At the same time, it involved a variety of people in this process through participation in working groups, writing draft statements, and debating positions at plenaries and in the pages of the paper. This kind of anarchist intellectual culture does not exist today. The great thing about Love and Rage's attempt to develop a political statement, in addition to its participatory character, was the way the discussion of ideas took place in the context of an organized attempt to change the world. Thus the ideas, although sometimes abstract or theoretical, were part of an engagement with society. Too often today, discussions of radical ideas are purely abstract, with little or no relation to organizing work or a larger public.
Intellectual work goes on in isolation, or is perverted in service to academic requirements.
And on the other hand, as is so often the case, organizing work goes on in a rather rote fashion, with little room to explore theoretical dimensions or argue how tactics are part of a long-term revolutionary strategy or theory of the world. One current organization which promotes anarchist scholarship, The Institute for Anarchist Studies, funds individual writers, not collective writing projects, because the applications for funding it receives are from individuals. With the demise of Love and Rage and other organizations engaged in collective, democratic writing processes, like the Youth Greens, the anarchist intellectual scene has become atomized and fragmented. It is rare to find collective writing projects or popular forums for discussing radical ideas. Without them, people often drift away, or begin to regurgitate mainstream thought about the inevitability of the market, or the state, or about how people are fundamentally greedy and will never change.