I'm not an anarchist anymore in the specific elective sense of the term, that's not to say that I don't technically still register with the ideas and then some. The word I use to some up my world view would be Anarch Egoist Anarchy. It's my idea of what the post left Stirnerian analysis should really become. Anarch after anarchist, Anarchy after anarchism. The 'ist' and the 'ism' will always connote elective positions and proposed solutions which will always have a mediating affect on anarchy and uniqueness as far as I'm concerned.
That aside, I'm still interested in a strong anarchist discourse in a world that is still political-economic. Anarchism will always be a political economic discourse to some degree and even in it's marginal extremes it will always represent a form of elective politics.
This brings me to the colour orange. You would think this would be a dead color for the anarchist banner. It's economic colour of exchange, it's not the predominate red that has been the baseline frame of reference for much of anarchist thought. I propose that a new baseline colour is needed and orange is that colour. Orange is the new black. It's not my colour, it's not my flag, but it's preferable to red for some obvious reasons. For one thing the color red cannot escape the ugly side of leftism particularly vanguard Marxist ideology and it's my view that a healthy anarchism should do everything it can to differentiate itself from the blood stained aspect of red ideology. Orange can at least be a new baseline alternative color with vastly less baggage. Orange of course correlates with Proudhonian Mutualism which of course allows for a baseline degree of exchange and exchange is seen as the no go area clear on back to Kropotkin. Let's get to that.
My reading of Shawn Wilbur has really helped to clarify my views on this but essentially I see exchange at most as an epiphenomenal branching problem. As an anti-reification thinker you would think I would fall in line like most anarchists but it should be said that Stirner, the anti-reified thinker par excellence, did not have a strong position on exchange beyond something to be mediated by ones egoism. On the whole I would say there is an agnosticism to be had on the question of exchange as a whole. Emile Armand for instance would take the plural position, a gift process here, exchange there. This is essentially my view. You are not going to 'abolish' exchange in any general sense. The stranger-friend relational context define these sorts of things. Exchange was always a tangential issue brought up by Karl Marx and his base-surface literalism along with is economic materialist reductionist analysis. As reified issues go, exchange is an issue but it is not THE root issue. The most glaring thing about the anti-exchange all use value ideologues by far though is that fact that most of them do not reject the organization form the comes along side the dynamics of complex complicated exchange. They want to have their cake and eat it to. They want preserve the material abundance that comes with exchange(which I have some sympathy towards) but along with that they want to retain the weighted organization that comes with modern processes. One of the basic exchange does is that it solves these complicated calculation issues. The red ideologues want the exchange spook gone but they will double down on the organization spook to get their productive way. This is not surprising considering that nearly all of the red ideologies do not have a formal critique of organization which of course includes work and education.
Beyond all this a return to orange can represent a new means for anarchism to develop a strong structural baseline that is no longer informed by the flawed structural analysis of Marx and the communists. Again, I will say Shawn Wilbur represents of preferable example of what anarchism could be in regards to a non-orthodox Proudhonian orange. It can take on more radical thinkers such as Emile Armand who was not an anarcho-communist but something much better even though he was partially influenced by Proudhon and even Tucker. Most importantly it would complete a much needed divorce from all things red which include everything from the Marxist Vanguard trash to Syndicalism and Communism which should never be associated with anarchism again. I've also mentioned a need for a blue anti-civilized alternative to green but that is for another writing. Until then.
Let orange be the new black for anarchism.
