On A Roll

As a friend of mine recently decided, the clique that he and I fit into in our college can only be described as the "haters." With that in mind, this blog rules:

(A) Hataz: http://ahataz.blogspot.com/

Fuckin' anarchists, man.

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.

Blah blah blah

Okay, let's get real here.

I'm totally tired of reading communiques/statements/expositions about short actions that run on for four paragraphs. There's this tendency to write these great pieces and delivery them during the course of a direct action, or even a symbolic but danger-zone actions. But no one is listening to you talk about the war in Iraq or political prisoners or whatever, while all your nearby buddies are locking down the building or tossing agitational pamphlets from a third story balcony. They are watching people do cool/weird shit. I respect well-worded statements and I think they can be powerful and affect people. But I've been in discussions which drag on for hours about the precise wording of a specific phrase for a statement during an action which assures that no one will ever listen to the speaker.

It's not a big deal ya'll, just read a few sentences and let everybody dig the cool shit you're doing.

Additionally, writing a three paragraph manifesto for some sneaky late night DA is equally lame. The most egregious recent example is a video called "19 segundos de guerra social" that's swirling around the anarchosphere. It breaks all my rules of things I like (smashing banks and thinking you're super-revolutionary, using the phrase "social war," being the same group that attacks people at the bullfights here in Mexico City.) Seriously gang. Go ahead, fuck up a bank if you feel like it. But post a long release about how hard you are and how you're fighting the system? And then get it translated? Self-important much? Sheesh...

Today's Quote

"Normally, Wobbly bluster far outdistanced performance but it is undeniable that they sometimes acted upon, or intended to carry out, their wild schemes."

-Lowell Blaisdale, The Desert Revolution - Baja California 1911

Something for the Moment

Soon: heaps of critique about the RNC protests, hopefully full of on-the-ground knowledge and insight. Likely to get lost in mounds of school work, but still a possibility.

Now: Quotes from Turbulence, a new favorite out of the autonomist Marxist milieu in Britian:

Re climate change: "...[T]he radical left is so academic and steeped in the tradition of ‘critical theory’ and ‘deconstruction’ that the main response to the challenge posed by climate change is to engage in a ‘critique’ of the ‘dominant climate change discourse’ and the ‘hegemonic role of scientific knowledge’ in constructing climate change as a crisis... It feels a bit like throwing copies of Adorno and Foucault at a coming flood and hoping that it’ll just go away."

More fun at their site.

You are what you eat

Peter Gelderloos, anarchist revolutionary currently being held on bullshit charges in Barcelona. Still has time to speak truth to power. It's pretty sweet.

There is no coherent morality or ethics rooted in nature that can view the killing and eating of animals as wrong. In nature, killing and eating something is a respectful, intimate activity, and a necessary part of natural cycles. Viewing this as wrong is nothing but a shockingly alienated, civilized view that domesticates animals at a metaphysical level by reducing them to quasi-citizens in need of rights. Fuck that shit. Humans and all other animals are much more free and full outside of legal frameworks, without rights, only needs and desires.

Here's the article.

Last on my List

Okay, last post before I dig in for finals. A round-up of things I am considering:

1. Congratulations to the newest bourgeois revolution in the world: Nepal! Thanks to the Maoists, Nepal can finally move beyond the backwards monarchy and into industrial capitalism.

Oh I'm sorry, what did you say? "Communism"? No, we wouldn't want that. The Maoists have encourage foreign investment and want to work with the other bourgeois politicians. It's like that great prole.info pamphlet said: the best way for a third-world country to reach capitalism is to have a Communist Party takeover.

2. Props to CrimethInc on the clever detournment of Elle magazine's article about Anna, the FBI snitch. Great work, ya'll. Now, with all your clever graphic design knowledge and seemingly bottomless budget, could you go out and, ya know, get better politics?

3. Must. Use. College. Funds. To. Buy.

4. "We refute the reality of a communist movement because we require a purer form of communism, and that in itself seeks to retrieve the idea of such a movement but now preserved from its more obvious and embarrassing absurdities. Nothing of what we have achieved is as negative as the behavior and opinions of those who say yes to the world we live in, those who accept it without question and shove as much of it as they can down their gob without a thought about it – that's true nihilism. And we are very pale imitators by contrast."
-"FD", considering an article from '39 by a long-lost council communist. His original piece. I can't decide if this new "nihilist communism" thing is the cynical other side of the autonomist's coin or just masturbation. Either way, it's enjoyable.

Discovered through this awesome journal, Letters, that I hope comes out with a second issue soon.

Alright, that's the short list for right now. See you when the struggle gets hot. Err, or when I finish all my papers.

My newest cliché

"The problem is our mode of civilization, not the civilization-mode!"

I'm lovin' it.

Rememberance

Today is the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Why is this important? Because it provides an example of oppressed people taking their lives into their own hands and resisting with violence.

I am sick and tired with the played out Gandhisms on the Left, particularly where nonviolence is concerned. Let's not forget that Gandhi suggested that the Jews commit mass suicide to protest the Nazi occupation. This kind of mystical thinking is exactly the type which pervades the fundamentalist pacifists today.

And while I'm trashing people, it is exactly the type of mystical thinking which pervades their tactical opposites, the fundamentalist black bloc-ers, who believe that any and every action taken against the State must be manifested in the maximum amount of violence possible. Both sides miss the nuances of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Finally!

An anonymous poster on the "anarchists" community on LiveJournal finally fucking says what I've been wanting to say for months:

Semantics is valuable, under certain circumstances. Colloquial language is too. When red anarchists here discuss "free trade" or "free market capitalism" or "laissez faire" or "privatization" in US economic policy, or in Euroimperial economic policy, or in WTO/GATT/NAFTA/LMNOP/QRSTUV... they're *almost never* discussing what you or [another anarcho-capitalist] refer to as market anarchy. They're referring, quite specifically, to a phenomenon in what you'd call mixed economies wherein clearly socialized (cost) states are manipulating a highly regulated, highly subsidized, highly protected market and calling it "free trade" by rewarding powerful private tyrannies (to borrow from Chomsky, since you cited him) with even greater power at the expense of the general public.

What drives me absolutely batty is *you fucking know* this is true. You know what's being discussed. There *are no valid semantic objections* because the words in use, while spelled and pronounced the same, are clearly different words with clearly different meanings. You don't like that these semirandom strings of vowels and consonants represent something other than what you'd want them to represent? Pick a new fucking set of vowels and consonants. You have a worse chance of reclaiming these terms than Buddhists in Europe have of reclaiming the swastika.

Thank you, anonymous wonder. Market anarchists shit a brick when we reds start railing against "capitalism," but of course they know exactly what we're talking about. We're not talking about their utopian "free market" without a government. We're talking about the very real, very oppressive market capitalist system of the present day. If they could get their heads out of their ideological asses for two seconds and acknowledge this, maybe we could start working together. But in the meantime, they'll just remain a pointless internet tendency.

From the mouths of babes (or rather, LibCom)

"I mean, look at CrimethInc. They're essentially a bunch of badly dressed drop-outs with shit politics, but have a very high profile because they print sexy looking books and use loads of romantic sub-situationist beatnik imagery. Class struggle politics aren't as "boring as fuck" but a lot of class struggle media and publicity is. "

-John Stevens, LibCom.org Collective