A Quick Explosion of Anger

Fuck the anarchist movement, or at least a chunk of it. My latest proof?

Just fucking read this. Also another version here.

I must admit that I'm more interested in the comments than the initial piece. They express what I've come to hate about the movement, a bullshit game of "who's more radical" that lacks a basis in reality and uses not-so-sneaky techniques to shut down dissenting viewpoints. What's great is that there are whole conversations that basically consist of someone going "You've gotta check your privilege and here's why" and someone else replying "No, you've gotta check yours and here's why." With all this privilege-checking (a masturbatory game that basically boils down to a hip new PC version of the prolier-than-thou of the Marxists) is anyone actually out there doing anything? With all this internal discussion about whether or not we should put newspaper boxes in the street or take them out, I'm wondering what exactly it is that any of this shit means.

Autonomous cells in affinity with a points of unity? Anarcho-liberals? ? What the fuck does any of this shit mean? Literally, every other response on BashBack.org and Infoshop are telling people to fuck off because whatever their opinion is, it is "oppressive" or "authoritarian" or "patriarchical." I'll take one quote verbatim: Someone made a point that this poster had correllated "rowdyness" with masculinity and passivity with femininity. To which the reply went "Thanks for your critiques. That's a good point...However, I hold that my experience of machismo and being othered and womaned as a female-bodied genderqueer is valid. Please do not try to negate my experience, because that’s patriarchal." I basically agree that there is more to it than just pointing out the constructedness of machismo, it's still a functioning social structure that educates women and men to act differently. But what a sneaky rhetorical trick. This person's argument basically boils down to "I don't agree with the point you are making and because it is something involving my feelings, you telling me that I am wrong is authoritarian." I can't see any escape from this trap of self-indulgent argumentative method, and it's what I see all over this milleu. Instead of discussion based on furthering our understandings and strategies, we see a bunch of cheap tricks to avoid debate and a few well-worn cliches ("diversity of tactics" immediately springs to mind as the most flagarent example.)

On Infoshop, someone says "But let's face it-- Bash Back! as we once knew it is dead." I can't help but not be surprised. While it's disappointing when an anarchist project that so many people have spent so much time working on is heading towards irrelevance or collapse, but the way that BB! has operated makes me pretty neutral towards its end. For a group (or whatever, since I guess I can't call it a group) that spends so much time talking about privilege and identity, I'm pretty impressed with how little work I've seen them do. Was BB! working in queer communities to help fight internal problems like substance abuse and racism? Was BB! organizing for rights and benefits for sex workers? What exactly were they doing besides throwing protests at churches and at the Human Rights Campaign? Of course those douches deserve it, but I don't think that stuff is the same as organizing for the concrete liberation of LGBTQ folks. Maybe I just missed the real work because it didn't show up on the 5 o'clock news. Still, my impression is that on the whole BB! has not really done anything concrete to fix this broken society besides a couple of interventions and protests. But who am I to say so? I guess I'm just being authoritarian and patriachical.

Pondering

So I think that it's probably the biggest waste of time for me to criticize an action by an anonymous underground cell of a radical organization, because 1. who cares what I have to say and 2. what they're doing is pretty radical and I should try to support it.

But I'm going to do it anyway, because I think that it's important to constantly be critical of ourselves and our comrades, otherwise we develop a kind of groupthink that only leads to our own ineffectiveness.

I saw this reportback from an underground cell of Bash Back! who trashed a Mormon church the other day. I've been really excited by BB!, they're the only long-standing network that has emerged out of the RNC/DNC organizing. For those like me who thought that was part of the reason for organizing against the conventions, the fact that BB! is a post-convention network is really important. I like their sexy actions and their aggressive rhetoric. They target oppressive institutions who don't expect to be targeted and then they fuck with them in a very media-friendly way. They also just straight up confront evil, homophobic jerk-offs, which is also great.

But I'm still not sure how I feel about this recent action. On one hand, the Mormon church is a really fucked-up organization that lots of queer people are feeling a lot of rage against since the passage of Prop 8. On the other, I don't know how I feel about anarchists attacking mainstream churches.

This is a paradoxical situation, because I am a Bakuninist atheist and believe that religion is inherently and at its core oppressive. However, I have no problem working with religious folk or even religious organizations if they are fighting for liberation. I tend to see the God contradiction as considerably less pressing than the class contradiction or the state contradiction. So I do think that fighting religious orthodoxy is great. But I'm not sure if trashing a church is exactly doing that. I think it's revenge. Revenge which is perfectly justifiable after the passage of Prop 8.

But confusing revenge and politics is a recipe for disaster.

Needless to say, I'm still not convinced about this action. And obviously, one action doesn't mean much in the larger scheme of things, but I guess what I'm pondering about more generally is the tactic of anarchists/radicals attacking churches. Is this a good idea, because it strikes against oppression and might possibly (though I highly doubt it) open up the flock's minds? Or does it accomplish nearly nothing and simultaneously make us look like absolute jackasses? Thoughts?