There's a great essay by Gershom Scholem about Jewish messianic thought that this question brings to mind. Scholem points out an interesting paradox. On the one hand, the messianic idea is absolutely revolutionary and iconoclastic. Jewish messianic movements, such as those associated with Sabbatai Zevi or Jacob Frank, are antinomian: they break with every letter of Jewish law, abandon the tradition, and become enfants terribles. The messianic demands this, as it entails a complete rupture with the world and life one has lived up till then, a total destruction-creation, another world. On the other hand, Scholem argues, every aspect of the Jewish tradition, every letter of the law, every word of the sacred texts and every ritual carried out repeatedly, laboriously, over the years and generations, bears in its heart the messianic, carrying, transmitting, and ultimately giving birth to the force that will destroy it.
I think anarchy and anarchism hold a very similar, if not identical, tension. It is what Bonanno calls the anarchist tension. On the one hand, anarchism is radically anti-traditional. Anarchists can't stand traditions. Anarchy is such a utopian moment, such a radical break from mundane reality that it undoes everything, even everything about the anarchism we live day to day. In crude terms, we must burn the black flags after the revolution. But here's the rub. We have to live our anarchism day to day, or else it is nothing. And by living it day to day, we are or become part of a tradition, even while it is a tradition dedicated to a spirit that annihilates tradition. (If we haven't studied religion, especially along its messianic paths, we may think this contradiction is unique to anarchism. It isn't.) It's tempting to try to deny the paradox of it and dissolve it into something simpler, but this would kill the spirit. Individuals within messianic, supposedly political movements -- i.e. revolutionaries -- would do well to consider their traditions as religious traditions -- or spiritual, if they prefer.
Aside from our antinomianism and messianism (i.e. a deeply embedded, healthy resistance to tradition) another reason anarchists have a troubled relation to tradition is that ours is such a "broken" one. The lines of transmission and the ancestral lines are ruptured so often by a whole litany of factors and tragedies, often it feels like the elders aren't there or the youth don't care to listen to them. And, though the ancestors are sometimes remembered, it seems there are not many encouragements to seek relation with them. But the traditions persist anyway, as others have pointed out: smashing windows and quoting Kropotkin (ancestor!) are both traditional. We have holidays: May Day (ancestors!), June 11th, Haymarket Martyr's Day, etc. We have special styles of dress, of language, of eating. But in my opinion these too often manifest as habit rather than ritual. I'd say that habits are what we do unintentionally and rituals are practices of hyper-intention. I propose we infuse more intention into our practices, to allow ourselves the feeling and awareness of ourselves moving within a tradition as we live out our day to day anarchy. This, I think, will help in creating-destroying the tradition.
There's my initial stab. Interested to hear what others think.
