Bourdieu on anarchists and Mills on being a Wobbly

Pierre Bourdieu: "In the arguments which I develop, it seems to me that the anarchist tradition has a role to play. I consider that all who are inspired by anarchist thought, or who are close to that way of thinking, are precisely the sort of people I want to reach. Alongside others, anarchists seem to me to be particularly suitable to enter into the new international political movement which is being organized."

C. Wright Mills: "Over the last several years I have become quite aware of a certain mixture of personal and political and professional factors which have come together to determine such intellectual roles as I play, and even such intellectual and moral work as I have done and am doing. All these factors, to put it briefly, have constructed in me the ethos of the Wobbly. You’ve asked me, “What might you be?” Now I answer you: “I am a Wobbly.” I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. (I want to tell you this in order that you may understand my own values as fully as possible and hence be able to better control your understanding of my letters to you.) I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It’s a kind of spiritual condition. Don’t be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He’s also a man who’s often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn’t made up himself. He doesn’t like bosses— capitalistic or communistic— they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom."