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Cindy Milstein is an American anarchist activist based in Brooklyn. They have also been involved with the Institute for Social Ecology, and are currently a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference.
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Still, the grand experiments of the past aimed at a free and self-governing society have not been extinguished—they have reemerged in the anarchistic strains charted here and, most promisingly, the current contest against capitalism fought along antiauthoritarian lines. Not a bad beginning to the twenty-first century.
Anarchism and Its Aspirations (2010)
I've never been at home in this world, though. That's why I fight so fiercely for other possible ones. That's why, as both an anarchist and Jew, I've long dreamed of do-it-ourselves, egalitarian forms of social organization ones in which we're all reciprocally and abundantly cared for, not to mention messy-beautifully whole.
"Ethics" isn't some fixed entity but rather the continual questioning of what it means to be a good person in a good society. It draws from the classical triad of philosophy's aspirations: the good, the true, and the beautiful.
What gets forgotten in relation to direct action mobilizations is the promise implicit in their own structure: that power not only needs to be contested; it must also be constituted anew in liberatory and egalitarian forms. This entails taking directly democratic processes seriously—not simply as a tactic to organize protests but as the very way we organize society, specifically the political realm.
Anarchism and Its Aspirations (2010)
Despite the difficulties, anarchists never advocate a purely reformist attitude. They try their best never to participate in reform as an end in itself, or to bring about improvements that also make the present social order look attractive. Their efforts to move from "here" to "there" intentionally highlight how current social arrangements cannot, by their own raison d'être, meet everyone's needs and desires.
Anarchism and Its Aspirations (2010)
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