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.

History

I love seeing this title on the IWW webpage:

"Industrial Worker - Issue #1701, November 2007"

And yet they remain the most relevant working class organization in the States.

On class reductionism

I don't have any cohesive thoughts on this subject, but its something which has been playing on mind a lot after some discussion with a female comrade.

One of the irritating habits of the more Marxist-inclined anarchists (a group of which I am a member) is the ability to reduce all problems to problems of class. Clearly, this approach is outdated as other reductionist approaches, like petite-bourgeois anarchism (the State is the bad guy!) or jingoist workerism (the Foreigners are the bad guy!)

Noticing the development of the capitalist system, Marxist critics have far outweighed their anarchist comrades in their consideration of the system as scientific. The work of Negri, Tronti, and the autonomists has been particularly enlightening. But this is not enough.

Other thinkers, some of them Marxist, some of them not, have noticed that the oppressions present in capitalist society exist in non-capitalist society. The kneejerk reaction, that capitalism has imperialized its prejudices and internal contradictions, is simply not true. Non-capitalist societies are not paradises, they too have their problems (with gender in particular). Anthropology has been particularly helpful my understanding of the universalism of oppression.

So class reductionism is not enough. Clearly, as the autonomists have pointed out, the traditional role of women in capitalist society has functioned to reproduce labor. Likewise, as the Johnson-Forrest Tendency folks and their successors have indicated, the working class of color is the most revolutionary class in America. But these problems do not simply disappear when capitalism ends.

To build an authentically anti-capitalist movement of the working class, we cannot simply eschew personal and social racism, sexism, and heteronormativity as "liberal identity politics". To do so not only further oppresses already oppressed people, but discourages the development of people as people. If we seek to build an anarchist future, we must model the social relations we seek to create in our communities.

Nor can we fall into the trap of the liberals, who focus solely on personal and social oppression. But that is not my concern with class reductionists. They already know this part, but can't understand that the movement for workers' liberation must be lead by oppressed peoples, as they have the most to gain. Simply waiting for the OBU to organize them, or events to radicalize them, denies agency and is also poor strategy.

Fives sketches and five theses

This will hopefully be in a forthcoming zine:

“The student struggle has now been left behind…The outcome of the present crisis is in the hands of the workers themselves, if they succeed in accomplishing in their factory occupations the goals that the university occupation was only able to hint at..”

- COUNCIL FOR MAINTAINING THE OCCUPATIONS
Paris, May 19, 1968

Wind howls and echoes eerily through the empty shell of the new athletic facility, half built. The whole south side of campus is always singing this screechy, unearthly tune. It is the first snow of the year, just a couple of days after Halloween. My bike is cold to the touch, my gloves are busted through and don’t help much. I swear that I can see my breath in front of me. The Upper Midwest wastes no time in moving from one of our hottest, driest summers on record to plunging below freezing.

Thesis 1: Students have no revolutionary potential as a class. The student exists in a cocoon, a moment of stasis, between childhood and the workplace.

******

Sitting in my room, music is faintly playing. I am writing another paper. I don’t even remember what class this is for anymore, or what it means. They all just blend together. Was this one of the classes I picked because I liked it or to fulfill a requirement? It doesn’t really matter I suppose, I can’t stand it either way. Why is it that the only really good parts of school don’t involve homework? My mind wanders, I search the internet for something more exciting. I turn off my computer and pray to the god I know is a fiction, if only to break the monotony.

Thesis 2: The role of the student in bourgeois society is become the next generation of skilled workers. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is one created by capital to encourage workers to fight against each other. This dichotomy must be problematized primarily by the workers who benefit from it, i.e. students.

******

I took a sociology class one time. The professor had us read this bit by Max Weber. It was explained to us that basically the purpose of having a college degree was to legitimize our presence in the workplace, to illustrate that we can shut up and follow rules, that we are able to listen and repeat. All four years basically for a piece of paper, as the cliché goes. Seemed like a pretty radical thing for Weber to say, but the class came to agree pretty quick. And why wouldn’t they, witnessing what they have?

Thesis 3: Students can only become revolutionary when they align themselves with the interests of the working class. Students are workers-in-training. Attempts to theorize or organize revolution lead by students-as-students in the modern late-capitalist context are useless.

******

This time of year always gets me a little excited, but ultimately disappointed. I wish there was time to reflect on the seasons, but I don’t have it. I’ve gotta rush from place to place, meeting to work to class to meeting to homework to sleep. The couple of spare minutes I find each day get wasted because I can’t motivate myself to bike to the river or check out some book on anthropology or biology. Which is tragic. My father once told me that the truly wise man (sic) learns more outside of class than in it. The trees are just at the end of their leaves, the last yellows and reds are beginning to get ugly.

Thesis 4: Working class identity which remains theorized only classically is pure Stalinism. Rather, working class struggle must be built upon the struggles against whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexism. Without these oppressions, capital could not reproduce labor or divide the working class.

******

My brother and I are walking out of a punk show to take a break and grab some food. As we walk down the street, a homeless man asks us for coins, all we have are a couple bucks and are hungry. A red-faced man walking into the bar yells at the beggar to get a job. My little brother’s face burns with fury at this yuppie scum, but we plunge our hands into our pockets, walk on, and buy a spicy gyro from a bored young East African woman. I feel implicated, culpable, feel like I am in a stage production of a witty, post-modern farce.

Thesis 5: Alienation from school is related, but not identical to, alienation from work. Whereas worker alienation stems from the extraction of surplus and the commodification of all activities in capitalism, student alienation stems from the production of valueless commodities and the disconnect between presumed class identity and reality, past and future.

On Organization

Organizing is the most efficient way of creating a world. Simply waiting for a moment of insurrection is insufficient strategically.

Creating highly organized programs and campaigns empowers people, it does not take away their power. Organized does not mean the same as proscribed. It means a plan of action, accountable to the participants (subjects) and the society on which it acts (objects).

Anarchists need to stop fearing organization. The only way to end capitalism is to confront it with a front of heterogenous elements which can work together in this task. Anarchy, as noted so long ago, is order.

I do not believe that anarchism is a project that a small number of people can carry out. A small number of people can carry out anarchism in a small place, in a small time. These fights are beautiful and I respect them utterly. But Rome wasn't built in a day and it won't be torn by an affinity group.

We simply cannot turn anarchism into a "small-a" idea, where our tactics pervade other groups (consensus, for example) but we lack our own organizations. Likewise, we cannot abandon the masses, as some of our contemporaries would suggest that we do. The working class, in its most complex understanding, a multifaceted group of people that includes people at the point of production, excluded from production, and those who reproduce the ability to produce, are still the most revolutionary class of people in the spectacular economy.

I write these things because they seem so logical and obvious that they need not be said. Yet anarchists still think that we can turn inwards to our own comrades, remove organizing others as a priority, and engage in political work without organization. These suggestions may be pleasing on a theoretical level, but they are pragmatically unimplementable. We may practice them, but we do so at the risk of accomplishing our goals. While I remain cognizant of the exhortation that one cannot fight alienation with alienated means, I recognize that there are unalienated means of organization. If not, then what is the point of organizing to change society in the first place?

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

On (not) being watched

Surveillance is the assumption of our times. Every day, more and more things are viewed by state or corporate actors. We have lost all choice in the matter. I feel doubly effected by this. I know that the State has tapped my phone lines simply on account of who my roommates were at the time.

The initial fear of surveillance slowly gives way to gradual acceptance. These legitimizes the fear that the State wishes to instill by normalizing it. It is the sick logic of capital that we accept by accepting our pursuers. Activists should not simply roll over and allow surveillance to occur. Rather than assuming that the State knows everything about us, we should challenge its control over the content of our lives.

Behave in unorthodox or unexpected ways while engaging in non-illegal activity. Not in order to draw suspicion, but in order to throw off the scent of the authorities. If you do something which cannot be explained, you waste FBI time in trying to explain it. By littering your files with evidence which doesn't connect, you illustrate, if only to the Empire itself, that capitalism is not all controlling, that it has unexplainable gaps.

This also presents a challenge to the dictatorship of the so-called "everyday life". Acting outside of the few proscribed leisure activities that we have expands the horizons of anti-capitalist culture. To be able to honestly challenge the Empire, we must be able to hold up examples of how our society will be better. Finding fun outside of capital's boundaries is an important and difficult task.

This is one tiny facet of the total resistance that makes up anti-capitalist struggle. It is both internal and external. It is internal insofar as it refuses to accept the status quo and external insofar as it constitutes another tiny drain on the State's resources. If we are to be consistent in our refutation of bourgeois society, than a good place to start refuting it is the mechanization and boredom of acting as you are expected.