Again and again over the last month’s political turmoil folks from all political comers—and many that should damn well know better—have gone absolutely apoplectic to discover anarchists still consistently denouncing and opposing authoritarianism, from Castro to Trump, maoists to alt-righters. In short they’re seemingly wildly surprised that anarchists are anarchists. In one absurd instance I was personally called a “dogmatic hack” who “only cares about anti-authoritarianism.” Well yes. What did you think anarchism was about? Such hilarious expressions of shock have been widespread across social media. Among the left there’s been a unending feed of: “Wait, you even oppose left-wing ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The first time I encountered the claim that an anarchistic society would impede scientific[1] progress I was too shocked — and later busy chortling — to sketch out a thorough response.
It’s a surprising sentiment to me for a lot of reasons, not the least for the well known correspondence between scientific progress and social and material freedom in mass societies. I suppose liberals might be inclined to write this relation off as a low value-correspondence – like solely whether free speech is allowed or if folks even have time for anything besides the struggle to stay alive – but to me the connection seems quite obviously fundamental. Power relations of any kind are ultimately more constrictive of inq... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) When the USSR fell one of the “privatization” schemes was to just hand workers stock certificates in the companies they worked at. The problem of course was that the economy was seized up and everyone was starving. So gangsters and the children of the soviet upper-class with actual money bought up all the certificates. They had folks literally go around with wheelbarrows full of vodka trading one bottle for a stock cert. Thus were state enterprises promptly handed over to the existing rich.
This is an important historical example because it demonstrated with devastating clarity how “entrepreneurs” with a small amount of unfair seed money can rapidly take over an entire economy and turn it into an oligarchy. Th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There are numerous points in Shane Burley’s Fascism Today: What It Is And How To End It where I stopped, reread a passage, and with a little bit of shocked relief went “that is entirely accurate!” I don’t mean to damn with faint praise. In this last year’s stampede of everyone suddenly writing about fascism let’s just say that accuracy has broadly diminished. So many people have next to no familiarity with the subjects they try to write about, either missing critical details and context or just going in half-cocked. So it must be said that in this context I found Burley’s book studiously and refreshingly boring — in the way that sanity is boring.
Fascism Today, for the most part, operat... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There is no reviewing Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House without commenting on its questionable cannonicity. But there’s also no mistaking its appeal as a supplemental to the last season of electoral politics in America. Like any good expanded universe offering it tries to enrich and deepen everything that entertained us on the screen, offering retcons, fleshed in backstory, and world-building. There’s a certain kind of minor catharsis to such works, making sense of the sometimes rushed, contradictory and half-assed storyline we were initially presented, but it is also undermined by a sense that anything within could be casually discarded back on the television show.
Wolff, like all goo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I will always remember the first time I paused while flicking through channels and heard “boy, this planet really smells!” I was immediately hooked. And I spent the following long dark years before Serenity a fervent evangelist. That we even got our Big Damn Movie shocks me to this day and I want to make clear that I am more than content to sit back, wrap up my fandom with a little bow, put it on a shelf, and only ever trot it out when someone makes the mistake of asking the wrong question at a party. We got our ending–such as it is–and I have no illusions that our wildly successful cast will ever disentangle themselves from their various contracts in time to film anything other than Firefly: The Geriatrics.
H... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Adult supremacy claims its legitimacy from the notion that age grants critical experience and wisdom. We all know exceptions to this, adults we would classify as unwise, but the ideology persists because it is true that choice in the absence of knowledge is not real choice. Someone has to understand the context of their actions, they have to have an accurate map of the world in order to be able to trace the consequences. This much is true. And so defenders of adult supremacy always want to get into a fine grained fight over how informed a child is or can be.
But picture yourself today ripped from your modern adult body back into that of a child – all of your knowledge, experience, and wisdom transmitted intact. Try to imagine h... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Radicals! Are you sick of being spontaneously overcome by blistering rage and horrified vertigo on a daily basis? Do you find yourself foolishly opening comment threads on gender issues thinking yourself desensitized to the mind-warping misogyny that invariably pops into existence like a quantum foam of entitlement underpinning the internet? Are you sick of wasting precious minutes standing slackjawed in front of some new twisting complex of deep psychological issues couched as grandiose social analysis? Do you find yourself humbled into quiet bitter despair while pondering just how long it would take to fight their misrepresentation of reality?
Are you sick, in short, of time-burglaring gender-essentialists?
Then Anarcho-Tran... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Many market theorists take property titles as axiomatic and then develop coercive apparatuses to enforce them — justifying such coercion by appealing to notions like implicit consent and/or the justness of contracts that sell off part of one’s agency in the future. This rightfully bugs the crap out of many anarcho-communists. Left market theorists in turn tend to write off these apprehensions as a contention over differing ideal systems of property — ie differences over what constitutes abandonment and the general viability of collective property.
But this, as I’ve argued time and time again, is a profoundly limited understanding of the criticisms being lobbed against them.
First off, not every system o... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There’s an increasing sense of crisis in the far left today. Having lashed itself to an implicit primitivism over the course of the twentieth century now that that ship is sinking much of the left is desperately looking for a way off.
The Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek is one of a number of recent attempts by those resisting capital to free themselves from this deadweight and chart a course forward that is actually — in its words — “at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” While largely failing to draw attention from on-the-streets radicals, the MAP has still emerged as a significant document for a certain set of ‘... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One of the more annoying things about our norms of discourse is that we tend to collapse our talk of the future into singular predictions rather than arrays of different possibilities each with different probabilities. It’s easier to pretend like we each have one singular future that we’re betting on. We more or less commit to that single possibility and others assume we’re fully committed to that future. Such simplification makes casual discussion more tractable. But it creates distorted incentives. Some try to focus on some kind of median among the possibilities, some vague central cluster. Yet this in turn suppresses the variance and the dangers on the edge. So then you get a second tendency of people who focus on the e... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) As the Haymarket Martyrs went to their deaths they were resolute, in no small part because they knew future generations of anarchists would remember them.
This sentiment extended from August Spies, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today,” to Louis Lingg, “I die happy on the gallows, so confident am I that the hundreds and thousands to whom I have spoken will remember my words; and when you shall have hanged us, then—mark my words—they will do the bombthrowing! In this hope do I say to you: I despise you. I despise your order, your laws, your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!”
Try as the forces of power have, they have not suc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I’m feeling profoundly under the weather so it’s as good a time as any to indulge in that most venerable of radical pastimes, ranting about Star Wars.
I discovered Star Wars the same way any poor eight-year-old did in the early 90s, through the comics section at my local library. Dark Empire and Tales of the Jedi were richly watercolored and stunning in their scope. And eventually I got bored enough to follow up on their source films. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Star Wars was an acceptable geekdom in the otherwise harsh projects. Star Wars was gangsta. And the root of this I suspect lies in its dramatically different character from Star Trek, Lord of the Rings or the myriad superheroes and chain-mail ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I think I’ve figured out how to salvage The Force Awakens. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie, a damn fun and refreshing movie, but it’s widely acknowledge to still have deep problems, especially in the second half. Surprisingly there’s basically one change that I think could have turned it into a great movie.
And no, I’m not talking about R2-D2’s random map bit. Yes the whole map-to-Luke mcguffin was kinda forced, but JJ could have easily focused in on some part of R2 after BB-8 leaves him and let a small light start blinking to remove the perceived arbitrariness of his later awakening. That’s trivial to solve and will probably be done in a special edition.
No, I’m talk... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) (this was delivered as a speech on October 18, 2015, in Oakland, California, at the “Future of Politics” conference co-sponsored by IEET)
The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes.
It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our software ecosystems today and any other system with many dimensions of movement.
Complexity, more degrees of freedom within a system, allow for greater attack surface. When they can come not just from all points on the compass but from above and belo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In Ursula K Le Guin’s classic short “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” she considers a prosperous and happy society whose success is somehow purchased through a dark bargain — the torture and abject immiseration of a single child. Despite the positive good won for the many, a few starry-eyed children of Omelas refuse to temper their hunger for a better deal, and reject this otherwise utopian society, albeit with no alternative blueprint in hand. Simply insisting that there must be something better, or that their lives should be devoted to at least searching for it.
To opponents of markets they pose an equivalent faustian bargain; no measure of background wealth and technological advancement is worth the pric... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Elon Musk is trolling on twitter. A celebrity billionaire wasting his time making inane provocations would hardly be worthy of note but in the process Musk has declared that his politics are in line with Iain Banks’ anarcho-transhumanist utopia and that he aspires to see a world of direct democracy. There’s few spectacles like a billionaire in a labor dispute essentially fronting as a proponent of fully automated luxury communism. Yet when a number of his statements wander close to left wing market anarchist takes it may be worth responding.
In particular I want to focus on the line, “Socialism vs capitalism is not even the right question. What really matters is avoiding monopolies that restrict people’s freed... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Over-35s seem to love nothing more than being told that the Internet — and the rapid cultural developments that have paralleled it — have been a terrible mistake with huge downsides that will surely doom us. And there’s no end to the opportunistic hacks lining up to dress this generational reactionary spasm as the contrarian voice of reason.
We’re told that we need elites, that people talking about injustice in their own online communities has gone on long enough, that decentralized systems are surely too complicated to figure out, that Chelsea Manning and activists who care about a free Internet are a false front for the Koch brothers, et cetera. The arguments are inevitably as preposterous as they are haught... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I was watching Redbeard‘s presentation from 28c3 summarizing the current context of corporate datatrawling and not for the first time it struck me just how wrongheaded and wasteful the standard radical/hacker kvetching about public sharing is. I mean, I get it. It would be great if people thought more about all the knickknacks of personal information they put in essentially public spaces and it would be fucking wonderful if they avoided putting it all directly in the hands of centralized servers run by big corporations like Google and Facebook. And there’s some serious late-game efforts to try and provide users with alternatives that encourage and facilitate more consciousness about privacy. But by and large that ship has sailed... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Anarchist bookfairs are one of the most interesting features of anarchist life.
A bookfair is immediately recognizable as hierarchical. There are the booksellers and there are the consumers. What separates the two is not merely the physicality of a table, but the capital investment it represents. Those distroing have usually been required to purchase space in the bookfair. But moreover they have had to invest in the things they are now trying to sell.
And these investments are often well beyond the means of a good percentage of the anarchists they attempt to sell to. A table for a day can cost between 50 and 200 dollars, and while it used to be the case that anarchist bookfairs would usually provide extensive outdoor space for... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One of the most disappointing things about the anarchist community is that while we’ve widely recognized that our critique of power relations extends to interpersonal dynamics we’ve — so far — largely shied away from addressing such in concrete terms. One-on-one we often repeat accusations and condemnations of manipulation, but we’ve never sorted out precisely what manipulation is. Even in the tumblr renaissance there’s a marked tendency for the heroic young folk decrying power structures within various scenes or milieus to suddenly shy away when it comes to identifying and arguing against manipulation itself. Instead we generally mutter about how such and such example of manipulation rhymes with aspects ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I think it’s a shame that anarchists don’t write more on either geopolitics or analyzes of the future; over the last two centuries our greatest successes have come from our imagination and foresight. For this reason I applaud Peter Gelderloos’ recent attempted forecast, published in a variety of forms by Crimethinc.
There’s much to agree with in Gelderloos’ analysis and I applaud his effort, but there’s nevertheless much in his analysis I find askew.
We could do with more predictive evaluation of geopolitical or institutional forces, and I hope this opens the door to more writing in these arenas by anarchists, but there’s an ever-present danger to such lenses: you start seeing the worl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The next President of the United States will be one of the worst.
If September 11th was a gunshot that allowed the Bush Administration to take off sprinting, the Obama administration grabbed the baton and charged forward even faster. No one spends years pursuing political power only to walk into the Oval Office and suddenly decide to surrender and abolish their power. The exchange of the executive office between Republicans and Democrats is just the steady ratchet of authoritarianism — each side stamping out pockets of freedom that their predecessor’s didn’t.
And yet this election poses a situation even more dire than usual. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have the most extreme unfavorability ratings of any ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I think it’s insufficiently analyzed how the banner of “negative liberty” often replicates the “hardness” of masculinity and gets wrapped in it. Interdependence & contingency of feelings is often ridiculed alongside means of interdependence & contingency in social & economic relations.
I’ve long been skeptical of the ways “autonomy” – instead of “freedom” – gets thrown around in the left because of how often it is used as something like “sovereignty” and how quickly I’ve seen said negative approach to freedom collapse to nativism, isolationism, and self-reliance as the true goal. And it always tends to be coded masculine or appeal to... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It’s fun to reimagine the same damn fights among anarchists over “markets” with “network” substituted in its place. After all, “market” just stands for “trade network.” And while opposition to the act of trade is a distinct and important component of most rejections of markets — see my prior parable about the benefits of trade — those hostile to markets rarely stop there.
One might well imagine the same abstract structure of arguments being brought to bear against networks as a whole rather than just trade networks…
“We’ve all seen how miserable we are under The Network, forced into social interaction with one another at all times, all to ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Talking about nihilism, much less attempting to define and critique it, is an exhausting sort of task, akin to talking to a mischievous toddler who has learned some empty single-word responses that make an adult go in circles. And one risks serious strain from all the eyerolling necessary to get through any such discussion. Most of us recognize that to bother to debate or critique nihilism is to lose from the outset. In the same way that feeding the trolls is a game utterly disconnected from sincere comparison and collaboration on ideas. And yet total disengagement is unsustainable.
What are we to do when former friends or lovers start falling for such inane tripe and then are somehow shocked by our revulsion? One doesn’t have ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference has long been one of the more explicitly leftist and politically conscious hacker conferences. Unlike hacker conferences like Defcon and BlackHat, where the atmosphere has been relatively permissive of sexual harassment, state collaborators, and reactionary politics, HOPE has a reputation for being better. A little outpost of European hacker radicalism in America, HOPE has slowly improved; this year anarchists and anarchist propaganda were everywhere, talks featured reports from antifascists on their efforts to dox nazis, and heroes like Chelsea Manning were headline speakers.
And yet at this year’s HOPE some shitbag got up during a Q&A and bragged about having marched in UniteT... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Obvious trigger warnings. Further this is gonna be an abstract conversation on concepts. If you’re one of those rare folks who feels the war against patriarchy can’t ever afford side conversations for the sake of curiosity/clarity that aren’t rhetorically perfected weapons pointed towards teh enemy or if you figure there’s nothing new under the sun to be heard from cis-ish male-bodied people I totes understand and sympathize and I hope you will take my disagreement for what it is. I abhor speaking to a choir and try not to write until I’m assured I can at least contribute something at least moderately original and challenging, but c’est la vie.
No one would disagree that porn is a major site of imp... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Should publishing neonazi material be tolerated among anarchists?
To almost every anarchist the answer is and has always been no. This is not a matter of censoring or hiding from ideas, it’s a matter of not giving shitty people with shitty values and goals the legitimacy of a platform and connection with us. Social association matters, it maps networks of trust and collaboration, it declares degrees of affinity, and provides points of entry. When you hang with nazis, when you allow them into your spaces, or when you promote their propaganda you’re quite reasonably gonna get treated like a nazi collaborator.
The world is not a formless and consequenceless forum for the airing and interplay of ideas. It’s parti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) For centuries radicals have debated alternative property systems, and I’m glad we’re having these conversations. But what has been consistently disappointing about them is how little they generally seek to explore the underlying roots of “property” itself. To be sure, all sides provide ethical arguments for why their system is superior that make moves in this direction, but the debate happens largely as though each of these systems were politicians or platforms. Rather than illuminate why we are having our disagreements and whether they can be bypassed, the various positions slide into mere competition by presenting their own positive qualities and the downsides of their competitors.
The approach I encourage a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)