Where does Anarchism cross paths with anti-state Marxism?

John P. Clark’s new book, The Impossible Community, comes out of the anarchist Social Ecology tendency of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin’s ideas have been cited lately as one of the influences among Kurds of Turkey and northern Syria. The latter have inspired the world with their defense of an egalitarian, gender-equal community against the superior weapons of the Islamic State butchers.

For Clark, Hegel’s dialectic addresses the problem of free and full development after a revolution when new forms like popular assemblies appear. For Bookchin these popular assemblies are purely “unmediated social relations.” That, says Clark, can never be. Freedom means confronting anew the necessarily mediated character of social relations.

An Anarchist / Marxist-Humanist dialog will engage this issue from the perspective of Hegel’s concept of dialectical mediation. Hegel saw the need for his dialectic to be projected directly into the fray as the prevailing discourse late in his life had retrogressed into two opposite forms of “immediate truth:” either a fundamentalist attitude toward scripture or an “enlightened” pure intuitionism.

Sunday, December 7, 6:30 p.m.
Niebyl-Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. (at Alcatraz), Oakland
come up the back stairs

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