Introduction
The “Post-Left” as a term is defined as not by what it generally believes, other than as Jason McQuinn said in his essay Post-Left Anarchism, “Leftism is dead! Long live anarchy!” Many of the ideas espoused by early Post-Leftists such as Bob Black, John Zerzan, and the aforementioned Jason McQuinn can be traced to the Situationist International as well as the German philosopher Max Stirner. As the ideas of “Post-Leftism” spread online, many people embraced the ideas of the rejection of the left such as the Insurrectionary Anarchist, Wolfi Landstreicher, and the Anarcho-Nihilists such as Aragorn! and Serafinski, all of whom embraced a more anti-communist stance. Around the same time however we see a different turn to a reconciliation with the communist movement in people like D. Z. Rowan and more recently Hellothere314. The relationship between Post-Leftists and Communists varies a lot between individuals and time periods and the ways they are described are reliant on the context in which they were written.
The Post-Situationist Mileu
The ideas and personalities of Post-Leftism emerged from the milieu of post-situationists in America, as Bob Black noted;
As the SI decomposed, pro-situ groups formed in New York City and in the San Francisco Bay Area with names like Negation, Point Blank, Contradiction and Bureau of Public Secrets, followed in other localities by not-so-sit grouplets (Upshot, Aurora, Tampa Narcissus) which, without intending to, insinuated situationism into the somewhat resurgent American anarchism of the 1970s.1
The spread of the ideas proposed by Debord, Vaneigem, and the rest of the Situationist International was not led by the Marxists and Communists as in Europe and Asia, but by the “resurgent American anarchism”2 emerging out of the New Left.
The Situationist pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life, which was published in 1966 by students at Strasbourg University, was one of the most impactful pieces in the development of the Post-Left. Originally translated into English in 1967, and would impact the American Anarchist movement for decades. Another edition published by Black & Red, along with its translations of the SI, brought the core of the Situationist thought into the American radical conscience.
One of the earliest groups in the American situationist milieu, which were called “pro-situs” by the SI, a name I will use, was the collective For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management, which, in 1974, published The Right to be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything. Bob Black noted of the text: “I came across the pamphlet a couple of years later, by which time For Ourselves was defunct. I was charmed and challenged by its “communist egoism,” its audacious attempt to synthesize a collectivist social vision of left-wing origin with an individualistic (for lack of a better word) ethic usually articulated on the right.” The Ideas of “communist egoism” was an important bridge to connect the Marxism of the SI with the Egoism of Max Stirner. This synthesis of the 2, primarily Stirner, would play an important role in the development of the theories of all of the Post-Left.