Globalization makes anarchism's aspirations increasingly apropos. Far from being anti-globalization per se, anarchists have long dreamed of the world… - Cindy Milstein
" "Globalization makes anarchism's aspirations increasingly apropos. Far from being anti-globalization per se, anarchists have long dreamed of the world without borders made potentially feasible by the transformations now under way. Indeed, the means utilized by globalization are quite amenable to anarchist values, such as decentralization and interconnectedness, elastic identities and the shattering of binaries, creative borrowings, cooperation, and openness. Most strikingly, globalization is structurally undermining the centrality of states. [...] In this globalizing world, though, "nonstatist" can mean everything from supranational institutions governed by business elites and international nongovernmental organizations to world courts and regional trade zones to networks of free-floating individuals willing to employ terror tactics. Globalization within a capitalistic framework is just as likely to birth new hierarchies and deepen alienation, shaping all in its own image—the state, but also anarchism included. If anything, the changing social landscape and its many new dangers compel anarchists to take themselves and their ideas more seriously, particularly given anarchism's avant-garde role in the anticapitalist movement of movements. [...] The highly participatory practices of today's anarchism have to be continually reimagined both to keep three steps ahead of those that would contain or co-opt it, and to be up to the task of remaking society. This entails understanding the specific forms that contemporary governance is taking, in order to ensure that anarchism is reaching the right mark in its ongoing effort to dismantle the state. Both theory and practice thus need to catch up to the present if an anarchist politics is to become more than a historical footnote about a missed moment.
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About Cindy Milstein
Cindy Milstein is an American anarchist activist based in Brooklyn. They have also been involved with the Institute for Social Ecology, and are currently a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference. Milstein speaks regularly in public, at anarchist conferences and bookfairs as well as radical spaces, including the Finding Our Roots conference, the Unschooling Oppression conference, the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, the Bay Area Bookfair, the New York Anarchist Book Fair, and Left Forum, among others. Milstein was an active member of Occupy Philly.
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Alternative Names:
Cindy Barukh Milstein
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Additional quotes by Cindy Milstein
It (anarchism) looks at how our forms of social relationships and social organization could revolve, or should revolve, around aspiring to be a social structure of free people in a free society of free beings, not just humans. Anarchism has a dual process or practice. It’s very much about questioning and dismantling all forms of hierarchy, domination, oppression, and subjugation — things like the state, colonialism, capitalism, fascism, et cetera. In its place, and at the same time, anarchism tries to envision and experiment with how we structure our daily lives as much as possible around egalitarian, do-it-ourselves forms of self-organization: self-determination, community self-defense, self-governance. Anarchists fill that out with a whole constellation of ethics, like solidarity, collective care, and mutual aid.
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Coming to anarchism, taking up the mantle of imagining a world beyond hierarchy, is like a lightbulb going off inside one's head. It first offers a sense of one's own empowerment and liberation, and then, hopefully, a sense of collective social power and freedom. There is something euphoric in casting off, even if only on the level of personal beliefs initially, the idea that hierarchy is somehow a given, and that one has to abide by its rules. It's a life-altering leap when one truly uproots the belief within oneself that, say, racism or states are normal and necessary. The move toward increasingly nonhierarchical mind-sets, relations, and institutions opens up a whole world of possibility—at least as a start, within oneself. The first act might be critical thought, a less estranged relationship with oneself and others, or the reappropriation of imagination as a step toward a nonalienated society.
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