that we build on, rather simply rest on, the dubious laurels of (increasingly distant) past successes. Good shit. Read on…

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Dear Friends and Comrades,

Economic and political landscapes are shifting rapidly. Around the world, people are coming to the conclusion that the institutions of power have failed us. Many are looking for new ways to restructure society. The question is not whether things are changing but rather whether these changes can enable us to make the lives we share qualitatively better. As antiauthoritarians, our duty is to ask the challenging questions as to how the society we create can be the egalitarian one we’d like to see. The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) is an organization that is dedicated to fostering educational space, promoting radical literature, and curating dialogue in order to grapple with these difficult questions.

Many of you remember the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. Anarchists were running through the streets with spray paint, writing “We Are Winning” on the walls. At the time it felt great, “Yeah, we’re winning!” But enough time has passed to look back and ask the questions: Was there any truth in that statement? What does it actually mean to win? What are we winning?

Well, we have won a Left where a soft, or “lowercase a,” anarchism has become the default political position. Consensus decision making, spokescouncils, horizontalism—these are all assumed in much Left organizing today, and most young people gravitate to the liberatory promises of anarchism. Even among many sectarian groups, when they do public outreach they wrap themselves in the veneer of direct democracy. Many of the values considered part of anarchism have been fully embraced. That’s useful and important, but there are limitations.

There’s not enough honesty assessing the situation we’re in, which makes it difficult to think critically about how to get where we want to go. We have largely failed to give any real intellectual direction to this newfound popularity of antiauthoritarian ideas and actions. Rather than strengthening our tradition so that we can provide vital analysis as well as criticism of both what we are up against and our own self-organization, we have defaulted to a lazy horizontalist position where fuzzy ideas like “affinity” and “diversity of tactics” have replaced serious debate about who we are, what we are doing, and how we are going to overcome the obstacles we face.

This is where the IAS has an important role to play. The IAS supports the development of anarchist theory adequate to the times we live in. Such theory must be rigorous yet flexible, counteracting a troubling tendency toward anti-intellectualism in the movement. Yet it must not be purely academic; it must also be firmly rooted in praxis, emergent from frontline struggles for equality and liberation, and oriented toward the furthering of substantive social change.

We hope to raise much-needed funds to support our ongoing work, including funding writing and research. Over the summer, we were able to fund the writing of three excellent essays:

• “Sienvolando: Snapshots of Art Actions, Popular Power, and Collaborative Networks in Argentina,” by KellyAnne Mifflin

• “Organizing against Capitalism: Translation of Eric Duran’s ‘Creating a Counterhegemonic Economic System,’” by Scott Pinkelman

• “Futures Not (Yet) Chosen: An Antiauthoritarian Vision for South Africa,” by Taylor Sparrow

February 2010 will see the print revival of our journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. In March, we’ll be publishing the first book in our collaborative series with AK Press, Anarchism and Its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein. We’d like to be able to expand the amount of research and writing we can fund and publish, but we need your help.

The IAS grant program is entirely funded by the generous donations of people and collectives like you. Your support allows the IAS to grow and nurture anarchist debate and discourse around the world. Please consider making a donation as small or as large as you like! Every little bit helps—from $20 to $200 to $2,000. If you can donate by credit or debit card, consider visiting our online donations page at, where you can also make a monthly donation of as little as $5 to whatever larger amount fits your budget. You can also send a check made out to the Institute for Anarchist Studies to:

Institute for Anarchist Studies
P.O Box 15586
Washington, DC 20003

Another way to contribute is by hosting one of the many speakers on the Mutual Aid Speakers list at an event in your town and donating the honorarium to the IAS. Contribute to the IAS today, and together we will show what a better world can look like, and to the degree our power permits, make it happen.

Sincerely, Josh MacPhee
for the Board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies

www.anarchist-studies.org