Intuition

Recently, in anarchist circles I have heard a term uttered more times than I care to hear it: Intuition.

There is an assumption that all of this dead society is bad and so we cannot trust it. Instead, we should get back to some mythical intuition and throw the baby out with the bath water. Let me be clear, whatever we cannot change or rebuild, we shall destroy. That understood, I didn’t get attracted to radical politics so that we could become idiots.

I was attracted to struggle through the prism of Marxism and dialectical materialism. Yes, science. I still think of politics in terms of a science (albeit more post-modern now). I want no part of a supposed radical critique that tells us not to trust science and to instead trust our intuitions. Science has a set of rules and no matter how un-anarchist that sounds, it is a set of rules so that we can judge and learn from the objective world as unfettered by our acknowledged subjectivity as possible. I have read plenty, usually from the likes of Crimethinc and primitivists, that espouses the value of intuitive folk science. Folk science. Uh, no thank you. It was, and continues to be, the politics of intuition and emotion that creates and perpetuates systems of hierarchy.
I realize one’s mind might be poisoned by their surroundings to even think that their self(ish) interests should drive social institutions over common interests but that is what has happened in all “primitive” stages of history. I want nothing to do with intuitive beliefs wrapped in new gods.
My radicalism is grounded in the material world. A world that can be tested by more than my feelings.