An Anti-Authoritarian response to the war efforts.

• Author: Sitrin, Marina

[Two activists based in New York City wrote the following piece 10 days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It was circulated around the world through the Internet and locally by hand It was later published in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory (Fall 2001, Vol. 5, No. 2) and The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books (Issue #1, November 2001).]

We are living through scary times. Clearly the US government and its allies believe they have a grand opportunity to realign domestic and international relationships in their interest. This is frightening. Major shifts in the political landscape threaten to tear the ground from beneath our feet.

These glacial shifts in the political scene also offer anti-authoritarians a unique opportunity to obtain a new and more secure footing in our struggle against economic exploitation, political hierarchy, and cultural domination.

First of all, we must not be cowed by present circumstances, as disturbing as they are. On the contrary, recent events call upon us to exercise political leadership in the best, most principled and visionary sense of the term. This is a challenge, and one that we can meet with anti-authoritarian vision and politics.

We believe it is imperative that anti-authoritarians formulate a coherent response to the war buildup and a role within the growing peace movement. We must not allow our perspective to be subsumed under more prominent but less radical tendencies in the left. Also, the peace movement is presently defining its politics and structures. We have a great opportunity to engage the movement and push it in the most radical direction.

The purpose of this letter is to explore the contours of an anti-authoritarian position on recent events.

We want to address three important issues: structure, politics, and the future.

Structure

We anticipate that the anti-war movement will experience divisions similar to those that beset the peace movement during the Gulf War. National organizing efforts will be split into two organizations: one will be pacifist and more libertarian in character, and the other will be more militant and Stalinist. Both will be top-down mobilizations, built around well-known "leaders," and awash with a moralism that would turn off even the most open-minded citizens and activists.

Thus, we think our immediate challenge is to ensure that the antiwar mobilizations are decentralized and democratic in structure.

Specifically, we believe...