In Our Time Comments

I've listened to it, a brief history of anarchism in forty minutes, and found it quite interesting; a group of academics looking at anarchism from the outside. Many of the criticisms listed in my previous post seem valid, and I have just on addition. It might have been due to the setup of the programme (In Our Time), but I think there could have been much more (there was only a sentence tacked in at the end) of anarchism today. Go here for other folks' comments.

And, one this point anarchists must take some of the blame. There is probably no other political movement that has a greater obsession with its history than anarchism; in fact, if there could ever be a criteria for becoming an card-carrying anarchist, it'd be in the form of a history test. There is some truth in Bob Black's statement;

The history of anarchism is a history of unparalleled defeat and martyrdom, yet anarchists venerate their victimized forebears with a morbid devotion which occasions suspicion that the anarchists, like everybody else, think that the only good anarchist is a dead one.

I guess the real irony of the programme is that it was on a state-sponsered radio station.