#title ATUBES October 2017

#author ANEWS

#source https://anarchistnews.org

#lang en

**** i'll bite!

There are some people who want to be real rude aboyt the definition of anarchy, also, to exclude (explicitly or not) anything they're not into, basically a "no true Scotsman" thing. But then there's also people striving to be accurate. It is a widespread fallacy to think words' semantic contents have fixed borders, but working within this fallacy, this is hardly morally objectionable. Personally speaking, it is very rare for me to say "you are not an anarchist", but I definitely raise my eyebrows when some people use that word for themselves, given what they're into (and this includes some crypto-Leninists fwiw, not just post-left types). It's like, you seem to be using that word because you want to recruit or you want to belong. Understandable, but why the fuck should I feel duty-bound to accommodate you?

**** The answer to leadership

https://anarchistnews.org/comment/242047#comment-242047

The answer to leadership based on technical specialisms is skill-sharing.

The answer to covert intellectual leadership is for everyone to develop the ability to think critically and formulate their own ideas.

I'd advise people trying to *theorise* anarchist thought to look at Freire on cultural submersion, and the last part of Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks on this kind of thing. Also "Critical Thinking as an Anarchist Weapon", "Strip the Experts", and "Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself". And if you can manage it, Deleuze/Guattari on problem-fields, concepts, and nomad/royal sciences, and Korzybski or Postman/Weingartner on the difference between what people perceive and what people think. Read Hakim Bey on the source of values in chaos, in desire, and in altered consciousness. Add in Bonanno on propulsive desire and Stirner on wheels in the head, and maybe Barthes on myths, Boal's cops in the head, Vaneigem, and you've pretty much got an anarchist theory of critical thought.

Quick summary: if you aren't thinking for yourself, you're probably being manipulated by someone else who is. Everyday common sense is confused, contradictory, responds to right-wing dog-whistles, and is easily channelled by the media and politicians. Your average right-wing press reader thinks they're thinking for themselves but they're just jumping to conclusions they've been primed to reach. Autonomy is useless if we don't have our own projects and an ability to reconceptualise the outer world through them.

If people have these abilities - it doesn't matter if there's an intellectual hierarchy, because they won't have any power. If people don't have these abilities - they're probably being manipulated.

Generally, people become anarchists because an intense, powerful experience - of a riot, say, or a festival or party, or a particularly inspiring piece of direct action - overrides the attachments which tie them to the status quo and its ways of generating meaning. Alternatively, people who have no existing attachments, who can't plug into the mainstream, are drawn to the rhizomes of anarchism. This is the first step. People already begin to process things through this new source of meaning - not through the system's meanings. But it's hard to move beyond the processes of statist thought which are present in so much of social life. It isn't some sad, traumatic "learning through discomfort" like idpols propose - it's more a matter of following through one's own desires and beliefs more consistently. Clearing out cops in the head. Anarchism is a type of inner desire which disperses power, which breaks the hold of the state, capital, "society" on the individual, the unique one, or on the flow of desire. But thought needs to follow from this desire. Too often, the internal managers and survival parts of the unconscious kick back into superego, statist, moral reactions even after the break is made. And the entire apparatus of repression and recuperation is designed to encourage this process.

Anarchist thought is thought which disperses power. It is dispersed thought. It is not the imposition of a blueprint, a *different* concentrated power (as most radical politics is). And it is not self-disempowerment (as Buddhism and postmodernism often are). It is thought - and desire, feeling, fantasy - which disperses, diffuses, decentralises power - which infrapolitically, micropolitically balances against any concentration of power, sabotages, subverts, exoduses, rages against it - which in its very structure as well as its content, saps power from centralising signifiers and places power in the zone of desire itself.

I know people with no theoretical training whatsoever, who seem to naturally think like anarchists - often because they're traumatised by authority, or they've lived in autonomous zones for a lot of their life. There are indigenous groups who are not anarchists, do not call themselves anarchists, yet in many ways think like an anarchist. There are people who are not anarchist, who are anti-anarchist, who think like anarchists to the extent that their own communities or networks or movements are pitted against the state. And there are people who claim to be anarchists, who *are* anarchists in most of their macro-politics, who do *not* think like anarchists, but rather, think like the mainstream. These people are incapable of revolution because of the cops and wheels in their heads. Ultimately a clever media strategy or a social crisis rigged the right way would be enough to get them acting like just another curtain-twitching Fox-viewer. I'd count most left-anarchists and idpols in this category. They could have a revolution, create no-go zones, and all the state would have to do is encourage some drug dealing or petty crime and they'd start acting like pigs. Because they care about spooks and morality, in-group and out-group, more than they care about dispersing power.

**** ….

by Suomynona (not verified)

1st paragraph: A lot of platitudes and some empty phrases. Ends up in the nonsensical conclusion: "Ultimately our demands will be too threatening to the elite classes for them to bear; and their resistance to our drive for freedom will be too much for us to tolerate any longer." Except that has never happened, it is not what is happening, and honestly it is not very likely to occur like that.

2. paragraph: Well, okay then. How you not gonna avoid ending up with nothing else than reform when you don't address the systemic problems other than a reiteration of marxist garbage (power and the allocation of it)?

3. paragraph: More platitudes. Capitalism is only a part of larger whole. To suggest, as Kropotkin did, that we basically can just replace the economical incentives of the present system might have made sense a 100 years ago. These days, not so much. And slavery and exploitation were and are not only a "factor", it is fucking it. So how you gonna run a system based on resource colonialism, slavery, exploitation, war, coercion? Just make sure it is worker managed?

And now I actually can't be bothered anymore. Why don't you rather just go and do some shit instead of this paternal crap? Why argue for the right to self organize a corpse? I don't fucking know. If you actually speak to people, you'd perhaps be surprised to find out that they actually get that capitalism is a shit deal. And instead of this social insertion, and supposing that since you've read Kropotkin you can go and get them to organize better, be better and all such shit. Why don't you actually figure out what it is these people themselves want? And insofar as your interests meets theirs, then this would be where you organized?

**** As all the responses to this…

https://anarchistnews.org/comment/242048#comment-242048

Is there then a black anarchist/post-left response to the post-Christian ethics of our red comrades? Yes-- sabotage, circumvent, nihilate, avoid and destroy those institutions and practices that one finds most egregious. Will this build power revolutionary consciousness for the working classes? Who cares. All I know is that individuals acting as agents of destruction are far more likely to realize an insurrectionary moment, and I would trust them for just that reason, as opposed to a gaggle of anti-reformism reformists whose skill set is limited to soliciting signatures for a petition or buttonholing elected officials.

**** From a strictly personal POV …

... based in Norway, The Old World, I can only add to this wonderful mess that anarchism in 2017 is of course still what it always was. Go figure. If you don't know what it is by now, I guess it's wasted time to try to explain, but you'll probably find out for yourselves sooner or later anyway. Nothing beats home grown conclusions.

So stop asking for my advice, take what you need but be fair, share with those of your kind and mind your own dirty business, right?

And as if that wasn't a nice enough hint, I'll throw in another one for good measure, just to show what a generous sharer of ideas I actually am:

Now, get a wrench and go subvert some authoritarian pig system, will you?! Jeez. ;)

**** yes, it was a good thing that

by boles

**** as is the case with many

as is the case with many discussions centered on anti-politics, my assumptions have a lot to do with scale and the differences between big ideas and the smaller face -to-face interactions. antifascists like ARR and Bray constantly take the macro view, positing an existential crisis for what they call "the radical left" if its partisans ignore the looming threat of fascism, cryptofascism, and anarchists (and other "radical leftists"?) who don't subscribe to their alarmist pronouncements. the threat those guys and their fans are worried about are large, connected to social institutions and the mainstream -- hence their focus on "attempting to counter the misinformation" about antifa. my worries have to do with the more personal level of threats, like the ones implicit in the attempt of those asshats to invade the Houston Anarchist Book Fair. my antifascism is gut-based; i know quite well the threat those asshats pose to me and my friends, and it is on that level where i choose to respond (or not). that level of threat is real, and the threshold is mine; the threat ARR and Bray perceive is wider -- and that's where they lose me. essentially what they (and other professional antifascists) are calling for is a broad Popular Front-type organizational coalition to combat all levels of fascism, regardless of the actual or perceived threats among specific individuals who may or may not be specifically targeted by the fash. their calls are for "the radical left" to set aside doctrinal -- and even strategic -- differences in the face of some "greater threat." that's alarmist bullshit, and brief surveys of radical history will show the self-defeating aspects of this kind of agree-to-disagree politeness. i'll never work with leftists, "radical" or not; they are not my allies in the long-term, so why would i expect them to decide to be allies in the short-term?

**** if the only strategic value

by boles

if the only strategic value in what Bray were doing is countering mainstream information, that'd be fine; mainstream loathing of any kind of radical direct action is a no-brainer and there needs to be someone out there who can stand toe to toe with scumbags like Hedges and all those DSA clowns. but there's more to Bray's and ARR's project than that. if you can't see the strategic suicide in that, it may be a failure of understanding on your part. they are quite explicitly trying to engage "organizers" (Bray uses the term quite unselfconsciously, as if there hasn't been decades of discussion about anarchists and the organizational question) -- that is, people who organize others, or who have a specific kind of organization on the agenda. you know, specialists in other people's struggles...

that's where my hackles go up. that's why i don't call myself "antifascist" the same way i don't call myself "anti-imperialist": each term comes with a lot of historical baggage from leftist organizations, and they are not just analytical positions. when people call themselves antifascists, or anti-imperialists, or antiracists, they are also telling you the *right way* to organize to combat those things they're against. that's called ideology.

**** Boring

by Sogna (not verified)

**** This is a classical example

by disorder (not verified)

There's one thing that runs through the whole article, though, which is rather specific to Catalan anarchism: the appreciation of all that is local ("our neighbourhoods", "local assemblies", etc) as opposed to big and evil State forces (ie. the Catalan proto-State). And that is even when the famous local assemblies struggle rather explicitly for the creation of a new State. I need not remind you that assemblies do not have to be "run" by anarchists to work on anti-authoritarian principles and have anti-authoritarian goals (contrary as to what is thought by Bonanno who would like to silently guide the masses). It is not a question of the assemblies being explicitly anarchists -- an assembly waving a CNT flag and fighting for the creation of a new State is still an assembly that is fighting for the creation of a new State. Defending any manifestation of local initiative as contrary to the State (ie. beaten voters vs. evil Guardia Civil, which soon becomes Catalan cops vs. Spanish cops) is failing to understand how democracy has been functionning for the last thirty years -- by encouraging active participation, formal or informal, in the institutional life.

It is extremely tiresome to constantly run into this stupid accusation of orthodoxy and dogmatism. It is not because one is "more" anarchist than another that nationalism is never on the side of those who don't want to be ruled neither rule. It is because nationalism is to be condemned on its own grounds -- the "for" or "against" of some anarchists is of little importance.

May I remind you that just like we refuse to chose between the rope and guillotine, we also refuse to chose between one State and another -- at war as at peace. This refusal is the only theoretical and practical position worthy of being developped on this question. The desire of some anarchists to join the ranks is no excuse.