Theory and Literature
Various theories or conceptions of anarchism arose from the literature of Australia, writers and poets either identified as anarchists or became closely associated with associations and literary movements since the late 19th century. As a school of ethics or radicalism, anarchism is inherently prone to schism and dissolution. Sometimes given as a weakness of its political effectiveness, many anarchists maintain that dynamic political association is its strength. Magazines and pamphlets were generated throughout its history, associations came and went, and poets used the medium to illustrate their sometimes utopic vision. Many anarchists were engaged to socialist campaigning or in political actions involving other groups.
The term has been used in the Australian press to indicate a position of extreme or violent revolution, or of simple lawlessness. During the 1970s and to some extent the 1980s there was a tendency for anarchists to prefer such terms as "libertarian socialist".
The established and ongoing press of the Australian anarchist movement presently (July 2007) consists of the anarcho-syndicalist bimonthly Rebel Worker, founded in 1982; and the Anarchist Age Weekly Review.
- the newsletter, founded in 1991, of the Anarchist Media Institute. Many more ephemeral publications have existed and continue to be produced.
Rebel Worker has carried over the years a body of polemic critical of inward-looking or "sect-building" anarchism, accused of seeing itself as something apart from the day to day struggles of working people. Associated with this polemic it has also carried articles critical of a "faista" (that is, dominated by the perspective favourable to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica) interpretation of the history of Spanish Anarchism. The Anarchist Age Weekly Review provides a running commentary on the news plus very short theoretical and historical articles.
The pamphlet You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship is a critique of guerilla-ism or "terrorism" as a strategy. It was published in 1978 in the name of several Australian groups following the Sydney Hilton bombing. Another significant pamphlet, from the early 1980s, was Julie McCrossin's Women, wimmin, womyn, womin, whippets an anarchist-feminist critique of some aspects of the separatist feminism of the day.
Read more about this topic: Anarchism In Australia
Famous quotes containing the words theory and/or literature:
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)