Was Woody Guthrie an anarchist? Beats me. Would he have approved the following statement of Anarchist goals? Again, it beats me, but I think he would have found much in this statement that resonated with his own brand of Left-wing populism:
The anarchist conception of power is in opposition to the Marxist conception of the seizure and adaptation of coercive, vertical, centralised [sic], bourgeois power. Instead, anarchists argue for, and in their innumerable revolts and their four main revolutions have practiced, a free, horizontal, federalist, proletarian counter-power that would equitably distribute decision-making powers and responsibilities across liberated communities. In particular, anarchist theorists have grappled with how to construct a real, living libertarian communist praxis, thereby encountering the key question facing all revolutionaries: how does the militant minority transmit the ideas of a free society to the oppressed classes, in such a way that the oppressed makes those ideas their own, moving beyond the origins of those ideas into the realm of libertarian autogestion.--Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, AK Press (2013),
6.
Moreover, I think Woody might answer the "key question facing all revolutionaries" with one word: music.
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