Human Iterations

2015 In Review: A Memoir On The Fascist Resurgence

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:47:27 +0000

It’s 2015 and I’m sitting on a couch with my roommate, gazing down on another Fuck The Police riot turned street party. The day has been long, the bars have already closed, and we’re both back in our rent-controlled collective house in San Francisco’s Lower Haight, too exhausted to go out and join the rowdies blaring music beneath our window.

A year since the start of the Ferguson Uprising, months into the latest since Freddie Gray was murdered in Baltimore, and my friends and I have grown tired and perfunctory about the whole thing. Get burritos. Gossip about Boots Riley after seeing him in line. Then follow the helicopters to join the action. Make snarky comments as the inevitable nightly argument breaks out in the bloc at MacArthur and 40th about whether to go to West Oakland or Berkeley this time. The nights blur into one another. Remember that cop pulling his gun and then tripping? …No, I meant the other time.

As my roommate and I look tiredly down at the folks in the street laughing and cracking beers, she starts gushing about some politician she’s weirdly gotten into. I’m perplexed and embarrassed for her. You mean that one old Senator in Vermont?! I mostly just know him as the off-color tile in senate infographics: gray but functionally just another blue tile. You don’t understand, she tells me, he’s making socialism cool! Everyone has just discovered him. He’s the hip new thing. It’s all anyone our age can talk about. You’re missing out.

Oh, god, have the hipsters discovered politics? A nightmarish prospect. The last thing we need is for all those IPA-drinking yuppies who have long sneered at us for giving a fuck about anything to rebrand as marxists.

I change the topic, searching for a way to go back to making fun of electoral pretensions.

Has she seen that wacky news story about a reality show host declaring his candidacy?

She has. We laugh about the absurdity of it. A universally disdained loser more famous for pretending to be rich than actually having any money, going down what looked like a mall escalator to applause from bored extras he paid to be there. And then blathering batshit racist nonsense. A scandalous display of the Boomer id.

…It’s troubling how the media reported on it, though.

I mention the wave of excitement I’ve seen from 4chan nazis and twitter neoreactionaries.

Everyone looks at me sideways when I mention anything “online,” and she’s no different. It’s neither cool nor couth to admit the internet exists, much less social media.

Reactionary politics seem to be bubbling up everywhere I look, but I feel insane trying to persuade anyone that they’re a threat. So I moderate my concern and trail off mumbling about the fascists praising this nobody’s candidacy as a way to bypass and erode prohibitions on saying racist shit.

If the liberal establishment has proven so invulnerable to those of us in the streets for black liberation, surely it’ll prove invulnerable to some random joke who wants to tank the economy with tariffs and deportations.

. . .

2015 feels, in retrospect from 2025, like an inflection point. People fetishize it, dream of returning to it. And I can’t help but nod along. It really does feel like the last frail moment of anything like “normal” before reality was suspended and the horror movie started.

I know, I know, shit has always been bad and I’ve lived through other historical shifts: My leftist parents processing the fall of the USSR. The sheer terror everyone in the counter-globalization movement felt when The World Trade Center in NYC came down. We thought we were going to get rounded up that afternoon.

But I keep going back to 2015.

In The Water Knife, published in 2015, the main character lives in a shattered United States where internal borders, desperate resource conflicts, unchecked corporate power, and exploitation from external state powers have instilled a new logic of survival. She cannot understand the soft old folks from prior generations who still cling to moral values and aspirations for justice, egalitarianism, liberation. Hers is a world of zero-sum competition, where basic empathy—to say nothing of utopianism—is an unthinkable mental illness. Or maybe just a failure to update, to throw off old delusions, to grow and get with the times. Readers are forced to consider a future where everything we value at the core of our being, even having any compassion whatsoever, marks us as dinosaurs whose age has passed.

In the middle of 2015 I publish a couple long-form pieces on science and primitivism, garnering my first real collection of death threats, and a more tolerable primitivist I argue with breaks our disagreement down for me with a certain desperation in his voice: “I don’t care about ‘liberation for all’ or any of your fancy dreams; I just want to secure my daughter from rapists and marauders in the world to come.”

Survival has always had long-odds.

I grew up doing drills for how to evacuate the city, how to access hidden resource stockpiles, how to cling on to life for a few years longer than anyone else in the coming collapse. Chances are none of us are making it out. However you face the darkness, you will be making a gamble.

But in 1999, in the streets of Seattle, under the hail of tear gas canisters, I decided that you can either spend your life mewling and clawing for a few extra minutes of barest life, or you can light your life on fire for the highest ideal, the most beautiful idea. Sure, the odds are worse, but the potential payout is better. And you stay warmer along the way.

In 2015, I try to tell the primitivist all this, but he’s more optimistic than me, and as a consequence more shell-shocked by the horrors of our dying world. He just wants to curl up and die in a hole.

By 2025 a lot more folks will sympathize with this. The urge to slowly lick your wounds as you grow cold in the fascist hellscape. Every morning will bring the normalization of some new unthinkable atrocity. There is, of course, nothing fundamentally new in a state founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism, but the frontlines change and the brazenness of our enemies reflects real advances. The Patriot Act was right out of an airport thriller novel and Obama used flying robots to bomb citizens, but the headlines keep getting more cartoonish. Today’s attempted parody is tomorrow’s status quo.

Supreme court rules that chattel slavery is still legal, and we owe reparations to the pure aryan descendants of former slaveowners.
The lead contender for the Democratic nomination, Gavin Newsom, promises that he will ritualistically slaughter his firstborn on Ben Shapiro’s podcast, to prove that he’s not committing “the sin of empathy.”
Trump signs an executive order revoking citizenship from orphans (“losers”) and foster parents (“cucks”). ICE furnaces to be opened in local strip malls to speed up removals.
Pete Hegseth showcases to reporters a series of missile strikes by “Right Wing Death Squads” (the renamed Army) on the prime minister of Spain and his family following some instagram posts that were deemed inappropriately happy while conservative media influencers were eulogizing the canceling of a flavor of mountain dew.
RICO charges with terrorism enhancements opened against the entire goth subculture. The FBI deputizes a batch of podcasters to oversee hiring the shapely models that will announce the arrests.

By 2025, the storytelling will all be completely hamfisted. The sort of environmental detail they put on discarded newspapers to signify to viewers that in this timeline the Thousand Year Reich has been established, with all empathy, morality, or intelligence to be permanently expunged from the species.

2025 is the ghost of futures lost. It’s an extreme vision that haunts you in 2015, promising the absolute worst. The machinery of an unchecked police state fully funded. The convulsing corpse of an empire dragging the rest of the world into its grave.

Go hide in a hole and wait for the death squads to process you. Dream small. Dream meekly.

And you know, maybe.

Maybe 2025 will prove to be simply past the event horizon.

If so, future historians, picking at the rubble, might ask how the end started.

. . .

At the end of 2015 I move to Portland, intended to be a couple-month stop-over on my way to Greece to join a friend organizing against Fortress Europe. I’m sick of my latest bout of writing and there is tangible direct work to be done helping refugees get past borders.

In a bar in my old neighborhood, I meet a former Occupy organizer who has abandoned anarchism for marxism, one of a few putting the once esoteric phrase “left communist” back into circulation. He’s joined academia, he has a child. He is furious that a friend of his was canceled by anarchists for being a patriarchal sex pest. Any anarchism that would exclude his friend, he lectures to me, is electorally dead on arrival; you will never win a majority with that approach! I wonder how he could have ever identified as an anarchist.

Truth be told, at this moment the Bernie wave concerns and distresses me a lot more than the Trump wave. It’s one thing to watch boomers cannibalize themselves into rabid fascism under a laughingstock figure, but radical leftists (and even some post-leftists) keep jumping ship for this tepid reformist “socialism” stuff. A giant wave of preference-falsification collapse. It turns out that a ton of people were only pretending to be aligned with anarchists (“oh I’m basically an anarchist; I just prefer the phrase ‘anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist’; I’m in the Movement Of Movements”) when we were the only game in town.

Bernie echoes the exact same closed-border anti-immigrant nonsense as Trump, yet leftists who once fought in the streets alongside me shrug, unconcerned. “We’re so close to getting universal healthcare!”

They taste establishment power and it’s apparently beguiling. Struggle for decades has been long and hard, building a broad resistance movement is exhausting. Every win or advance we make requires constant diligence, a grinding pressure of individual responsibility. But what if you gave up and came in to the electoral system? What if you could just sit back and let something else, something big, protect you, fight for you?

This is the year that the long-running anarchist cafe in my hometown folds. I grew up going to it, organizing out of it. Eating dragon noodles on sagging couches, reading the latest reportbacks and communiques while pickled in caffeine. A third of the activist scene boycotted it after the collective sided with Rose City Antifa against a prominent holocaust denier in the local left. Now he’s back at events and the cafe is gone.

One of the interchangeably irrelevant state socialist groups, the “DSA”, is suddenly aflood with members and doing socials at bars.

The wind is certainly behind their sails.

Legions of formerly apolitical people are developing “political” identities rapidly online, in a way that operates more by the logic of fandom than organizing or subculture. Bernie’s recuperation of the “socialism” word has led to a jaw-dropping resuscitation of state communist identifications. It’s all transparently paper-thin, just grabbing onto the aesthetics of the USSR and Maoist China for edge points. A wave of kids who don’t want to studiously earn their wings in the existing punk or activist milieu and think they can bypass that and build their own “radical left” on vibes and skimmed wikipedia articles.

Hilariously, they frequently don’t realize that every existing org or project doing anything substantive is primarily made up of anarchists.

We start seeing extremely-online looking folks applying to join organizations and projects, confident that we must all be Stalinists or Maoists, identities they’ve just adopted and barely understand. A cursory skim through their social media invariably reveals a speedrun from apolitical to Bernie campaigner to “kill all anarchists” tankie in a matter of months.

Older activists recoil when I show them, but still reflexively consider such people a bemusing aberration. Everyone knows the internet is unserious. They treat it like a cringe fad. Normality will reassert itself. These kids will get bored, they’ll go back to their videogames or whatever it is people who use the internet do instead of politics.

But the internet is seeping into everything.

. . .

By the end of 2015, smartphone adoption has rocketed up to over two thirds of US adults. This is no longer the era of checking Indymedia and Myspace for 10 minutes a day on the collectively shared computer in the corner of the punk house.

In my personal life at least, this is amazing and wonderful. Finally having Open Street Maps in my pocket supercharges urban exploration. Wardriving is still easy and makes hopping from one city to another smooth. I can have encrypted chats on the bus with comrades who had to flee far away. Rather than grovel for someone to teach me or hope to stumble across a zine, every DIY skill is immediately available in easy instructions. They put bus passes on phones and mistakenly leave the database of tickets unencrypted, enabling hundreds of punks to ride free for years.

But it’s the ubiquity of fact-checking on-demand that’s truly revolutionary.

For the first time in my life I start to see headway on old intractable arguments within the radical scene. For something like the fiftieth time, a punk bemoans how antifa are a bunch of thuggish Thought Police who don’t understand art or Death In June’s complex ironic stance on fascism, and in frustration I violate social mores by pulling out my evil technological device, doing a quick google search and reading aloud an antifascist write-up with receipts on the band. “Oh,” says my interlocutor, visibly shocked, “Well, okay, that changes things. But no one ever told me all that.”

Within my old circles, it feels like the floodgates have finally opened. Friend after friend recant their once strident anti-vaccine positions, in many cases suddenly pretending they never held them. A Crimethinc kid with zines on a blanket in front of the bookfair aggressively holds her own defending GMOs, forcing the other anarchists gathered to back down from the pop pseudoscience ubiquitous in our circles for two decades. Genocide deniers are exposed. Conspiracies debunked. Lazy half-remembered conspiratorial claims suddenly face the sharp steel of smartphone pulled from a pocket. It’s partial and incomplete, of course, but the ocean of bullshit that characterized the long ’90s is finally parting.

Back in 2001 someone posting the most hesitant anarcha-feminist takes on Indymedia would get screamed at in a deluge of abuse, decried as a “fascist man hater.” But by the 2010s the tide had turned, the once-fringe antifacscist and radical feminist blogs I read voraciously were getting exposure for their arguments, discussion of such ideas was super-charging to a daily affair, and the result was was a blowout in radical spaces.

When a grotesque “accountability process” was used by red organizers in Portland to attack and besmirch a survivor while covering for her violent abuser—like so many had before—folks rapidly counter-organized and crushed the Old Boys.

When Cathy Brennan’s TERFs and SWERFs raised hell over the 2013 San Francisco anarchist bookfair I showed up with trans and sex worker friends, ready for a fight in a big moderated discussion; we found the battlefield virtually abandoned. There was no question, the radical milieu was ours.

The internet was fulfilling its promise of providing voice to the once marginalized. Factual reality and better arguments were winning. The ableist cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist status quo was simply crumbling in the face of our arguments. They had no counters that weren’t transparently false, vapid, incoherent, or evil.

To deny our points you’d have to be impossibly thick, or even reject the core moral values of anarchism itself. And no one who mattered could be so craven, so utterly beyond the pale.

. . .

In 2013 a stranger walked in through the doors of my anarchist tech collective and asked for help. Her website was suffering under an endless barrage of attacks. This totally normal Anita Sarkeesian person made videos with the softest most inoffensive 101 introductions to liberal feminism. The sort of pop culture criticism you feel safe handing to a kindergartner, with gently rounded corners to make sure even the most bumbling baby could not get hurt. …And she was receiving a constant deluge of serious death threats.

At the time, anarchists, by and large, didn’t pay much attention to Gamergate. In part because it was an era when punks still felt like computers were cringe and evil.

But also because activists were used to a default model of the world wherein almost no one had agency besides us. To be an “activist” of any stripe more or less meant being part of a single culture, a single milieu, a single politic. Turtles and teamsters, we had our divisions but were all one extended community.

In the paradigm of the long ’90s, 1% of the population ruled while 1% of the population collectively resisted, and everyone else was a featureless apathetic gray blob, complicit and unthinking.

If liberal normies were drones, those who explicitly identified as “video gamers” were even less agential, deliberately hooking themselves up to the megamachine and its digital heroin, irrelevant to the world and the grand contest of history.

I honestly don’t think I ever heard anyone in the activist world even hypothesize that such faceless NPCs could revolt against us, much less organize or take action. We faced the occasional minor backlash from among the brainwashed masses—drunk loggers going out to the tree sit, fundies chanting outside a Planned Parenthood, veterans facing us down outside a military recruitment center… but they were always a scant handful of people, acting more like confused zombies. And “gamers”? If you had told someone that neonazi boneheads would try to convert and mobilize them the response would have been laughter: “they’re welcome to them!”

What sort of activism were “gamers” going to do? Lock themselves on tripods in front of a Gamestop? Paddle out in a kayak blockade of a port until Playstation prices come down? Distribute dumpstered doritos and mountain dew to the homeless in parks?

On November 15, 2015, Minneapolis police killed unarmed 24-year-old Jamar Clark. The community responded by occupying the police’s 4th Precinct. On November 23rd—just as I got back to Portland—I received frantic messages from friends there: four scrawny racist nerds who lived on 4chan had shown up, tried to pick a fight, and unloaded bullets into the encampment.

Minneapolis is no stranger to fascist violence—the Baldies were founded there!—but this was something new.

. . .

A minority of anarchists took the internet seriously. We built encryption tools, blogging software, even the original foundation of Twitter (certain comrades are still apologizing). It’s hard to convey to younger generations how much the global Indymedia network shook the world for nearly a decade. There are still countries where IMCs keep chugging as important tools, helping keep local activist struggles afloat, providing a certain connection and unity.

But—at least in the Anglophone world—this viscerally changed after Occupy.

In many ways, Occupy was the vanguard of the normie intrusion on activist spaces. What could be more despicably normie lib than Adbusters? Yes, yes, yes, Graeber and older activists tried to steal their little Wall Street protest from them and do something more effective with it, taking inspiration from the UC occupations. But—with the partial exception of the more militant Oakland Commune—Occupy resonated with normie libs in a way that the existing activist milieu was completely unprepared for. Camps were not just flooded by random people “from the internet” who had zero protest experience, they were often set up and run by those folks.

And the very first thing they inevitably wanted to secure was internet presence.

“Occupy” was a precious brand, it was real estate, it had representational power and weight. So people scrambled to create Occupy groups on Facebook, bespoke local Occupy wordpress sites. Anything to be in control over what got posted. Anything to bypass the local Indymedia that reflected the old activist scene.

Newbies always derisively believe that all preexisting activists have been “doing it wrong.”

You don’t get it, if we all wear suits then we’ll look respectable on the nightly news and everyone will support us. You don’t get it, the mayor and chief of police have been really nice to us so we need to return the favor and clear the barricades. You don’t get it, why collectively edit video after actions to remove incriminating evidence when you can make money and a personal brand just livestreaming everything.

And so even though anarchists had pioneered everything, by 2015 our tools and platforms were dead, bypassed, captured, or drowned. But at the same time, aspects of what we had created spread like crazy, albeit in distorted and watered-down forms.

We had never really planned for things to catch on with normies.

So we won even quicker than many of us had dreamed. We won with all the projects to “democratize” the web and give individuals a voice. And we won when it came to our arguments. All the weird little utopian prefigurations and critical insights we had cultivated in the tiny corners of our milieu spread like wildfire. Pronouns and privilege and microaggressions oh my. We won and won and won.

The gray drab normie world had no immunities.

This was what fascists in 2025 will call “the great awokening.” The more evolved intellectual, cultural, and technological ecosystems that had long fermented in the radical activist milieu crashed out upon an unsuspecting continent.

If anyone had any intelligence or conscience whatsoever, we cut through them like butter.

At least if we were in a sufficient level of contact or proximity.

“Why shouldn’t there be a white student union too; feels unfair,” is an impossibly vapid argument. It’s deathly embarrassing to even deign to respond to it. And a real response would require either someone spending months hand-holding someone through the context of white supremacy in this country and some basic ethical philosophy, or it would require the person making it to have some autonomous curiosity and intellectual drive, a willingness, even eagerness, to turn hard against self-interest. When I was momentarily partially suckered by someone making that argument at age 13, I was being a stupid dipshit, and the dozen or so anarchist peers around me in my Portland school both ruthlessly bit my head off and pointed me towards resources.

When I mockingly made a seig heil at our authoritarian vice principle the same year, a mexican friend took me aside and politely explained how parody didn’t lesson the sting and promised to kick my ass if I ever did it again. We didn’t have to have a detailed conversation about the stakes of political symbolism, the pragmatic value of uniform cultural prohibitions or the ways in which irony can be corrosively turned into vehicle for entryism and normalization; I could rapidly work the proof of the argument out on my own, critically evaluate, and then verify it.

In short, I was the beneficiary of tactit knowledge and more complex arguments because I was embedded in meatspace communities where they were ubiquitous.

But imagine if I was less agile or inquisitive, more selfish and rigid. Imagine if I grew up surrounded by suburban normies, rather than anarchist punks and generally decent geeks. Worse—imagine if my friends had been a self-selected circle of the laziest and most defensively reactive assholes on the planet.

It’s time to talk about libertarians.

. . .

In 2004, three disparate camps organized a unified march to protest the US presidential debates: anarchists in black bloc, the Green Party (the DSA of its day), and the Libertarian Party.

While there’s some roots going back to slavery abolitionists and anti-new-dealers, today’s Libertarian movement congealed as a disparate coalition of wingnut hippies in the 1970s. They drew pretty much everyone of any stripe opposed to the war in Vietnam but marginalized from the mainstream left by their rejection of state communism.

Their early platforms were strident on border abolition, abortion rights, and sex worker rights. These old hippies still exist, scattered around, confused and befuddled by many developments. But by the 1980s they were eclipsed as a result of runaway ideological crossover with neoconfederates, the militia movement, the “leaderless resistance” turn among fascist ranks, as well as nerds in suits content to spend their lives sucking on the think tank teats of a few billionaires.

By the nineties there was widespread acknowledgment of a split between rural folks fixated on the feds raiding them to take their guns (but soft on racism), and city-dwellers focused on lower taxes (but soft on imperialism).

This changed a little in the 2000s, as the libertarian movement grew massively from backlash to the Patriot Act and the Bush wars. While the Green Pary became the meeting site of anyone vaguely environmentalist or anticapitalist (but scared of full-throated anarchism), the Libertarian Party became the meeting point of anyone vaguely focused on civil liberties and runaway state power (but scared of full-throated anarchism).

The scale of this growth cannot be overemphasized. An old libertarian friend of mine used to say that if you ran into someone wearing a libertarian t-shirt in the 90s, that was probably the only other libertarian in your state and you were instantaneously obliged to be friends for life.

By 2015, even one of the top voices in the exploding sphere of “podcasting”, Joe Rogan, identified with the term.

During the Bush wars I often scoffed that libertarians may have gotten a lot of folks to use the word, but they lacked anything like the organs of a social movement. They were all just random disparate individuals, driven by dozens of different motivations, barely in any sustained contact. But, by 2015, this criticism had been outdated. Libertarians copied many blueprints from the anarchist movement and unleashed a slew of summits and projects, building their own network of subcultural spaces and alternate economic venues. Cringe, hierarchical, and infested with grifters, but community spaces nonetheless.

They were so relieved and entranced by the taste of community that they broadly refused to do any of the basic gardening required. No one, however toxic or shallow, was ever shown the door. It was a club excited to have anyone.

Libertarianism massively expanded its footprint across college campuses via the funding of groups like Students For Liberty. But it likewise exploded from internet personalities packaging political critique as spectator bloodsports. Those recruited in this context couldn’t help but centrally identify themselves not in terms of unifying ideals or aspirations, but in opposition to the vaguely progressive political sentiment around them.

What resulted was an echo-chamber where what was reinforced was not a common valuing of liberty for all, but any and all lines of attack against progressives. “Libertarianism” migrated from the conceptual frameworks of people like Nozick, Rothbard, Friedman, and Huemer (however incomplete or misguided those were), to a grab bag of responses to common talking points. Want to win a debate against liberal? Here are some easy tricks you can learn to crush them! Many of the constitutive facts or arguments involved were legitimate—minimum wage laws were instituted deliberately to hurt women and blacks—and your generic off-the-street progressive is easily surprised and flattened by such.

The result was mass recruitment of upper-middle-class white boys who were attracted to the power and status of low-level debate wins. Libertarianism promised one thing and one thing alone: owning the libs. This had always been an attractive factor to recruits, but its new populist social organs and recruitment projects, in conjunction with podcasts and compilation reels—intensified these dynamics.

As longstanding anarchist critiques of cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, etc won ground among normie liberals, the young white libertarians who would otherwise be dunking on liberals over gun laws, taxes, and zoning regulations, found it desperately pressing to have fierce counter-attacks. And so the racist drelk that had always been a part of libertarianism, like Lew Rockwell posting links to Stormfront, shot up in relevance. A fringe laughingstock among libertarian theorists, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, rose in circulation not through the respect of libertarian theorists or the think tank class, but among this base of angry white boys with only the barest of attachment to “libertarianism.”

Wanna genocide nonwhites and enslave women? Well, I hear they’re biologically incapable of understanding property rights, so honestly it’s a necessarily prerequisite to a free society. Wanna live in a draconian absolutist state as violently simple as your mind? Well, just relabel it a private company.

I’m jaded, but nevertheless the speed at which explicit fascism metastasizes across libertarian movement is stunning. Christopher Cantwell will achieve fame in Charlottesville as “the crying nazi.” The head of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, will declare that libertarians should reject universalism and do more to cater to “blood and soil” interests. And Lauren Southern, libertarian candidate in Canada, will massively popularize “white genocide” conspiracy drelk on youtube, when she isn’t personally trying to kill migrants in the Mediterranean.

In 2015, I would occasionally get lunch with a libertarian historian and argue with him about things like the black bloc and shoplifting. He was an oldhead libertarian, but he found himself increasingly withdrawing from the movement. He was visibly mixed-race and had recently been added to a public kill list pushed by some neonazis seeking to purge the movement of non-whites. Other libertarians would express polite dismay, but there was nothing in the way of meaningful action.

These neonazis were associated with a blog that I’d noticed a few years earlier attacking me and my market anarchist friends as “communist” infiltrators corrupting libertarians with our arguments. They started as precisely this sort of “libertarian” furious about the universalist “humanist morality” of libertarian theory. As they cast around looking for anything to justify rejecting caring about strangers, they had initially latched onto things like Stirner and Trad Catholicism. They named their blog TheRightStuff.biz—per a fad among libertarians at the time to grab .biz domains—but soon enough they were running the largest neonazi podcast, The Daily Shoah.

They would have gone into convulsions if they’d learned of one of my friends in the Ferguson Uprising, a former libertarian of color who had started out as a fan of one Stefan Molyneux. Molyneux originated as an ancap focused on youth liberation, but when he used intellectual property law to silence a critic and lost much of his audience, he promptly pivoted to full-throated misogyny and white supremacy. In revulsion, my friend dropped all contact with libertarians, focusing on anarchist projects.

I encountered similar stories with some regularity as anyone with a conscience was driven out of libertarianism. Graffiti artists, black bloc streetfighters, antifa researchers, cryptography engineers, organic famers… they would thank me for showing them greener pastures, but they didn’t want anyone to know their shameful past.

Pinochet memes about torturing and mass murdering leftist dissidents fill libertarian forums. It’s plainly obvious how much of this is being driven by full-blown neonazis who have abandoned any remote concern with “free markets” or “universal rights”, but libertarians respond tepidly. They feel cultural and demographic affinity with these nazis, they’re often still personal friends with them, and besides their entire identity has become about combating the left. Whenever anyone criticizes the nazis, they immediately close ranks.

To give just one example in 2015, at Portland State University, the libertarian student org is busy getting hollowed out by a neonazi, Vlad, as he purges dissenters, organizes fellow racists in secret internal chats, and hangs a white nationalist flag on his wall, daring anyone to criticize. By the summer of 2016, Vlad will announce a “Fascist-Ancap Alliance” and invite Infowars fans to march with rifles through campus aggressively chanting “Build A Wall!” at any students of color they see.

The Right Stuff boys are at the center of it all. On their website they scream about how “humanism” has brainwashed people into caring about strangers and summarize their interests in “monarchism,” “crushing the urbanite,” and “pan-secessionist” “national-anarchism.”

. . .

In 2012, a wave of federal repression of anarchists in the Pacific Northwest had helped send me to Oakland, where I was surprised to find a small circle praising a group of reactionaries in Mexico City, going by Individualistas Tendiendo a lo Salvaje (Individuals Tending Towards Savagery). ITS had once identified as anarcho-primitivists, but when Ted K publicly broke with John Zerzan—prioritizing opposition to civilization over basic anarchist moral commitments—they sided with Ted. The bay area had accumulated a collection of rejects bounced from other cities’ scenes and they thought ITS was the coolest thing. Cosmo Rydra, at the then popular podcast Free Radical Radio, took it the furthest in public, denouncing the inherent morality of anarchists and declaring that, like ITS, he and his ilk were no longer anarchists, they were “nihilists.” (No relation to the 1800s Russian movement, which was social democratic and rabidly pro science.)

ITS has weak tradecraft and lazy targets like poor university students. Their real passion is bombastic performative communiques where they lambaste the anarchist scene that has excluded their tiny crew. They eagerly declare themselves “worse than Hitler!” They urge readers to blow up nuclear power plants and “kill 200 million people in your local bioregion.” To underline their hostility to humanism and anarchism, they bomb a children’s hospital and try to set a bomb at an anarchist infoshop (it fails to detonate). They claim to have bombed public buses and get copycats in Chile and Brazil. “They sought to kill a comrade after he got out of prison,” a local comrade tells me in fury, “If we find them, we’re gutting them.” The communiques are desperate to be edgy. They start claiming murders they clearly had no hand in, anything in the news. Anything to desperately attach the moral that “you shouldn’t care about strangers you don’t know; doing so is unnatural humanist brainwashing.”

Eventually they find a provocation that will get them attention again: as the Mexico City Left mobilizes against a particularly heinous femicide, ITS will side with the chief of police, disparaging the victim as a drug-using slut who deserved it, and claiming the murder for themselves. This will finally get them the attention they crave, but it doesn’t go well.

Among their enthusiastic cheerleaders in the US, and connection to the bay area circle so ecstatic over them, is one Arturo Vasquez who goes by “Abe Cabrera”, a UC Berkeley lawyer married to a vivisectionist in New Orleans. (He will later get doxed by the insurrectionary anarchist website 325, and threaten to call the FBI about it.)

In 2015, Vasquez runs the infamous website Atassa, the english language press office for ITS, where he translates communiques from ITS into English. Later it will be alleged he gets in the habit of writing some of their communiques himself. Beyond “nihilist” broadsides against anarchists, Arturo is also big into the new wave of 4chan Trad Cath memes. He publicly backslaps with Aragorn, the main figure behind Little Black Cart, and in turn Aragorn is about to publish Art’s media project as a physical journal. After baiting feints and “they’re not technically fascists” smirking, Art and ITS will only be encouraged to double down, even praising the Christchurch shooter. And Aragorn will interview a “pan-secessionist” “national-anarchist”, Keith Preston, for his podcast.

Preston is a headline speaker at Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute conference. It will become most famous for the video of a room full of nazis seig heiling to the cameras while they chant “hail Trump!” But while ITS arose from edgelords in the primitivist scene who rejected Zerzan for Kaczynski, Preston’s origins are in IWW and Love & Rage.

In 2015, the Red ideologues of the anarchist movement are enchanted with a book, Black Flame, that aggressively writes out of history every other current in anarchism. Mutualists, individualists, greens, animal liberationists, feminists, “lifestylists”… all gone. “Identitarianism” that foregrounds issues of race, sexuality, and gender is a contemptible deviation. Anarchism, it declares, is not a deep philosophy teasing out the implications of total opposition to domination, but just the anti-state wing of the revolutionary working class movement.

One of book’s two authors, Lucien van der Walt, aggressively contributes to his own wikipedia entries, heaping defensive praise on himself and his work. But the other author?

Michael Schmidt is secretly a “national anarchist.”

By this point Schmidt has a long corpus of writing in platformist circles, trying to evacuate anarchism of any depth beyond anti-state anti-capitalism, while often heaping praise on any examples of anarchists tolerating nationalism of the oppressed. In South Africa, he has become notorious for pushing for racial segregation within movement organizations—with white anarchists to then take a leadership role over the inferior blacks—and disciplining female members for being interested in feminism. He embraces the hierarchical crypto-leninism of platformist organizations, and neatly plugs in white supremacy, branded as culturally-specific and national liberationist. And under his paternalistic influence, the South African anarchist group Zabalaza collapsed to only six white members.

But what’s semi-secret is Schmidt is an enthusiastic participant on the infamous neonazi website Stormfront, praising the “Good Guys of the Waffen SS,” openly posting his face, associating with real-life friends of his, detailing his tattoos as well as where he lives, identifying as a fascist skinhead, and trying to explain leftist movements to the other nazis. Meanwhile he posts on other websites using the same handle, spreading around virulent racism and lines like “ghetto the homeless & queers together.” The thors hammer he wears around his neck, the lebensrune tattoo, the red-and-black rebrands he makes of fascist symbols… His anticapitalism is rife with anti-semitic currents and he’s in love with the “national anarchism” of neonazi streetfighter Troy Southgate and the former darling zinester of AK Press, vicious racist and rape advocate, Jim Goad.

When Michael Schmidt and Arturo Vasquez are exposed—when anarchists draw lines of exclusion against ITS and national-anarchism, with many projects refusing to carry Atassa and Black Flame—there are paroxysms of outrage across myriad currents of anarchism. This is all beyond scandalous and enraging! Older generations among greens, reds, and even mutualists, leap to the defense of those who would be pushed out by those notoriously evil censors, the antifascists.

Since when did a little platforming of reactionaries become a bad thing? Surely every boomer conspiracy head or gen-x punk can agree that provocation and transgression are the entire point of anarchy?!

The platformists might have tried to violently write green anarchists out of anarchism, but the second that Schmidt was exposed as a nazi the inclination of so many isn’t to crow about The Platformist Bible being actually fascist entryism, but to offer them assistance against The Real Enemy, The Real Fascists: antifa.

And when Aragorn publishes Atassa shortly after Schmidt’s exposure, he is sincerely shocked when his white edgelord lackeys get banned from bookfairs. He meant to provoke a few harpies to make fun of their shrieking, but he had no idea the scene would close ranks on him. Are the dastardly moralists really so vast in number outside his circle? He can’t believe that antifa crews and projects still exist, much less have support.

Because in 2015, for all the advances that the internet has facilitated, a great many older folks in anarchism retain sharp anti-antifa sentiments, where the insights of No Platforming or Three Way Fight worked out by antifascists over the last few decades might as well be alien language. Where they’re even sympathetic to racial segregation, fantasizing of the same patchwork of micro-nationalisms that Preston and Southgate promise will defeat the globalist universalism of humanist moralism.

They scrunch up their faces in horror upon learning antifascists have picketed Death In June shows.

What about free speech and open debate?!

. . .

In 2015, I accept an invite to a transhumanist political conference. Initially I think nothing of it: a throwaway event at the hippie Humanist Hall in Oakland, organized by a lefty activist. I’ll write something the night before and pop over for a few hours. But then a flier for the event has the name “Michael Anissimov” on it and I immediately call up an old antifa organizer.

Anissimov is a terminally online character prone to obsessing over anime and pledging his life to e-girls, wearing drag in the Castro and then declaring he’s an alpha male online. The sort of cringe dipshit who runs around asserting to everyone that he has an IQ of 180. Naturally, he haunted 2000s transhumanist mailing lists and the early Less Wrong forums. But by the early 2010s he had pivoted from transhumanism to advocating a total dictatorship to stop technology.

You see, Anissimov has been horrified to discover that poors, queers, and blacks can get their hands on technology and put it towards liberatory ends. As a result of this epiphany, a number of his circle start endorsing stanning Ted K and the violent collapse of civilization—anything to stop the transes from tweaking their hormones. Anissimov likes their tweets about becoming amoral uncivilized warlords raping all the liberals to death in the ruins, but he largely sticks with fantasies of a state so powerful and invasive it can stop everyone from tinkering or inventing. By 2015, Anissimov is one of the most notorious proponents of “neoreaction,” eclipsed only by Curtis Yarvin.

“Some people would say I’m a fascist…” he loves to cloyingly open, before going on a long spiel about how he’s actually a “monarchist” but “basically the same thing.”

The lefty activist organizing the event wants to put us together on a panel to debate.

My old friend, the antifa organizer, is exhausted but in good humor as I explain the strange subculture of the bay area rationalist scene. She laughs a lot, but she is used to helping strange subcultures fend off fascist entryism. There’s no way I’m legitimizing a fascist freak with some kind of staged debate, but we chatter about strategy and ethics for a while. I had expected her to desire more militant disruption, but she’s surprisingly in favor of me giving my talk separately, just tailoring it to dunk on Anissimov’s arguments in advance. “Obviously we should work to draw a line and push him out, but you have to be strategic about not ceding the entire space.”

I reach out to the lefty organizer and meet him in Sproul Plaza on campus at Berkeley.

A year and a half later this will be ground zero for street battles between Identity Europa nazis and protesters broadcast around the nation. The media will suddenly decide to hype bog-standard antifa work as brand new and an existential risk to normal republican grandpas.

I explain to the organizer that there is a firewall of No Platforming that has successfully kept fascists exiled to the fringes of society for decades. Putting Anissimov on stage will only legitimize and normalize him; additionally it will lead to an evaporative cooling effect as anyone with a conscience flees association with the organizers.

Surely he understands that if an astrophysics conference gives a Flat Earther the prestige of an invited talk their credibility collapses, and astrophysicists interested in more serious discussions will stop attending, leaving only inane debate bros and an increasing number of Flat Earthers. The mechanism by which free speech sorts through ideas innately and critically involves disassociation and boycotts.

Since Anissimov is now quite openly hostile to morphological freedom, the core value of transhumanism, to say nothing of other basic moral values, what is the point of platforming him at a conference for transhumanists?

I’m patient and soft, but it does not go down well. He squirms in the face of my arguments. Forget reason, he wants to hold onto a vibe of performatively open-minded and edgy nerd culture. To deny someone a platform would be a violation of that culture’s implicit rules, folks’ self-identity.

He refuses to uninvite Anissimov and says he’ll go forward with the panel regardless of my involvement.

I show up with a pile of antifascist zines, give my talk denouncing any non-anarchist transhumanism, and have conversations with as many people as I can about Anissimov. Folks start to walk out before the panel with Anissimov can begin, emptying the hall and obliging the organizer to conclude the entire event.

At the front of the hall a large body of people gather at the left side to chatter about how absurd Anissimov is. His string bean ass huddles at the right side, near the door, with two fans, trying to puff up and appear tough. It’s a stark visual.

But dinner with other attendees makes clear how low the bar of “better than an outright anime nazi” is.

National borders, IQ, transphobia… too many attendees think of these as delicious opportunities to burnish their edgy freethinker credentials. Not in the direction of anything liberatory, compassionate, or rational—of course not—the only metric that matters is of course, whether it offers to bind those present in the community of those smugly better than the SJWs. When another person with a physics background objects that some reactionary claim clearly falls apart as a deep account because of significant exceptions, the shallow engineers look perplexed. “It’s a rule of thumb. It just needs to kinda work well enough.”

“Okay, but if your account only works over an effective domain the will break down beyond some horizon. And if it prescribes shitty things as harsh necessities, then surely our effort should be on pressing beyond the horizon of its utility; we should be focused on how to it breaks down.”

Ah, the speaker has committed the cardinal sin. He’s acted like we should have values. He’s done a moralism.

. . .

When Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote Politics Is The Mindkiller in 2007, who but Anissimov was in the comments obsequiously fawning over it.

One of the marble pillars holding up the rationalist scene, Yudkowsky’s blog post had the effect of soft-tabooing contemporary political topics. You see, things with potentially pressing stakes or existing social camps cause people to just get too irrational, too emotional. There’s every pressure to cut corners, to treat arguments not as objective claims about reality, but as rhetorical soldiers, pragmatic tools to signal alliances, apply social pressures, misdirect and batter adversaries into submission.

What this is taken to mean is that talking about systemic oppression is suspect. But any political talking points that seem unfamiliar or new—in short, reactionary talking points—are obviously alien enough to have been arrived at dispassionately, stumbled upon in good faith.

Rationalists want a safe space for earnest epistemic diligence. They want to get serious about countering cognitive biases and pursuing the truth for its own sake. I have always been a fervent, passionate, and unabashed partisan of this. Beliefs should stem from reality, from what actually is, not what is convenient. (Yo-hoh.)

But subcultures are tricky things, and Yudkowsky is really bad at bootstrapping a healthy one from scratch.

In Berkeley, these nerds do a bunch of really healthy and well-adjusted things like forming collective houses, getting into polyamory, militant veganism, and taking HRT. But rather than riding the rails and getting drawn into decades-long fights about whether Green Day should be banned from Gilman for being fake punks, things take a nasty turn.

As with any subculture, belonging to the in-group of rationalism is ascertained by how much one performs belonging. The metric you choose becomes your goal. And rather than valuing epistemic rationality – which can’t actually be measured from outside someone’s subjective internal experience – the rationalist milieu decides to value performative vibes of “intelligence” and a code of civility.

Common, if crude, nerd instincts get enshrined as the foundations of citizenship with little to no critical interrogation.

Those who don’t integrate well with broader social norms tend to have a lot of trauma around getting excluded, and community belonging is so desperately precious when they obtain it, ostracism treated as one of the most dire crimes against humanity conceivable. We’re all so happy to have found one another, why ruin it by taking a hard line against genocide? Why can’t you just bracket consideration of all other values to avoid causing fractures?

They want to reserve coordinated social boycotts exclusively as a means of punishing those who engage in coordinated social boycotts.

Unfortunately for the rationalists, ostracism is always at the very foundation of anti-authoritarian societies: it’s the very core of norm enforcement among stateless peoples. And it’s inseparable from any enshrinement of agency and freedom of association.

Treating it like unspeakable superultra terrorism is like spreading roundup across your yard, then being surprised when your fruits are poisoned and the garden is overrun by the hardiest of weeds. Subcultures are ecosystems; to optimize them requires grappling with a ton of complex particulars, enshrining and protecting multiple values. You gotta be very proactive about kicking the civil nazis or you’re gonna have a nazi bar.

In 2015, I’m working in my local anarchist hackerspace, SudoRoom, when a skinny kid lurking around the fringes comes up to talk to us about the project he’s been working on. Something to do with medical kits, I think. He proudly tells us that this really cool guy, Peter Thiel, is funding him. When, again, anarchists, are weirded out by this, he looks disgusted with us. How could we be so base, so political, as to take issue with a reactionary billionaire.

. . .

Scott Alexander Siskind is basically the same age as me. We both went to liberal arts colleges of roughly the same prestige, him in New York, me in Minnesota. We were both nerds obsessed with ethics and feminism who tortured ourselves in fear of ever overstepping with girls. We both hated college, we both share a host of rationalist inclinations, and we both write ridiculously long self-indulgent blog posts.

But while I was going to endless anarchist meetings pausing only to glare at the Third Precinct in south Minneapolis (imagining it on fire every Thursday while eating Jalapeno bites at the next door Arby’s), Scott was getting canceled by other students for something fucked up he said (or did?). At least, this is the tale he obliquely shares.

It’s the foundational psychological trauma of his super-villain story. It’s why every fucking single thing he has ever written comes with an implicit “social justice delenda est” at the end.

As long as the furnaces might run, darkening the world with human soot, it will never eclipse the primordial sin of the feminists. Of what they did to Scott. Of how they started it.

What I see as pretty minor unfortunate inanities on pop-feminist blogs like Gawker—inherent transcription errors as opportunistic yuppie liberals copy slogans out of actual radical diourse—Scott sees apocalyptic world-ending threats.

Scott is also, deeply, emphatically, passionately, a pretty boring run-of-the-mill racist. The sort that think they aren’t like other racists because they rank The Varieties of Human Stock by “intelligence” and place Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians as more intelligent than whites. Bet you weren’t expecting that, a hundred thousand standard boneheads exclaim.

He was a boring run-of-the-mill racist when he went to Haiti as a young doctor and ranted about how stupid they all must be. And he was a boring run-of-the-mill racist when he bragged to someone in an email that he’s a secret racist, hiding his power-level from the woke mob, while intentionally platforming racists and neoreactionaries as he engaged in calculatedly tepid criticism of them.

In 2015, I have my inklings and suspicions of his reactionary inclinations, but I don’t fully see it yet. I haven’t read his entire corpus and the email admitting to his disingenuousness has yet to leak. “Scott is my favorite reactionary,” I joke to a trans anarchist professor who also reads many of his blog posts. It’s a joke, see, because he studiously presents himself as a liberal but there’s this unmistakable smell…

The founding blogger of neoreaction, Curtis Yarvin, loves to cultivate a reputation as an evil vizier behind the scenes of the tech world. And it’s true, he’s friends with Peter Thiel; that’s a connection that will certainly pay off when JD Vance becomes veep. But Yarvin is a fucking awful writer, his “patchwork” prescription is just a repackaging of national-anarchism and Hoppeanism with references to Sith lords, obscure monarchist essayists, and brags about secret inside knowledge of liberalism (they use Dr Bronners soap). His prose is a torturous slog and the only payout is if you wanna feel highbrow about snarling that the homeless should be executed. Unlike Yarvin, Scott Siskind is read by fucking everyone in silicon valley.

Scott will be responsible for more sympathetic eyeballs on anti-feminist and neoreactionary arguments than any other individual on the planet.

He will be a huge driving force behind James Damore, helping a broad crusade in silicon valley against any effort to be more welcoming to women, telling them all that women are somehow just biologically inclined against STEM things, never you mind how the cultural valences have changed or how gender ratios have shifted in different contexts, just don’t let the shrill bitches derail your perfectly fun frat culture.

But most of all, after Trump wins and an emboldened neonazi pulls a gun on me outside my house, Scott will assure millions of readers that fascists don’t exist in any appreciable number, that Trump is not a white supremacist, that claims that he is “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” are “made up,” and the jaw-dropping statement of proud ignorance that “I don’t see any sign that there are other official white supremacy movements that are larger than the Klan.”

This piece is so audaciously ghastly that a dozen or so rationalists will bounce off of it and go directly into working as antifa researchers and organizers, furiously driven for years by Siskind’s sneering denials of reality.

But unfortunately his popular impact upon most credulous rationalists and techies will be to firm up a decade-long counter-narrative wherein Trump is no big deal but the Left is an unhinged threat to civility and discursive practice.

“Caring about who the KKK or the alt-right supports is a lot like caring about who Satanists support. It’s not something you would do if you wanted to understand real political forces. It’s only something you would do if you want to connect an opposing candidate to the most outrageous caricature of evil you can find on short notice.”

This denial of the relevance and danger of movements smaller than full electoral demographic status totally avoided the antifascist critique of Trump: that he was supercharging fascists and bringing them into mainstream connection, influence, and capacity.

Siskind certainly never bothered to look up or read the antifascist theorists, activists, researchers, and scholars, never talked in depth with those with long term tacit knowledge. Never bothers to spend much time extrapolating or steel manning when it comes to the woke menace. He is, as always, studiously asymmetrical.

. . .

I almost went to high school with Andy Ngo.

Most of my friends in middle school choose Benson Polytechnic, but at the last moment I opted for something closer. I stayed in loose touch with a couple of them. As I organized walkouts and actions across Portland in the Student Activist Alliance, I ended up walking the halls of Benson more than a few times to meet up with fellow anarchists.

Years later, I will hit up some of Ngo’s classmates. What was he like?

“Who?” “Totally unremarkable.” “Boring.” “I don’t think he had real friends?”

In 2015, when he enrolls at Portland State, practically no one knows who Andy Ngo is. His parents grudgingly tolerate his unemployed ass in a plain cookie-cutter house a few blocks from where I once taught math to elementary students. The closest thing he has to a personality is fuming about fat people and muslims on reddit and attending a New Atheist student group run by Peter Boghossian.

Vlad is busy seeding his “Fascist-Ancap Alliance” in an overlapping student group, but Ngo remains indistinguishable from tens of millions of other gray, faceless nobodies.

By summer 2016, that will start to change. The first first flicker of attention will come when folks protest the murder of Philando Castile in Portland and a minor rightwing youtuber, Michael Strickland (“LaughingAtLiberals”), belligerently provokes the crowd before drawing a loaded pistol and muzzle-sweeping hundreds, including my mother. Some kid no one’s heard of at the student paper will cut video to hide Strickland’s aggressive start and imply he acted out of desperate self defense. With only a few RTs, it will nonetheless get embedded in articles on Strickland by some major newspapers, loathe to ever publish anything incidentally sympathetic to dirty protesters.

In 2017, he’ll be fired from PSU’s student paper for wildly stripping context from another video to imply a muslim student personally supported killing apostates. You can see the gears turning for the college student in his thirties. “Conservative journalist censored and suppressed” gets a little traction with an ecosystem hungry for such stories. Not a ton of attention, but enough to provide an addictive thrill of purpose and meaning.

In 2018, he’ll shove his way into the ranks of antifascist protesters to film their faces, and, when someone silly strings him in response, he will try to spin this as a “chemical attack.” But it’s too cringe for news outlets to cover.

In spring of 2019, he’ll team up with a group of portly fascists and wingnuts in attacking an antifascist bar I’m drinking at, and dox the woman his nazi friend Ian Kramer beats with a baton, breaking her vertebra. When he gets hit with mace alongside his buddies, he’ll try the “chemical attack on a journalist” thing again. No bites.

It will take some vegan milkshakes (and a helping hand from the Portland Police loudly announcing that an anonymous person had claimed the milkshakes everyone was drinking had concrete in them) to finally launch Andy Ngo to the rightwing stardom he craves, sniffling in national interviews about how the antifa terrorists hate free speech and journalists so much they will attack innocent little gay asian men (at least after being shoved enough). He will lean into a fake English accent.

…By 2025, he will be testifying before congress as an “expert” to direct the police state against random activists.

Everyone knows Andy Ngo is a breathtakingly dishonest grifter in bed with nazis. Even Claire Lehmann of the skull-measurers at Quillette distanced herself. There’s an unmistakable stink on him.

And there’s a story the ivy league legacy media class would love to tell, wherein obvious losers like Ngo are a symptom of the internet and independent media.

They always said letting the rabble in was a bad idea.

It’s hard to describe how much the establishment media violently loathed the once-ubiquitous Indymedia network, how much they still loathe small independent radical collectives. When CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX all marched in lockstep to slur protesters and spread audacious lies, the very existence of little independent IMCs, each running on dozens of volunteers, and collecting video evidence to the contrary of the capitalist press, was not just an insult to the profession, but an existential risk.

That so many right-wing figures like Tim Pool arose out of Occupy as streamers, that the now fascist-cesspool of Twitter was first birthed from the anarchist project of TXTmob, that animal liberation activists were sneaking cameras into places before Project Veritas and Laura Loomer were… allows these establishment journalists a certain “both sides” sneer.

The old world depended upon a respectable responsible centrist media establishment, and the collapse of their stranglehold since the 90s is the rise of “extremism.” Declasse losers like Ngo and anarchist collectives like Indymedia are thus two sides of the same coin—the devaluation of our betters.

If only readers hadn’t ignored their paywalls. If only there had been some kind of law preventing the existence of blogs. If only bay area tech billionaires had recognized the social standing of east coast ivy league graduates. Then “disinformation” might’ve been stopped. The center might’ve held.

But the truth is that they are the ones who built fascism. While Ngo languished as a loser nobody at Portland State, the New York Times and CNN were the ones breathing life into the faded reality tv personality doing a vanity run for president to boost his brand.

In 2025, Trump will return to the podium at the White House and one reporter in the establishment press pool will whisper excitedly to another, “We’re so back!”

However much you hate the media, it’s not nearly enough.

They did this.

And it wasn’t just center-right rags like the NYT, continuing their long sordid history of apologia for Hitler, lying about weapons of mass destruction, and rabidly protecting the class interests of brownstone retirees against the leftist rabble. Left-liberal media institutions participated just as enthusiastically. It was Mother Jones that fawned over Richard Spencer with “Meet the dapper white nationalist riding the Trump wave.” It was Portland’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Willamette Week, that by 2015 had repeatedly slurred Rose City Antifa as “the real fascists” and ran endless hagiography for Jim Goad.

Reporters all sit in the same group chats, play the same games of prestige, and they have a siege mentality towards those outside their subculture. If one of their number is so abysmally stupid as to fall for TERF or nazi shit, everyone in the chat has to close ranks against the foul outsider critics, disreputable savages who haven’t earned their right to have a voice. Forget 4chan, this is where fascism is being supercharged.

In 2015, star reporter on the hacker world, Quinn Norton, is surprised to find herself increasingly under fire. Not for freely using disgusting slurs or for openly talking to the Grand Jury prosecuting her ex Aaron Swartz—even as anarchists prominently went to solitary or fled the country to avoid testifying before other Grand juries. No, Norton is a longtime close friend of Weev, the sysadmin of Stormfront, and by 2015 his full chest swastika tattoo has finally started raising some eyebrows. The notoriously unprincipled hacker scene is starting to question whether it’s worth defending notorious rapists like Julian Assange and Jacob Appelbaum. And if even those titans of influence could finally fall, who’s gonna defend a notorious asshole nazi like Weev?

But Norton sees it as virtuous to be friends with nazis. “Weev is a terrible person, & an old friend of mine. I’ve been very clear on this. Some of my friend are terrible people, & also my friends,” she writes at one point. Having nazi friends is the most praiseworthy thing a liberal can do. For an impressive demonstration of open-mindedness and commitment to free speech, you have to pick out the most over-the-top nazi you can find and hug them close. It doesn’t count if you were to do the same with someone you disagree with on the radical left. In fact those associations would gain you negative points.

The New York Times will try to appoint Norton to their editorial page.

At the same time, Bari Weiss will publish a column in the NYT titled, “We’re All Fascists Now” decrying antifa as, you guessed it, The Real Fascists, and citing an obviously fake “antifa” account created by nazis.

. . .

In 2015 the antifa milieu is still internally debating whether paying attention to the reality tv person with a fake campaign for president is within their wheelhouse. Electoral politics is a far cry from busting up prison nazi gangs and picketing NSBM shows. There are technical debates on the line between reactionary populist and formal fascist, but there’s a vibe issue too: most antifascists at this time are anarchists and thus grossed out at the idea of being seen picking sides in an election.

There’s a quite reasonable concern that this will risk catalyzing broader support for fascists among conservatives. After all, antifa, like anarchists, are seen as rather orthogonal to conventional political dramas. We make a point to protest both sides equally. We don’t want to get lumped in with the accursed neoliberal center-right warmongering police-state empowering Democrats. When the RNC was to be hosted in St. Paul, those of us organizing the protests made a point to protest Obama when he came to town and to collaborate closely with anarchists protesting the DNC.

In 2015, Anti-Racist Action had folded and the Torch Network had been reformed by local groups in its place. Feminist critiques were taking a more central place and outside things like the shooting of Luke Querner or the Tinley Park fight, most antifa work looked like independent journalism, tightly organized and increasingly professionalized.

This is an era where antifa researchers could hand an expose of a secret nazi to a local GOP organization and get thanked while they expelled him. When the neonazi Dylann Roof slaughters nine people at a black church in Charleston, you don’t see major voices or accounts in the right-wing ecosystem heaping praise on him, the average conservative doesn’t identify with him.

Antifascists are not apolitical, but they benefit from being totally outside the two party system.

Business Bureau Republicans may be implicitly or even explicitly racist in a variety of ways, they may be instinctually authoritarian in a broad sense, but they’re not Groypers jerking off to gas chambers. They’re embarrassed by outright fascists. And the average conservative schmuck may have chanted “nuke the [slur]s till they glow” after 9/11 or fervently agreed with Limbaugh that it should be legal to run over protesters, but they are not yet activated. They have not come to a full awareness of what they are, where their values actually fall. They are still a jumbled incoherent mess, prone to shy away from full swastikas and not yet seeing themselves as an army. Many still sincerely echo things like “the Democrats were the ones who supported slavery; Lincoln was a republican.”

Decades into their work keeping the streets clean of boneheads, practically no non-fascist conservative is aware that antifa exists. And when they do, antifa is treated as weird particularity, something you go “huh” to.

And so antifascists wince and cringe as the media hypes Trump up and every single nazi forum blows up with hyperactivity. The fash are going to Trump rallies. They’re using him as a wedge to normalize outright racism.

Antifascists can’t do nothing, they can’t just allow boneheads to have the run of the streets whenever they hold a big blue Trump banner like a magical shield.

Decades of experience cleaning fascist filth out of subcultural scenes has taught that you can’t afford to concede them any territory. Trump is enabling the fascists to gain ground like crazy. If this shit continues, then—as Richard Spencer promises in an absurd flight of ethnic cleansing fantasy—there will be military planes filled up with shackled brown Americans, running nonstop flights to other continents.

And so, at the end of 2015, antifascists begin to steel themselves. They would search, record, and expose fascist involvement with the Trump movement. They would confront the fascist streetfighters trying to return and refuse to give them ground.

. . .

I don’t think it’s contentious, from the vantagepoint of 2025, to say that antifa was totally unprepared for a media war.

They had cut their teeth for decades on boneheads and entryists, but they had little experience fighting the media itself. In a healthy anarchist movement there would be other projects capable of taking on that burden, but the unpopular yet necessary work of resisting fascist creep in radical spaces had left antifascists relatively isolated.

In 2015, many antifascists were or had been independent journalists. But they still take serious many of the field’s narratives. Where mainstream reporters were lazy and slapdash, antifascists prize getting the facts perfect, holding stories and doxes for extensive checking and confirming. Where mainstream journalists stole stories flagrantly (especially from radicals), antifascists are meticulous about sourcing and giving credit.

Many antifascists devoted themselves to achieving the supposed ideals of journalism, and in the process some began to partially look down on anything so crudely populist as to reach people. Sure there might be a lecture at a progressive church here, a neighborhood flier campaign there… but these were limited in scope in part because there was no sense that the enemy could suddenly and massively grow.

Perfect exposes were published to tiny sites that got dozens of views at best. Fine-crafted arguments found almost no traction among even other leftists. Their studiousness is, of course, to be commended. Dishonesty or rhetorical expedience would have created more problems. But there is a sense in which many antifa groups have grown comfortable, even virtuous, with a more limited purview, a more niche existence. And without the organs of a wider anarchist movement actively contesting or laying siege to the media, they’re gonna get completely drowned.

I say this with all the love in my heart, but as the mainstream media suddenly finds profit in promoting Donald Trump and the fascists around him, antifa look like bewildered nerds on the sidelines.

. . .

Over the coming years, a subset of Libertarians will repeatedly whine that antifa makes one core mistake and would instead win if only they were studious about absolutely never throwing the first punch in any situation ever.

This is absurd.

First off, media discipline is totally impossible for movements. The only way activist organizations have ever gotten anywhere close (and still pretty far away at that) is by becoming completely authoritarian monstrosities.

But secondly, such a picture is totally disconnected from how violence actually functions. If a neonazi group storms into a neighborhood to terrorize and antifascists square up to oppose them, conflict is already inevitable, the nazis will brutalize you, they will whip out knives and stab everyone they can, as they will in Sacramento in 2016. If the goal is to win, to physically stop them, then tactical choices have to be made midst constantly swirling pressures and contextual particulars, and good tactics sometimes involves taking the initiative.

Always waiting for the boneheads to act first, in every rung of the escalation ladder, unavoidably means losing the war they already started.

That is, of course, unless a choice has been made to lose the battle, to embrace a role as some noble victim. But this only works if there are cameras on you. Cameras that record the whole context. Cameras that aren’t immediately seized by the state. Cameras that will reliably broadcast to hundreds of millions, rather than just the home team or a buried report at 11.

If any of that doesn’t line up, you’re just getting stabbed for nothing.

And if you do manage to strike a sympathetic pose on the national evening news, while your blood sprays everywhere and your organs shut down, what does that actually tangibly win?

Sometimes the stars align, as they will with Heather Heyer’s murder, and a little bit of intangible shame will enter the national discourse for a month. But the stars will not align for so so so many other people.

When, in two years, from our vantagepoint in 2015, but before Heyer’s murder, Ricky John Best (conservative) and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche (liberal) will be stabbed to death, with Micah Fletcher (antifascist) bleeding out on a light rail stop, the three of them will be pitch-perfect martyrs of the fascist Jeremy Christian. Spontaneous good samitarians from across the political spectrum that did everything right and approached a violent racist with peaceful open hands. No one outside of Portland will learn their names. When the earnest nerds of Rose City Antifa provide security for the memorial, Portland police will openly scoff in front of me about wanting to murder them and no real national media will show. No national conversation will be had. No polling numbers change. Not a single conservative, by then pickled in layers of hilarious delusions about antifa, will hear of it.

On and on the slaughters will inexorably march, across the country. When the furry nazi Benjamin Jeffery Smith will gun down June Knightly and Deg in 2022, hitting several others, no one outside of Portland will read about it, no matter how perfect of an angel June was, no matter how heart-wrenching Deg’s story. There will be no New York Times columns. CNN will not run a week’s coverage. Harper’s will not shop around some giant public letter bemoaning the fascist threat. No complicit politician will be pressed about it in debates.

Their blood will lead to fucking nothing.

. . .

There is another hypothetical universe in which the mainstream media reports this kind of stuff, takes it seriously, gives it attention.

But we do not live in that universe.

We live in the universe where centrist columnists will treat getting occasional pushback on twitter from vaguely progressive people as worthy of 24-7-365 national conversations. We live in the universe where the media elites will hyperventilate for years about needing to genocide trans kids more aggressively. We live in the universe where every newspaper and television channel will enthusiastically launder fascist lies at every opportunity.

Andy Ngo will become a thing because establishment media institutions will choose to make him into a thing.

When, in 2017, an anonymous email will be sent threatening to attack random conservatives at a parade in Portland, promising to have “two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push them out. You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads,” no national journalist will ever say to their readers, “this is beyond obviously fake.” When right-wing ecosystem tries to push it as a thing, CNN won’t spend days mocking the idea that a chud thought that was how any activist or antifascist would talk.

The NYT won’t lead national discussions about how such misinformation could spread, they won’t interview antifascists and showcase the ecosystem of established antifa sites with in depth reporting to their readers.

Of course not.

Structurally, every major media outlet is of course driven by capitalist interests, and has always been so, long before cartoon villain billionaires buy them all up and hand down edicts. In its entire lifespan The Oregonian, for instance, has never once reported positively about leftists, anarchists, or protesters, and it’s an absurd exercise to imagine it ever doing so. In the final leg of power, every newspaper is the press office of the business alliance.

The people who staff these institutions, of course, don’t identify with the grubby money that funds them, and are proud that they sometimes press in different directions. But their interests are just as venal. East coast ivy league graduates are united in an old guard elitism that looks down at striving for money, but is even more violently hostile to any erosion of their prestige. As newsrooms fold and the internet gives voice to millions, they are forced to realize that there are other cultural and intellectual elites in America. What is anarchism if not such an elite? We have long looked down our noses from our squats and social centers at the hilariously ignorant centrists pickled in their own juices, sealed away in epistemic bubbles. We’re better than them in every way. We’re smarter, more moral, more educated, more informed, more advanced in discourse and language. We always have been. As the internet leaks into the ears of the old media elites, they fall into conniptions upon discovering there are people who smugly superior to them, and with every right to be.

The debate on pronouns, for instance, was had and conclusively ended in the 00s in the circles of the real culture elites in America: the radical left. It happened in the only places that matter: punk houses and queer blogs. If liberal centrists chose not to pay attention or participate, that’s on them. It’s too late now. The matter is as decisively concluded as the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Those fucking culturally uneducated ignorant deplorables in their backwater brownstones can either get with the times or they can sink into irrelevance, just like the babbling MAGA troglodytes they obsessively try to make common cause with.

Being polite about the situation, patronizing those who willfully refused to engage in the discussion for decades, would do grotesque damage to the truth. Physicists should obviously not bend over backwards to pretend flat earthers are valid discursive peers. And in no universe should anarchists lie about our superiority. Unlike the pretensions of the media elites, we actually worked to achieve it.

But even beyond the Ivy League elites ruling major institutions like the Gray Lady, the subculture of “journalism” as a whole has long been infested with inane delusions.

Journalists are indoctrinated in a worldview where everything important happens in one flat public record, one collective national conversation, that they are the professional stewards of. The investigative journalist gets out the truth. The anchor on the evening news explains it, making it palatable to the widest audience. And the columnists then argue in the genteel process of crafting a compromise that is then codified by democratic process.

The proper role of “activists” (if there even is one) within this framework is politely begging on the sidelines for a cup of attention from their journalist superiors. Perhaps holding signs tamely in large numbers to help underline a columnist’s claim to the popularity of a position.

Just as antifascist groups doing their own high-quality reporting bypasses the appropriate authorities, radicals developing expert analyses and more advanced social norms on their own is an existential threat to the media-complex’s monopoly of epistemic force. And activists simply taking direct action outside the democratic process of the state? An unthinkable danger.

In short, every single fiber of the journalism-complex has always been existentially aligned against activists, anarchists, and antifascists. There is simply no way to make them not hate us and instinctively work against us. It’s in their blood.

And so, in 2025, when the White House will cite the aforementioned random fake email as well-established proof that antifa is a terrorist organization, not a single fucking media outlet will even flinch or note the lie. And no one will be able to meaningfully hold them to account.

. . .

In my opinion, the great failure of anarchists and antifascists was not failing to more aggressively pander to the media, but in beginning to forget their centrality as our enemy. This was a mistake well underway by 2015.

In the 2003, in our many protests against the Invasion of Iraq, anarchists often took a more combative line: breaking the cameras of journalists, getting into shoving matches with them, and tagging their vans. It was the only sane or ethical thing to do. I still remember the grotesque audacious sins of each local channel. KATU, the notoriously evil ABC affiliate, loved to get out an unmarked map and try to quiz every single protester on the location of Iraq until they could find a couple who pointed incorrectly, for repeated highlight. Even KGW, the NBC affiliate and the best of the rotten bunch, would always delightedly join the rest in lying about crowd numbers. Sixty thousand protesters pack the entire waterfront shoulder-to-shoulder and make the bridges sag under their weight? “Several thousand.”

These people were always the vanguard of the war against us.

When fascists mobilize around the country and police brutalize anarchist marchers on May Day, The Oregonian will declare “Portland must be done with punk fascists” – siding with the police state and calling for more repression of anarchists. When Jeremy Christian murders two Portlanders on the light rail twenty one days later he will have spent the prior night on the light rail screaming about how antifa are “the real fascists.” The Oregonian will never apologize for helping radicalize him. Neither will Willamette Week.

These are not people who could ever be expected to tell the truth, they are not people who would ever platform or profile us. It should have been no surprise when they lovingly built up a fascist movement to exterminate us.

They look down on Andy Ngo, but they embed his disingenuously edited videos anyway. They look down on Trump, but they’re ecstatic when their puppet promises to torture trans kids.

By 2015, the die is already cast. There is no way to stop them. They will have the entertaining fascist dictator they so crave.

I emphasize this because while there’s a lot to learn from 2015, there is no timeline in which we prostrate ourselves hard enough and the media relents. Our mere existence is an existential threat to their prestige and power structures. Our correct and good arguments will always win over the diligent and decent and, in so doing, cause backlash from a media class.

The only way out was only ever total war on them, to commit to the information space and erode their standing and reach from all angles. Our survival has always depended on the total destruction of The New York Times, CNN, Facebook, and all their ilk.

We built a vast and potent global movement in the 00s, you would think that, by 2015, it’s time to grow it.

. . .

Once I get back to Portland at the end of 2015 and hang with some dear old friends, I mention that I think anarchists should try to contest Youtube, should try to make video content for those using it and then bridge to our own networked protocol-based alternatives. In particular, I’m very worried about young teenagers who are getting fed stuff like Molyneux and who don’t have local anarchist social centers to hang at. These friends of mine are storied and respected, international travelers, pillars of the movement, and they mostly scoff in disgusted horror. Why would we want to attract such horrible people or make our movement more transparent to them? And it’s bad enough that I write essays, but video is so much lower status than zines.

By this point Indymedia has long been functionally dead.

We pioneered putting video on the internet and now all the links are dead, the torrents have no peers. We burnt bright… and burnt out within a decade. Everyone is embarrassed that we ever tried to contest the internet. Where we once shaped and drove it, once created the tools and spaces that would shake the bones of media institutions, we gave up and resigned to being bit players in fringe corners of it.

In 2015 an anarchist in Chicago has been building a decentralized social media network for years, everyone scoffs at him. Riseup has been pushing an innovative new software stack for activist groups, everyone politely ignores it. Two relatively local projects, Unicorn Riot and Submedia, get some respect, Agency technically exists, Crimethinc continues chugging in their corner, but on the whole across our movement few push for broader engagement. Social media use beyond kvetching with a few friends or getting a passing dunk in is treated like a moral failing. It’s uncouth to try to win over normies or acknowledge they exist, even when that means leaving them to the media or the 4chan incels. When liberals on Tumblr take our ideas and run with them in imperfect silly ways we don’t really push back or take point, we sneer about “internet people.”

I have long diagnosed the toxicity of social network sites as a product of their unnaturally flat topology. You are given two choices: put yourself on lock to a small static number of friends, or hang fully out there in front of all of humanity, for literally anyone to show up and interrupt your conversation, stalk you, obsess over you. There is nothing in between. No organic space where the statistical likelihoods change. A punk bar filters the frequency of sorts of folks you encounter. Same with an infoshop or a Food Not Bombs. You are not given sliders to dissuade certain bystanders or ensure certain commonalities. All the mechanisms of being physically in the same room disappear. The only tool individuals have to shape who clusters into their conversations is verbal hostility.

2015 is the era of “it’s not my job to educate you.” Which is trivially true. I would go insane if I didn’t aggressively filter my notifications, if I bothered to read the unhinged rants and sincere messages of every random person on the planet, much less try to respond to them all. Even a couple million anarchists worldwide constitute but a tiny island in the sea of humanity. We cannot and should not spend all our time arguing with 13-year-old boys into Crusader Kings. Handholding dipshits is not an individual moral responsibility.

But in 2015, there’s a broad violent revulsion and active sanction of the very idea of anyone doing outreach or engagement. Anarchists largely react with horror to the inane masses on social media, and take it as a matter of faith that the spectacle, the discourse, does not matter and cannot matter.

When everyone decides to platform Donald Trump and old bonehead talking points we have nothing in the tank to contest them. No voice to even begin to push back at the national scale.

Those birthed in the internet are perhaps more nearsighted to it, too focused on spectacle and attention at the expense of tangible struggle and community, but they can still instinctively identify lines of pressure.

Some nazis on 4chan have no assumptions about how activist campaigns are done. They just want to win. So even while they stumble around in ignorance, they think “hey, people get socially and mentally pressured by lots of accounts, so let’s just manually create a bunch of social media accounts and seed discourse through them.”

Some dipshit baby leftists spontaneously cling onto Leninism without any real knowledge of it, but they know that meme pages get a lot of attention and influence, so they do infiltration campaigns and make up whatever lies can get their accounts appointed as mods.

Anarchists correctly turn up our noses at this crude brutish unethical stuff, but we failed to imagine alternatives. We didn’t have the hunger to win. We abandoned creativity, preferring to spend our efforts holding onto the amazing AFK communities we had successfully created over the counter-globalization era.

We stopped imagining that winning was even a possibility. We told ourselves that the real prize was the friends made along the way.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. When my friends scoff at the idea of anarchist video content, I pretty much entirely abandon writing 101s for youtube, never do anything with footage I shoot of activist campaigns, treat social media largely as a space for cranky kvetching into the void rather than friendly explainers. I would rather keep my standing in my circles than help explain things to newbies.

Two different orgs ask me to run their social media and/or answer press emails and I decline, because I would want to be to more proactive than canned statements and I know it will inevitably hurt my friendships to fight about it in consensus meetings.

I want my friends more than I want to win.

Everywhere in 2015, comrades are explicitly talking in such terms. Building land projects. Retreating, to hug close the social gains we made.

Community is beguiling.

A little earlier in the year, my roommate and I sit, looking out our window, down on the Fuck The Police street party outside our place. The cops are nowhere to be seen and yet nothing is pushed forward. Struggle has gotten performative rather than audacious. They’re content to laugh and drink together. She and I are content to talk to one another.

And all things considered, 2015 is a pretty good year for me. I have amazing friends and live most of the year in a cute bohemian collective house in the center of everything. I take a ton of classes at Berkeley, get a ton of writing done, have long debates with famous people. I go to parties, I hang at social centers. I manage to get by without working very much, exploring the city for fun. I have complaints and adversaries, but I have community, and it’s hard not to revel in it.

But, in 2025, that euphoria will be remembered forebodingly.

Libertarians, having gotten a taste of community, will go crazy for it, abandoning their values for parasocial relationships with podcasters and posting buddies who ritualistically own the libs with them. Socialists will hardly fare better, with their toxic cults and dirtbag idols. Both will platform the shit out of fascists and normalize evil.

Rationalists will throw everything on the bonfire for the taste of community, chucking epistemic diligence for inane civility norms that promise to secure their precious friends and social circles – while empowering and covering for fascists and billionaires.

And anarchists – after over a decade of unprecedented success and influence – turn inward. There are many reasons for this, but a non-negligible component is the succor of victory. We’ve collected all the good friends, why do anything more? Many among us throw tantrums rather than risk social friction kicking out the most extreme of reactionaries and entryists.

Meanwhile fascists, furiously apathetic normies and media elites build a broad coalition against creeping anarchist social pressures, however attenuated into “wokeness.” Their two planks are 1) hostility to the “humanist moralism” of ever caring about distant strangers and 2) hostility to the erosion of patriarchy and its sex/gender hierarchy. It is the resurgence of outright fucking nationalism. But it also looks like an existential freakout over trans people.

But this wave will break. The coalition of the bad will not have their thousand year Reich. Many of the horrors will get worse, of course, I’ve never been an optimist. But fascism will always stumble and falter. Whenever and however it comes, there will be a day when they are in retreat, there will come victories for us, victories even that we grow to take for granted, victories that we risk squandering, and then it will be necessary to remember.

I share all these personal memories because they should be written down somewhere, because our movement has been so focused on the momentary and ephemeral that the equivalent of entire libraries from the last few decades seem always in the process of being lost, discarded or rewritten. I have my grudges and I-told-you-sos, sure, but mostly I believe in order to win anything we have to try to retain what we learn. If the past is, as they say, a foreign nation, we should actively smuggle out word of its struggles. And, if we’re really lucky, we can pass such on to comrades in the foreign nations of the future.

While the me that lives in 2015 can only see 2025 as the cartoonish Bad End, we do not live in 2015.

Our present is birthing many futures. Some will make new mistakes. Let’s at least try to curtail the old mistakes.

'lol', texted the billionaire

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 10:47:27 +0000

“lol,” texted the billionaire, “i love it. fuck them.”

And so it was announced: in four years the world would be destroyed.

At first there was a flurry of editorials and think pieces.

On a wet fall morning a hundred student protesters broke through the outer chain link fencing surrounding an ICBM silo in Montana and were gunned down. That evening, with great fanfare, Philadelphia was nuked.

Aid workers were permitted to attend to hundreds of thousands of dying of burns and radiation poisoning in a network of tent cities surrounding the destruction because it would “give those bleeding hearts something to do.”

And, with that, the will to act was broken. When protesters dared to gather they were immediately set upon by bystanders, furious at them. Those willing to sacrifice to try to stop the scheduled missile launches were simply outnumbered by the self-interested, looking for a little bit more time and enraged by the self-righteousness of those still resisting.

A million futile think pieces were published in a haze of noise. A gaseous cloud of complexity, where every conceivable angle was discussed, and no traction made. Fatigue eclipsed all other emotions or thoughts.

One by one, most of the billionaires in their text group went on podcasts to brag. “Shouldn’t have said mean things about us.” “Should have been more respectful.” “This is what you get for breaking the social pact to obey us.” “You did this.” “Why should we care about our future selves? That’s empathy talk from those brainwashed by humanism.”

The dictator was slowly dying and didn’t care much one way or the other. He had been told that the planet would be turned into a mausoleum to his greatness and that seemed somewhat appropriate. After all, what was the point in letting anyone live after he died? Future generations might forget or erase or criticize his greatness. His advisors told him that the giant pyramid being built to his honor would last “forever” in the inky lifeless void to follow. He felt this was as good as any other policy proposal. No one bothered showing him any pictures of the barely fenced, empty plot of land where the pyramid was allegedly being built.

The economy, of course, was not doing well. Spiraling inflation and shockwaves of collapses battered everyone, even those who didn’t immediately cease showing up for work. This uncertainty and desperation enabled the billionaires to keep funding the cops and whatever other thugs they felt like. Promises of maybe getting to live as a slave in one of the bunkers that might survive kept a fringe motivated, but for a great many people the joy was simply getting to rape, torture, and kill in an authorized way, openly and alongside others who had your back. Finally the world was back to making sense.

They’d been arresting public figures, politicians and journalists one at a time for a few months–earlier mass raids of anarchists and their disappearances from custody went without comment–but then one day there was a flurry of arrests and almost the entire internet seemed inaccessible. Signal’s servers were gone. VPNs and Tor were blocked. Most of what was accessible were just websites and services that had been whitelisted after groveling.

The major social media platforms continued trucking along, forming the only place for communication but were completely hostile and reach was limited.

Some major tentpole publications continued, folks going through the motions of maintaining the prestige they’d dedicated their lives to, so folks were able to see the fawning coverage of the arrests and shuttering of newspapers as they proceeded.

Throughout it all, liberals encouraged everyone to disbelieve in what was happening in front of their eyes, because believing it would make it more real. Surely, when the time came, those obliged to turn the keys and input the firing codes would choose not to. Our make believe might somehow reach out and affect them.

But crews of kids went out to the silos and the submarines came into dock one at a time, getting retrofitted with automation, and no one did anything. It didn’t seem to be the right moment. And then everyone started to agree that too much had been automated, it was truly a done deal.

As the economy dissolved starvation, immediate needs started to overwhelm thought of anything else. As death squads got their daily jollies going door-to-door killing the bleeding hearts, the stress drove those few still working on resistance into conflict with one another. As the day of death marched closer, it became less painful to retreat to nostalgia and fantasy.

We woke up that morning to gunfire down the road and didn’t bother getting in the bathtub. The power was out, naturally. The wood fencing had long been burned for fuel, but we boiled tea with the remains of a blanket. What to do on this last day? Everyone was too depressed to even think of sex. Could go drive towards the nearest ICBM silo and shoot it up in one last–hopefully collective–dash? Honestly though, that just felt like a variation on the cops executing people for fun down the road. Just an act of expression into the void. And maybe, someone said, the billionaires were just joking. Maybe they were just trolling us. We started arguing.

Long drawn out howls, trying to find the skeleton key of thought that could unlock the trap we were stuck in. When the blinding light of the detonation came, my only thought was, well, at least I was right all along.

What’s In A Slogan? “KYLR” and Militant Anarcha-feminism

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 10:47:27 +0000

This text is available as a zine formatted for printing.

An anarchist walks out of a punk show to smoke. On her vest are anarchist patches with various standard slogans, “No Gods No Masters,” “Death To Transphobes,” “Kill Your Local Rapist,” “All Cops Are Bastards,” “Punch Nazis,” “From The River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” “Make Total Destroy,” “The Only Good Cop Is A Dead Cop,” “Eat The Rich,” “Death Before Detransition” and… “Fire To The Prisons.”

A suddenly red-faced bystander trots up to her to argue.

“Oh so you’re saying you support a blanket social policy of allowing anyone to burn anything they accuse of being a ‘prison’ with no evidentiary standards?! With that sort of policy you would have endorsed the Philadelphia police when they burned down an entire black neighborhood! Encouraging people to burn down prisons like vigilantes is worse than maintaining them because you’d kill all the prisoners inside! You’re actually the opposite of abolition!”

She laughs and spits in his face.

Back inside the band on stage howls something about “liberation.” The lead singer has raped five people, and each time an “accountability process” of his friends proclaimed him reformed, so still talking about it is “carceral.” The venue coordinator infamously provides unspecified drugs to young women and then brutally rapes them for hours in collaboration with his wife, both smirkingly justifying it with the phrase “buy the ticket, take the ride.” Several of their survivors have needed reconstructive surgery on their genitals. The bouncer has never raped anyone, but when girls get “hysterical” or “start talking drama” he always kicks them out and not their rapists. At the merch tables a proud womens’ and gender studies major distros zines with pastel flowers on them; he speaks in rapt, seemingly compassionate and spritely tones, about how “we all do harm.” He hospitalized his last partner twice. She got out a couple months ago and fled the punk scene and the city.

An older trans woman, covered in tattoos and with graying hair, tentatively enters the space with a friend, their first night out at a show in years and look around, quickly recognizing her own rapist happily chatting and backslapping with the “professional accountability team” who stepped in and offered their services when she called him out. One of her conditions was that he stop attending shows and stop drinking. He has a beer in hand.

Nothing can be done.

“It’s an unfortunate fact,” says an older punk in earshot, “but while perpetrators can be rehabilitated, survivors are often too broken and crazy to be allowed in our spaces. They’re disruptive, individualistic, and anti-democratic. They’d just continue the cycle of violence if they got their way.”

The older trans woman and her friend walk out the door, they’ve been there for all of a minute but the night is ruined.

The red-faced liberal with spit on his beard is still screaming apoplectically at the punk girl in the battle vest, “That’s assault! You’ve committed assault! That’s carceral! That’s retaliatory! You think you’re an anarchist but you’re reproducing the logic of revenge that constitutes the state! I’m calling the police!”

She’s still laughing.

The older trans woman notices her “Kill Your Local Rapist” patch and smiles, some tension finally releasing. “Hey, I like your patches. You wanna ditch this shitshow and go get pizza?”

A SLOGAN WITH CONTEXT

HOW STATELESS SOCIETIES WORK

A BRIEF REPORT BACK ON ACCOUNTABILITY PROCESSES

RAPE AS A VALUE SYSTEM, IDEOLOGY, AND POWER DYNAMIC

EPISTEMICS AND ASYMMETRIES

INSURGENCY VS LIBERAL “ABOLITIONISM”

RETRIBUTION AND REVENGE

CONCLUSION: THE DISCOURSE

.

A SLOGAN WITH CONTEXT

All language use takes place within social contexts. Unfortunately, the internet often strips away this context. Someone in a wildly different subculture, enmeshed in a different default paradigm, might see “No Gods No Masters” and immediately pattern-match that to a call to exterminate every religious believer. Or, more directly, see “Death To Transphobes,” believe it to be a serious policy proposal for death camps, and start screaming about how most of the world is presently transphobic, and so this is genocidal western imperialism. But just as “Death Before Detransition” isn’t a call to kill other people detransitioning, “From The River To The Sea…” isn’t a call to exterminate Jews from the Levant, and “Make Total Destroy” isn’t a call to blow up the sun, “Kill Your Local Rapist” isn’t a policy proposal to have everyone on the planet immediately lynch literally anyone ever accused of rape by anyone. Everyday language use, to say nothing of a political meme, always has context.

The line between deliberate baiting bad faith and simple ignorance on the part of responders can be hard to parse, however.

Some, with little contact with radical subcultures away from glowing electronic screens, might read the above story as an absurdly contrived one, rhetorically loaded hypotheticals designed to completely obscure reality. But while I stacked the deck in presentation, the examples are all absolutely real. Even the clownish objections to “Fire To The Prisons.”

Nor is the density of examples of rapists in one venue at all contrived. I’ve experienced going to a protest or a show or a general meeting and noticing a pile of rapists present countless times, my friends even more. All of the examples are themselves generalizations over multiple similar examples I’ve known, all well-worn common categories. I am not inventing extreme hypotheticals but trying to relay basic context to you. This is just part of the world in which old anarcha-feminist slogans like “Kill Your Local Rapist” live.

It’s also important to note that this isn’t something magically unique to subcultures or ones with certain politics. The background rate of rapists in our society is pretty high, even the extremely conservative estimates put it at 5% of men alone, with evidence for higher claims of 20%. This base rate applies to suburban normies just as much as activists or punks, the difference is that in subcultural scenes folks are often far more socially connected — instead of having at best a couple friends and a couple work friends like most people, you have social ties with hundreds of other people in your city. And plenty of people are constantly moving to and from other cities, bringing stories and direct experiences. You thus encounter more rapists in active subcultures. Although how many you hear about is influenced by how trustworthy folks may consider you. Yes, it’s true that predators are attracted to subcultural spaces with a large pool of potential victims, to say nothing of communities with high turnover like radical activism. And there are some who are drawn to spaces like anarchism because they mistakenly think a community prohibition on calling the cops means they’ll face no consequences. But the main influence that an ideology like anarchism has is being more prone to proactively air the presence of rapists rather than hush it up behind closed doors. Thus one publicly hears about the rapists in anarchist spaces (at least if the town in question isn’t toxically secretive), but less frequently about the same number in liberal, communist, or conservative spaces.

In 2007, some conservatives in Minnesota discovered the existence of anarchists as we planned for protests against the Republican National Convention. They read our websites with astonishment, “These anarchists seem really fucked up! They talk about having something called ‘rape culture’. Imagine being so evil that you have a rape culture!”

I hope you, dear reader, can laugh and immediately recognize the fallacy. But it’s a recurring one.

We exist pickled in an omnipresent rape culture. The chortling conservatives certainly do. There are tons of rapists in their communities; they just cover it up, studiously avoid seeing it, or torture the definition of rape so badly that the complaints of their uncle’s child bride don’t register. Liberals of course use different deflections, but are just as saturated. From the Catholic Church to Hollywood, our society may occasionally put on some pretenses of opposing rape, but in every way that matters abet and defend rapists. Work a crisis line and you will discover, beyond the callousness of almost everyone and the stunning lack of even the most basic resources for survivors, the sheer ubiquity of rape in all corners and all communities.

Driving home one night a couple years ago, my partner and I stopped for a naked girl standing dazed in the middle of the street as every other driver moved around her, dismissing her as an insane homeless person. She was drugged out of her mind, terrified beyond all sanity, and incapable of speech. As we waited with her for hours, got her clothes and drove her home, the horrific bruises started to form everywhere on her body. She had barely escaped a planned and brutal rapist who had clearly done this many times before. She was just some normie girl. He’s one of our friendly normie neighbors. We just don’t know which one; it would have been inappropriate to press her. Statistically speaking, one of your neighbors is just like him.

If you think you don’t personally know rapists, you just have your eyes closed.

What can be done?

By default, even in radical subcultures, everyone wants to go through something like official channels. No one likes to rock the boat and piss everyone off. So you walk up to the show organizer or the venue organizer or the bouncer and ask them to kick a rapist. They refuse. “Where’s your evidence?! We can’t just accept testimony from anyone! I take rape really seriously and so I’m offended by how casually your making this accusation without sufficient documentation!”

Even if the individual in question isn’t bad faith, they instinctively see the situation as one of conflict mediation where they are obliged to start from neutrality between two equally likely possibilities, rape and false-accusation. Except there usually is an asymmetry: they’re annoyed at you for making it their problem and they’re often already in closer social proximity to the rapist, otherwise you wouldn’t be bringing this to them. Thus if they side with you to any degree there will be fallout for them, hangouts and conversations will suddenly become awkward at best. Removing a band or a speaker or a tabler they were working with? That’s a huge cost on them.

From your pocket your phone keeps buzzing as many of the alerted survivors you’re friends with scream at you to jump their rapist, to get them kicked out, to scream warnings out to the entire room, to cut the power to the whole show, to relay a personal message to anyone he’s chatting up, but watch out, he carries a big knife and freely uses it on folks… It’s overwhelming. You remember helping one of these friends get to the emergency room and then escape when an officer demanded a statement. You remember months of helping another friend process over text messages.

So you keep pressing the venue’s authorities for a while about the active risk to attendees the rapists pose, and emphasizing that the venue could be seen as culpable for refusing to do anything. They finally relent and allow you to make a general statement about the presence of rapists in the room, “But don’t name anyone!!”

That’s how you end up standing before a room of people, interrupting the show or meeting or whatever and awkwardly tell them that there are known rapists in the room and just to like watch your drinks and maybe be a little careful.

The room suddenly explodes in outrage at you.

“Why won’t you name them!” “Because they obviously don’t have proof!” “I say! Interesting hypothetical! I think we should all discuss how we should decide these kinds of novel situations!”

With amazing speed the room spontaneously organizes itself into a collective judicial proceeding. Everyone feels right with this new arrangement. It feels correct, known. The Thing To Do.

Regardless of whether any given person took civics class, there are omnipresent narratives, frameworks and techniques in our society that we grow up breathing in and out like air. So the entire room starts vapidly declaring phrases like “Innocent Until Proven Guilty.”

One of the brutal serial rapists you know closely looks you square in the eyes with a cocky smirk and announces to the room, “Speaking as a survivor, this feels really retraumatizing and inappropriate. It’s irresponsible to call people out against the wishes of any survivors and outside of the formal channels for transformative justice. In general I think you all could really stand to read unspecified Black Indigenous feminists so you could learn this kind of carceral mob mentality doesn’t help anything.”

After you’ve done this dance a few times you stop bothering. You just go home. You never go in the first place.

Dozens of you do the same. Then hundreds. But, of course, the shows, the protests, the meetings, keep happening with the same old folks and the same old rapists and their enablers. New survivors keep being generated. But the people who remain notice none of this damage; they thank themselves for having bravely resisted the potential injustice of wild accusations. Some of them think they helped survivors! They took the dangerous chaotic messiness and pressured it into stable institutionalized accountability processes. When a rapist talks a big talk about being reformed after reading a single bell hooks zine, everyone present feels warmly encouraged. They did do the right thing! Of course they did! Society is at peace now. The destabilizing exceptions have been dealt with.

And they can get those warm feels again in a couple years when he echoes the same words in an accountability process for another rape!

Part of the dynamic is that half the population quite evidently can’t imagine being raped, yet think it’s totally plausible that they could rape someone or be falsely accused.

But another dynamic is that liberalism completely warps most people’s perspectives, making them incapable of thinking outside the implicit framework of a state. The necessity of centralized authority to exclusively evaluate and sentence, itself bound by formal constraints, is deeply embedded in many people, regardless of whether this is relabeled as The Commune, The Organization, or The Community.

Okay, but what else could we do?

“Kill Your Local Rapist” may read to a liberal used to thinking in terms of policy proposals, like a legal regime of immediately executing anyone ever accused of being a rapist by anyone else; certainly a bad prescription. But even if most anarcha-feminist punks wearing the patch mean something more like a provocative push towards survivor-led militancy, for most liberals there’s nothing in their frame of reference besides legal trials and lynch mobs. Contextual provocation or not, “Kill Your Local Rapist” is still an endorsement of “vigilante” action, the same as assassinating a cop or CEO or nazi, and isn’t that just mindless mob justice that would lead to endless cycles of violence?

What even is there outside the state?

HOW STATELESS SOCIETIES WORK

The first thing to understand about actually existing stateless societies is that they’re not naive, merely stateless by ignorance, having failed to invent or even imagine the state. To the contrary, stateless societies are constantly haunted by the possibility of state-formation and thus diligently shape almost everything they do around avoiding such runaway power. They may have seen a king emerge in a neighboring region and they’ll be damned if the same thing happens to them.

This is important because no state in history was formed through rational deliberation on collective action problems and risk —like a liberal textbook might suggest— instead the statist system is everywhere the unbroken continuous legacy of pillage and despotism. No community ever consensed on a social contract; power was always imposed. Insofar as modern states “provide” any boons to their citizens, these are the product of the state eventually seizing control over preexisting dynamics in society or seeking to better manage and control their workforce.

Liberals are very proud of a few “checks and balances” imposed into the flesh of these bloodthirsty beasts: things like voting, competing branches of government, semi-consistent legal systems, and epistemic blinders to deal with evaluating truth in all-or-nothings. In practice, of course, none of these has any real traction or stopping power. At best they slow the state’s compounding tyranny a little. The power-seeking simply focus their efforts on capturing a single existing behemoth and then leverage its economies of scale to do unimaginable levels of harm. The centralization is a runaway feedback process. All the incentives are to increase the power of that beast, never to diminish its power, and so people are fed to it in an endless stream of carnage. Killing the beast becomes a harder and harder task, requiring ever greater levels of sacrifice, so that even if we eventually win, the statist system that presently enlocks the planet will have tortured, enslaved and murdered for generations.

To avoid this runaway process, at least locally within their own domain, stateless societies create fractally more checks and balances, often by rejecting centralization entirely, so that every individual becomes themselves an active check and balance in a host of ways.

To really understand stateless societies it’s best to get outside the frame of mind of institutions — thinking of a “stateless society” as a single thing, a state that technically isn’t a state, a state minus some distinct state aspects — and instead think in terms of a collection of individuals running various strategies, in a game theoretic sense.

In game theory you might have a set of actors all interacting with one another in endlessly repeating iterations. Thanks to repetition and the ability of actors to remember past behavior, there can be strong pressures towards cooperation. The anarchist game theorist Michael Taylor famously wrote about these dynamics, providing rigorous modern grounding for Kropotkin’s arguments for the social and evolutionary emergence of mutual aid.

The classic example is the n-iterated prisoner’s dilemma. While snitching is the optimal strategy in the one-off version of the game, when parties repeatedly play the game and can make decisions based on the track record of the other player, more complicated strategies become possible and yet the best one is incredibly simple: tit-for-tat with a slight skew towards cooperation. You cooperate by default but punish deviation from cooperation, maybe eventually testing out a tentative forgiveness; you don’t trust someone against the evidence.

More interesting things start happening when you run a bunch of different types of games and increase the number of players in the pool from two. Surprisingly, cooperation often remains highly viable, but two things broadly emerge:

The first is that the population often contains a mix of strategies. Some players (human or automated) consistently play minority strategies and still survive. The resulting ecosystem may stabilize with a high number of cooperators, but it usually retains a stubborn minority of predatory monsters who will take advantage of them at the first opportunity; these never go entirely extinct or all mutate to a different strategy, at best they settle into a persistent fringe exploiting the cooperators.

The second is that dominant strategies of cooperation involve not just mild retaliations in kind when someone does something to you specifically, but aggressive self-sacrificing retaliation against those who demonstrate predatory strategies to anyone. Solidarity, as the old anarchist saying goes, means attack.

What’s important to note is that there is nothing like a state in these models, just decentralized individuals adopting varying strategies. Depending on a host of things the resulting overall ecosystems that stabilize can vary quite a bit.

Of course, anthropologists never needed fancy math and computer simulations to discover this reality. Many learned it quickly from just talking to those actually living in stateless societies.

These people were not unaware of the possibility of state formation, but all-too-aware, and thus their societies were characterized by extreme hypervigilance distributed in a multitude of ways aggressively trying to nip all possible state-formation in the bud.

The central imperative is that anyone seeking power be immediately recognized and attacked or aggressively sanctioned by everyone. If someone tries to set up severe charismatic authority, a mafia shakedown operation or a personal army, this must be quickly detected and relayed widely and everyone in the vicinity has to put everything down to go create a massive disincentive, using whatever’s normalized as sufficient for a class of cases in a long spectrum of options from mockery to lethal force. Such confrontations can be costly, and some individuals might be disinclined to join in, so often the strategic norm is to likewise apply social pressure against neutrality, in much the same way that activists will when mobilizing a boycott or strike.

Infamously, state societies like our own normalize neutrality and passiveness, even in the face of oppression, always sloughing off all responsibility or decisionmaking to some distant collective institution or authority that, even if it’s somehow aligned against the oppression in question, has an inherently hard time integrating knowledge of particular contexts much less acting quickly or dexterously. In contrast, stateless societies, at their best, are all about active individual responsibility. Proactive vigilance against tyranny taking root is the concern of everyone, with a distributed social fabric thus enabling individuals to apply their own unique particularized knowledge to disincentivize power-seeking behavior, in ways that can fluidly shift and vary across contexts. How far along is a certain charismatic individual aggregating sharp influence to becoming a warlord?

The mix of strategies a given stateless society uses around this disincentivization vary, and obviously not every one of them should be uncritically treated or fully adopted by anarchists, who additionally seek to avoid interpersonal domination and maximize freedom, not merely to avoid states. Some strategies — like extreme mockery of anything that smells like personal confidence, or extremely aggressive sanction of having any wealth whatsoever, or periodic uprisings against the “sorcery” of anyone with social prestige, or totally ostracizing anyone who uses violence at all ever, even when resisting slave raids — clearly overreach. Those might suppress the emergence of power loci and keep the cancer of state-formation at bay, but they do so at arguably unnecessary costs. Someone being obnoxiously arrogant is not the same thing as someone actually wielding power. Similarly, a small degree of variation in personal material wealth or status is worth accepting if the alternative is owning nothing but what you can carry, never having friends, or never excelling at anything. And similarly violence as a category isn’t the same thing as power or oppression, but often quite important to resistance.

But even if the strategies that congealed in some stateless communities as social norms are less than fully optimized by anarchist perspectives – and we can significantly improve on them with more meta-awareness and nuance – we may still appreciate how such societies historically evolved such imprecise measures and overcorrections just to be safe. The examples of bottom-up censure of wealth, arrogance, or any violence are understandable failures of targeting a simple and readily apparent metric rather than the underlying target, a classic hallmark of social norms formed through piecemeal evolution rather than deliberative radicalism.

When it comes to rapists, a diversity of responses is documented, in part depending on how gender-egalitarian a society was. Two extreme categories are illustrative: In the first, some stateless societies just kill rapists (or expel them alone into the wilderness where death is likely). In the second, other societies handle a rapist by means of adjudicators in a polycentric legal system.

Neither of these examples is perfect, nevertheless the structure of imperfections can be instructive.

The Xeer polycentric legal system across Somalia, adopted since the seventh century, is a classic example of a stateless “justice system” and has been cited as inspiration by both social anarchists and libertarians. There’s certainly strong commonalities with approaches independently invented and applied in anarchist communities across the world since the 90s. Yet, across these cases, while the polycentric adjudication model could work on cases of mere interpersonal harm, like stealing another activist’s car, they proved incredibly weak on rape, being structurally skewed towards maintaining social peace.

In more traditional polycentric systems like Xeer, kinship is the central social unit and this collective structure is how accountability is enforced. Unlike individuals who can die and thus no longer present their case to an adjudicator, families are relatively perpetual “actors.” Your family is thus responsible for defending you, taking any claim you might have before adjudicators, but your actions are in turn the responsibility of your family. If you murder someone, their family and your family agree on common reputable adjudicators, the adjudicators weigh the evidence and circumstances, and then your family pays their family some restitution. Agreeing on common adjudicators is actually pretty smooth, as are the competitive pressures on them to be neutral between clans and consistent. Outsiders expect this sort of system to immediately devolve into blood feuds between families, but those are surprisingly rare because no one involved is a fool and the entire system is shaped around avoiding such. Peace rather than conflict is always strongly in the interests of families and adjudicators, individuals be damned.

As two liberal critics put it,

“the accused in a rape case is usually required to pay monetary compensation, a burden shared by his family and clan members, or, in limited circumstances, he may be required to marry the victim. The victim is not perceived as being denied justice, or as someone whose welfare has been subsumed by the wider interests of her community. Instead, keeping the rape case out of the courts and the public eye is regarded as advantageous for the victim. The objective sought by elders is to ensure there are no reprisals that could unleash a cycle of violence and to protect the reputation and marriage prospects of the victim, not to prevent future criminal behaviour. While peace between families and clans is maintained, it is at the expense of providing a deterrent against rape” source

We can also view the explicit patriarchal norms of such traditional polycentric systems as a product of regulatory capture. The professional adjudicators have some level of competition keeping them honest between clans, but with stature and familial representation as central dynamics, both are easily captured by the gerontocratic. With men then controlling roles as familial representatives and adjudicative elders they can lock out women and their concerns, both involving rapes inside a clan and rapes that cross clan boundaries. This is the core problem with the collective institutions of the Xeer approach. Maybe not quite as bad as states, but subject to the same corruptions.

In medieval Iceland – often cited by anarcho-capitalists as an ideal – the same sort of relative centralization and clan structure applied, with similar patriarchal failure modes. In relative contrast among polycentric legal systems, the anthropologist Oko Elechi detailed in Doing Justice Without The State, how his people, the Igbo, used what were functionally overlapping meshes of mutual aid societies instead of patriarchal clans, so a given individual could appeal to multiple groups for solidarity and representation, including along common lines of identity like youth and women. The point of such further decentralization was to provide counter pressures against systemic regulatory capture, although this did not end up preventing the Afikpo (in contrast to the Abaja, Otanzu and Isu) from classifying some rape as adultery, and adultery as a crime against social stability, with the solution sometimes being the marriage of the survivor and their rapist. As Oko Elechi writes, centralization into the Nigerian state only expanded such leniency towards rape. Deeper decentralization than Xeer is thus an important but insufficient component in stopping rape, there are broader dynamics that constitute a culture, for good or for bad, beyond a formal justice system. The book People Without Government, by the anthropologist Harold Barclay — who came to embrace anarchism — covers a wide array of examples of stateless societies beyond such polycentric systems, including more egalitarian ones, comprised of diffuse strategic mixes where distributed sanction and more spontaneous ad hoc counter-organizing or direct action is normalized.

Given all this context, the liberals quoted on the Xeer system are silly to expect a state justice system to offer survivors anything more or provide substantive disincentivization. Xeer is captured by patriarchy in no small part because of the centralization within it. The centralization of states makes them prey to even worse regulatory capture by patriarchy — consider the sheer hostility cops have to survivors — and even if they were to be somehow shifted to prosecute rape stringently, we would have good reason to not want them to. Rape, by its nature, often occurs in ways where knowledge of the truth is highly localized; you and your friends may have very good contextual reason to believe, but that isn’t necessarily transitive to a distant global arbiter like the state. What individuals can in fact know near absolutely, distant strangers divorced from the social local web of trust must be more reserved about. A single centralized system with a monopoly on violence should not easily believe any given accusation, because that would incentivize wild exploitation of the system. A single centralized system capable of extracting the truth would use those surveillance powers for absolute tyranny. It’s almost as if centralization removes dexterity, knowledge, and nuance while intensifying all dangers.

If centralized solutions like state judicial systems were the only option on the menu for rape survivors, there would be no hope.

Thankfully, we can demonstrably do without states. Statelessness thus offers a wide platform within which we can craft better individual strategies and norm ecosystems – not just polycentric adjudicative institutions. The extent of the possible is much vaster than with statism. It’s thus critical that we understand the core strategy dynamics that enable them to exist at all; but not every experiment is perfect and we should learn from and improve on mistakes.

A BRIEF REPORT BACK ON ACCOUNTABILITY PROCESSES

In the 1990s anarcha-feminists started experimenting with ad hoc attempts to reform rapists. Some of the early projects in Portland, Minneapolis, and Philly became templates that were copied across continents and into small towns with great hope.

Uniform across these attempts was a DIY ethos. How hard could it be?

But the folks involved often had divergent implicit goals and expectations; for example:

1) Restoring the survivor, providing them with safety from the rapist/abuser.

2) Protecting potential targets of the rapist/abuser in the future.

3) Getting the rapist/abuser to change their core motivational system and entire view of the world.

4) Restoring peace in the broader community and suppressing social conflicts.

This is because the makeup of an accountability team dramatically varied. Sometimes it was the survivor’s friends and the perpetrator’s friends. Sometimes only one “side.” Sometimes it was them plus bystanders. Sometimes it was only ad hoc bystanders. Sometimes it was bystanders trying to make a reputation for themselves as professionals and authorities in this new field. Sometimes it was just an existing patriarch leaping at the opportunity to posture as macho and benevolent. Personal motivations varied wildly.

I want to be clear: Despite them now being a widespread joke, I’ve seen and heard of accountability processes that worked. But only ever because the perpetrator was independently motivated and driven to change or because the accountability process was over something like mere interpersonal conflict, a theft of a car or a clash of personalities, for example, not an act like rape or abuse that’s grounded in power-seeking.

The latter sort of successes parallel polycentric adjudication systems like Xeer. They work really well over friction and economic disputes between individuals! When an individual does mere “harm” to another, an accountability process may be the way to go. But rape is usually not even remotely in the same category as mere harm.

An anarcha-feminst friend of mine and scholar of accountability processes, who was herself repeatedly raped for years as a child by a neighbor, has laughed darkly about these approaches for over a decade. “They think of rape through the lens of a drunken consent slip during a hookup, because that’s hard enough to confront, they can’t really even begin to fathom anything beyond that.”

In this view (3) is virtually impossible. Someone whose core motivation towards the world is one of predation, who joined anarchist subcultural spaces purely because he thought there would be more vulnerable lambs there, is not going to invent empathy and ethics from scratch by reading some feminist theory. He’s not going to be peer-pressured into it. Nor is he going to break down on the couch, discover some childhood trauma, and transcend it, because two punk scouts trying to get their therapy badge talked to him. And if you think “providing him with resources for his needs and community belonging” is going to open his heart, congratulations you’re just voluntarily subsidizing a predator, while in the process offensively and incorrectly suggesting poor or marginalized people are more likely to rape.

At best he’s gonna learn some new impressive language and plan ways around this inconvenience in the future.

Some people get really weird at this junction and start expressing existential depression around the proposition “everyone can change.” I’ve never understood this reaction.

There’s a finite number of bits in a human brain and thus always some conceivable input string that will undo whatever complex path-dependent chain of causes led that person to ossify into the values they currently hold. With immortality and trillions of years a team of likewise immortal therapists could nonstop try to figure out some exact fractal skeleton key that will turn Hitler into a devoted anarchist. It is technically possible.

And you, yourself, can do incredible feats of self-reconfiguration, if you want to. Take some LSD, reconnect with your childhood perspective, meditate and build extensive chains of self-awareness down the entirety of your conscious process. Restructure your daily habits, correct your default narratives. There’s so much you can do. You are almost infinitely plastic, exactly to the extent you want to be. One of the sweetest guys I’ve known was studiously self-controlled like no other and of constant compassionate assistance to survivors, precisely because he’d beaten a partner decades prior and, living with the visceral horror and disgust of that, on his own dedicated his entire life to never letting anything like that happen again. But if those processes, narratives, instinctual strategic frames, and notions of self-identity, in your brain with root privileges, are never internally motivated to release control, then nothing’s happening.

Neither of these facts changes the reality of cost-benefit tradeoffs we usually face. How long will it take to convert a captured spy of the enemy army before we trust him to wander freely back out into the trenches, transformed into a committed anarchist? More time and effort than we can spare.

Half the stories told of failed accountability processes zero in on this. The perpetrator never changed in any core way; instead years went by with a crew of activists wasting their lives and energy down the drain. In many cases this is so demoralizing and exhausting that they drop out of the movement or of being activists altogether.

But the other half of the stories are somehow even worse. In these stories it’s not just the perpetrator failing to change, it’s that the entire accountability process was hijacked by folks involved in it — regulatory capture on the fly.

Sometimes the accountability is captured by the perpetrator’s friends who use it as a shield between him and the survivor, a way to marginalize her and paint her as unreasonable, and then a way to certify him as reformed and aggressively silence anyone still talking about things.

Sometimes the accountability process is captured by opportunists seeking validation. They see the accountability process as a personal position of power and prestige. From this vantage point, it makes no sense to admit any problems with the accountability process. The whole goal is to certify what an amazing job as mediator you did, and thus anything to the contrary must be suppressed.

Often the accountability process is captured by scene elders and bystanders whose primary goal is to stop the fighting, to remove all social pressures to break apart friendships. Their whole framework is restoring The Community, a nebulous concept that means something like a warm feeling of belonging their instinctual primate brain conjures when they have a bunch of friends and no one is mad. Of course the most efficient way to do that is to kick the survivor out. She’s the one that raised all the fuss in the first place. The rapist only hurt one relationship, she’s hurt many relationships by trying to make them take a stance on the rapist. Folks may not consciously want to expel the survivor from the start; but as things go on the conflict between their goals and hers become more and more apparent, which they consider a betrayal by the survivor, prompting them to come up with reasons to crusade against her. Additionally —beyond the maintenance of “Community”— specific scene elders often actively benefit from the continuation of patriarchal norms just as tribal elders in Somalia do.

Usually it’s a mixture of these dynamics of regulatory capture. As a result, survivors frequently report the accountability process as far more traumatizing and alienating than the rape.

This has led to widespread endorsement of survivors going it alone or with their friends, which can still look like different things. In terms of accountability processes there’s been a shift to recognize that “if it’s not survivor-led, it’s not accountability.” (Because who else would it be accountability to?) But beyond the instances where a survivor believes an accountability process might work, anarchists have adapted the tools we use in insurgent struggle on other fronts, recognizing the rapist as often less a case of interpersonal conflict than something more akin to state-formation.

So anarcha-feminists form networks of underground cells (whisper networks), some crews become research professionals (adapting work exposing nazis), folks may do a house demo (much like a march on the boss), or sabotage the perpetrator’s tools, or tag and paste up warnings, or hunt down and jump the perpetrator like one does neonazi boneheads. And just as boycotts can be necessary up and down the supply chain to bring a capitalist to heel, mobilization against rapists obliges pressing sanctions on their friends and support network.

A vast shift has thus occurred from viewing rapists as misbehaving folks in mere intra-scene conflict, to viewing them as existential threats or outside enemies. Just as anarchists will still ruthlessly organize labor against “small business owner” bosses within our subcultural scenes, ignoring their claims that “we’re all on the same side,” so too have we learned to organize against rapists.

So it’s worth asking why anyone would think the community-restoring “accountability” approaches would work with rapists, when we would never consider applying them with some random neonazi bonehead, MAGA chud, occult ecofascist entryist, TERF karen, or killer cop.

RAPE AS A VALUE SYSTEM, IDEOLOGY, AND POWER DYNAMIC

I mean the answer obviously is patriarchy. Any given feminist on the street could provide an impromptu lecture in depth on why so many people identify with rapists more than survivors. As well as how the overall social norms created by rape culture provides a variety of material benefits to tons of people (mostly cis men) who don’t themselves rape, thus seeding incentives to shy from tackling it. Hell, I knew a cis woman who explicitly endorsed rape culture because she liked it rough and “it makes getting laid easier for me; if some other bitches get hurt, why should I care?” (She later raped a close friend of mine and then bragged about it publicly afterwards, mocking him.)

Vast numbers of books and zines have been written tracing all the ways narratives underpinning rape culture course through our society and embed themselves as common sense, both misrepresenting the facts of patriarchy and reinforcing identification and values that align with rapists against survivors. But if tracing such narratives were sufficient, one could truly just hand a perpetrator (or apologist) a reading list and fix the problem.

What anarchists and feminists have been emphasizing in addition is that rape is a matter of power. Beyond the experience of rape for its target, which is a direct and visceral experience of having all your agency taken away, much the same way that waterboarding is, rape is about power for the rapist:

1) People feel sufficiently entitled to use other people’s bodies because they already have only weak recognition of the other person as just as much a moral ends as themselves and thus relax or simply fail to feel ethical diligence towards them. Controlling people is often quite efficiently instrumental to other ends. Existing apathy and self-interest thus finds rapid expression as power.

2) People pursue power over others as an end-unto-itself, relishing situations and relationships of domination and control. The victory of suppressing another person’s annoying agency, the sense of strength and potency is intoxicating to a lot of people, but it also closely interlocks with their core worldview. Power as a terminal goal thus becomes satiated through the rape itself.

3) There are power differentials in our society such that it’s not just quite feasible to get away with rape, but often positively rewarded. People with power forge bonds together over raping their social inferiors. This doesn’t just mean billionaires bonding on Epstein’s island, but extends as a wide phenomenon: Oakland cops repeatedly raping an underage girl together. A circus punk project, band, fraternity, or occult group may rape to demonstrate their solidarity with one another over both outsiders and the targets’ specific class. It extends down to the most micro-interpersonal level: a couple might help each other rape a target in part because it creates shared social culpability and obligation to one another. Thus rape often functions to facilitate broader social dynamics, like centralized social bubbles of power, some of the earliest seeds of states.

When speaking of patriarchy as a cultural and institutional system, rape is its most core technology of enforcement. Rapists are not just cops in the sense of dishing out terror and control, but in the way that they interlock in mutual class identity, solidarity, and collaboration. The lone rapist whose motivation is cold apathy and selfishness rather than active sadism is facilitated by this wider army of rapists, who make his choice so easy, and of course the impact of his act is to reinforce the wider system; in this he operates akin to someone voluntarily deputized into a posse.

Note how you can’t at all fix this stuff by reading a pile of feminist analysis or being hugged by everyone in your “community.” These are questions of values. Someone who does not ultimately care very much about other people will be unmoved. Someone who sees power as an end-in-itself might read feminist analyses of patriarchy as blueprints with critical commentary implying how patriarchy could be strengthened. The member of the fraternity, manarchist platformist reading group, or whatever that uses collective solidarity around rape as a bond will be unmoved so long as the power nexus remains. Even if you break it up and resituate each member in a new community of exclusively feminists who might create a different norm system of social solidarity, you haven’t addressed the underlying motivations that led him to it.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, in theory, to bootstrap a change in someone’s personal values against their value for the self-preservation of said values — values can and do change, but such cases are relatively rare in adults, usually the result of preexisting dramatic internal tension between values. They’re also really hard to oversee or mastermind from the outside, especially in an antagonistic or stressful confrontation with someone they’ve raped, where every incentive is to find a way out. At best, all that social pressure or rewards can do is incentivize not getting caught, performing a certain way, winning over those watching you, triangulating, taking advantage of new context. Importantly, and contrary to a popular myth on the Left, value changes are not something that falls into place as an inexorable deterministic result of social changes. The structures and norms of a society can certainly partially influence the development of our orientations, but a significant component is random, internal or stray local influences. And many of those locked into power-seeking values stay locked in.

In this sense it makes sense to think of rapists in much the same way that we do cops or capitalists or tankies or nazis, as ideological enemies. If you find a cop hiding in anarchist circles there’s no question about the severity of the response required, so why should we treat rapists all that differently?

When confronted with these realities, a sizable fraction of people in radical milieus have one of four responses:

1) One response is to take objection to the entire idea of anarchism in the first place. “What?! Since when are we supposed to be opposed to power-seeking or actively seek to prevent it in the wider world?! That’s woke moralism!!” To which you can really only say, yes yes yes, we’re anarchists, that’s the whole point, see yourself out. This fraction of people is small, but they will at times quite frankly admit that they’re in radical circles specifically to prey upon people. They may see anarchist politics as adding some slight constraints on how the game of such predation functions, but they primarily see it as about resisting distant formal institutions like the state. Struggles for interpersonal power and domination should continue — as they can’t imagine sociality or satiation without it — and they were mistakenly attracted to anarchism as the affirmation of this supposed “individualism.” This sort of person is often also attracted to occult or satanist circles — “do what thou wilt!” has many a nazi or rapist in punk circles shouted in their own defense — but always believes the liberal narrative that police either desire or are intended to stop rape, and thus see any anarchist efforts at stopping rape as us “being cops.” In this topsy-turvy worldview, rapists are the anti-establishment rebels, and those survivors struggling against their oppression are tantamount to a police state.

2) Some people weirdly have an emotional breakdown and existential crisis, because their entire worldview has been built on the assumption that people are innately good and only institutions make them behave badly. They correctly notice that police forces are structurally incentivized to behave in certain ways, but largely discount that they also work by centrally collecting and mobilizing people with already bad value systems. In this sort of person’s perspective, power is a matter of big distant systems that somehow exist separate from us and then impose their logic downward, not something that bubbles up fractally. But state-formation is not something magically imposed from without, nor is it a single mistake. Individuals are constantly trying out different strategies from birth on, and thus power-seeking is constantly reinvented, at least at some low rate. While actually existing stateless societies understand the need for constant vigilance and suppression of power, this person often inherits a very marxist way of thinking in which people are merely the products of their culture and time, so abolishing rape is impossible until we have a revolution and abolish capitalism; whereupon it’s an automatic result.

3) Quite a lot of folks will violently reject the premise that rape is about power on the grounds that, because they worry about “accidentally” raping someone, such cases should be the prototypical ones. I want to be clear: well-intentioned missteps around consent in bed can happen, as can missteps from relatively limited levels of apathy and selfishness. Consent isn’t a legalistic absolutist system of formal agreements, but can extend to context, implications, non-verbal signals, etc. Someone didn’t think you were affected by alcohol, but you were. You froze up having a severe trauma reaction and your partner didn’t notice. You felt obligated to say yes and pretend you were enthusiastic because you were alone on a boat with them and couldn’t risk “the implication.” Even people who are hypervigilant about consent can miss signals and context. Furthermore there are situations where, yes, someone got lazy about attentiveness and memory from what is ultimately their selfishness, but the degree of such is relatively limited. “Hey come back to bed,” and they lightly grab your arm, something that in some contexts would just be a friendly form of nonverbal communication, but creates a threatening or “implication” dynamic in this specific context they don’t bother to see. Or someone consensually sleeps with one partner off-condom and then gets so wasted before sleeping with their other partner they fail to inform them of the contextual change in risks around STIs. Or someone gets so into the act that they at one point instinctually and animalistically claw so hard at their partner’s back they draw blood, despite an explicit prior agreement against pain or blood. These are violations of consent and they can be quite grave or dismissible to different affected parties in different contexts. Consent is inextricably a felt experience, not something entirely reducible to formal paperwork. It’s totally fair for someone to describe a given experience like this as rape, including the implicit leveraging not just of interpersonal power but of systemic power, but also feel that their rapist is not wedded to the pursuit of power as a core value and would pretty easily course-correct forever upon being informed and helped. Survivors — as previously discussed — are the most informed party with the best knowledge of their situation. “We were both 17, he was just ignorant,” is a common line as is, “it was technically a consent violation worth noting, but I read it as an accident, it didn’t mean much to me, and having given it a lot of thought I think she’s now very unlikely to repeat it.” And fair enough! But while somewhat common, these are simply not anywhere near the prototypical case of rape. The vast majority of rapes are done by serial rapists.

4) Most frequently, however, the person goes into conniptions about “how can you know?!!!” For survivors and their immediate friends — those likely to be wearing the aforementioned “KYLR” patches — this is a completely bizarre and ludicrous response, a shockingly bad faith non-sequitur. How can you “know” that someone is a cop or a CEO? How can a survivor of Guantanamo bay “know” that their torturer is a torturer? Such demands are absurdities, preposterous derailments and deflections that aggressively misread an ongoing context in which almost never is there any conflict or remotely plausible doubt over the facts. It’s honestly rare even for serial rapists in subcultural spaces to deny their actions, so confidently insulated have they long been from any consequences. A lot of the time the rapist even has released a statement admitting to it, thinking that will win accolades and then bury the issue. “But she’s a crazy bitch who keeps bringing it up” and “this was a couple years ago, let it go” are usually more than sufficient. Those who do deny the bare facts usually do so in the most cartoonish and least convincing manner possible, my favorite example was a bro who puffed up his chest and shouted in the middle of an anarchist space, “What, are you gonna listen to those lying crazy bitches! Say it to my face, you pussies! I’ll stab anyone who says I’m patriarchal!” Suffice to say there should be no real epistemic barrier to evaluating the truth of his case. In this ubiquitous context of well-known serial rapists infesting subcultural spaces and continuing to prey without consequences, as well as the >99% failure rate to do anything by centralized systems (state justice and organizational accountability processes), people declaring “we must treat everyone as totally innocent until proven guilty in a trial of law!” might as well be speaking Martian. But objectors in this vein often treat their objection as a concern with runaway power… in the other direction. “If we promote believing any accusation and taking militant action then that’ll inevitably lead to opportunists taking advantage of this and the most successful will be those with power already, targeting the weakest, so any punishment of rape will only deepen existing power relations!”

So okay, let’s finally talk about

EPISTEMICS AND ASYMMETRIES

In 2012, defenders of a contrived accountability process that had not just protected an acknowledged violent abuser but aggressively attacked the survivor and her friends, trying to box them out of anarchist and antifascist circles nationwide, interrupted a feminist conference to read aloud a statement ghostwritten in part by Kristian Williams. What it amounted to was a list of contrived rhetorical questions like, Should we always believe survivors?! Should we always follow the wishes of survivors?!

They were unprepared for the room to be critical of this insultingly baiting line of attack and, when folks pressed back, this confirmed to them that feminists were totally unreasonable, gripped by hysterical thinking and a mob mentality. They themselves were self-evidently the cool, collected, reasonable ones, dealing in abstractions and principles; it’s such a shame that such emotional feminism had infected anarchism and refused to civilly debate in the public marketplace of ideas. But then such feminists were so obviously illogical that is it any surprise they only rely upon knee-jerk denunciation of anyone who merely questions them?

If it will bring you comfort, let me now hold your hand and say, yes, exceptions are possible. Exceptions exist.

Yes, there are occasionally some false accusations in radical spaces. I’ve seen people in queer spaces rush to get out fake accusations first in hopes of turning a community against their survivor. I’ve also seen rapists compose studiously disingenuous callouts of their survivor. I’ve seen all kinds of wildly fucked shit. Still, false accusations are far rarer than even just easily confirmable ones.

Yes, a flat societal norm of “believe every stray verbal accusation of any stranger with 100% credence and immediately use lethal force as a punitive measure” will be exploited. In the immediate aftermath of #MeToo someone once went around town threatening people with the claim that they were best friends with a prominent feminist (they were not) and, “if you don’t do as I say I’ll tell them to make up a callout about you.” I’ve read text messages in which someone tries to rope another person into a relationship by threatening to make a contrived callout. Both opportunists were laboring under the hilariously mistaken belief that callouts are easy and likely to do anything beyond at most losing a couple friends and causing some friction, and both were promptly exposed in their malicious opportunism on local anarcha-feminist whisper networks.

Yes, there are still ethical bounds on survivor requests. If a survivor asks you to blow up a planet to kill their rapist, that’s bad. If a survivor asks you, as one once did, to kill their violent abuser – who had literally gotten away with murdering a homeless man – by, in turn, burning down an entire venue he was in, killing countless innocent attendees as collateral damage in the process, that’s obviously bad and you should say no. Similarly, some things are categorically bad, like rape or prison, because they instantiate precisely the worst sort of persistent relationships we’re seeking to abolish. So if a survivor demands to rape their rapist, that’s bad and should set off every alarm bell possible. Assassinating Hitler to quickly remove his threat is one thing, raping him is a completely different thing that reveals far more about the would-be-rapist.

Yes, existing power relationships can influence and skew who is taken seriously and who is weak to attacks. Outside of anarchist spaces, blanket claims that queer folk, trans femmes, Black men, and many others are rapists by nature remain rampant. Some have thus increasingly claimed that trans femmes are overwhelmingly targeted by false claims of rape in radical circles as well and thus no one should ever believe any specific accusation against one. In my experience – just as is true with all other demographics – there are far more easily confirmed accusations of rape than even slightly suspect ones and most predators get away without any real consequences. Rapists are just as common as anywhere else. The only appreciable difference regards the kind of opportunism available: the rapists in this community frequently leap to use their transness as some kind of a defense, even when – as is often the case in a marginalized community that clusters together – their survivor is also a trans woman.

That said, when a predator exempt from transmisogyny rapes or abuses a trans femme – which is quite common given the precarity of many trans femmes – and then attempts to push lies about the survivor, it’s ghastly how viciously many bystanders or even friends who directly know it to be a lie will enthusiastically side against the trans femme and ruthlessly and explicitly leverage claims that they’re just a man and thus inherently evil. By her very act of naming, resisting, or denouncing the rapist, the trans femme is derided as failing to perform her gender role (as a passive object) and thus trans femmes experience particularly aggressive gender policing around any rage they demonstrate towards perpetrators. Rape apologists are notoriously opportunistic, grabbing onto anything they think might work, and thus they have no qualms against trying to rally outsiders to a radical space to defeat a survivor.

The impact that both dynamics have is to cut young precarious trans women off from any support against their rapists. It’s no wonder then that the overwhelming majority of militant anarcha-feminists I encounter wearing “Kill Your Local Rapist” patches in recent years are themselves trans femmes.

Over prior decades I’ve seen survivors completely leave radical scenes rather than attempt to callout someone with more, as it were, “oppression points” than them, and this used to provide a lot of cover for cis women raping men. At least in radical spaces, times have increasingly changed as folks have been forced to come to terms with the ubiquity of rape across demographic categories, but rape apologists will always be more than happy to leverage identity whichever way. A Black man accused by a Black queer woman will scream about how he’s being lynched and imply she and her friends are white, then explicitly leverage misogyny and colorism against her. Opportunism abounds. Folks grab at whatever they think might work before a given audience.

Far more stark, though, are asymmetries around social capital.

There are still a couple serial rapists and abusers in positions at, for lack of a better description, high places in the anarchist movement, considered elders with immense social capital and/or organizational standing. Survivor stories have circulated for decades, but all have been too scared of a public fight. “Nothing can be done.” And it’s true, even if the anarchist movement organized one big formal public trial, there’s good chances it’d be a blowout against the survivors. I’m not going to lie to anyone about that. If it’s sometimes impossibly hard to kick a couch surfing nazi out of a punk house for raping one of the actual roommates, the odds aren’t good against someone with an entire network of old boys immediately willing to side with them against some upstart. Such pressure extends and can quickly overwhelm a few voices. A direct confrontation threatens to swamp you just in the replies and the counter-narratives being spun too fast to even see. The second a social media account starts to imply something it gets reported into oblivion by hundreds of followers. And the echo-chamber effects of large numbers feeling legitimized by the amount of other people agreeing with them is a horrifying thing to watch. The last thing you sometimes want is a jury of your “peers.”

Similarly, when you have very little social capital you have very little capacity to punch back or disrupt free floating accusations. This is true. But I want to note something specifically about that:

It’s far easier to box someone out of communities with something other than a callout of rape.

Even beyond the present ubiquity of rape culture, such that someone will get a volunteer defense army upon accusation, a rape callout puts you personally on the line. It exposes and risks your own skin. Even if you claim it happened to someone else and you’re just relaying, you’ve taken a concrete and major action.

Most people who want to marginalize someone else instinctively use far more efficient tools that are also nebulous. “Hahaha, let’s all make fun of this person.” “Oh she’s so problematic.” “Wait, you actually hang with them? Oh, wow…”

Unfortunately, at almost no time in history has “rapist” been a more cutting barb than the local equivalent of “poseur.” Anyone with eyes can see that people will collectively shower far more active harassment, cruelty, and outright violence on people for a nebulous crime like “cringe” than they ever will for actual concrete ethical infringements.

When you’re striking from above in a social capital landscape, you have far more efficient tools that do not bother to contest in the realm of crude facts and thus expose you. And what are you gonna do when targeted like this, write a counter-callout about how someone incorrectly spread the claim that you were “deeply unserious“? Are you going to meet someone in court and litigate the claim that you have “loser taste in music“? Are you going to write a defensive thread on twitter about how the scene queen derisively refers to you with the nickname “Stunty“? Even “it’s sad and my heart goes out to her, I wish we could provide her help, she’s really unhinged and has a lot of STIs” can be devastating. These are impossible to contest or even acknowledge and FAR more effective at boxing people out from a position of social capital because they carry overwhelming implicit threats around having anything to do with you. Even when you’re threatening someone, in this age of screenshots it’s easier to work in the realm of nebulous implication.

You absolutely do not want to show your hand or get into an actual argument with them over nerd shit like values and facts.

Even in toxic corners of entirely-online Leftist spaces where callouts are weaponized incessantly, it’s far easier to nuke someone with a callout of language misuse or problematic take or insufficient deference. Indeed, in the constantly shifting landscape of made-up-on-the-spot expectations around precise language use, the piranhas attracted to these spaces tend to condemn rape callouts as carceral, as not speaking the language, not following a subcultural code of performative tenderness, precisely because they’re too grounded in serious matters of direct reality, they would disrupt the daily games.

Almost no one with social capital uses rape accusations against those without. It’s simply way too inefficient and risky. Rapists and their apologists tend to know this in their bones, which is why their counter-plays are so often of this form rather than direct counter-accusations. Again, not saying they never make fake rape accusations in response; the powerful can always get creative in their sadism, and there’s an eternal tendency of those called out for rape to want to craft a fake callout “to prove a point,” but in general why take direct risks when other means have long sufficed?

Even though there are still some holdouts who have wrapped themselves in sufficient shielding to avoid getting dethroned, the increasing tendency for rape callouts to matter hasn’t reinforced the power of those with social capital; it’s eroded their insulation.

I also want to acknowledge that when people think of “gossip” they often collapse a bunch of things together including the above social moves. To some people “gossip” can be a stressful cipher, a cursed realm that operates according to chaotic and unpredictable, seemingly magical, rules. I have sympathy for this perspective. Different social circles, stratas, cultures, etc. leverage different norms around such decentralized epistemologies. Some dynamics stuck under the umbrella of “gossip” can, in fact, be fast and loose. I learned years later that someone I’d helped online during a suicidal moment and only met in person twice, had promptly gone around implying to tons of people that we were partners. And some other random person in Olympia apparently told lots of people we were in a polycule together! These are silly and a little creepy and I was disturbed when both got back around to me. But how can I tell that the version that got back to me was even the form in which things were originally relayed? Everyone knows that retellings can get distorted.

It is certainly true that some decentralized ways of spreading and ingesting information are not reliable.

So how can we know?

How is knowledge even possible?

Don’t we need formal trials? Isn’t that the best means ever invented for finding truth?

We’ve talked about how centralized systems are prone to regulatory capture and have structural biases towards prioritizing the community “peace” that underpins their own existence, but it’s worth emphasizing just as much that centralized systems are really bad at knowing anything and how unavoidable individualism is.

Individuals intimately know their own context: we know our memories and tendencies, we know the environment we interact with regularly, we know a lot about individual people close to us in some ways, we know the trust and affinity dynamics of our social relations and their interactions, we know particular skills, we know our own desires and motivations, and we know a ton more that is built up subconsciously or reflexively into instinct and habit… All of these are hard to convey: we have trouble codifying them in ideas, we have trouble enunciating them in words, we have trouble being concise in our testimony, we have trouble synching with the language and thoughts of the people we’re talking to, and we have immense trouble proving the appropriate level of trustworthiness for the things we say. Additionally, individuals can undertake great cognitive leaps that are almost impossible to replicate formally in front of other people. You can solve a math problem in seconds that then takes days to explain.

This is all a deep and inexorable phenomenon tied to the density of information our neural networks are capable of holding, the speed of computation that they’re able to handle internally and the sheer slowness of language.

Collective systems are constrained by the bitrate of language. A human brain on its own is incredibly dense and fast, but when a bunch of brains are wired together into a static “organization” said entity can only operate at the speed of language. This is why meetings are always such a drag. Every single person present can think faster than the meeting, as a collective entity, can.

But there’s the additional problem sometimes called that of revealed preference; even if every single participant is earnestly trying to convey the truth, it’s impossible for other individuals to know how much weight to give things. I may say that I want X “a lot” or “sorta” but that doesn’t mean much. Even if we start assigning numbers “on a scale of one to ten” there’s still no clarity on how I actually pick out those weightings in my own mind. Language alone, no matter how descriptive or evocative, simply can’t sync our brains up over questions of weightings. And when you start to delve past direct weightings you get then to questions of complicated dependencies, fractal tangles of influences, potentialities, causes, etc that are hard to convey and themselves involve weightings.

All this extends to veracity claims, too. When someone says “I’m really confident,” that doesn’t actually mean much to a room full of strangers. Even if someone sets out a pile of claims with various rankings against one another, like being more certain of A than B and B than C, or even saying “I’m 5% certain” the truthfulness and context of those claims is hard to convey. (This is part of why bets and markets do better than discussion groups or request forms at conveying things like certainty and interest.)

A fundamental gap exists between our individual brains, one that cannot be easily bridged by any application of language.

Collective entities thus face limited capacity to obtain or hold relevant information and systematic uncertainty about it. This is why legal systems develop so much timidity and constraints on action, judges, juries, legislatures, direct assemblies; there are sharp constraints on their capacity to know.

Individuals, on the other hand, are capable of knowing quite well. You know whether you were raped. (It’s no coincidence that so many of the reactionary “false memory” pseudoscientific grifters who spent the 90s telling everyone there was an epidemic of false accusations have gotten new lives as anti-trans grifters.) Similarly, while to a collective entity your friend Sarah is just another interchangeable hypothetical individual, relatively stripped of context, a single gray dot, to you, with rich and long knowledge of her, she’s a galaxy. Because of so many points of context that would be impossible to relay, when she confides in you that she was raped, you can evaluate how overwhelmingly unlikely it is that she would “make this up.”

Before the cold impartiality of a collective system, however, very little that informs your evaluation can be integrated. She’s a black box and a potential exploitation of the machine. Your testimony to her character is just another gray dot. A potential collaborator trying to exploit the system along with her.

The centralized trial system of the state is so systematically bad at helping survivors, not merely because of historical contingency, but for structural reasons.

Moreover, trials dehumanize, traumatize, publicize, and provide means for continued torture by the original perpetrator. Some are able to find solace or strength in confronting their torturer before witnesses, but for many, especially given the structural inclination of courts to remain neutral on facts (i.e. side against survivors) with regard to things like rape and stalking so dependent upon personal experience and hyperlocal context, the trial is a continuation of the original act.

Again, adjudication by a collective or neutral third party may work well enough in cases of mere conflict, like a disagreement over the title to a car — two gray dots in a tug of war seeking a mediator. But it’s simply not in any way able to handle instances of deeply personal power-seeking.

Part of why people overwhelmingly love the centralization of the state is that it removes all obligation to think and act for yourself. Did Monica rape Susie? You can simply wait for The Trial to decide. What should be done about it? I’m sure the appropriate sentence will be handed down.

Even when The State or The Organization hands down a verdict and sentence you disagree with, it provides an easy reference point to center discussion on.

Anarchism, by contrast, is infamously unpopular because we demand individual ethical responsibility without bounds. Where fake anarchists like “anarcho-capitalists” draw a tiny circle around a few power dynamics they oppose, declaring neutrality on every other ethical issue, anarchists follow Malatesta in believing that there is no end to our struggle against power. This hypervigilance where we never stop evaluating our interpersonal and contextual acts defines our movement, where we press new frontiers on relationships, youth liberation, animal liberation, etc. This is similar to how power-seekers will always be inclined to unify against us because our aspirations leave them no room to retreat, no alternate way of playing ‘the game,’ no private realm of unchallenged tyranny.

Part of the transition from stateless societies to states can be explained by the fact that oppression is simpler. We can complain about how power is systematically riven with stupidity, but that can have a visceral appeal. Liberals get to not have to think, just offload everything onto The State, maybe take a vote, and then sit back and grill. The infamously unselfaware slogan during the Trump years, “If Hillary won we’d be at brunch right now,” is reflective of this.

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of examples of decentralized social epistemology even in our statist society. Science, for example, manages to capture more and more truth without anything like a centralized trial. Indeed science is robust in no small part according to how much it resists centralization; individuals following their own noses in varied local contexts and sharing their results is a starkly potent approach, which explains why the state works so hard against science to constrain and re-centralize it.

Similarly, antifascist research crews are notoriously better than professional news outlets when it comes to identifying, tracking, and exposing fascists. One’s reputation for diligent research and nuanced accuracy means a ton, and the pushback of reality over time is a harsh filter; those who fall short in these aggregating standards are marginalized from existing networks. Thresholds of diligence are expected before sharing leads or initial work. The innocent are protected — for example blurred out of photographic evidence (including the faces of dogs). The work can even extend to deeply serious and highly resourced projects of long term infiltration. There is never any “trial” of a fascist before they’re doxed or jumped, the proof is aggregated as open source and verified across competing researchers.

Anarcha-feminist whisper networks are remarkably similar in function, aggregating over time with increased standards and expectations. An individual that’s sloppy in research, believes eventually revealed falsities without verifiable good cause, or tramples over the wishes of survivors in their means of sharing will get iced out in proportion, a crew that leverages callouts in attempts to grab power will be treated hostilely. Some of the sharpest sanction I’ve ever seen militant anarcha-feminists bring on individuals was on those proven to be lying. Often this happened immediately because the lies were bad, but sometimes it took the liar continuing to apply their strategy.

None of this should be a surprise. Just as when you run games like the prisoner’s dilemma repeatedly, and allow the actors to remember past behavior from other actors and respond with disincentivization, bad behavior becomes sharply suppressed.

But the benefits of n-iteration isn’t just that agents running the lying strategy eventually slip up, and only need to slip up once, it’s also that agents running the altruistically-sanction strategy repeatedly play the game and evolve, integrating more and more tacit knowledge. Thus the “bitter old crazy bitch” of a given scene that every survivor goes to for help ends up getting a lot of experience with rapists and their games as well as false-accusations, learning more and more about how to detect and counter.

In contrast a liar does not have this experience, because they’re strategizing from a deeply asymmetric vantagepoint. They can less afford to lose in conflicts, so they can’t aggregate knowledge from those losses. They’re also focused on fewer interactions because their selfishness gives them limited horizons. A liar isn’t going to slog through supporting three dozen survivors in depth to gather the tacit knowledge to pull off a lie. That’s just not a cost-efficient investment for whatever the fringe personal benefit might be. Plus their heart just isn’t going to be in it, and the facade will eventually crack.

Now, despite these asymmetries, certainly bad actors can and do sometimes attempt to grow more enmeshed in survivor support circles in order to gain useful social capital and learn how to cloak their own power-seeking. A classic example from the 80s is a woman who gained power as director of a Portland domestic violence nonprofit after having been abusive to her husband, and, after he escaped, she stalked his new partner, assaulted her, and then shot him in the genitals at his new house. This was the bad old days of second wave feminism, so she’d been able to partially cloak her own power-seeking by means of absolutist stereotypes about gender classes. Still, even before this was revealed, her staff – who were, unlike her, actually involved in repeated day-to-day support for survivors – hated her, correctly recognizing a pattern of abusive behavior in other contexts and generally smelling what she was. It’s important to note two things about this: first, this infiltration leveraged organizational centralization and hierarchy, and second, it was relatively early on in the history of domestic violence activism.

As many of the early grassroots radical activist projects of the 60s and 70s were turned into nonprofits, they became subject to this sort of regulatory capture. Yet across the wider movement, as time progressed, experience with the diversity of abuse and rape aggregated, building knowledge and nuance in.

Infiltration into dens of altruists is a satiation-postponing strategy for power-seekers, which few have the stomach for. But even those with such tolerance then have to operate surrounded by vigilant enemies. It’s far less risky to group up with other power-seekers rather than among those anti-authoritarians actively trying to reveal people like you. You might pull off some short term gains, but you will eventually be exposed. And when exposed you will have sunk so much into the investment you’ll have nothing left to retreat back to. I know of an abuser who spent immense energy and time posturing as good on abuse, to the point that, when his ongoing abuse he was hiding was revealed and he committed suicide, every single one of his friends refused to shed a tear.

All of this is a subset of a broader asymmetry that has enabled anarchists to dramatically influence the world and achieve many victories over the course of our movement, despite our unavoidable unpopularity: Mutual aid.

While some now use the term as merely “nice feels when being nice,” what Kropotkin described was a game theoretic dynamic that skews what strategies survive in a population, both biologically and socially. Altruists are better at decentralized coordination than the selfish and power-seeking. The non-altruistic will sometimes recognize they have common goals or a class identity, but they will never individually sacrifice for others. To solve collective action problems their only option is centralization and hierarchies. Cops won’t run into a burning building to save one another unless someone is capable of ordering them. But a distributed network of altruistic individuals can autonomously solve collective action problems.

Power-seekers are simply bad at collective action in decentralized contexts, which is part of why fascists seeking to do intelligence work against anarchists and antifascists so frequently use the cops like a crutch. Left on their own, they’re notoriously bad at evidentiary standards. Each individual has an incentive to be sloppy on dox work or — more often — make up fantastical fabrications, with no real incentive to personally engage in internal conflict or pushback that would disincentivize such. As a result of their limited experiences in such decentralized situations, the non-altruistic tend to throw up their hands and categorically dismiss the decentralized as the same sort of cesspool of constant lies that they generate. The same unbroken dynamic that lynched Emmett Till today sets up rural barricades and pulls people out of cars demanding to know if they’re the Soros-funded antifa responsible for forest fires to push “global warming.”

Now there are exceptions, to be sure. A small minority of reactionaries are altruistic in the sense that they will seriously self-sacrifice for one another or a cause — not just in a showy self-aggrandizing moment of martyrdom, but in uncelebrated daily drudgery. Nor is everyone on our side altruistic, diligent, or experienced. (Personally, I heard that a thousand Proud Boys are coming to attack this protest right now because a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend heard someone saw a pickup truck with an American flag.) But the overall skew is sharp.

The solution to this phenomenon is not to deny that you can know situations directly as an individual and you can develop incredibly high credences in certain things via network effects and their compounding dynamics, but to more aggressively leverage the asymmetries that benefit the altruistic, the true, and resistance to power. The anarchist solution to the specter of false accusations, in other words, is to intensify what we already do. To spread participation in our kinds of decentralized epistemological structures and continue to insurgently disrupt and disincentivize power.

After all, we broadly trust our comrades fighting ISIS in Syria to make evaluations on the ground, to evaluate who’s an ISIS member and who isn’t on the fly. Sometimes the evidence can be borderline, but mostly it’s overwhelmingly clearcut. And those with experience build up tacit knowledge about what constitutes a sniper or not that would be hard to codify into some centralized universal “justice system.” If anarchism is an unending path we walk, a perpetual minority insurgency against power, why should our campaigns of resistance against rapists look any different?

Why shouldn’t a crew of survivors who’ve dropped out of activism to waste their time and emotional health for years on a fruitless accountability process, while the rapist keeps raping, just get some baseball bats and jump the fucker?

INSURGENCY VS LIBERAL ABOLITIONISM

But, of course, liberals simply cannot think outside the artificial global neutrality of “policy” and “justice.” A liberal will hear something like “Fire To The Prisons” and immediately transmute this into a meta-policy that licenses the police burning down neighborhoods. I wasn’t making up that example! Liberals have literally had that response!

Even when looking at a group of insurgent Maquis fighters assassinating a fascist in his sleep, the liberal mind squirms to avoid recognizing the specificity, “oh so you think it’s okay for any individual to kill anyone whenever they feel like it.”

This is because liberals are utterly terrified of taking object-level stances on specific things, even when that’s something like “fascists are a threat and individual violence is justified in stopping them.” To get inside the liberal mind you have to understand that they feel overwhelmingly weak, they do not think they can win any outright conflict head-on, so instead the strategy is always to trick the opponent into agreeing to a neutral meta-framework. You will then both be bound by this framework, but — surprise — it is structured in such a way that the liberal is favored.

This is why liberals cannot stand outright violent resistance to fascists; they feel this sacrifices an existing mutual compact with the fascists to civil debate and electoral competition within a framework of law.

You may retort that this is self-evidently absurd, no fascist is in any way bound to that meta-accord and failing to violently disrupt them early in their mobilization only allows them to gather strength before they inevitably strike, but just as liberals recoil from personal responsibility they cannot fathom anything like war. This is why they refuse to arm themselves or prepare in any way. They would ultimately rather be passively led to the death camps than turn to actual resistance. Liberals believe that armed conflict is inherently the domain of fascists. Thus to even personally own a gun in preparation is to embrace a conflict one will lose.

In a bar in Hamburg after the Chaos Communications Congress in 2013 a liberal lawyer overheard a friend and me talking about potentially picketing talks by collaborators with the NSA, and expressed her outrage that we would abandon civility and The System’s internal mechanisms for adjudication. I laughed and said something like, “I mean, lady, I support people shooting snitches. The civil rights movement was won through the barrel of activists’ guns.” She lost her mind and apoplectically screamed at us in horror like we were lovecraftian nightmares out to abduct her child, spraying spittle in our faces as she detailed how many members of her family had been lost in the Holocaust, before shouting her chilling conclusion that I have never forgotten, “But if the fascists took power again today I would proudly march you anarchists to the camps myself! Because anarchists are far worse than fascists! We need laws!“

So it goes with liberals.

I want to be clear, however, that they do have a smidgen of a point. Even though it’s a myth that fascist governments were efficient at warfare, and even though anarchists have many advantages in decentralized conflict — hence our longstanding embrace of insurgency and 4th generation warfare — there are some respects in which power-seekers are better at violence than us. Violence is artificially simple, it cuts away tangles of complexity and reduces situations down to a calculus in which some of our greatest advantages do not apply.

We’re exceptionally good in domains like art and science, but not particularly good by default at fisticuffs. Fascists know this and spend almost their entire time complaining about how unfair it is that their preferred arenas aren’t dominant. They long for the day of the rope, where all the cultural decentralized thinky-things are irrelevant and all that matters is brute strength and cruelty. In a parallel to the eternal outrage of patriarchs about their wives poisoning them, they’re perpetually mad that many antifascists are twiggy or effeminate and fight from the shadows “without honor.” They know that in a “fair fight” on an open battlefield or an open campaign of total genocide in which they, for instance, just slaughter all city-dwellers, they would finally stop losing to us.

But just because fascists have an edge on us in violence doesn’t mean that the moment things shift to violence they obtain a final total victory.

Liberals are prone to sneer about the encouragement of gun-owning as a check on the state, “Don’t you know that in a real war the state would steamroll you with missiles and drones?! You’re never going to win a revolution against something like the US empire, that’s why you’ve gotta vote and build a mass movement!“

But this entirely misses the point. War is costly. The potential and presence of violence, can have a massive impact in changing incentives, without lining everyone up on a field and letting them fire all their weapons at one another directly.

Just because it’s theoretically possible for one party to defeat another doesn’t mean such would be cheap or preferrable. Similarly, insurgents don’t have to march into the capital of an evil system to win against it, they just have to make its continued operations unfeasibly expensive.

As every radical knows, KKK lynch mobs were defeated not through centralized means, but through Black communities and activists getting armed to the teeth. Yes, white racists often outnumbered their targets, but the moment things got costly or risky most of them backed down. While figures like MLK put on public spectacles of nonviolence, behind the scenes he embraced protection from armed activists.

Moreover, violence isn’t just useful for liberation in the context of defensive counter-escalation; there are often specific situations in which we do have an advantage in violence over our enemies. Where an insurgent strikes at a vulnerability can have a huge impact. Awareness of these possibilities requires effort. But, from riots to assassinations to punching Richard Spencer, history shows a host of examples.

Across the board, liberals have studiously refused to learn this lesson because it obliges personal responsibility and risk outside the comforting structures of centralized law. As a result they refuse to even think about engagements past a certain point in the escalation ladder, and thus provide every incentive for fascists to just escalate to the level of conflict in which they are unopposed.

Rape culture, as feminists have emphasized for decades, constitutes a widespread war. Patriarchy is a constant campaign of abuse, femicides, and rape — a regime of terror where violence is always partially targeted to bystanders as a means of broad enforcement, setting norms, expectations, risks, and fears. Like white supremacy, patriarchy is both centralized into institutions and decentralized into an ecosystem of reinforcing individual strategies.

Since liberals cannot imagine or permit decentralized solutions to decentralized problems, they instead try to box rape into being a mere matter for a “justice system”. They will themselves behind a veil of ignorance so they can ignore all context, just as they refuse to see the future implications of conceding the top of an escalation ladder. Rape is then always an individual exception rather than an ongoing struggle. And rape is not a matter of power; rape becomes simply a matter of “harm,” in no sense categorically different from the harms everyone inflicts on one another all the time.

These biases of liberals are why they’ve so badly misconstrued the anarchist project of abolishing the state’s core tools of prisons and police.

Liberals read our critique of these mechanisms on the surface level, as a critique of people being mean or violent. They failed to grasp that the critique is of centralization and its runaway dynamics, not of any negative feelings or harmful actions per se. Thus this liberal appropriation of “abolition” has managed to steal some of the aesthetics and cultural cachet built by the anarchist movement and allied liberation struggles and used it to repeat the same stale old attacks on those very same people.

In 1999 during the Battle of Seattle against the WTO, I was across the street when some anarchists in bloc smashed up the Starbucks. The liberals immediately freaked out. Some complained about such “vigilantism” being the same as KKK lynchings. They said that all violence was inherently male and thus patriarchal. And they said that only white people would ever engage in violence because people of color are too terrified of ever acting against their oppressors. They’ve been repeating these same silly bits for twenty five years. Infamously, they will look directly at a Black girl in bloc clearly among other non white males and refer to her as a “straight white male.” They are absolutely shameless. And they all come up with exactly the same objections to any disturbance of the peace.

“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind.”

In strict categorical terms this kind of objection is ludicrous; if the price for smashing up a billionaire’s Starbucks is he gets to smash up any starbucks I own, that’s an easy trade. I will happily steal 100% of a billionaire’s wealth and donate it away if the trade is he gets to do the same to me. Context clearly matters. And, by definition, no feminist whatsoever is calling for an eye-for-an-eye in the case of rape. We don’t think that the solution to torturers is torture. We don’t think that the solution to prisons is prisons. We don’t think the solution to rape is rape.

But what the liberal really means is that something they call “retaliation” is bad.

This is an interesting conceptual slippage.

At core anarchists want to abolish prisons for the same reason we want to abolish police, borders, legislatures, etc: because they’re tools by which organized violence is centralized and thus inherently corrupted in an inexorable feedback loop of power concentration. Unlike decentralized societies, these institutions are not fluidly contestable, but insulate themselves, creating higher and higher thresholds of investment necessary for any sort of change.

Liberals cannot admit that such runaway power concentration is a problem, so they have selectively focused on symptoms of it.

This is partially the fault of radicals. In our arguments against prisons we would often make throwaway points at the end like, “and even in their own terms they don’t even work at stopping crime!” But this rhetorical point-scoring undermined our project by allowing liberals to focus on the wrong thing. Thus revolutionary arguments for the abolition of prisons became subsumed under existing prison reform movements.

As Black radicals like Joy James have critiqued at length, these reform movements were not interested in burning down the prisons and liberating police-killing comrades at gunpoint to continue the struggle, they were motivated by trying to make the existing regime work better. And the regime has been happy to cultivate such pseudo “abolitionists” as a dumping ground for misdirected activist energy. Whole ecosystems of nonprofits and academics now happily run on grant-funded treadmills, echoing an “abolitionism” stripped of any radical analysis or revolutionary imperative.

These reformists correctly recognize that prisons constitute a form of sustained personal domination – torture, in other words. But they don’t place responsibility for this on the core self-preservation imperatives of the state; they don’t see this as part of a wider feedbacking of power. No. Instead they decide that prisons must be a product of psychological failing in the general population.

Like the Christian traditions of justice reform that they are a continuation of, these liberals continue to view this all in terms of people holding negative feelings.

RETRIBUTION AND REVENGE

During the 2020 uprisings literally millions of dollars poured into Portland, filling the pockets of whatever grifter or liberal was ready to mobilize a donation link online.

One of these, “Portland Freedom Fund” proclaimed it would pay for bail for people of color. After ignoring countless folks for months they got a request from someone in their circles to bail out one Mohamed Adan. The papers that the main woman behind the fund signed explained some of the situation of strangulation and contempt violation. Adan was on his 9th domestic violence charge, this time arrested after he had again broken into the home of his ex, Rachael Abraham, and woken her up by beating her with prayer beads. He had been charged with five different attempts at strangulation, in addition to the lengthy beatings and putting a gun to her head promising to murder her… only to be released on an ankle monitor and then cut it off. Rachael, an Afro Latina and a Muslim, had emphasized with frantic certainty that Adan had promised to murder her. The bail fund covered his bail and released him without any plan to check him or to provide safety for his target. He promptly murdered his ex, beating and repeatedly stabbing her countless times in front of their three children before finally strangling her to death and continuing to stab the corpse – a slow excruciating murder that had been telegraphed and warned of in every conceivable way.

Local anarchists involved in survivor support, leftists in domestic violence orgs, as well as numerous orgs in local Black and Muslim communities were beyond furious at the irresponsibility and/or naivety. But the bail fund, for their part, callously referred to the brutal murder as “harm”, refused to admit mistake or apologize, complained that the children who had watched their mother murdered were now being denied a father figure by his arrest, and decided that any critiques of their actions were definitionally right-wing. Questions of why this man was prioritized over hundreds of other folks were responded to with incredulity.

It should come as no surprise that conservative media latched onto the case to demonize everyone opposed to prisons and police as equally callous and irresponsible. But liberals have largely responded, in turn, by leaping to defend the Portland Freedom Fund, repeatedly expressing rabid outrage that anyone would critique them for Adan’s actions when the Fund was (supposedly, if not in fact) committed to a general rule of bailing everyone.

In the liberal mind the universality of the meta-rule must come first; this is why liberals are always most interested in defending the free speech of nazis and not leftists. The bail fund’s support for a monster like Adan over other petty criminals or political arrestees is likewise seen as an expression of how committed they were. Nothing signals one’s personal virtue (ie dedication to liberalism) more than picking out and defending the most shockingly noxious case.

If women have to die, brutally killed at the hands of these cases, that’s a small price to pay.

In this framework, survivors are, almost by definition, the enemy. And statements put out by these sorts of liberals, as well as talks and trainings they give, couldn’t be more clear on this disdain and enmity.

Because, let’s be frank, survivors will frequently work their asses off, do whatever they can, to get imminent threats to their life put behind bars. It rarely works, but a lot of them do try. When your life is on the line, when you’re desperately scrambling for any one to help and any option whatsoever, you don’t pause to think “but what if my lifeless body could provide liberalism with a few more intangible virtue points?“

Some survivors, however, correctly realize that the state is aligned against them. That calling the cops will almost certainly make things worse. So they take things into their own hands and kill their rapist, their abuser, their trafficker, their father.

Liberal abolitionists hate these people more than anything. They get apoplectic when the very concept is brought up. These are not who they’re trying to bail out! Indeed, they repeatedly give every indication that this is the one category of prisoner they think should remain in prison.

In much the same way that liberals furiously wail about the violence of antifascists while ignoring that of fascists, the category of “survivor defendant” sunders the earth between liberal abolitionism and radical abolitionism.

The liberal sees in the survivor defendant not an insurgent against the patriarchal system that prisons are a part of, but instead the essence of everything in the prison system the liberal wants to do away with. Not only do survivor defendants shatter the social peace, not only do they open up the prospect of individual responsibility in decentralized and context-aware struggle outside the state, but they embraced ‘retribution,’ and potentially the worst thing possible, in the eyes of liberals, ‘revenge.’

The conceptual category of “retribution” is fucking weird. It’s literally just any sort of negative response to an act. If you touch my thigh and I slap your hand away, that can be classified as ‘retribution.’ If you say something awful and I tell you to shut up, that’s ‘retribution.’ And certainly any response to an act that attempts to disincentivize it constitutes “retribution” in the broadest sense. If you exclude any strategy that could look like “retribution” you get game-theoretically clobbered. The emergence of mutual aid that Kropotkin mapped becomes entirely impossible.

Positive-reinforcement with children and animals is both ethical and an amazingly effective strategy — no one is beaten into having good values and healthy relationships — but if you’re totally unwilling to draw a barrier at some point in an escalation ladder and push back, your puppy will shove you aside and eat off your plate. And if you’re unwilling to punch or shoot nazis, you will simply be murdered. Every strategic bundle capable of flourishing necessarily includes some threshold at which you respond negatively.

It’s not even clear that we can distinguish some essential line between disincentives and incentives. The two are the same thing; the possibility space of our world is just a single continuous landscape of relative ups and downs.

Revenge, by contrast, is an emotional concept.

And liberals operate by default in a paradigm of personal virtue — especially those “abolitionists” who are just continuing the tradition of christian prison reformists. In such a paradigm, emotions are not heuristics, tools, or even hazily grouped byproducts of underlying thoughts, but virtues and vices in-and-of-themselves. To be mad is to be bad. Thus to be mad at your rapist is an unethical state, however understandable, that you have an obligation to work yourself out of.

Liberals swoon when told of a story where a survivor of genocide or torture looks their captor in the face, ideally in a court of law, and forgives them. They are not so happy about revenge stories. They do not want to hear about the survivor who goes to their grave hating the monsters.

Hate, after all, implies a continued tension. To hate the bloodsoaked genocidaire of your people who has retired comfortably to the same american suburb as you, is to reject the neutrality of the comfortable personal bubbles liberalism would put you in. Hate is a directedness on the social graph, akin to an individual obligation or responsibility.

In the late 1990s, the SPLC classified anarchism as an ideology of hate.

This is not to simply reverse the liberal narrative and make a virtue out of hate or revenge. There’s a longstanding tendency for anarchists to lean into this. “REVENGE” has long graced our banners in various slogans, and while there’s a trivial sense in which this is fine enough, even useful rhetoric, I believe we can go wrong when we act like it picks out a clear or natural category, much less try to valorize such a fuzzy notion as an emotional state that is good in-and-of-itself. I just don’t know what it would mean to oppose or endorse an emotion and I’m wary of the arbitrariness of any ethical framework that acts like the descriptive bundlings we pick out with our names for “emotions” cut reality at the joints.

Still, if “vengefulness” is anything like a natural cluster of brain states, it probably emerges at a primordial evolutionary level, in much the same way as the highs we can feel when engaged in mutual aid, these are rough strategies that every organism needs some mix of to succeed. If there is an instinctual urge to retaliate when infringed upon, this makes sense as a survival trait. But it is also the case that primordial evolutionary instincts are not always the best strategy; we have brains specifically to think things through in unique contexts and improve over raw heuristics.

I am thus uncomfortable with “vengeance” as an end-in-itself. And just because Christianity promotes a form of patriarchy grounded in pushing “forgiveness,” we shouldn’t forget that there are older genealogies of patriarchy grounded in the fetishization of revenge. When I grew up in the projects the local strategic mix was toxic: every public slight demanded immediate violent retaliation or else you would be branded as weak and made a target. I did well enough, but my mother certainly got bored with driving me to the hospital to get stitches. I have absolutely no desire to live in a world where escalation is the only available strategy and seething vengefulness is seen as a personal virtue. My embrace of anarchism is in no small part grounded in rejecting that world’s simplistic norms. But for a given emotional state in a given context, I think that “revenge” can only be judged in terms of its consequences for liberation.

Any ethics that doesn’t terminate in describing emotional states as virtues or vices would have to concede that revenge is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on, you know, everything else. If vengeance clouds the mind and self-perpetuates regardless of consequences, then it’s bad. If it gets you out of bed each morning to plot the downfall of a king, it’s good.

When feminist fighters in Syria kill a member of ISIS they’ll often go through the contacts in his phone and call every one of them to brag that, “another rapist is dead!“

While unrecognized by the international community and deeply inspiring in its liberatory reforms, the experiment in Rojava is functionally a state, and as such is shot through with centralization. It has police, courts, and prisons. Uniform guidelines are said to apply no matter the context. Six month to three year prison sentences are handed out to rapists, regardless of the wishes of survivors one way or the other. One of the main intentions of its centralized structures has been to assure peace and suppress vengeance. This is because the social landscape it operates above is still structured into perpetualized collective units, families, and thus the fear of blood feuds dictates policy. Revenge is bad, they lecture.

And yet there is no other way to describe the act of calling someone’s entire social network and shouting with joy in their ear that their friend, their son, their brother is dead.

ISIS is best defined as an army of rapists, whose central motivation is the ideology of rape. Privileged first world kids, from engineering students to doctors, poured into its ranks to form what amounts to a single battalion in the cause.

The women who fight them are often survivors without a family or clan to treat them as property or wage blood feuds over them — individuals engaged in the worldwide feminist insurgency against the army of rapists. Whatever the “revolutionary” authorities try to dictate, they still scream with joy.

CONCLUSION: THE DISCOURSE

In 1975, Joan Little, a 21-year-old Black woman, was put on trial for murdering the 62-year-old white jailer, Clarence Alligood, who attempted to rape her. The case drew massive attention and her act was enthusiastically defended by the wider Black liberation, revolutionary abolitionist, and feminist movements. Because she killed him with an ice pick, the radical left chanted the slogan “All Power To The Ice Pick.”

In 2022, leftist social media spaces were plunged into a sudden contrived storm of outrage over the similar decades-old punk and anarcha-feminist slogan of Kill Your Local Rapist. About a month in, it was revealed that the two most virulent and active accounts fanning the outrage were separately run by notorious serial rapists, Laurelai and Uriel. One local leftist had a breakdown in shock when folks proved the account was Uriel’s and showed his callouts – suddenly in their twitter feed was the face of the stranger who had raped them at a party, a face they never thought they’d see again. As time has gone on even more of the accounts that raised such a disingenuous fuss have been exposed as well known rapists and abusers, in some cases literally even working for the FBI or defense contractors.

That such predators would be highly active parts of the coalition of outrage should be completely unsurprising; they know who their enemies are. They know “the cancel horde” poses an existential risk to them; their very survival depends upon weakening all consequences whatsoever.

Now this is not to slur all those who raised objections as rapists and cops. But other factions of the coalition suddenly screaming abuse and bad faith arguments at anyone defending the slogan surely had to know rapists would be joining alongside them, yet I never saw a single attempt by those screaming about principle to preemptively draw lines against both sides or really engage in any counter-signaling against the intense rapist apologia and anti-survivor shit in their same dogpiles. Outrage was unrelentingly directed to the anarcha-feminists.

The account later exposed as Uriel wrapped itself in certain aesthetics of pastel softness (Uriel has always aggressively identified as a straight cis man), yet would spend all day snarling threats and posting images of lynchings of Black people in the comments of the Black radicals defending “KYLR.” Uriel was not alone in this; liberal “abolitionists” came to barrage pretty much any feminist voice defending militancy against rapists with images of lynchings and, in particular, Emmett Till. Often their sharpest bile was reserved for Black women endorsing violent resistance. I’m willing to bet not a one of them had ever heard of Joan Little, despite the equal historical significance of her case and it being the far more relevant comparison.

A huge fraction of the anarcha-feminists that faced this storm were trans women; after all a majority of the local anarchists I know in militant girl gangs are trans women, and yet an absurd narrative began to be aggressively pushed in which, because many transmisogynists falsely believe trans women to be rapists by nature, to support anarchist militancy against or even public callouts of rapists was treason to trans women. One can not imagine a more toxic and deadly way to empower rapists than telling already extremely marginalized trans women that they will be expelled from their circles if they resist a predator in their own ranks.

In a patriarchal world where rape is so deeply legitimized and normalized as a method of gender control, one cannot imagine a greater betrayal of queer folks than to try to frame resistance to rape as inherently anti-queer.

But okay, the discourse was bad online, so what?

Well, at the end of the day it shouldn’t be too surprising if a liberal — even one with a pastel and twee #abolition Instagram account — has never heard venerable anarchist slogans, has no awareness of subcultural scenes or the history of prefigurative experiments, and so reacts in horror to militancy by screaming about how you can’t take action outside the law. We expect liberals to have these responses, but it’s particularly galling when anarchists do.

This was the thing endlessly repeated in shock and disbelief by anarchists about the KYLR discourse online: “Why are you suddenly making liberal arguments about rapists that you would never make about fascists, cops, bosses, etc? Why shouldn’t we use the anarchist toolkit here too?”

The sense of betrayal is intense. And I’ve seen literally dozens of comrades ditch social media entirely over it.

This was, of course, the intent.

The old boys networks that defend the missing stairs of radical subcultural scenes do so for a host of reasons. Some are self-consciously anti-feminist, others are knee-jerk defenders of their friends, others just want to restore social peace and avoid personal responsibility at any cost, and still others are sincerely infected with liberal ideology in some way. All of them wish survivors making trouble would shut the fuck up and go away.

By coalescing in wide coalitions with storms of normie liberals against militant anarcha-feminists, they very much seek to push the “crazy bitches” that have haunted anarchism out of discourse and out of radical spaces. They wish to cultivate community ignorance again. I’ve seen them try to paint the militant anarcha-feminists as newbies, as rabble, as purely online weirdos, when a huge fraction of the people they’re talking about have been around longer than them.

This is a message for them: I’ve seen you cheer about how the “tide is turning” against militant feminists by rallying liberals outraged about “KYLR.” The idea that the tide was ever anything but on your side is laughable, but I will frankly admit that you may yet be able to defeat the menace, in some sense. You may yet be able to secure hegemonic control over local scenes and even form up national or international ranks. But the simple fact is that for decades the approaches you demand and say are enough have not had any real success in stopping rapists. Thus you will continually produce “crazy bitches” you then have to work to shut out.

You will never find peace.

And the rest of us will still be here, waiting for them.

Against Campism and Nationalism on Ukraine

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:47:27 +0000

I haven’t talked much about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since it occurred, mostly just sharing Ukrainian voices and chastising a now former friend for calling for a NATO enforced no fly zone (e.g. shooting down a nuclear power’s planes). There’s something grotesque about the way slaughter can be turned into posturing discourse among the comfortable while the bombs are falling. The way that horrors in Ukraine and Palestine are so easily turned into abstractions should bring us all up short.

But it doesn’t. For two years now the involvement of the US and NATO in the conflict has drawn out some of the most retrograde campist tendencies in the Left, who seek to turn back the clock on the ascendency of the “Three Way Fight” analysis of antifascists.

In some ways this abrupt return of monsters once banished helps re-illustrate how starkly unpopular antifa was in the wider Left before the rise of Trump made everyone think they could redefine “antifa” as a populist movement rather than specific practice and analysis. Before liberals thought they could get nonprofit careers as talking heads about “violent extremism,” and before Leftists started trying to slap this “antifa” brand the kids were so into on all their old unrelated projects, antifa stood for a network of researchers and dedicated crews whose emphasis on defeating fascist threats outside the establishment and expelling reactionary creep among leftist spaces often made them marginal and hated.

In particular the now plumbline analysis of Three Way Fight emerged in response to popular Leftist narratives during the Bush years, that downplayed Islamist reaction or even celebrated it as a strike by the global south against the US empire. (Also relevant was the just prior wave of “anti-imperialist” leftist genocide denial around the Balkans.) If the mainstream Left monofocused on bringing down the empire to absurd degrees and simple-mindedly reacted against whatever its dominant narratives were, antifa urged a wider lens in which liberalism and the US empire were just one of our enemies, one that should not entirely eclipse diligently fighting reactionaries with less power or in conflict with the US.

Unfortunately, for the decade and a half between 9/11 and the alt-right wave of 2016, most on the Left still saw fighting with fascists or reactionaries a distraction, or even a counter-productive betrayal of potential allies. And before Rojava’s struggle with ISIS, a certain number on the Left likewise saw ISIS as an irrelevancy, or — worse — noble fighters in a broad coalition of underdogs out to smash the US Empire. The idea that anarchists would volunteer to fight ISIS was unthinkable.

But, after the threat of reactionaries outside of the US establishment power structure became impossible to ignore, this legacy of the Left was eclipsed and many reactionaries screamed in agony. From Alex Jones to Glenn Greenwald, their sense of betrayal was not without historical substance. To many in the 90s, the Left was nothing if not a grand coalition against the US Empire, happily inclusive of the most rank reaction. The best response that could be mustered against fascist or reactionary presence during this era was to squirmingly assert that they must not be serious about opposing the US Empire. If the Left was exclusively and centrally defined by opposing the US Empire, no other response seemed possible. And the more complicated calculus of antifascists made them, by definition, traitors.

One of the most common categories of fascist memes is mocking anarchists as having sided with corporations and “globalism” because we also fight with fascists. If we’re not against the liberal regime to the exclusion of all else, then we must be in its pocket. It’s hard not to listen to the reactionary ramblings of an old marginalized wingnut like Keith McHenry of Food Not Bombs and not have some sympathy for him. The anarchist movement really did “change positions” on things like “Big Medicine.” I remember with painful clarity when a huge majority of the scene was anti-vaccine. Hell, we’ve only just begun to pivot back from rejecting science as a whole. Of course our evolution on this was an update for the better, a shedding off of a simplistic knee-jerk anti-establishment narrative for something more accurate, nuanced, and thus in line with anarchism. But true believers from the 90s like McHenry have had a rough time of it.

There are many such people deeply wedded to the old “one big coalition to destroy the one big enemy” way of thinking, and the Ukraine war has shaken them out. They cannot believe that many of us could resist NATO in the streets of Chicago and then come home and fight against the “national-anarchists” and tankies in our local scenes who likewise oppose NATO. This is, to them, not consistency in anti-authoritarian principles but inconsistency in alliances.

But again, I have some sympathy for them. I really do. And I have consistently expressed sympathies for criticisms of Ukrainian nationalism and anarchist involvement in the military. There are important issues at hand that should not be eclipsed by reactive dismissal of all the bad arguments going around.

This recent piece by Ariane Miéville and José Luis García González, originally published in French, has some flabbergastingly bad arguments but it also makes a number of important points.

It’s quite valid to argue that there are important structural differences between insurgent anarchist participation in World War 2 and anarchist participation under regimented military units in Ukraine. Yes, few would condemn anarchist Maquis and other insurgents for collaborating with allied powers, even accepting commands from them in World War 2. But there is an important strategic distinction to be had between insurgencies where our decentralized proactive approach gives us comparative advantage, and meatgrinders of trench warfare where already few precious anarchist lives are snuffed to almost no impact.

It should be clear that the greatest impact anarchists can have against the atrocities taking place in Ukraine is in Russia, in the sabotage of its war machine. A single railroad connects the Russian Empire across its holdings in Asia to the Siberian peninsula and its length cannot be policed without redirecting significant resources from the Ukrainian front. Those anarchists like BOAK that have targeted such weak spots are incredible heroes who deserve far more support. When we choose violence, we are best as saboteurs, assassins, and organizers. We certainly have experience building basic needs support for refugees, from medical to food to underground efforts against borders. In contrast I can’t help but feel our talents go to waste running through a bombed out village waiting for hours for commands before dying randomly to mines and artillery fire.

One could go further and ask what proof there is that anarchist participation in the Ukrainian armed forces will actually buy the Ukrainian anarchist movement any standing or reprieve? That bastard Zelenzky was imprisoning anarchists before the invasion; I see no proof whatsoever that the liberal state will remember our sacrifices and honor some kind of compact where each anarchist life lost in the trenches will buy freedom for even one anarchist who would otherwise be arrested and imprisoned.

My concern here is historical. Anarchists have gotten into bed with nationalists before; we have joined national-liberation struggles through commendable solidarity with the oppressed and/or personal desperation, accepting coalition with the underpowered or out-of-power enemy to defeat the big enemy… and every single time we have regretted it. I am quite intimately aware of how many Korean anarchists today renounce their forefathers, evaluating the anarchist collaboration with nationalists against the horrors of Japanese colonialism to be an unforgivable lapse in principle and one whose result was only the empowerment of nationalism. I am also intimately aware of how fascist entryists, the boneheads of the so called “national-anarchists” who spent the 00s trying to infiltrate anarchist spaces, have celebrated and leaned on every example of such collaboration to legitimize their own ideology of fractal borders, parochial communities, and tribal warlords. In particular, I remember well the burst of global fascist enthusiasm and mobilization around the 2014 invasion and the clownishly mistaken allegiances or affinities that some in the US radical left fell into as a response.

Some have argued that, with fascist formations employed on the frontlines by both sides, the best of the bad options is to have the war grind on, hopefully whittling them down, rather than unleashing them back to their countries of origin, but the scale of death of non-fascists in this trade is staggering. And what of the slippage and corruption that inevitably happens when anarchists and fascists fight alongside one another? When there’s talk of former comrades joining Azov for the “mundane” reason that they have better gear and training, one cannot say that these dynamics do not matter. No one in the west can speak to the details or extent, rumors are rumors, perhaps it is only a handful of the usual suspects who have embraced full nationalism. But no matter how well Ukrainian anarchists hold back the fascist creep, we are right to be wary of what might eventually come back to our local communities.

Many anarchists on the ground in Ukraine believe that they can navigate these tensions, that they have no choice but to make the bets they have made. They may be correct; certainly they have more intimate and detailed knowledge of a context and their available choices far beyond my grasp. Similarly, a few anarchists in Palestine believe collaborating under the command of Hamas’ de facto state that folks were rioting against not that long ago, and in geopolitical coalition with Iranian imperialism, is a necessary evil against the genocidal onslaught of Israel. Perhaps they are right as well. Desperation can license concessions. I certainly hope their gambles work out in both cases. A great deal would be licensed if it could truly defeat Russia and Israel. But from the outside perspective the bet seems bad.

While certain demagogues in the Left have screamed invective towards those fighting in Ukraine, or those even in the most tangential or ephemeral way supporting the Ukrainian people, my heart goes out to our Ukrainian comrades. I cannot begin to appreciate the alienation and isolation they must be feeling. But I also cannot pretend that I do not have a sick feeling lurking in my stomach that many of the gambles being made will not turn out well.

Yes, the arrogant west of the anarchist movement has sometimes demonstrated a disgusting entitlement to backseat drive from afar, boxing a distant struggle into familiar conflicts at home, focusing more on scoring points or making grabs for power within our local discursive contexts than extending any meaningful support or compassion. Many of the critiques of hypocrisy and arrogance on the part of western critics are potent. But when a friend gets into a relationship that looks bad, you may be wrong in your outside evaluation — certainly your friend has far more detailed knowledge about the relationship in many respects than you —but you can still be right and as a result you owe them a warning, however perfunctory.

Maybe the only way to survive the state’s conscription effort and the fascists arming themselves is to allow yourself to get armed too. But war has dangerous incentives that ratchet on their own accord, and the resulting environment silences those who dissent. If a major goal of many anarchists is to not draw overwhelming fire as traitors to the nation, then it can follow that there can be no public bragging, encouragement, or discussion of efforts that would be seen as undermining the war – like helping folks escape conscription. The totalizing narratives that result do not only paper over complexities and necessary subversions, but they create an environment and norms that risk being inherited to new generations of radicals. Compromises have a tendency to take a life of their own.

As things heat up within the dying US empire, I am reminded increasingly of the stories from an anarchist friend of mine who grew up as a Palestinian refugee in the ruins of the Lebanese Civil War. A war where the fight wasn’t three-way, but thirty-ways; where the near-enemy and far-enemy calculus shifted daily, alliances had to be broken and forged without regard for the past but merely for daily survival. I worry that anarchists in the US will live to face similar wrenching problems; where there simply is nothing your neighborhood commune can do but pivot again and again between fighting and allying with other factions. Will we really be able to hold firm against collaboration with the tankie cult run by a rapist that kills homeless kids, when we need more bodies to attack the fascist convoy? Will we accept tactical collaboration with chud militias against the US army? Will we squirm and tolerate the remains of the empire’s forces, when they set up food distribution camps and run missions to hunt down the Wolves of Vinland crew trying to blow up the dam powering our neighborhood’s heating through the winter?

Even if we have certain critiques, even if we step back from making certain concessions, even if we subvert and sabotage certain forces, even if we keep to Three Way Fight, will we find ourselves unable to speak of such? Will the paranoia, desperation, and jingoistic mobilization around us make it impossible to speak freely about certain facts?

Or will we run and hide, leaving our friends and families behind to cling to privileged “normalcy” in some foreign city, justifying survival on the grounds that we’ll be keeping texts and networks alive? Will we watch the desperate complex choices of our sleep-deprived and malnourished friends on the news, and listen to strangers lecture us on how short those choices measure up?

War presents a cascading series of trolley problems of astonishing severity, and our bare hunger for survival can end up eroding how we evaluate them. Even if our comrades in Ukraine have no time for our pontifications and distant evaluations, we should still think quite hard about what they’re going through — not to backseat drive necessarily, but to prepare for our own coming fraught decisions as the US empire shatters.

If you never prepare to be tested on a principle, if you never think through potential challenges and tradeoffs with all their richness, you are more likely to fold.

I don’t think that I would ever wear the uniform of a state. But I have never faced conscription when my country was invaded by a genocidal army. Perhaps the Ukrainian state’s carrot of “if you join an army unit with ‘anarchist’ branding you’ll have some autonomy and control of weapons” would sucker me in. Perhaps it would truly be the best of the bad options. As we’ve covered, escape for conscription-age “men” is not trivial or certain. (Although there are groups working to help escape from conscription… often the same people collaborating with the military in other respects, war is complicated.)

Anarchism is at core a universal stance on power: It’s all bad. This sets our tiny beautiful minority against the entire world at once. Because everyone besides us wants some form of power, thinks some level of authority, some slicing apart of humanity, is justified. Everything we do in the world is thus innately compromised from get-go. We have flexibility to deal with these challenges, but there are still hard lines just as there are always important interrelations between ends and means. Our ideals press hard.

We went through all this before with Rojava, in starkly similar terms, including accepting US & NATO weapons, intel, training, and even airstrikes, on the consequentialist grounds that surviving genocide by ISIS or Ergodan outweighed the negative externalities. For years, as a result, most Marxists derisively referred to Rojava as a US puppet, even encouraging the extermination of its project by Assad.

Now, we are definitely not Marxists, nor something vapid like “non-sectarian leftists,” and it is of course absurd to declare, as a few residual wingnuts of the olden days have, that “the core of our politics is destroying the US.” Of course the US is evil and must be destroyed; this is certainly an important strategic aim we have, that should go without saying – although some liberals need reminding. But why, for instance, would any feminist collapse her politics to destroying merely one select momentary epiphenomenon of patriarchy? The US didn’t invent patriarchy, and for all the ways it contributes to it there is every reason to think even that a world system with the PRC as the global hegemon would be even worse in terms of patriarchal policies. Even if the core of our politics was destroying white supremacy, that wouldn’t destroy racism, imperialism, settler-colonialism, genocide, etc., which predate and extend well beyond whiteness or European culture, to say nothing of the US empire.

The thing about ideals is that while anarchism’s universalism leaves us almost no friends or allies, it avoids locking us into a myopic particularism. We don’t fixate on merely the immediate, but try to view the vaster picture. The point of radicalism, of grasping at the roots, is to be able to see beyond the historically contingent, to recognize the horizons beyond which our rules of thumb can break down.

But at the same time flexibility can simply slide us into new traps.

There was, from the beginning, a tendency of over-deference to Rojava from some corners of the anarchist movement.

My sharpest personal experience of such absurdities was playing host to Paul Z Simons as he, an ardent post-leftist anti-organizationalist, tried to frame Rojava as more in line with Bob Black than Murray Bookchin, desperately trying to convince himself and us of the ideologically impossible out of a bare macho attraction to guns and militancy. “They’re real men!” he rhapsodized at one point, before stumbling on what he’d just said.

This fetishization for militant struggle and the eternal appeal of a colored region on a map, left many failing to recognize the ways it — despite being truly inspiring and overwhelmingly better than Assad, ISIS, or Ergodan — replicates statism and is trapped within the logic of territory and war. The YPG made public threats to murder the families of ISIS members, has been credibly accused of ethnic biases to say nothing of reactionary baseline cultural attitudes, and is collaborating with the bloodsoaked Assad regime. I have earned many enemies pointing these out and refusing to allow anarchists to look away.

The Ukrainian state has gotten into bed with nazis, allowing the Azov Brigade and other fascists a degree of autonomy and funding (yes I’m aware there’s been institutional attempts to massage the leadership and blunt the ideological aspects, but let’s not pretend this goes anywhere far enough). The Ukrainian state runs a border regime that, like all border regimes, is racist and the direct cause of immense suffering. And again, it runs a conscription program.

Those of us who do not cling to historical reenactment fantasies have never forgiven the CNT for conscription; it remains one of the most prominent bullet points anarchists use to prove the CNT abandoned anarchism in the Spanish civil war. If we make apologia for conscription by a full-fledged state, what level of compromises will we happily accept in a US civil war? Will anarchists defend tankie cults conscripting neighborhood kids as an unpleasant necessity? Will we tolerate the neighborhood “mutual aid” assembly as it starts granting to itself the powers of a state?

Yes, extreme situations can license extreme responses. But one of the worst things war does is silence critical evaluations. The “exceptions” that pass without objection become the new norms.

Worse than silence, however, can be a poisoned debate where reactive thinking leads to polarization.

Perhaps the greatest ally of normalizing ideological compromise around Ukraine has been the return of all-or-nothing thinking in the Left, particularly the return of outright campists using the thinnest pretense of “anti-imperialism.” It’s not just that such erodes our values, it also quickly leads to absurdly inaccurate maps of reality.

In their article Miéville and González write that,

“There are two possibilities: either Putin is an irrational madman, and bringing him to his knees would directly lead to the Third World War and the annihilation of humanity; or the war he has unleashed can, at least in part, be explained by perceived threats also felt by a portion of the Russian population. In any case, the only possible way out is negotiation, a ceasefire.”

This framing is a shockingly ignorant and rhetorically simplistic collapse of geopolitics in ways that should distress any anarchist. There are vast worlds of possibilities between “total madman” and merely “responding to threats.” Just as there is a vast spread of possibilities between nuclear war and effective Ukrainian capitulation. Missing is any notion of Putin’s agency or Russia as a proactive entity. One doesn’t have to believe that someone would slam their fist on the nuclear armageddon button for fun to believe that the Russian state apparatus intends world domination or as near as they can come, and will doggedly pursue further invasions, further devastation, authoritarianism, and genocide. It is totally plausible that a settlement in Ukraine favorable to Russia will help consolidate Putin’s power, provide the war machine time to regroup and rebuild, and lay the groundwork for the next horrific aggression.

Of course some sort of negotiated compromise is inherent; both the Russian and Ukrainian state say they’re open to a compromise, they just disagree on terms. It’s impossible to a priori derive what terms people in Ukraine should accept — like a fait accompli of the war frontier right now, leaving behind those imprisoned in the captured territories — because there’s no objective middle ground. Should the Kanehsata:ke have settled for the de facto borders to their land imposed by Canada? Peace is not necessarily justice. In much the same way that liberals in the US wring their hands with inanities like “both sides are bad,” saying nothing else while tens of thousands of children are butchered in Gaza, to simply advocate ceasefire or compromise alone in the abstract, at the exclusion of all other considerations, is not principled. You can’t, as Ward Churchill got us all saying, be neutral on a moving train. And, make no mistake, Russia is driving this train.

This is, obviously, not to warmonger, reject any compromise, or somehow – by recognizing Russia’s proactive and primary role – deny NATO’s proactivity in horrors from Turtle Island to Afghanistan. But there’s a particularly galling narrative popular among abuse apologists that abusers are simply normal people acting out because their normal human needs haven’t been met, or because they have legitimate fears that need to be addressed, and Miéville and González’s cartoonish reduction of Putin’s agency and ideological aspirations leverages this exact sort of simplistic thinking where he is cast as reacting.

Let us be very clear about Putin’s aims. His original goal was to take over the entire territory, purging Ukrainian culture as well as anything in civil society that might pose a threat to his regime. This meant kill lists of activists and dissidents that they were crowdsourcing help with as tanks rolled on Kyiv, but it also meant classic pre-modern European warfare of pillaging, enslavement, and extermination once it became clear the government couldn’t be seized. The horrors documented in captured towns make clear that Ukrainians are to be butchered or forcibly used as canon fodder, while hundreds of thousands of their children are to be “lost” in a clearcut genocidal adoption project — facts that have left the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine starkly polarized against Putin.

To bring Russia back to glory in its rightful place as a world superpower, it must regain domination over all the peoples’ who escaped it during the fall of the USSR, even systematically replace them with Russian settlers as they’ve financed in Crimea. It must exterminate the populations of its occupied territories and steal hundreds of thousands of their children. And of course it means to shatter the West, leaving only weak reactionary puppets or unending civil conflicts. While this may be propagandized in parts of the global south as “multipolarity” — which is potentially an even worse thing, as a network of locally attentive and energetically competing warlords can sometimes be worse than a fumbling Emperor far away — the Russian goal has long been to ultimately take the crown of the US Empire for itself. The nazi-ridden Wagner group’s backing of murderous tyrants across Saharan Africa, for example, has merely traded French imperialism for Russian.

Putin’s personal control is predicated upon tapping into widespread nationalist, racist, and chauvinist narratives. He came to power because imperialist wars in Chechnya gave Russian nationalists a sense that Russia was expanding again, on its way to its rightful place ruling the world. Right now Russia blends plumbline contemporary fascist ideology (from myriad directions including most notably Dugin) with an authoritarian kleptocratic state structure and its continued direct grasp of settler colonial imperialist holdings even more vast than the US. This includes horrific repression of anarchists in Russia proper and in its puppet state of Belarus (I strongly encourage every anarchist to read the account of Ihar Alinevich). The Russian empire has been eroding and much of its population fears further erosion, much as the British population feared the loss of their holdings and stature as their empire was in decline.

But the popularity of imperialistic, nationalistic, and fascistic sentiments in Russia, what the authors frame as perceived threats also felt by a portion of the Russian population, do not provide any sort of legitimacy whatsoever. The US population broadly perceives a multitude of threats, some even real; that does not mean negotiation is called for on how much white supremacy to tolerate.

Russian revanchism on its “near abroad” — a region of former conquests it feels entitled to control for eternity — predates Putin and NATO expansion after the cold war. Indeed Russian dreams of imperial conquest of Europe and beyond far predate NATO. It is extremely relevant that there is a long history of slaughter, slavery, genocide, and settler-colonial projects in Ukraine, just as there is in Rojava or Palestine or the US. Every anarchist raised with stories of Makhno and Marusya knows this quite well. These Russian ambitions and entitlements didn’t dissolve or reside — rather they remain widespread to the point where they provide legitimization for Putin.

They must be entirely defeated, of course. For anarchism to triumph Russia must die, not just the US. This means we ultimately do not care that large sections of either population have deep seated anxieties about the loss of their power. Imagine someone saying that the North Vietnamese should make concessions to the US and negotiate a ceasefire early on because the US population is fearful of expanding Soviet influence.

NATO is a military alliance of states. The states involved vary between imperialist genocidal engines that have drenched the world in blood, like the US and France, to relatively underpowered enclaves like Estonia or Finland for whom being under the thumb of NATO has been by far the lesser evil to extermination under Russia. It is a perfectly reasonable evaluation by many in these countries that Russia will be emboldened and strengthened if it permanently wins territory in its war of conquest. Indeed much of the drama since the February 2022 invasion has been internal tensions within NATO, with those countries most threatened by Russia being the most bellicose, while those most safe, like the US, even offering assistance to Putin to keep him in power, providing early proactive intel on dissent in his ranks, because they fear destabilization more than anything else. Internal military documents are quite clear that they don’t want Russia to fall, for fear of fragmentation – they think in terms of draining resources and countering projections, noting correctly that they do not have the capacity for regime change, much less occupation or annihilation. To frame a ceasefire on these terms as a matter of assuaging Russian feelings of existential threat from NATO is proactively blind to reality, and should be completely offensive to anyone with a conscience.

If a nearby state — let’s say Cuba — that suffered from US imperialism and feared a US invasion chose to petition to join a military compact for defense with Russia, even positioning nuclear weapons there, would the US be justified in invading? Would the openness to that defensive agreement on the part of Russia be the “root” cause of the conflict? Should we say that the US simply has a natural “sphere of influence,” and that this must be accepted as a fact about the world?

No, if the US had invaded Cuba outright in response to it asking Russia for closer defense collaboration, we could well imagine Cuban anarchists who had faced severe repression from the Castro regime, taking up arms against the US invaders, even collaborating with state communist forces! We could certainly expect anarchists in the US, Canada and Mexico to escalate armed activity against the US invasion and to collaborate with Cuban forces resisting.

Would they be wrong to do all that? Perhaps. I don’t know.

But what this intuition pump leverages and makes apparent is that many US Leftists, even some “anarchists,” still feel instinctive campist geopolitical and regime affinities. Both in the sense of a weird lingering “pan-leftist” identification with Castro’s regime, and in even the most attenuated identification with Putin’s Russia by way of nebulous cold war continuity, and in the sense of an instinctive campism that, ‘we should bullheadedly focus exclusively on always and in all contexts working against our own countries’ and the US in particular because it is presently the most powerful among empires. Never mind what would make sense in that context from the perspective of a global movement that faces many challenges simultaneously.

If NATO did not exist, the Russian attempt to colonize Ukraine would still have happened, and if the Ukrainian state apparatus did not exist during this invasion, Ukrainians would still have fought the genocidal settler-colonialist invaders. If — as might well happen — Zelensky and the Ukrainian state were to order the Ukrainian people to stop fighting, and accept some unjust peace, surely we would recognize the state’s edict as something to be resisted.

I’m not without sympathy for concerns of escalation to nuclear warfare, but would those who think the fighting should stop over such fears side with the Ukrainian state in rounding up or shooting those Ukrainians who continue to fight in defiance of their authority? If the US cuts a deal with Putin to sacrifice or cut up Ukraine, would those screaming about peace at any cost back even US troops helping round up anyone continuing armed struggle? At what point does Putin’s saber rattling become a reason to defer endlessly and completely? If he threatens to lob nukes in response to riots or an anarchist insurgency or a mass uprising at home, should we condemn those?

The spectacle of a number of supposed “anarchists” echoing Russia Today propaganda is bad enough, but when they get warped to the point of dismissive hostility to “color revolutions” (the myth that the US somehow pulls the puppet strings of all popular revolts in countries outside their direct control) they become indistinguishable from Leninists or any other cop-cheering reactionary.

The sheer fact of the matter is that struggle against power everywhere will sometimes be in line with the interests or imperatives of the US. To demand folks await the fall of the US to resist other powers is identical to Communist demands in so many other contexts that we wait for the masses, The Party strategists, or the Withering To Come.

Calla Walsh made the grotesque authoritarianism of campism even more stark when she declared, in a stunningly self-aware statement,

“If “woman life freedom” succeeded & overthrew the sovereign govt of Iran, there’d be no Axis Of Resistance as we know it to resist US-Zionist imperialism.”

Ultimately Campism is inextricably a statist framework. It doesn’t just treat states as merely the largest loosely congealing patterns in a wider and deeper ecology of power relations, but centers them in a way that slices away all other considerations. Rather than seeing the two hundred or so formally recognized nation-states as an interlocking mesh of gangs, where — in normal workings — as one gang loses power the others rise to take it, the campist sees the US as not different in degree or happenstance but ontologically exceptional. This leads one to abandon critical analysis of the other state power structures but it also inevitably leads to functionally backing those “lesser evils.”

We can all recognize that an anarchist utilizing the chaos of Russia’s invasion to assassinate notorious Ukrainian cops or fascists would clearly be commendable, but the campist shies away from thinking that a Palestinian anarchist likewise using the chaos of Israel’s invasion to assassinate notorious Hamas cops or islamists would likewise be commendable. In the supposed “axis of resistance” resistance must be crushed.

To be an anarchist is to have far more in common with anarchists in any distant country in the world than with any non-anarchist. And yet the campist does not ground their solidarity or affinity in values, but in the arrangement of pieces in the statist framework of geopolitics and the blinders of immediacy. Often they will even proactively tell you that they have more in common with our Leninist enemies than with us! They see values as secondary to coalitions.

This sort of thinking operates in coalitional all-or-nothings, so that someone supporting Ukrainians using US arms is magically transmuted into saying “don’t attack the US war machine.” As though a person supporting Rojava getting weapons from the US means they should stop simultaneously vandalizing military recruitment offices, blockading Raytheon offices, or fragging officers. That doesn’t even remotely follow!

The Republican Spain and the anarchists of the CNT/FAI had basically two options for armament: the Soviet Union or the capitalist arms manufacturers of the West. Stalin was clearly a catastrophic mistake; trading the plundered gold of the Spanish Empire to the USSR only strengthened its regime for decades and gave them the footing to betray the anarchists and seize power in Spain. In response, many anarchists decided it was clear we’d made the wrong choice and the West was the lesser evil in the strategic calculus. But even supporting the Republican forces buying weapons from Stalin doesn’t mean thinking that anarchists in the Soviet Union should stop bombing Cheka and Bolshevik meetings.

I make these comparisons, to Rojava, to Gaza, to Korea, to Cuba, and to Spain, not because they are absolutely identical situations or to steal some unproblematic or heroic veneer for all Ukrainian anarchists today and all their different choices, but precisely because those other situations should be deeply problematic for anarchists. We should feel tortured about the complexities in those examples. We should think quite critically and recognize enemies and dangers in multiple directions.

In a quite decent panel on the ways western anarchists have failed our Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian anarchists, echoing false propaganda, leveraging privilege imperiously, and failing to supply aid in even more limited ways, one comrade eloquently spoke:

“It’s a strange world where anarchists tell fighting people to lay down their weapons… It is a strange world where capitalist peace is more important than the anarchist fight against dictatorship …It is a strange world where anarchists are laughing during a minute of solidarity with those tortured and murdered by the state… As anarchists we have to be in the places where the world is burning.”

This is true.

It’s a strange and complicated world — one where a minority of “anarchists” somehow feel no shame at acting like Leninists. We do have obligations to press into the heat, to make hard choices. Anarchism means nothing if it does not mean taking proactive responsibility, often living soaked in mud and blood. Still, anarchism also means nothing if we focus on immediate challenges at the exclusion of potential or distant tangles. We are justifiably proud of our movement’s great accomplishment in exposing Marx’s implicit authoritarianism decades before any Marxist was near success in their plans. To make such a critique did not diminish fighting the immediate danger of capitalism, it meant keeping our heads clear. If we cared exclusively about the immediate, about the evil on our doorstep — whether Russian or Yankee — we simply wouldn’t be anarchists. We are at our best when we concern ourselves with many dangers at once, distant ones as well as pressing ones. Not just the pressing danger of the Russian genocidal project, but the danger of nationalist creep and state entanglement. Not just the pressing danger of the US empire, but the other monsters that will quickly rise to take its place.

To live in the mess means making hard choices, but it also means avoiding the reassurances of simple strategies or poisoned alliances. We are always inherently at odds with everyone.

What is so dangerous about the extremities of war is the pull to forget this multipronged fight.

We must avoid the campism that would short-circuit all considerations beyond destroying the US, but so too must we avoid a reflexive underdogism that embraces not just struggle against the subjugation of peoples on national lines but proactive nationalism of the oppressed. The kind of crude ghoulishness that places the national flags of Ukraine, Palestine, or Rojava in a social media bio like one’s rooting for a sports team, or even worse, in such spectacle, ignores the cops to be fought at home – like the liberals who will cheer the Zapatistas but turn you in for fighting.

As I’ve said, one of the worst things about campism is that it reinforces this sort of binary thinking not just in its own ranks but in those who react to it. With every ghastly insult and despicable take, with every hypocrisy or rhetorical bombast, the campist stokes the liberalism they accuse everyone of. When western anarchists sneer at or even physically attack Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian anarchists, the pressure only naturally builds to see more in common with those hiding from the bombs alongside you than some smug French or US anarchist writer. When “anarchists” on twitter declare that we should follow Leninist prescriptions and organize alongside them as good little dupes, their absurdity becomes a pressing near-enemy that obscures the other “anarchists” literally sharing NATO memes.

While it may be hard for some dinosaurs among us to grasp, to fight one evil effectively you often have to fight other evils in conflict with it at the same time.

It’s a strange and complicated world. And we should remember that. Especially those of us who live in relative privilege and peace for now. Because it’s going to get stranger. And while I may not know as much on Ukraine as some, I do know that anyone looking for the relief of coalitions or simple fights is going to make bad evaluations as things grow more complicated.

One Giant Red Flag, Folded Into A Book

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 18:16:50 +0000

This text is available as a zine formatted for printing.

CW: lengthy and detailed discussion of abuse, rape, stalking, and apologia for such

Let’s be clear from the outset: Conflict Is Not Abuse is not even remotely the same thing as the sentiment or thesis that “conflict is not abuse.” Much of the success Sarah Schulman’s book has seen is the result of people wanting a defense of the latter thesis and assuming her appropriation of the pre-existing phrase means the book’s content follows whatever their own motivations and approach to that distinction is. I will refer to Schulman’s book by the acronym CINA throughout this review specifically to avoid such a default association and emphasize the ways in which CINA is not an appropriate or productive illustration of the differences between conflict and abuse (a distinction it barely touches and handles inaccurately), nor a useful investigation into the origins of conflations between those two categories.

The first time I was recommended CINA it was by an old comrade and former coworker, a survivor of the green scare, someone I have a deep personal respect and appreciation for. The Left, she complained to me over coffee, has become too quick to cut people off, to leap into recriminations and bitter denunciations over small infractions. Ignorance of non-standard language or etiquette, to say nothing of complex history, systems, and dynamics, is quickly turned into an indelible stain of character. Those without a liberal arts education and other markers of class are gatekept from The Left, which increasingly collapses to nothing more than status games in the non-profit sector. And within such spaces those who flourish are those who turn every disagreement, harm, or conflict, however minor, into a point of perpetual hostility and fracture. Every small clique closes up the drawbridges. Every wound festers. Mutual unintelligibility grows and every issue of epistemology becomes a hotly political declaration of personal alliances.

Sure! I said, I think pretty much everyone agrees with that. Indeed such a surface characterization of the left (compounded by today’s particularly crude and protozoic social media tools) is pretty much universal. But crucial and grave distinctions emerge in our analysis and prescriptions. One can find squabbles for status on Facebook or preening over demonstrating the absolute perfect social justice language to be laughably inane while also supporting the recent paradigm shift to a world where the regimes of sickening peace that so many predators and tyrants in subcultural spaces depended upon for decades is eroded and counter-mobilization isn’t tamped down.

My friend and I talked for hours, but our broad emphases could not have been more different.

In her mind the central flaw of the Left was people’s tolerance or even taste for conflict and schism. In my mind the central flaw of the left was the inverse: a hunger for unity, and, as a result, a simple-minded avoidance of schism.

Indeed, I argued, it’s precisely the Left’s pursuit of cohesion above all and an inability to gracefully accept rupture and separation that is the source of much intractable hostility. Instead of simply going our own ways, the Left sees any division as failure and so tries to force everything into The General Assembly or The Party or The Community – creating self-perpetuating quagmires in a blind faith that discussion can handle everything or that collectivity is a magical fountainhead of warm fuzzies. But the harder we attempt to press everyone into peace and unity the more violent and cataclysmic the inevitable splits. By trying to tamp down every fight and paper over every difference we create more division in total. Instead of stepping up to the hard fight to kick a serial abuser out of institutional power we defuse and avoid explicit conflict, pushing everything into hidden accountability processes designed solely to hold together The Community or The Organization, until the survivors get so exhausted and demoralized they quit activism or end up in a massive schism not just with the serial abuser but with the self-appointed overseers of accountability, even with the entire passively complicit scene.

It’s a general pattern: the more a scene accepts separation, the less catastrophic the divisions. Anarchist circles and projects, for example, certainly have our disagreements, grudges, and lingering animosities, but the resulting conflicts, even when they get violent or fucked up, are at least rarely as devastating as the unending fractal of cataclysmic splits between factions of marxists who cannot ideologically countenance any sort of schism and so are overrun by them.

In short, I agreed with the title of the book my friend so effusively praised, conflict isn’t abuse, but I disagreed with what she seemed to have gotten from it. While there are some inane exceptions, we don’t have an epidemic of inflating conflict into abuse, we far more often see abuse minimized and marginalized as mere “conflict,” with struggles against abusers cast as even worse than abuse. And while normal conflict is sometimes unnecessary or defaulted on for bad reasons, I believe it is often good or even necessary in many situations to embrace conflict, and in many cases that can take the form of individuals cutting off contact or collectively boycotting (“ostracizing”). Yes, the insufficiently developed structure of certain contemporary communications technologies that still provide few options in social scope and context, leads to a lot of noise and posturing over trivialities, but this issue pales in comparison to the importance of tearing down the regimes of unjust peace and unity in subcultural communities that have long held up predators, nihilistic apathy and the old boys clubs that cultivate both.

It’s worth noting Sarah Schulman repeatedly emphasizes in interviews that she didn’t write CINA to address abuse or #MeToo. And yet in practice the discourse around CINA is invariably drawn to such issues.

The most pernicious and loudly prominent tendency among references to CINA are those who use it to declare that a given situation of severe abuse is merely “conflict” – and also, usually, to then frame those treating it more seriously as engaging in “abuse” themselves for their reaction. #ConflictIsNotAbuse, in this usage, becomes an opportunistic slogan for deflection and reversals, with a book only distantly attached, off in the ether, providing legitimization in a nebulous but authoritative way.

It’s very similar to The Tyranny Of Structurelessness – a similarly notorious text that lives primarily as a slogan to legitimize any given instance of tyranny and bureaucracy or to dismiss out of hand any resistance and alternatives to such, as well as to shut down all investigation or talk of non-formalized bottom-up strategies for dealing with informal power. The particulars of the text are less important than the assumed canonicity and unassailability of its title. Few fans invoking the title of the text have actually read the thing; they don’t need to.

This isn’t to say that the wildly fucked up ends to which either text get cited are unfair readings or misappropriations of good texts. Make no mistake, CINA is ultimately exactly what it has been widely accused of being: a jawdropping book of nonstop abuse apologia, a good representation of the ideological frameworks and defensive narratives of many abusers and their defenders. The array of horrid ends to which CINA is widely leveraged may not always be direct reflections of the text, but they do inexorably derive from it.

Just as it’s important to be fair and note her repeated dismissals that she wasn’t writing about abuse, it’s also important to provide the context that Schulman was, according to several publicly posted and widely shared accounts of fellow activists, run out of Toronto for abusing and stalking an ex, repeatedly violating boundaries and even showing up at her house. When she writes things like “Resistance to shunning, exclusion, and unilateral control, while necessary, are mischaracterized as harm,” she’s quite openly attempting to cast her own personal history of violating requested boundaries as morally necessary resistance rather than abuse. This context is critical and clearly drives everything in CINA, which repeatedly to the point of cringe comedy inserts asides about how such stalking and boundary violation isn’t abuse, but is even morally obligatory, all while casting someone refusing to answer your calls as essentially The Real Abuse.

Yet I am not here to provide one more sweeping rhetorical denunciation of Schulman and her grotesque book but an autopsy. How specifically does CINA function towards the ends of abuse apologia? Why might a few reasonable and even valorous people find it sympathetic?

CINA invites the reader to consider the many situations everyone on the planet has experienced where someone doing bad things sees (or rhetorically frames) themselves as grievously harmed by minor acts, including the resistance or self-defense of those they’re harming. Since this is a very broad and sweeping category readers can insert pretty much whatever they like into this picture. After all, it’s a common enough experience in the most abstract sense; we’re all familiar with crybullies who will claim the smallest misstep is cataclysmically harmful and then frame any sort of resistance to their claims as further grievous injustice. CINA sweepingly postulates that in all these cases the bad-doer sees themselves as the victim because they have little experience dealing with self-criticism, self-doubt, and personal change and so fear collapsing entirely in the face of engagement, choosing to lash out instead.

I want to be clear: instances of this can certainly occur!

The trap is that this explanation can be slapped over almost any situation… including criticism of CINA. The credulous reader is enthused by the sense of support they get from the text regarding particular harrowing situations in their own social life. Whenever Schulman’s language gets dicey they just remember that one time someone was out-of-pocket online (eg comparing reposting a journalist’s copyrighted photo to rape or calling giving neighbors food racist). But increasingly the psychological narrative explanation applies to everything, and so must reflect Deep Truth. It becomes a hammer that can strike at anyone’s umbrage with you, all the more so if they have little interest in handholding you endlessly but instead just want you to fuck off and stop bothering them. And so when legions of survivors recoil in horror and denounce CINA as abuse apologia, there’s a ready-made explanation for their hysteria.

This potent appeal conjoins with the title into a readymade deflection: okay, sure, the text could maybe do with more caveats that in various places the author isn’t saying X when she says something that could be construed as X, but it’s not on her to explore in depth what constitutes abuse rather than conflict. She’s just doing one half of the work.

And finally, the favorite defense of Schulman herself: the book is just a grab bag of random ideas, not a formal academic thesis, and is meant to be charitably approached like a jumble of half-finished thoughts mumbled in a bar. Whatever the merits or demerits of this approach, CINA has reached such cultural pervasiveness because it does in fact functionally make a single argument and it’s one a lot of people want to hear: The people accusing you of abuse are in fact the real abusers because it’s not like you repeatedly beat anyone, but they ostracized you and refused to return your calls, and that’s honestly the worst thing possible.

The lazy way to denounce CINA is to list some extremely horrible or scandalous pull-quotes at the extremes of this and then just point to them and go “holy shit” (believe me, we’ll do that) but I want to talk concretely about some straightforward mistakes in CINA’s overall conceptual analysis, the values it assumes, and how they build on one another. There are three core mistakes Schulman makes:

1) Centering community, collectivity and existing relationships – as opposed to individual agency – as valuable in-and-of-themselves and the fountainhead of solutions.

2) Ridiculously overestimating the utility or potency of verbal discussion, and prioritizing maintaining communication rather than embracing free association.

3) Treating refusal to talk as itself abusive, or at least shockingly severe harm, rather than something not only often pragmatically necessary but core to and inextricable from individual agency.

The end result of these mistakes (and a variety of reinforcing ones) is the diminishing of actual abuse into the category of conflict by shifting the focus of critique upon survivors and others who set boundaries around communication and association.

Schulman’s explicit diminishment of actual abuse is important, as are her extremely reactionary narratives about survivors and false accusations, but such are the product of a certain logic that must be explored in depth to be refuted. Along the way I will not in the slightest respect the tissue-thin pretense that CINA is a book merely about conflict and not abuse.

Community Over Individual Choice

Schulman, like a lot of leftists unfortunately, really passionately believes in a phantasm called “community” and has this kind of background assumption that togetherness is both what we’re all obviously striving for and is also basically a fountainhead of magic that can solve anything. She just takes it for granted that anyone reading would recognize “relationships” hold innate value in themselves above the freedom of their constituent individuals, and she also believes that The Community should be the primary agent and sovereign involved in resolving a conflict. In short, community is the goal, the means, and the subject. As she puts it at the outset:

“At the center of my vision is the recognition that above all, it is the community surrounding a Conflict that is the source of its resolution. The community holds the crucial responsibility to resist overreaction to difference, and to offer alternatives of understanding and complexity. We have to help each other illuminate and counter the role of overstating harm instead of using it to justify cruelty. I suggest that we have a better chance at interrupting unnecessary pain if we articulate our shared responsibility in creating alternatives. Looking for methods of collective problem-solving make these destructive, tragic leaps more difficult to accomplish. People who are being punished for doing nothing, for having normative conflict, or for resisting unjustified situations, need the help of other people. While there are many excuses for not intervening in unjust punishment, that intervention is, nonetheless, essential. Without the intervention that most people are afraid to commit to, this escalation cannot be interrupted.” [emphasis added]

There’s a world of horrors Shulman is stuffing under anodyne phrases like “normative conflict” or “resisting unjustified situations” but, again, we’ll get to all that. However it’s important to note that the “tragic” “escalation” she’s concerned with here is explicitly laid out as that of refusing to talk to someone or attempting to organize a boycott of them, both characterized by the severing of relationships. Such is something Schulman repeatedly treats as unimaginably dire and endlessly compares or equivocates with things like racist police violence and Israel’s genocidal project in Palestine. Schulman’s position is that if you see someone refusing to talk to a shitbag or folks cutting ties over associating with said shitbag, you have a moral obligation not just to proactively violate any requested boundaries against contact (eg stalking and harassing them to get them to talk to said shitbag) but to aggressively mobilize with other “community” members to band to the “aid” of the shitbag, to force other people into association with said shitbag and defeat any boycott or deplatforming that might otherwise result from a wider awareness of his shitbaggery. Again, Schulman presents this sort of response as a moral imperative. And she seems to think this isn’t happening and needs to.

“One problem here is how to intervene with a person who is overstating harm, hiding behind technology [note: by this she explicitly means anything from preferring email over phone calls to blocking someone], shunning or otherwise escalating… This is the structure behind every successful piece of non-violent progressive political action:

Scapegoated people cannot be made to stand alone.

Community needs to move towards negotiation.

More and more people have to join in together to create change.

The conversation is not over just because an escalator insists that it is.”

But this is already the blueprint of pretty much every attack on a survivor in subcultural spaces. A mob is rallied together to overwhelm someone and deny their basic agency as an individual, to deny them the autonomy to set boundaries and choose who they associate with, to impose an endless conversation against their wishes, to re-establish relationships to some degree, rather than permit them to escape.

Indeed one of the most constant critiques survivors make is that Leftist and subcultural spaces prioritize the maintenance of “The Community” over the freedom of the survivors.

No one wants to sacrifice their own relationships and personal social capital or disrupt the overall social network and so the interests of an abstract “The Community” are leveraged to keep abusers while aggressively mobilizing against the disruptiveness of survivors. Even when the abuser in question is a literal admitted child molester (as infamously occurred in the Portland IWW), his friends selfishly don’t want to lose the benefits of their relationships with him and so when the parent and a pile of survivors of child sexual assault demand his exclusion from an organization and radical events (to say nothing of his frequent role providing childcare at meetings) they were framed as aggressors against the social peace tearing apart “The Community” (hurting the organization’s reputation, harming “the work”, destroying relationships, violating procedures for endless formal discussion, etc). Because what’s really (selfishly) valued is social peace rather than individual autonomy, better social norms, or the liberation of survivors. Anarchists have endlessly written about this over the last two decades:

“In the most extreme cases, accountability processes will be initiated against the explicit wishes of survivors, as an attempt to legitimize the perpetrator in the eyes of others. The pretence of making it a “community issue” allows the false supporters to not only take control out of the survivors hands, but also to portray survivors who refuse to cooperate with their own disempowerment as a barrier to accountability.“ (Betrayal: A Critical Analysis of Rape Culture In Anarchist Subcultures, 2013)

“Transformative justice processes” have widely become not one tool among many that survivors could pick as suits their needs and evaluation of a specific context and perpetrator, but a hidden cellar into which survivors can be reliably forced by organizations and milieus – by “The Community” – to contain their disruptiveness, often aggressively sticking them back into the hands of their abuser’s mind games, threats, traumatic memories, and exhausting lies. Like a small town delivering an unruly wife in town square back into the containing box of her husband’s house with a few token stern words to him, the point is to “repair the damage” to “The Community,” not the survivor.

The playbook is historically consistent and widespread across subcultures and ostensible politics: form ranks around the abuser and collectively bully any survivors demanding his exclusion or honestly really anything. Requests that he leave her alone, sharing what he did to warn other people to stay away, much less mobilizing grassroots social boycotts of him, are treated as high treasonous crimes against “The Community” and the web of relationships that comprise it.

However in practice the sheer self-interest of these machinations is pretty transparent. In the face of a declaration that someone was abusive, folks mobilize to defend their friendships, social capital, and the broader social order threatened by the survivor often without any sort of pretense (as well as to crack down on any chance they themselves might face negative consequences one day). And when moral arguments are grasped at to defend the maintenance of various relationships, it is usually a jumbled, reactive, contradictory affair.

What’s relatively novel about CINA is the way it attempts to provide a coherent unified moral argument to reject personal boundaries (“avoidance”) and grassroots boycotts (“shunning”) entirely. This is what makes the book so uniquely dangerous as a rallying document for abuse apologists. But it also makes it a fascinating artifact because, in so doing, Schulman leverages the collectivist values unfortunately already popular among leftists to shockingly extreme conclusions. CINA is nothing if not a systematic reductio ad absurdum of collectivism. If a Right Libertarian wrote it as a parody document of The Left we would sneer that it was a cartoonish hack job with takes no one real would ever make. And yet CINA is littered with sweeping statements that aggressively reject individual autonomy, to give just one example:

“If someone wishes to alter a relationship, they must discuss it with the other person, negotiate the change, and listen to the other person’s account. There is no ethical way around it.”

One would hope that any reasonable person would instantly recognize this claim as ridiculous and abhorrent. Individual agency implies plenty of situations where unilateral alteration of a relationship is clearly licensed and no “negotiation” whatsoever is appropriate. If a friend or acquaintance reveals a sexual interest in me they have unavoidably unilaterally changed some aspects to our relationship, and I may reciprocate or not, but I owe them no negotiation in my response, which in turn unilaterally creates a change. If a friend asks to become fuckbuddies I don’t even necessarily owe them an explanation for my refusal. Relationships are not democratic communes.

Another obvious and salient example is breaking up with someone. The right of exit from a relationship is not up for negotiation nor should it ever be, if someone wants out, they’re out. Hell, I say this as someone in my youth broken up with via an “I love you too intensely and I’ve decided I don’t want to feel such intensity, please don’t respond” text, a maddeningly and painfully limited puzzlebox if ever there was one. Everyone knows that getting ghosted can suck, but a breakup is fundamentally a matter of individual choice and should not be something where both parties are forced into a negotiation by some National Romantic Relations Board.

There are many situations of change in relationships in which discussion and even negotiation are quite ethically valorous, sometimes requisite on some level, but they are simply not as fundamental of moral priorities as individual autonomy. Having agency comes first. As such, there will always be many contexts in which there is no obligation or pull whatsoever to discuss or “negotiate” a change to a relationship. An employee, for example, is in a financial relationship with her boss and she can simply unilaterally declare that relationship finished at any time. If a friend of mine starts knowingly dating a cop or infamous snitch I do not owe them a discussion about their betrayal of our shared values or the risk they now pose, certainly not any negotiation, I can and should cut all contact with them ASAP.

Schulman’s language in even just the above betrays how deeply she sees things in terms of collectives, she speaks of “a relationship” as if it were a unified thing but there is actually no singular ontological object out there of “the relationship” that we are co-owners or constituent citizens of. There are rather always just individuals with different orientations or sentiments to others. Your sentiment towards me is not the same object as my sentiment towards you, they can interact but they are, at core, autonomous. Richly and delightedly entangled though we may become in friendships and love, we are still infinitely more individuals than some net collective entity. Even while the abstract simplification of “our relationship” might have significant utility as shorthand, it is just as ultimately ontologically vacuous as aggregate abstractions like “table” or “hand” – while useful shorthand in a lot of contexts, it describes no actual root thing in the universe and it is certainly not emergently autonomous as a new causal or moral entity beyond our individual minds and orientations. “Radicalism” is precisely about rejecting abstract conjured holisms and instead focusing our eyes on the actual roots.

It’s not uncommon for an abusive parent or partner to harangue someone for not “doing more for Our Relationship” in very much the same terms that Leninists will pressure you to sacrifice for The Organization they run or jingoists will encourage you to sacrifice at the altar of The Nation. These are not real things but simplified abstractions that are invoked to obscure the real dynamics and desires at play.

Your internal sentiment and orientation towards me is entirely your choice – were it anything less you would be reduced in your capacity to even function as a self-reflective agent. Our sentiments towards one another may, of course, grow strongly causally intertwined, and we may indeed pick up strong obligations in various contexts to discuss, engage or inform one another of things that expand our awareness and agency. Communication is vital to consent just as knowledge is vital to agency, so there can be extreme situations where you have an imperative to convey vital information to someone when they do not consent to hear it. Someone with a hangover might tell you to leave them in silence, but if you see them about to pour mislabeled rat poison into their coffee you obviously have a moral duty to violate their request. But this is just as obviously not the same thing as a general obligation to each others’ attention and engagement. Nor does it rise to the level of a duty of engagement that should be enforced upon the two of us by The Community.

It’s all the rage in The Left to treat “agency” as a kind of arbitrary compartmentalization that can be applied like a fractal, at any scale. In this lens collectives (from relationships to nations) are just as much “agents” as individuals, but there is a drastically important distinction that arises from the vast differences in how quickly and densely information can flow between neurons within a brain versus between conversing committee members. Put simply: the richness and depth of our thoughts, knowledge and experiences are generated far faster than language can ever convey to another person. We are an individuated species because the self-reflective processes that give rise to meaningful choice happen – by orders of magnitude – primarily in our skulls rather than in the thin bandwidth of communication that is able to pass between us. This is why individuals must be at the root of any “radical” analysis; in the absence of actual telepathy or borg-like hiveminds, agency and choice are only properties of individuals.

To maximize freedom thus obliges respecting the autonomy of individuals so that they can make their own choices rather than be drowned as mere components of some committee (or community) they are locked into. This is not to say that we always have no ethical obligations, I’ve noted the complexity at play and potential exceptions, but our primary lens and our starting point should always be something closer to the individual “right” of free association. It’s imperative that individual autonomy be preserved so that choices can be made at all, so that people can even just think for themselves, rather than be trapped under the barrage of inefficient chatter. Relations that are not actively and continually chosen by each individual can only suppress freedom in net.

It can be worth questioning the absolutist framework of “rights” that this prioritization is often framed in terms of, but Schulman’s approach is simply to reverse the right:

“What we have instead is a devolved definition of personal responsibility, which constructs avoidance as a right regardless of the harm it does to others.”

“Simply wanting to exclude… someone through forced absence is not an inherent right.”

“The concept of “safe space” …is used by the dominant to defend against the discomfort of hearing other people’s realities, to repress nuance, ignore multiple experiences, and reject the inherent human right to be heard.”

It’s truly hard to fathom a claim as gobsmackingly dystopian as a “right to be heard.” If Schulman recognizes that she’s declared an inherent right to ownership and control over another person’s brain, she’s completely untroubled by it. Again, Libertarians love to complain that The Left has a tendency to argue sloppily and make up “positive rights” to labor from other people (eg the “right” to a doctor’s labor), but not a one of them ever dreamed things could go this far. This is a right to abuse, and nothing less.

Instead of treating engagement as something to be pursued as a general ends or instrumental goal, Schulman instead presents it as a personal obligation in all relationships and contexts. Even worse, it’s a personal obligation that must be enforced by a community. You’re not allowed to come to the conclusion that there are better things to do with your life than continue arguing with your ex; The Community will pressure you to continue to engage with them, because your ex has a right to your attention. The Relationship has rights. The Community has a right to perpetuation. And these rights stand above individual free association (which necessarily includes choosing to not engage with someone, e.g. to avoid them). This is what’s inextricably at play in Schulman’s framework. You have a duty to engage with other people, to answer their calls, to include them when your friends hang out, to negotiate every social action you take rather than making them freely, and this duty must be enforced upon you, which is equivalent to asserting that others have a right to your attention, a vote in your “relationship” in all situations as if it were a collective or nation.

Schulman acts as though it’s self-evidently ludicrous to claim we have a right to shun but of course we have the right to shun. Good god, we have nothing if we do not have such a “right”! Which is to say in more clear terms: we, as individuals, must have the core freedom to choose who we associate with and who we waste time engaging with. This is the very premise of individual agency: choice. Not “voice” in a democratic assemblage, but choice in whether or not to show up or not. And, of course, choice in whether to fork the organization or group and convene a new one minus the assholes defending the child molester. Anything less is communistic tyranny rather than anarchy.

For a sustainable world of rich connection, individuals must have conscious choice in their connections. We must be able to fluidly reorganize and reposition ourselves, building not just chosen family but constantly and actively chosen family. Schulman hates the term “family” (“the phrase “chosen family” makes me quake with fear”), which, fair enough, and she juxtaposes this with friendship, concluding “a true friend has the conversation.”

I will say that it is valorous that Schulman seeks a world of connection and engagement, I do as well, but this leads her to praise and seek to deepen precisely the “unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation.” [emphasis added]

There are, of course, real and important dangers to clustering effects whereby different communities or cultures might seal themselves from one another and there is an imperative to resist such cultural and epistemic closure in some specific ways by encouraging the choice of engagement, but Schulman’s solutions are slapdash and authoritarian: If some people might choose to cluster homogeneously, then take away their choice; force them into diverse pluralistic social relationships that they have no agency in reconfiguring or navigating. This “solution” is not the rich teeming chaos of cosmopolitanism but a nationalist and totalitarian caricature of it in which we all have assigned seating to meet some crude diversity quotas.

Nationalists complain that without collectively enforced borders the free association of individuals means their neighbor could sell their home to a foreigner and thus “impose” diversity upon them. Schulman’s argument in CINA takes literally the same form but with different ends. But nationalism isn’t just wrong in the ends of homogeneity, it is wrong in its means of suppressing individual choice. A world of random arbitrary relationships into which we are thrust and locked, and that we must embrace rather than exercise choice over, is not a solution to nationalist divides but rather has been a characteristic fascist wet dream since the time of Heidegger.

The whole point to cosmopolitanism and increasingly global connectivity is to give people more choice. Bands of hunter-gatherers come together in large fairs, rural folks run away from small towns to giant cities, so many have fought for the online world we finally have, precisely so that people could have more social options. This often looks like more avenues of flight: a battered wife stuck in a small village has fewer chances for solidarity or a place to flee to than she does in a big city. But it can also look like more options in terms of affinity. Cities (and the biggest city, the internet) are sites of constantly spontaneously generated subcultures from the magic of free association. This enables the generation of complex and diverse new cultural experiments, but it also means the erosion of those that don’t work for their members. That is to say, diversity in some directions and not others.

That part is critical because “diversity” is not a value in and of itself. Nor is “tolerance.” Such notions are liberal pluralist hangups very different from anarchist commitments. Sadly, Schulman is firmly in the grip of an analysis in terms of diversity and difference:

“most of the pain, destruction, waste, and neglect towards human life that we create on this planet and beyond, are consequences of our overreaction to difference”

But that’s clearly not the case. If one person wants to selfishly consume a limited resource and the other person doesn’t want them to, that’s a conflict in values totally separate from any position on or response to difference. The small child torturing small animals to death for fun in the backyard isn’t acting out some fear of difference/otherness but simply not caring by default about anything beyond their self. Perhaps they can come to eventually recognize and blur their sense of self with the common spark of agency in other patches of the universe, but a failure to evolve such an awareness is not by any means automatically the result of fearing difference.

And we don’t seek to tolerate the existence of evangelical christians, we seek to completely replace them by facilitating escape (and militant resistance). We seek to crush and exterminate bad subcultures and communities from national socialist black metal to hindufascism. To accomplish this means fluidly prefiguratively coming together in new social and cultural spaces with better values and norms in which we can not just breathe more freely but where folks can escape to. Social boycott dynamics are critical to this process to keep out the creep of everything that goes against those values. It’s not through some centralized politburo meeting where edicts are voted on that better social spaces develop, but through individuals freely choosing to associate with people who share their values and not with those who don’t. People can only truly engage when they each have choice in their relations, the freedom to escape, to be able to cut any tie and build new ones with anyone consenting. To build a more richly connected world on the whole we often have to cut away our personal connections with malicious nodes in the network. The anarchist project involves embracing this as a catalyzing individual process from the bottom-up.

So in short: not every instance of homogeneous clustering or exclusion is pernicious. A child molester should not be tabling at a union’s family events. Immigrants new to a city reasonably desire to maintain many ties and commonalities. And radical subcultures of resistance should ostracize people for severely violating their assumed baseline of shared values and expectations.

Speech As Magic

If one half of Schulman’s moral appeal in CINA is a reductio of leftism as collectivism, its other half is a reductio of liberalism’s naive faith in speech as salve to everything. If people would only allow her to have a conversation with them, Schulman could correct “misinterpretations” of her and force them to come over to her perspective. CINA’s grand theory is that failing to critically engage and be critiqued by others engenders a kind of need for psychological stasis in trauma or entitlement that is the source of all closed groups and domination of the other. This is not a dynamic that never happens, it certainly describes many situations well enough, and I’ll engage with it more in a coming section, but CINA cashes this out as an imperative to always talk.

In this frame even fascism is explicitly rendered nothing more than a frantic attempt to escape whose “antidote” is literally just “love.” (Like a boomer parody par excellence she’s really into the early 20th century pseudoscience of “psychoanalysis” and spends a chapter wishing totally discredited wingnuts like Wilhelm Reich could have just sat all the nazis down in a therapy session and thus solved everything.) In this frame “the courage to love” is literally “inexhaustible” magic that can solve any problem.

“The responsible person who understands that all parties participate in conflict, says, “We need help.” If we really think that someone “needs help,” we help them. The claim “you need help, therefore I will compound your problems by shunning and bullying you,” obviously is entirely unethical, hypocritical, and socially detrimental.”

This shocking level of boomer liberalism extends from Schulman explicitly rejecting No Platforming fascists, to embracing inane IDW talking points like “the best answer to speech is more speech… the best answer to [negative] movements is more communication … what we need is more discomfort.” (41:10 here) to absolutely laugh-out-loud analysis of social change:

“If the powers that be had invited people with HIV into their halls and said, “We have a conflict here. Therefore we need to sit down together and solve it,” people with HIV would not have had to do civil disobedience, for which they and their supporters were arrested by the police. It was the shunning that made them have to do this. It was the immoral shunning that criminalized people with HIV.”

Naturally she also opposes content warnings as coddling those damn college kids too.

This is all so deeply liberal it’s gobsmacking. I already wrote a lengthy good faith engagement with critics of antifascism in 2017 handling every single argument against No Platforming extensively and laboriously showing how punching nazis is often the most efficient way to pursue the ends of a more connected and engaged world. Any liberal or conservative readers who have happened here and want the 101 should go there; I won’t insult your intelligence and the complexity of objections by simplifying and condensing everything here. However it goes without saying for anarchists or other radicals that Schulman’s takes here are deeply disqualifying.

This sort of liberal stuff is obviously embarrassing, and tends to be what many leftists sympathetic to CINA will make exceptions around or admit the book goes off the rails around, framing it as like “well grandma’s gonna say some cringe shit, but nevertheless,” but they’re not disconnected from everything else. They’re a critical link in the chain of Schulman’s argument.

Some of the most easily mocked passages in CINA arise from Schulman’s rants against kids these days with their text messages and emails; why won’t they answer the phone when I call?!! How dare they take advantage of the possibility for explicit consent!!

“Most Americans have cell phones now. They can return phone calls on the walk from the subway station to their apartment buildings, from the car to the mall. There is no reason why people do not return phone calls except for the power-play of not answering. It certainly does not save time. It is tragic that we have evolved a social custom that people need to email in order to ask for permission to make a phone call. Just call! Emailing to ask for permission to speak privileges the rage, Supremacy, and Trauma of withholding over the human responsibility to communicate and understand. I say, let’s get back to the first one hundred years of telephone culture, where people looked up each other’s numbers and called. The now “forbidden” ten-to-twenty-minute phone conversation could save the subsequent months or years of misplaced bad feeling. All this terrible loss, for nothing.”

It’s tempting to write these absurdities off as merely an embarrassing boomer moment irrelevant to the rest of CINA and move on, but I think it’s deeply illuminating to examine why she focuses in on phone calls and in-person conversations as positive conversation and is so hostile to not just text messages but letters. One can easily argue that text can strip away tone, but so too do phone calls strip away visual cues. In any case this would make such communication more limited bandwidth, but still a net positive over no communication. Yet Schulman hates text. As she puts it:

“email and text are both unidirectional and don’t allow for return information to enhance or transform comprehension.”

There are many distinctions between text and verbal communication, each of which can be a net positive or negative in different contexts, yet the “unidirectionality” Schulman focuses on would be better framed as a matter of letting someone gather their thoughts, to think at the speed they need to, to be precise and considered, rather than rushed and provoked. Abusers love to corner people in inescapable ratchets of immediacy, denying them the space and time to formulate and clarify their thoughts consciously.

At the very least consider the breathtaking neurotypical supremacy (and total lack of empathetic modeling of others) in Schulman’s characterization of someone preferring text:

“one party makes a negative power-play by refusing to speak to the other in person.”

Preferring a different medium of communication is thus transmuted into a “power-play“! And yet demanding someone allow you to corner them in a medium where they can ambush and escalate in wild directions and you can’t gather your thoughts to deal with these unforeseen maneuvers is somehow not one of the most classic power-plays?!

Surely we have all seen the ways that politicians and demagogues use the real-time constraints of verbal discussion to derail, mislead, manipulate, duck, and counter on the fly? If we want to talk about unidirectionality or asymmetry, how about the asymmetry that a small amount of time and effort at bullshit takes far more time and effort to clear up? Verbal communication is deeply prone to manipulators barraging you with tiny dense attacks or deflections that would take pages of written text to break down in response. There are surely plenty of valid reasons to want to avoid speaking to someone in person.

Schulman gives an example of a friend emailing her to cancel their lunch plans because of stressful major life commitments and presents that email as a trap:

“So if I respond to your email with one of my own: “I am sad, but let’s talk on the phone before you leave”—that could cause the cataclysmic catastrophic end of all ends. Instead of just calling me, you can decide that I am abusing you. That I am pressuring you, guilt-tripping you… All your anger… converges on me and the horrible transgressing demand I have made on you by asking for us to talk. I am actually your friend, but you turn me into your foe. You therefore don’t answer me, and now we’re fucked up.”

The assumption (or recollection) that such a response is even on the table speaks volumes about Schulman’s relationships and the patterns she’s personally established, but put that aside and note the supposedly innocuous example language she unthinkingly gives without a trace of self-criticism or self-awareness! “I am sad, but let’s talk on the phone before you leave.” The very first thing out of Schulman’s mouth is a declaration of her own feelings rather than any sort of sympathy with her friend’s life stresses. The second thing out of her mouth is an almost finalistic declaration of what will happen in a heavyhanded tone. Let’s. There’s no open “do you think you might have time to briefly catch up over phone after the chaos ends?” Also why on earth do a phone call when there isn’t space for a meet up? Why must a phone call happen in the brief window when you’re in the same city? There haven’t been long-distance charges for a glacial eon, Schulman.

So much abuse is about trapping and monopolizing the target’s attention, feeling entitled to claim a chunk of their brain. The experience of being abused is often one of being forced into thinking about the abuser constantly, from trying to predict their acts to trying to follow the latest tangle in their proclamations. Abuse strips away agency by stripping away the capacity for the abused to think for yourself, to think about anything else or think at all. If the abuser controls critical needs then everything is devoted to trying to turn yourself into a complex key that can unlock those needs. If the abuser besieges and terrorizes you randomly, you form your brain into a vast prediction net, trying to preempt as best you can every single avenue by which they might strike. Or you huddle up and turn yourself off, turn your brain off, to try and weather through things like an inert object. All of these are about losing your capacity for agency in a way that extends beyond any physical constraints directly imposed upon you. Abuse takes over your brain.

Sometimes the abuser acts so as to not have to think about you, to terrorize you into smallness and confined predictability, but sometimes the abuser is themselves driven by their own ravenous attention on you and the need to make you dedicate that same level of attention to them. This sort of abuser is never more happy than when their provocations force you into direct immediate raw unthought emotional tangles with them. They yell and yell until you finally yell back, and then they grin in glee because they have you. Neither abuser can stand your escape to any degree, which they read as a direct assault on them.

There are many aspects of abuse, but abusers feel entitled to your attention.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Demanding that an ex listen to you, mobilizing The Community to force that ex to give you a monopoly over their brain is an abuser’s wet dream. It’s how thousands of accountability processes have derailed into an abuser continuously retraumatizing their survivor.

Schulman, it must be emphasized, has no argument for why we should be obligated to give away our attention to anyone who wants it. What she has instead is 1) a fixation on pain and suffering of those denied control over the attention of their targets, and 2) the repeated assertion that having no boundaries is “adult” whereas saying no is “childish”. Mature adults talk things out in person, only immature children – or those so traumatized and broken as to be infantile children – would draw a line around their attention and enforce it.

“In another example from other people’s lives, sometimes angry, supremacist, or traumatized people send emails commanding, “Do not contact me.” I want to state here, for the record, that no one is obligated to obey a unidirectional order that has not been discussed. Negotiation is a human responsibility. Little children order their parents around: “Mommy, sit there!” When adults give orders while hiding behind technology, they are behaving illegitimately. These unilateral orders do not have to be obeyed. They need to be discussed.”

It would be trivial to compose a little passage reversing the associations, casting knowing how to draw boundaries and assert one’s independence and agency as the “mature adult” position whereas being caught under the boot of others demands to the point where you can’t own your own associations or attention as the “child” experience. But I want to reject the entire adult supremacist frame she’s appealing to.

If the child often stomps their feet and declares “no” – no, I refuse to give uncle a kiss, no, I refuse to get dressed to be your marionette at an event, no, I refuse to listen to your lecturing – perhaps we should see that as an inspiring site of resistance by those most oppressed before they are ground down. Perhaps we should endeavor to be more like children desperately trying to assert their autonomy and consent as agents who get to choose. Certainly the world “adults” have built and perpetuated by beating each new generation into surrender is a clearly sickening and grotesque one.

Even though I personally have made choices to maintain some level of contact, I vehemently support every abused child who walked away from their parents and never answered their calls ever again. Hell, I support children who killed their abusers. You do not owe everyone a path for reconciliation and negotiation. From abusers to even just wingnuts and inane time burglars, the best option is sometimes to just walk away forever. We have limited time on this planet, why spend it trying to repair every single relationship you have so far happened into?

Schulman somehow cannot even fathom goals other than the maintenance of existing relationships.

“Refusing to speak to someone without terms for repair is a strange, childish act of destruction in which nothing can be won.”

Liberation can be won. There’s a world of possibility beyond the confines of one given relationship. Opportunity cost is a real thing that is worth considering. That nothing is gained in one specific relationship by walking away doesn’t mean that a world of possibilities can’t be gained through the absence and negation of that relationship.

Rape Culture Narratives

Now that we’ve covered the broad theoretical structure behind much of CINA’s abuse apologia, let’s get directly to how it cashes out. You want the horror pull quotes, I am chomping at the bit to provide them.

Guess what Schulman thinks of “no means no” and how she speaks of “accusations”?

“Now when I hear “When a woman says no, she means no,” I know that that is too simple, because I have said no when I didn’t mean it. And I am a woman. When I have said “no” there were times when I did not know that I actually felt “yes” and there are times that I did know that I actually “felt” yes. People do not always know what they feel, nor do they acknowledge what they really know. Sometimes we say what we think we are supposed to say, or what we are used to saying; we don’t give the actual moment a chance. Sometimes we just try out saying certain things. Consequently, making an accusation does not make us right, being angry does not make us right, refusing to communicate does not make us right. In fact, all those things could make us very, very wrong.” [emphasis added]

I tend to assume my readers have basic critical thinking skills as feminists but I’ve been surprised before that a critique left to the reader I thought would be obvious wasn’t to some, so let’s be laborious: yes, it is trivially true that what is spoken in a moment is not always a perfect reflection of someone’s full internal utility function. But our incentives align to try to make our proclaimed desires as true to our inner ones as we can. An external observer will never have anywhere near as good of access to your internal desires as you, so we are obliged to take your word for it because the other direction is a hellish clusterfuck. Moreover there’s an assumption here that in a conflict of internal desires in a situation there’s some deeper truth being obscured by an incorrectly triumphant desire.

What is the fucking rhetorical purpose of going on in a book about how there are some occasions when someone who says no doesn’t mean it? Who and what does that kind of maneuver serve? If you go around saying “but did you know that some women have rape fantasies?!” loudly in public without a certain kind of studious contextualizing that’s not a bare statement of fact, that is a fucking move.

Note also the direct slide from “no doesn’t always mean no” wheedling to the implication that “making an accusation” is often about caving to social pressures, refusing to reflect, and/or just trying out saying a thing. As if rape or abuse accusations just fall out of an improvisational scat singing session at a jazz club.

If this is all sounding like victim blaming that could easily be mistaken for a bit on Tucker Carlson, you’re not wrong, Schulman could get a new job as a script writer for him:

“There is a contemporary, quite visible, collectively agreed-upon, almost traditional social model of “abuse” where a man invites a woman to respond to his desires when she does not return those desires, nor has she suggested or advertised that she does. …But what if she was attracted to him and did show it, and won’t acknowledge that? And he doesn’t want to live with the “he hit on me” narrative… What he wants is the “I was attracted to him but I wouldn’t acknowledge it, so I got confused” version.”

Flagrant justification by appealing to every flimsy narrative in mainstream patriarchal rape culture media that feminists have spent decades critiquing? You betcha:

“In the movie, the potential lover goes, knocks on the door, says “Wait,” and the reluctant party waits.

“Listen,” she tells her. “I know that someone, your ex or your father or someone, told you a story about yourself. That you don’t know how to love. But I am here to tell you that it’s not true.”

Unfortunately, in our contemporary confusion, at the point where the other knocks on our protagonist’s door, they are a “stalker.” We are no longer allowed to drop by unannounced when things are fraught. She can’t call on the phone to deliver the monologue of persuasion with an open heart, because our heroine hides behind voice mail. She can’t send it by email, because it will either be deleted, or forwarded to thousands. If she has knocked, called, and emailed, she is now officially, in the era of overstating harm, a “harasser.” The person who fights for honest conversation that can heal, such a well-known and beloved character of yore, is, alas, no more. And so Ms. Reluctant never gets the affective reality, the skin, the voice, the tone, the eyes, the smile, the jokes, and especially the back and forth, the interactivity that reminds her of what it feels like to let someone in, the interactivity that produces a revelation that her future is not impossible. Instead, past pain dominates over possibility. To suggest otherwise is forbidden.”

Schulman tells a story about fantasizing about sex with a stranger she’s eating lunch with, reading that person’s actions as flirtatious

“Is she innocent of being sexually suggestive or is she guilty? … If I attempt to follow up in order to discover if this was actually aimed at me, I too could be seen as a harasser; after all, this is a professional relationship. Human Resources could be called in to hurt me. Or, just as easily, my interest could be reciprocated. I have to be very, very careful. One false move and I could be the sad object of an outraged story on the dreaded grapevine: “Sarah Schulman came on to me. It was so inappropriate.” The story would never be “I liked her, I flirted with her, she understood me, and then I was scared I would be hurt like I have been before.” “

The dreaded grapevine. Amid everything else I want you to notice how she just assumes everyone sees whisper networks as figures of dread rather than spaces for release and agency.

Also note how the possibility of strategies of direct and explicit consent is not even considered. Instead Schulman leaps off to talking about how “being accused of desire” is the real dynamic going on.

“Being desired is not the same as being harassed, and we do not have to punish or shun the person who sees what is special about us. Just because you want me, doesn’t mean I have to hurt you. Especially if I also feel attractions that I don’t pursue for reasons of projections from my past. I don’t have to avoid you, ignore your call, refuse to return your email, or block you.”

Again, this is coming from someone accused of stalking. I will say the sheer narcissism about what’s going on when someone rejects or critiques her advances is actually impressive. Schulman talks a lot of game about critical reflection, but she always lobs such towards everyone making accusations of abuse or choosing not to talk to someone. You get the impression she has never once critically self-reflected about whether she’s actually harming people by trying to force real time conversation, whether her demands and entitlements are valid and whether the folks who give her pushback might be rational and self-aware enough to be worth considering. There’s never been a valid reason to press the block button on Sarah Schulman and she’s certain there never will or can be.

“Uneven desire is not a crime, it is not rude, it is not an assault or grounds for shunning or being hurtful. It’s just life and we can still be friends. For real. Even forever. But we have to talk.”

Uneven desire is definitely not a crime or even assault, but how we express and act on that desire can be. And no, we absolutely do not have to talk about it. You do not have to talk it out with the person catcalling you on the street. You are not under any obligation to try to talk things out with someone creeping you out.

You certainly can. I’ve leaned into uncomfortable interactions, talked at length with people who had crushes on me that I didn’t reciprocate. I’ve repeatedly invested my attention and emotions in care and communication in situations where I judged communication likely fruitful and the cost to me worth the assistance to them. I’ve stayed up responding to multiple page drunk emails with no paragraphing sent to me at 3am because I knew my response or lack of response would strongly affect someone and I chose to get entangled in that mess. But I had no social duty to or absolute ethical imperative.

“People who feel erotically towards forbidden objects—like those other than partners to whom they have pledged monogamy, or those who are the wrong age, who work in the same sexually prohibitive workplace, who are transgender, or sex workers, who are generally desexualized by the dominant culture, or who are “off-type” (as in not as butch as one’s femme identity demands in a partner)—can motivate them to hide feelings, even to themselves.”

Note the language: “forbidden objects” … “the wrong age“

If you want to read more about Schulman and her takes beyond the pages of CINA about erotic thoughts towards people “the wrong age” you can do some googling, she’s been rather forthright and there’s a lot of survivors of childhood sexual assault with strong feelings about it. Suffice to say it resounds particularly badly in the context of her sneers about how deplorably childish it is to try and set boundaries.

Attacking Survivors

Schulman has in public venues deflected comparisons to #MeToo and calling out rape or abuse saying she was targeting something else with CINA, but this is pretty dishonest as she herself disparages “call-out culture” in the text and directly targets things like believing accounts of abuse.

“We have developed these reductive modes like email and texts to accompany reductive ideas that are supposed to serve large social functions but are not based in human complexity… One of these is “Believe women!” We have this slogan in circulation because so many women are not believed when they tell the truth. But what about when they are not telling the truth? Are we still supposed to believe them? …What about when women say things that aren’t true because they don’t understand themselves, ourselves? Being defended, of course, is rarely deliberate when we are not self-aware, self-critical, accountable, or psychologically sophisticated. Are others still required to obey?”

These are almost exactly the same kind of snottily baiting rhetorical questions that Kristian Williams infamously wrote and had another person read aloud in an interruption at the 2012 Patriarchy In The Movement conference to gasps of fury from the audience. Are there literally no exceptions?!! Who will help the noble truth-speakers to fight their way out of the dogmatic chains of “believing survivors”? What if survivors are actually just fucking stupid and crazy? (Sorry, “not psychologically sophisticated.”) What if there’s actually an epidemic of folks deluding themselves in “victimology?” Hey, we’re just asking questions here. No need to get so upset.

This isn’t a sincere nerdy literalism that can’t process the existence of heuristics and counter-balancing emphases, this isn’t even remotely a nuanced exploration of the real (albeit rare) exceptions like false accusations and the complex dynamics and paths around such. This is a direct and intentional attack on even the most minimal pushes for solidarity with survivors and against patriarchy. It’s about constructing a narrative of equivocation and emphasized exceptions that can be dragged out in defense of inaction when your friend is called out again.

Schulman is so good at the “there’s an epidemic of false accusations” game it’s honestly shocking she doesn’t already have a column for Quillette:

“There are some women, often in the bourgeois class, who now perform that public event commonly recognized as “abused,” with ease: that the other person, male or female, wanted something from me that I did not want and so “I was abused.” It is a shortcut. They may select some details and omit others; they may rearrange the order of events so that consequences are reconstructed as causes; they may refuse to engage sequence, objective. I recite those few words: “I was abused” or “she was abusive” or “it was an abusive relationship” and it is immediately understood that I am right, and I am violated, and I am in danger and therefore deserving of group acclaim. While the other s/he is wrong, a harasser, s/he had desire and I didn’t, so I am clean and s/he is abusive. And if they wanted to straighten this out, or discuss it until more complexities are revealed, then s/he is a stalker, while I am clean.”

Look, it’s absolutely the case that we have a limited vernacular for abuse and sexual assault. Not everything fits cleanly into categories and the dominant associations they have, and there are some folks who slide descriptions around. I know an individual that worked through a rigorous accountability process and went around diligently and painstakingly warning everyone they were a perpetrator of sexual assault for nearly a decade before the person running their accountability revised and was like “naw it wasn’t sexual assault, you were really scummy about trauma in a conversation about the act after, but you were studiously good about consent during sex” and the perpetrator fervently argued back that such did qualify as sexual assault according to their own very stringent moral code because it was harm interrelated with the act of sex. Categories can be complicated and fuzzy at the edges! I know someone who was threatened with rape and extensively gaslit that it had been done while they slept. “Abuse” doesn’t really encapsulate the rapeyness of this experience, but it’s not clear that “rape” constitutes a perfectly accurate term either because of the uncertainty that it happened. And yet when warning about the perpetrator, is the survivor necessarily obliged to divulge and explain all the excruciating gory details to convey the exact haziness of the placement between abuse and rape? Why shouldn’t they just collapse things into the very quick description “rape”? I have another friend who largely avoids identifying as a rape survivor in radical spaces because she finds that people are quick to collapse “rape” into a prototypical and ubiquitous image of date rape after a punk show rather than the far more involved and horrifying experience of years of child sexual assault she actually experienced and she doesn’t want to deal with their misperceptions or explain her trauma.

You see my point: there are other ways to address the complexity of messy real world experiences and the utility of collapsing them into simple terms. Schulman postures as a proponent of nuance and complexity, but she’s completely one-sided.

All her examples, no matter how ostensibly diverse, build towards the same fucking narrative that we live in a world where all accusations are automatically believed and so there’s an epidemic of folks automatically lying (to themselves as well as others) because of their own brokenness. Thus, rather than folks having a moral responsibility to help facilitate de facto restraining orders, coming to the defense of a basic freedom to say no and assure the autonomy of those in danger from abusers, The Community is actually morally obliged to do the inverse, to force people into contact and take on the role of invasive inquisitors.

“Sometimes a person in our lives—a friend, a student, a neighbor or relative—makes negative insinuations about a third party (“He’s a stalker” or “She’s abusive”) and they want us to shun, be cold to, exclude, or in other ways punish this person. Our first responsibility is to determine if they are in physical danger from real violence. If not, then we ask to think with them about the order of events so that the complexities of the situation and how it unfolded can be revealed. It is unethical to hurt someone because we have been told to do so. We are required by decency to ask both the complainant and the accused how they understand the situation. And this, I truly believe, requires an in-person discussion.”

So let’s be clear on what this standard directly means:

1) No boycotts ever because every single person involved would need to have a personal in person conversation with the original parties. You can’t even heed someone’s warning about someone you’re about to go on a date with, at least not without snitching on them for warning you by bringing it up with him.

2) Constantly re-traumatizing the survivor and forcing them to spend all their energy litigating for the smallest of possible concessions re boxing out their abuser.

Fuck that.

Minimizing Abuse Into Conflict

One common criticism of CINA is that Schulman never defines abuse. That is approximately true in that she handwaves and deflects around it, but not entirely fair. It’s somewhat reasonable and common enough to assert that it’s impossible to give a comprehensive description of abuse because people are horrifically controlling in so many diverse and novel ways and abuse is often a matter of sufficient degree in terms of control, which necessarily involves some “we know it when we experience it” imprecision. Further, it must be admitted that Schulman definitely admits some limited (albeit extreme and basic) examples of abuse. I think there are some contexts where CINA is flogged as the default abuse apologia manifesto where Schulman herself would admit, contrary to those invoking her book, that abuse is taking place. Although it’s always easier to offhandedly support a survivor when the situation is far away from one’s community or context.

As CINA has grown in infamy I’ve increasingly run across people who’ve only encountered it secondhand or through shocking pull quotes of her abuse apologia. “I don’t get it, she’s so opposed to boundaries would she really be okay with someone raping her?” It’s important to correct such confusions: Schulman no doubt does think there are valid boundaries. She objects to abuse in the form of ongoing relationships of one-sided repeated physical violence.

The problem isn’t that Schulman minimizes literally all abuse, it’s that she focuses in CINA on equivocating and downplaying around some types of abuse, and most emphatically (and seemingly personally) the “I demand communication from you” genres of abuse.

To do this, Schulman cribs the authority of a single trainer, Catherine Hodes, giving a single training she attended, where Schulman breathlessly relays her dawning realization of inane ancient canards like “Abuse is Power Over and Conflict is Power Struggle.”

You can feel Schulman’s excitement as she relays scribbling these declarations down. Did you know that an action that at first glance, alone and in isolation, like yelling at a partner, appears abusive can be nothing of the sort when put in a wider context?! Schulman runs with such banalities in the direction of mandating inquisitions into every accusation and pushing to dismissively redefine most everything as “conflict.”

How reflective this is of Hodes’ positions is hard to judge, and Schulman is clearly making some leaps from these starting points and ignoring other possible paths, but I think there’s another misstep at play that intersects with and reinforces every other horrible argument she makes in CINA.

So far some will have judged me as unoriginal dogmatic attack dog of plumbline feminism, maybe only opportunistically slagging Schulman because she’s unpopular rather than horrifyingly wrong, but let me now illustrate a place where I have a nonstandard opinion a number of feminist comrades disagree with me on and how it is relevant to CINA: I think “power” is best understood as a relationship of control, not a resource ideally to be equally distributed, and thus there can be, however rarely, situations of mutual control and thus, technically, “mutual abuse.”

One has to be really careful with talk of “mutual abuse” because that concept is most often leveraged in the service of abuse apologia by way of false equivalence and a refusal to take sides or intervene. Indeed “mutual abuse” is almost always invoked to avoid shunning or otherwise sacrificing personal social capital. The survivor ever fought back or was grouchy at her abuser? Honestly that relationship was soooo toxic who can really say. It’s disgusting and if anyone cites me here to legitimize throwing around the accusation of “mutual abuse” to discredit survivors I’ll hunt you down. Also, it is absolutely worth noting that many comrades I respect who work in domestic violence disagree with me here, take everything with a grain of salt.

Yet intense mutual control is clearly a thing that can exist – and much of the Left’s most horrific failure modes stem from failing to understand that. Equal participation in a toxic democratic commune wherein everyone is severely controlled is not liberation, and this is very relevant because Schulman’s appeals to The Community replicate precisely this kind of evil.

Schulman’s diminishment of abuse looks like retaining the classic “mutual abuse” deflection but re-labeling it “conflict” to water things down even further. Only one partner used physical violence against another? Yeah, well but the other partner had said callous shit so it was just conflict, just a power struggle.

“I believe that what these couples went through was mutual and therefore Conflict, not Abuse.”

And Schulman delightedly quotes her trainer:

“All human relationships have power dynamics and that is neither good nor bad. Power is not the problem,” Hodes said. “It’s how it is wielded.”

But, as an anarchist, I have always fundamentally and vehemently rejected the notion that power is inherent and morally neutral, a noxious framing and dangerous use of language we have no reason to concede to just because it took off in the Academic Left after Foucault. I stand with anarchists throughout the ages who have always rejected power, from Russian anarchists declaring all power is poison to the Crass slogan that defined a generation of punk, urging us to destroy power. Precisely what is radical about anarchism is our mission to increasingly and ultimately abolish power dynamics on all scales and in all cracks, not merely rearrange or equalize them.

This sort of analysis is impossible to a fascist or leninist for whom everything is power and it’s only a question of who gets how much. In such a blinkered frame a slave revolt is just a different sort of power, a different side getting to take control. But I think there’s a major difference between resistance and control: control diminishes agency and net options, resistance, by way of disrupting control, expands net options. Escaping from your abuser, fighting dirty against them, or even just blocking someone wasting your time, expands options.

Part of what is stripped out and flattened away in Schulman’s sort of framing of “abuse” and “conflict” is an account of the ethics of conflict. Surely there are positive ways to have conflict. Two folks talking shit (sincerely) for decades about the other’s opposed political position can be neutral or even positive conflict. In contrast, one person dishonestly belittling another person’s qualifications in an activist meeting and the other person getting drunk and stealing their van and wrecking it is not a healthy conflict. No great acts there, severely harmful maybe, even deserving of sharp community response like boycotting, but also not abusive because they’re not matters of systematic control.

But there are and can be, however rarely, situations of mutual and equal systematic control. Two deeply abusive scumfucks who hunger for control can pair up together and create a spiral of mutually assured destruction if the other attempts to escape, while continuing to get their rocks off controlling the other. Predatory monsters do not always avoid one another, nor is there any law of physics assuring that one will have meaningfully greater material or social resources than the other. I know of two serial rapist and abuser occultists who eventually came together to run a rape cult, with as far as I can tell equal power and material resources, raping others even while reportedly alternatingly drugging and violating each other. ”Conflict” is simply too cheap a word for what was going on in that relationship, nor do I feel their systematic controlling is separable from either’s history of abusing. Nor was I comfortable with attempts after they separated by folks in their subculture to frame either one as The Survivor to the exclusion of the other and even appeal to me to side with or help one I had known a decade before. Both needed to be thrown into the ocean.

At play in this specific type of example I think is often a fetishization of strength in which neither can admit to the weakness of being afraid or hurt by the other, and so must each escalate in egregious acts of domination to prove their status as ubermensch to themselves and the other.

But consider also a codependent couple whose hunger for security in their relationship, for assurances that the other will never leave them, escalating in mutually agreed upon norms of never talking to other people, openly surveilling each other, etc, until such a toxic environment has developed that both desperately want to escape the other’s lines of control and yet do not want to surrender their own. Threats of retaliation can escalate to enforce the ratcheting norms of control. Both can even fear for their life and desperately want to escape the other’s control while simultaneously hungering for control of the other themselves. They could even both be houseless without any disparity of control of physical resources. This is qualitatively distinct from conflict (no matter how negative) because of the sustained systematic control each leverages over the other.

These are extreme and rare examples that may seem esoteric or contrived, but it’s an important point that people can chain each other down, much the same way that in Schulman’s ideal community members would chain each other down; you force me into engagement with someone today, I force you into engagement with someone tomorrow, and so on.

Schulman is incapable of seeing the horror of her prescription precisely because she sees power as neutral when it’s equalized. But power is what is wrong. And it’s not a scalar (a quantity about which you can say nothing beyond who has more) but more like a vector space of relations where each point has its own relation to each other, containing whatever mix of control or resistance. We recognize there can be cults, polycules, and communes of roughly equal participation in extreme mutual control. When a circle of rabid maoists in the cultural revolution held each other down, there need not have been one apex abuser or even a dominant clique. Mutual domination is possible.

This is not at all to say that we shouldn’t use basic sense, good heuristics, and conscientious evaluation of trust networks to evaluate situations, nor is it to say to that different proportionalities of control don’t matter immensely. Context matters, and a survivor who got a little “problematic” in resisting her abuser needs our full support. This is not at all a license to ignore differences in power and start labeling resistance as “mutual abuse.” Again, anyone citing me here to defend a claim of “mutual abuse” among their friends is almost certainly my enemy. But there is also practical danger in collapsing things to “conflict” out of a rhetorically defensive refusal to acknowledge even the remote possibility of mutual abuse.

““There should never be cross-restraining orders,” Hodes said. That’s like saying we agree to not see each other. Restraining orders should only be issued if one person is deemed to be a perpetrator and the restraining order is necessary to save the other from Power Over. It’s not a tactical strategy designed to prove a point. If both people are contributing to the problem, then it is mutual and therefore Conflict, and the intervention of the court is unreasonable.”

Putting aside the state legal system, surely there are situations where two parties would benefit from boundaries from one another and neither trusts the other to keep their word without broader social enforcement. Both Jane and Jill could be controlling and put the other in fear for her life. But if one side of that is (as is most common) lying to try and defensively reverse things or leverage their greater social capital against their target… it’s an objectively positive improvement to assist both boundaries!

If we as community and intimate bystanders somehow don’t know literally anything or there’s some dark and pressing uncertainty, if we truly can’t tell who the real abuser is, and both ostensibly want to escape the other… let’s fucking facilitate that! Why not just say neither is allowed to go to the other’s home or work? Why not share both accounts and asks around the situation?

If Jane is telling the truth and Jill is persuasively DARVOing, no “mutual agreement” to not see each other would be worth anything. If the community supports both boundaries, both acts of “shunning,” as Schulman would decry, then when Jill violates that shit at least Jane has folks ready to respond to help her. To be certain, it is absolutely a travesty and infuriating to allow Jill to go around lying or tell Jane she’s not allowed to come within a block of the co-op where Jill works, much better to figure out the truth, get a girl gang together and go smash out Jill’s windows, but when it comes to splitting the baby, “the community” enforcing each party’s protective boundaries is infinitely fucking better than forcing “conversation” and intervening to stop “shunning.” Our goal should be to facilitate agency and escape.

Every survivor I know who wants their rapist or abuser dead does so because they remain an active threat to them or to others that dramatically constrains their freedom. Radical milieus are notoriously bad at enforcing anything like a restraining order (only surpassed in ineffectiveness or unwillingness to enforce by the cops and the state) but if a situation arose in which community members did, in fact, give any sort of shit about survivors and abuse, and we could assist in enforcing such, we should remember that it’s better to err on the side of mutual escape.

Schulman wraps CINA up in the legitimization of “mutual abuse is impossible” and uses a focus on inequality of power rather than power itself as a way of working against escape from control. Like the worst liberals and leftists, she wants to democratize and communize control, make it a broad issue of community, to bind each other in “conversation” and “negotiation.” But power is the problem, not merely inequalities of it, our ends should be freedom, and language that doesn’t reflect that opens the door to dark shit.

Wild Comparisons

One of the most common critiques of CINA takes the form of just pointing in outrage to the comparisons Schulman makes between bottom-up individual choices to not associate with someone and institutional systems of exclusion and oppression. Refusing to talk to an ex or friends shunning someone is put in the same sweeping category as racist police violence, the suppression of queer activists during the AIDS crisis, and Israeli colonialism. Schulman makes clear she sees these on a spectrum of intensity, but the point of the comparison is to frame them as categorically the same, all explainable in terms of the same underlying dynamic.

Right out the gate she makes the following characterization

“Eric Garner informed the police of the consequences of their actions on him, when he told them eleven times, while in an illegal chokehold, “I can’t breathe.” Michael Brown raised his hands in a sign of surrender and said, “Don’t shoot.” But something occurred within the minds, impulses, and group identities of the white police officers, in that they construed the original non-event compounded with these factual and peacemaking communications as some kind of threat or attack. In other words, these policemen looked at nothing, the complete absence of threat, and there they saw threat gross enough to justify murder. Nothing happened, but these people with power saw abuse.” [her emphasis]

Of course virtually no cop in any such situation would even think to use that word, of course it’s deeply minimizing of the abuse to conflate the conceptual category of “threat” with the conceptual category of “abuse” as if all “harm” is conceptually the same, of course it’s ridiculous to remove the context of the state or treat it’s actions exactly as one would those of some random individual, and of course it’s grotesque to frame cop actions as actually being motivated by, as they say on the stand, “fear” rather than the myriad other emotions like outrage, anger, and disgust, that intersect with a general hunger for power and violent entitlement to it… but it’s imperative that we note the overall tendency towards flattening in every dimension to one metanarrative, one simple trick. The individual “fears difference” and so “lashes out” rather than having a heart-to-heart conversation. That’s it. That’s all that could conceivably be at play to Schulman.

Now it’s certainly true that Israel cultivates a national victim narrative, and it’s certainly true that some cops grow paranoid and fearful, or at least remember to intone the words “feared for my life” on the stand, but this is so far and away from police violence being of the same nature as someone moving out and not talking to an ex. Similarly, the dynamics and mistakes that lead to oppression from the oppressed, when that happens, take place in a vast variety of ways well beyond Schulman’s narrative. To give another historical example, slaughtering the mixed-race children of Spanish colonizers during a few revolts was not something done because the oppressed “fear self-critical vulnerability.”

To flatten such into the same underlying psychoanalytical dynamic takes stupendous effort to avoid thinking. And, of course, it is wildly insulting to survivors.

Examples of this kind of flattening are everywhere in CINA. Even when Schulman thinks she’s introducing nuance she still thinks in terms of degree within a single dimension.

“There is a continuum of pathology in blame, cold-shouldering, shunning, scapegoating, group bullying, incarcerating, occupying, assaulting, and killing.”

This is an array of strategies, but they are not necessarily pathologies nor approaches that should be rejected outright. Many clearly have contexts in which they are not just permissible but morally obligatory. And surely, even a pacifist who wouldn’t kill her rapist or fight the nazis can admit we should blame people who are to blame! Yet in Schulman’s warped boomer liberalism, even assigning causal blame is “pathological” because it gets in the way of resolving conflict via conversation.

This bundling of colonialism, police violence, and refusing to pick up the phone is invoked in a way that allows Schulman to perform intuition pumps across the combined bundle:

“The mere fact that someone has been the recipient of group cruelty has no relationship to whether or not they have done anything to merit it.”

That someone has seen their land invaded by a foreign army surely has no relationship with merit, but when someone whines that they’ve been run out of multiple cities’ activist scenes or none of their exes will speak with them should we really force ourselves to blankly assume there’s no likely fire behind the smoke?

You see how the argument works: Rather than just outright declaring that accusations of abuse are at least as often wrong as right, Schulman conflates such with wildly different institutional and historical situations where we recognize accusations are in fact largely bullshit, then implicitly transposes this finding over the weird combined bundle back down to the specific.

But in the real world where it is easy to ostracize someone for liking the wrong band or being cringe, it’s demonstrably very hard in virtually every subculture to get folks to ostracize someone over accusations of abuse or rape. If someone admits they’ve been ostracized by a scene over accusations of abuse, that’s a sharp indicator of the likely veracity of those accusations. Not perfect proof, of course, but a strong relationship nonetheless. If none of your friends will hang with someone because they each claim he was out-of-pocket and creepy, it’s rational and fair to likewise decline his invitation to a date. This adds up to collective shunning, an emergent boycott, but to outright reject “cold-shouldering” and “shunning” in-and-of-themselves requires the suppression of individual reason, it requires us to blind ourselves to data and refuse to think.

Engagement, Supremacy, and Humility

If there’s a single paragraph that provides the core thesis of CINA it’s the following abuse apologia narrative:

“Over and over I have seen traumatized people refuse to hear or engage information that would alter their self-concepts, even in ways that could bring them more happiness and integrity. For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent “right” not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation; that whatever is keeping them together is not flexible.”

It is absolutely the case that reactionary and power-seeking perspectives are almost always rooted with a drive towards simplicity and fixedness, often including a struggle to retain a fixed identity, narrative, strategy, worldview, or other attribute. The need to preserve an arbitrary structure through curtailing fluid possibility is almost always what motivates domination. This can cash out as an aversion to self-questioning or being questioned.

But there’s a lot that shouldn’t be extrapolated from that relationship.

To give just one example of a common misstep from that point, the drive to find a simple and fixed explanation for something is not in and of itself a problem; in many contexts the truth or the best solution is fixed and simple. Indeed, where they are possible, having fixed highly accurate and tightly compressible maps of the world enables fluidity because they provide us more agency in our actions.

But more pertinently, domination can come packaged as a drive for connection and “engagement.” The drive for simplicity and control often expresses as a domineering hunger to go out and batter down the other, to force them into a form of contact or engagement that shrinks their capacity to think and make choices. Plenty of stalkers turn obsessive about demanding “engagement” around some “misperceptions” or fixate on some narrative where they view themselves as simply trying to introduce critical self-reflection on the part of their targets, all to avoid critical self-reflection around their own infractions and abusive behavior.

Engagement can even be transformative for the abuser, prompting them to self-reflect and adapt rather than remain utterly fixed, but adapt in a direction of ever more simplicity. An abuser can drag themselves into the mud, destroy their own life, while doing the same for their victim, all in the name of an “engagement” that increasingly constrains all agency and options for both parties. The mere willingness to question oneself, even radically transform oneself is not on its own a virtue or marker that one is not a danger.

While engagement in some broad sense is a crucial component to the ultimate ends of liberation and in daily life, it’s a mistake to conflate all engagement as the same or always good in and of itself. A refusal to engage can be and often is necessary, even critical to the maximization of agency as a whole. Firewalls are necessary to keep malicious hackers out of our devices. When you know someone is attempting to threaten or blackmail you but they have not managed to relay particulars yet, the best strategy is often to simply refuse to read their messages.

The relaying and reception of information are not necessarily positive or even neutral acts. Someone coming up to you on the bus and inquiring if they can lick your ear is not merely asking for consent, their very inquiry is itself an action that can be violational. Life’s complicated that way.

Schulman’s fixation on avoidance of engagement and self-interrogation as the root evil in CINA is overly simplistic to dangerous conclusions.

So too, obviously is her analysis in terms of a sweepingly generalized “Supremacy Ideology,” a quintessentially boomer brainworm affliction where the problem is said to be not material relations of domination or even a desire for control, but rather merely ranking or valuing anything above anything else. One gets a whiff of the old hippie nihilists and postmodernists who accused anarchists of being “totalitarians” for our moral stance that freedom is better than domination. “Who are you to say that anything is better than anything else?!” Of course, specific patterns and ecosystems of domination can be labeled supremacist as just a matter of fact, white supremacy and adult supremacy are clearly systems that value and empower an arbitrary set of people over others, but to generalize “supremacy” as some kind of problem in-of-itself, would mean labeling “antiracist supremacy” or “antifa supremacy” as a problem.

Indeed one fan of CINA, an admitted abuser, responded to my essay “Bad People” where I discuss among others, torturers at Abu Ghraib, with the breathless accusation that I was a “supremacist” because I implicitly judged non-abusers as better than abusers. Like, yes? Also genocidaires are worse than non-genocidaires. Everyone reading this is probably better than Hitler. I prefer good things over bad things? I prefer to eat pizza than a pile of dogshit. You got me, I’m a “supremacist.” Who could conceivably care?

But the discursive trainwreck of centering “supremacy!!” on its own has grown in the wake of CINA’s publication and popularization, particularly around the kind of non-profit spaces where rich liberals make pastel slides for instagram and diversity trainings. It’s a good fit for them because it avoids talking about concrete and structural dynamics while at the same time pre-condemning any radical personal values or obligations. Don’t bother taking action because the core problem is just in people’s hearts, but also don’t believe in anything too hard because that would be supremacist.

The commonality across CINA’s focus on self-interrogation and its hostility to supremacy is an implicit commitment to “humility” as a virtue. It’s not humble to block Sarah Schulman’s number because you know she’s only going to waste your time, it’s not humble to think you could know better than The Community, it’s not humble to believe an accusation without a full trial. This fetishized timidity is the very heart of liberalism. Liberalism condemns taking action as not humble, it condemns caring about anything consistently or radically as not humble. It maintains the status quo and smothers individual agency by encouraging us to think that we can’t know anything and we dare not care enough to act on our own.

Fuck this “humility.” Let’s take it out back and beat it to death with baseball bats.

Rationality and Extreme Responses

All that said, it would be misguided and unproductive to treat CINA as though its every single paragraph were devoid of accurate statements. I may find such points inane, so obvious, basic, and uncontroversial as to be beneath discussion, but numerous fans of CINA evidently find them a breath of fresh air that legitimize or eclipse the rest of the book’s outrages.

Again, many people do opportunistically inflate minor grievances or harm in outrageous rhetorical terms. This has been particularly abundant in social media spaces since liberals discovered a set of anti-oppression heuristics and norms and collapsed them into overly simplistic codes, gamifying radical politics into a series of card-playing moves for clout. Someone still using a common word that was a few months ago deemed slightly problematic? Well I’ve never encountered such extreme violence! This attempt upon my life has left me scarred and disfigured! We’ve all been long familiar with extremely bad faith actors or just those so naive that they literally do think such maneuverings are liberatory struggle.

Although note that such robotic inanities and disingenuous opportunism as now runs rampant among the liberal college and nonprofit set are not in the slightest bit explained by the psychoanalytical story Schulman tells. No one actually feels like every use of the word “bad” is a heinous transmisogynist microaggression because of some postulated etymology. No one actually feels deeply hurt that “straights have started appropriating the term ‘partner’.” And those individuals acting profoundly harmed by such are obviously, trivially engaged in a performance whose self-aware goal is control and status, not originating in some traumatized fear of critical self-recognition or whatever. There are plenty of vicious jackals and disconnected rich kids who have delighted in adopting social justice like it’s a game – even the most remote uncontacted tribes know this by now – but that has nothing to do with the heinous epidemic of people not picking up the phone when Sarah Schulman calls.

It is also trivially the case that social divides and distance pose dangers, with different cliques congealing into “teams” that act as micro-nationalisms. Schulman is not wrong to point out that,

“There is often a “cadre” of bad friends around a person encouraging them to do things that are morally wrong, unjustified, and unethical, because endorsing each other’s negative actions is built into the group relationship.”

It is absolutely true that people will often echo support and hype each other up into delusions or moral erosions. Being loyal is placed above being principled or accurate and the result is an opportunistic collective warping of reality and ethical values. It’s just that this group loyalty dynamic most often attacks disruptive survivors. And for obvious reasons. No one is a greater threat to community loyalty than a survivor demanding folks place anarchist values above their personal friendships with the perpetrator.

Yes, a general norm of loyalty through thick and thin and fierce hostility to those who betray this norm by ever objecting or nuancing against the group consensus is obviously toxic. And this can occur among the traumatized and oppressed, leading to unethical overreaction. To give an extreme contemporary example from a sympathetic subject at a similar sweeping scale to Schulman’s favorite examples: the YPG infamously promised to murder the families and children of ISIS members, before retracting the tweet in English. Fear of a pressing enemy and the fearful need for loyal community can seal us off from important corrections and let our moral compasses go awry, and it’s easy to imagine this being at the root of the above war crime. I’ve seen this happen in organizations, small circles and crews in endless contexts, albeit to much smaller missteps than slaughtering children. When affirmations like “you’re so valid!!✨” are the only permissible response in a social circle, delusion is inevitable.

While any CINA fans reading this will have long before now concluded that I’m a hysterical extremist hostile to engagement and promoting us-vs-them epistemic bubbles, the reality is I am reflexively the annoying friend who pivots on a dime the moment they hear a bad argument against the enemy and must squash the bad argument and defend the enemy from it. When consensus process is being violated within an organization to silence a less popular member I intervene on their behalf. I have a compulsion around my friends to counteract confirmation spirals where a more extreme bit of rhetoric that diverges from facts gets reinforced as reality by the empathic hunger to affirm. I try to gently retreat from absolutist leaps of suspicion to numerical assessments of probability. Someone who, at heart, merely means something like, “Personally I think there’s an 80% chance that abuse apologist is himself an abuser with the way he talks and the company he keeps” can in some cases slip into overemphasizing probabilities with the wrong rhetoric which in turn can get passed around and cycle into assumed proof. I try to encourage placing actual bets using numbers and things of value as a way to settle language down around what we actually mean. Remembering that our predictions or suspicions are probabilistic and never absolute in knowledge also helps soften any whiplash upon a correction when it turns out we are indeed wrong. I strongly believe that our first priority must be acquiring accurate maps of reality; we simply cannot have agency without such. And this means pushing back against bad instincts and cognitive biases.

Being a friend does mean often pushing back on a friend’s statements. But more often that looks like firmly holding them to account when they underemphasize something like “it was just taking off a condom, not Real Rape” and the murmuring of reinforcing affirmation starts from a room full of bros. This kind of pushback is not done by or in the service of The Community, but is necessarily an individual act and often a deeply divisive one that can involve burning friendships and damaging communities. Merely telling a friend “yo dude, that was racist” has no teeth unless unilaterally ending the friendship is at least a possibility. The option of “shunning” is, in fact, often a means by which to secure real engagement rather than comfortable dismissals.

Schulman is also correct that a solution in interpersonal conflicts can sometimes be taking space for deescalated deliberation:

“The sudden, triggered reaction a) without consideration of choices; b) without looking at the order of events, motives, justifications, contexts, or outcomes; c) without taking responsibility for consequences on others and the escalation of Conflict; and d) without self-criticism, is the source of social and personal cruelty and the cause of great pain. Lashing out by overreaction, as has been demonstrated, deepens the problem. All of these systems recommend the same tactic: delay.”

It is worth noting that Schulman at least accepts the occasional utility of temporary distance. But note that this appeal to deliberation conflicts with her own valorization of pressing people into verbal real-time communication over text.

And, while we’re “handing it to ISIS”, there is such a phenomenon as “splitting” or “dichotomous thinking” which happens and occurs in everyone to varying degrees, across a variety of backgrounds, pathologized and not. And yes, it’s also often a dynamic with abusers; giving themselves permission to turn on a dime into one extreme emotion or another from the smallest of prompts, so their targets are left harried by constant anxiety, trying to preempt or predict the next trigger for the yelling or love-bombing. Sometimes such hot-and-cold behavior is consciously manipulative, but whether the pattern of behavior is intentional or not with a given abuser doesn’t matter.

But, yes, splitting can also be a lingering inclination with people who’ve gone through trauma. The push for absolute loyalty, and violent horrified hostility to anything more nuanced, can arise from a hunger for simplicity, which all abusers share, but also can become reflexive for certain individuals dealing with lingering trauma and seeking safety. Indeed, many abusers target and exploit people prone to dichotomous thinking.

It’s easy to see how such can be maliciously predatory or a coping strategy.

This duality is probably what scant substance lies underneath Schulman’s thesis, although she obviously packages it in awful terminology and sweeping liberal psychoanalytical frames which is then scaffolding for her piles of shocking abuse-apologia. But again, it’s not like there are never instances of the sort of dynamics she references.

“When the other seems to be meeting their needs, they’re cast in the role of goodness, but when the person challenges them, their intimate becomes the villain. The inability to hold simultaneity, nuance, and shades of mutual weakness and strength”

This is a fair enough portrayal of a thing that definitely can happen. And such can be a source and style of abuse. Even as a tiny child my mother would flip between a variety of perspectives towards me like tenderness and then suddenly violent castigation as “just another male abuser! just like your father! just like your grandfather!” set off by things like my four-year-old self letting a damp towel fall to the floor. This extreme kind of reflexive black and white, all or nothing thinking can impede epistemic rationality and facilitate both individuals and social cliques falling into runaway dynamics of us versus them that not just overrespond to legitimately fucked shit but also incorrectly identify threats. The oppressed can become oppressors, those under the boot can use it as an excuse to abandon moral responsibilities, including that for nuanced accuracy, and much of anarchism is about addressing this danger while we struggle against our enemies in power. We burn the guillotine precisely because we are concerned about our own potential overreach or missteps in fighting our oppressors. Denying that such can happen is not a good response to CINA and will only perpetuate the way it gets its claws into people.

But I want to be very clear here because this is tricky territory and there’s a dominant narrative around “the cycle of abuse” that portrays survivors as future abusers by default or even just more inclined to abuse. This is simply not born out by the numbers. A specific survivor can perpetuate abuse, in some cases, yes, giving themselves permission to lean into splitting, see people as threats who are not and escalate way out of bounds; but on the whole abusers do not have a background as survivors and it is far more common for survivors to be targeted and victimized again, rather than transforming into abusers themselves. Indeed the narrative that survivors are “made crazy” from their trauma is often used by predators to isolate them, just as the narrative that abuse originates from mental illness is used to shed abusers from responsibility and help them DARVO against pathologized survivors.

And, at the same time, it’s totally reasonable for those who’ve survived trauma to sharply adjust their heuristics accordingly, to have at least a bit more hair-trigger response to some things. It would be irrational for someone attacked by a sabertooth tiger not to increase their estimation of the likelihood of encountering sabertooth tigers in their region. It would be an irrational investment of attention not to err on the side of overactive pattern-recognition when the grass rustles. Both in the senses of epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. Moreover the bayesian adjustments made by individuals, even if actually over-adjustments in the most strict sense, can have collective benefits in social aggregate. If everyone else is still dismissive about the threat of sabertooth tigers, survivors of their prior attacks being hyper-vigilant can provide net benefits to the entire group including those underestimating the threat.

Schulman replicates and reinforces tired narratives about survivors being irrational and childish, but it’s critical that we note her prescriptions to not update our beliefs on survivor testimony directly oblige individuals to act irrationally, against their individual interests and best knowledge or evaluation of information, deleting what they know from their brains. And this isn’t even a situation of individual rationality versus collective rationality. Aggregate interests are often served best by divergent individual strategies that are responsive to the distinct conditions and information each encounters.

The fact is there are black-and-white situations, there are individuals of immense malice and danger who are not merely mistaken but irrevocably committed to bad values. To many survivors, our experiences are an epistemic awakening to the very real cloaked presence of such predators. It is, sniff, pure ideology to demand people abandon their own critical cognitive capacities because you’re committed to a liberal notion that no one is truly bad at heart and everyone can be reached.

Schulman’s game, casting those who furiously object to CINA’s abuse apologia as irrational traumatized children trying to preserve a weak mental self-image through defensive black-or-white thinking is, beyond being functionally unfalsifiable, itself a clear example of defensive simplistic thinking.

The fact is that many people cling to “the world comes in greys, never black and white” as a defensive simplification of reality to preserve their own self-image as someone who can change and muddle moral questions to avoid responsibility. Folks become obsessive zealots against the possibility or commonality of black and white situations and, in so doing, throw passionate support behind every abuser and cryptofascist in their community in the name of transformative justice, precisely to avoid the kind of dangerous self-reflection Schulman claims to prioritize.

Indeed it’s deeply irrational to think that The Community can or should centrally (ie “collectively”) plan responses to abuse. Schulman’s fetishization of community and collective responses is far worse than the risks of epistemic closure among the survivor’s friends since bystanders are broadly less equipped with relevant and direct knowledge. Further, the sort of folks who leap to appoint themselves investigators and arbiters of “accountability processes” over the wishes of survivors are just soviet commissars writ small and, beyond the grotesque power dynamics, we should immediately apprehend such situations as just as fundamentally irrational as state communism. It is irrational to assume that a third party, much less a committee of them, will generally have better capacity to understand, evaluate and solve a situation, and it is irrational to elevate their goals, values, and notions of “solution” above that of a survivor. It’s irrational to pretend you sit in a state of pure ignorance and must personally undertake a full investigation before holding any evaluation of probability in your brain when an accusation is made.

At least it is irrational if we presume the stated goals are indeed the goals.

We do have broad moral obligations to engage with ourselves and the world around us, to struggle to avoid epistemic bubbles, to lean into some hard and painful things to learn and better ourselves. But this is not at all the same thing as a specific obligation to answer when Sarah Schulman calls.

Yes, there are reasons to be inclined towards engagement but rejecting it in specific cases – what Schulman sees as cold shouldering, shunning, etc – is in many cases the only rational move.

On numerous occasions I have, for reasons of compassion and where I calculated it could make a net positive difference, made myself available for (limited) communication with individuals who have stalked or abused me, sometimes against the urgings of all my housemates, friends, partners, etc. But there is also a clear trap to a naive or first-order consequentialist analysis: by simply escalating one’s emotional investment in me it’s always possible for someone to create a situation where the pain caused to them by my not doing a thing is higher than the disutility that doing it would cause me. Obsessive stalker fans can thus make themselves into utility monsters. “If you don’t drop everything to meet me right now I’ll kill myself.” “Engage with my every question or I’ll lose my mind for weeks in anguish and rage.” Unless one creates and holds personal boundaries, including holding to permanent blocks, it incentivizes people to become emotional-investment traps whose wellbeing hangs on your every action, to exploit your empathy. This is a stark runaway failure mode, not just for the individual whose compassion is exploited, but for the entire community where this kind of manipulation via self-mutilation is productive.

A common pattern of abuse is disrupting and monopolizing the target’s attention, forcing us to think about them, to empathize with them. And in the process their emotional universe consumes our own. He had a bad day at work, she was abused by her dad, they fear being abandoned, etc. The abuser ceases to be an individual agent and becomes merely a vast network of tugging and pulling causes. We regain a limited sense of control by uncovering these hidden causes, and we redirect our attention from direct resistance to the abuse to instead trying to negotiate or influence these external prods. If only I send him to work with a better lunch, maybe he’ll weather the storm of his boss better. What is almost always lost in this sort of analysis is any recognition of the abuser’s own agency or potential for agency. And this facilitates them. The abuser gets to relax, to abandon any ethical pressure to diligent consideration and reasoned reflection, and instead devolve into nothing more than a billiard ball moved by other people and forces. Every impulse they have is the product of something external and there is no obligation upon them to reflect on it, much less deliberate and make a choice.

Empathy is often recognized as a characteristic of the oppressed; while our rulers often don’t have to think about us, we can be forced to think endlessly about our rulers. Even though this asymmetry of knowledge stems from their callous and confident disregard, it can be turned around and leveraged as a tool of resistance. The battered wife knows exactly how to administer the poison to her husband. The hacker knows an exploit to take down the system.

But what can be useful as a strategy of resistance individually is not necessarily desirable as social norms or individual obligations. Nor is obsession and emotional dependence a certifier of being oppressed or in the right.

Conclusion: An Unending Curse

Standing around a campfire with a couple dozen comrades as conversation turned to CINA, one of them asked, “Why do people always flock to the worst possible critiques of real problems? Why do they always pick the worst text and act like it invented critiquing the problem?” The answer, I think – beyond who has the time and capital to publish and promote full books that are academically “citable” – is just coalitional politics: A text pointing to eg the existence of folks exaggerating harm while analyzing such with nuance will draw a certain number of readers, but a text that points to that existence and also says what abusers want to hear will draw those same readers plus a highly motivated army of abuse apologists. Once a sufficient mass of attention is reached, a given text becomes canonical and gets handled with respect as somehow the origin of obvious things mentioned in passing. Jo Freeman invented pointing out informal power dynamics. Michel Foucault invented comparing schools to prisons. Kristian Williams invented thinking about false accusations. You’re allowed to respond, but aren’t you blessed that they started the conversation.

I worry this same cursed and dishonest dynamic is congealing around CINA as it has taken root in liberal and non-profit spaces.

You can say, if you like some stray legitimate points Schulman mentions, find a different author or text that makes them, or fuck it, make them yourself and share that, nobody owns ideas, no need to promote an overall evil book. But the response is increasingly “but it’s the canonical text!” usually followed by attempts to claim the mantle of “nuance” by way of shirking any responsibility to take a stand. “You both make some interesting points! We should promote the debate! …Whoever remains most genteel wins.”

You just want to scream.

At the same time, just as tepid glancing touches on trivially real dynamics provides cover to Schulman’s pernicious arguments and frameworks, I also worry that CINA is so noxious, so obviously bad, that other folks will try to slap down its abuser apologia by dismissing all concern with dynamics of group loyalty, splitting, spiraling, bubbling, etc. This is, after all, how so much discourse goes, the counter-reaction to a narrative often slides into rejecting anything that looks like any component of its arguments. Which, in turn, fuels the complexes of those who feel like the book is a solitary torch of light in the darkness, a noble dissent against a hegemonic culture, speaking truth to power.

But CINA is not a text that breaks new ground or takes real chances, its only remotely novel content is the absurd intensification of ancient abuser narratives. It says when someone draws a boundary and says “I refuse to speak to you” that is itself tantamount to abuse (or Israeli war crimes) and the other person has a right, even moral duty, to violate that boundary. Calling, messaging, physically stalking, harassing any mutuals, sealioning in their mentions, anything to force the other person to come to the table. You are even obliged to do this as a bystander to someone else drawing a boundary, in fact The Community must come together to ensure escape is impossible. You are obliged to do this because individuals cannot be allowed autonomy in their self-reflection and you, with a crude psychoanalytic just-so-story, surely know better than them when they are making a mistake or turning away from engagement with reality.

The ideology of domination is absolutely founded in a drive for stasis and isolation. Power – at every scale – is about reducing complexity in the world, simplifying to what can be controlled, what can be made rigid. The drive for power is deeply tied to a fear of the complexity created by other people having choices and thinking for themselves. Nationalism is a great expression of this: violently slicing through the complex tangle of actually existing human relationships and creating prisons in which to contain people, limiting their choice in possible relationships.

But so too is forced contact between individuals and elevating a Relationship or Community above individual choice. The abuser cannot stand their target thinking their own thoughts or living their own life, as such creates space for dangerous unknown possibilities. The abuser must interject and interrupt, make it impossible for a train of thought or existence to take flight away from their control. They often emotionally escalate or engage in other communicative strategies that demand further communication, until they can force their target to become preoccupied with them.

This hunger for real time contact is often righteously framed as a drive for honesty through directness, but rawness is not the same thing as honesty. The process of compressing our thoughts into words and then someone else unzipping those words into conceptual relations in their own brain requires active reflection and deliberation to achieve accuracy. Bypassing that for an immediate rawness can only mean a breakdown in the fidelity of the information transmitted, which reduces the agency of both individuals.

The other individual, in trying to get distance or enforce a defensive boundary, including permanent ones and even catalyzing social boycotts, is trying to create a world where they can think about something other than whatever the abuser is likely to do next and whatever is going on in their mind. Yes, the drawing of such boundaries involves the curtailment or severing of specific lines of engagement but they’re trying to create net possibility rather than strangle it.

But, sadly, many leftists dream not of a liberated world of infinite expanding possibility but of the reassurances of fixed Community. Capitalism appears to them primarily as an atomizing force that creates precarity and anxiety and so they focus on visions of a world where everything is more or less assured. Their core motivation is thus a hunger for permanence rather than choice.

Combine this with liberal delusions that talking and the magic of “looking into one another’s eyes” can solve any problem and what results is an ideology that cannot accept unresolved conflict, that compulsively cannot respect unilateral decisions to refuse to talk, and so makes every split worse.

I’ve spent the better part of two decades viciously critiquing the frameworks and instincts of right-libertarians, in particular the notion of rights and negative freedom. But they’re not wrong that norms and defaults of defensive individual boundaries are important. They’re not wrong that power should be abolished rather than democratized. CINA is a case study in the horrors of the opposite direction.

From Stirner to Mussolini

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 18:16:50 +0000

Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism

In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed and incapable of sex.

All three were prominent leaders in the Italian anarchist scene and involved in criminal activities. Despite having been abducted, medically raped, and slandered by her scene rivals, when the cops raided them for publishing anti-war articles, Maria Rygier refused to turn on anyone and tried to take full responsibility. She was sentenced to three years in prison where she was again medically raped, this time by representatives of the state.

Disenchanted with the anarchist scene’s patriarchs and looking for support from dissidents within the movement, upon release Rygier took up with a prominent Stirnerite, Massimo Rocca. But if you’re looking for a triumphant vindication of individualist underdogs against rapist scene patriarchs, this is not that story. Despite their origins in the anarchist movement, Rygier and Rocca would go on to play central roles in the emergence and establishment of fascism. Many of their followers would join them as fascists, with one, Leandro Arpinati, even rising to the status of “second Duce,” just behind Mussolini in power and popularity.

Stephen B. Whitaker’s obscure book The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism has been cited on occasion by communist reactionaries as a cudgel against anarchism and individualism. Yet whatever their misappropriations, the title shouldn’t be read to imply this is a book blaming individualist anarchism for the rise of fascism, it merely focuses on one specific ideological arena among many others (like syndicalism and communism) where fascists found root and that contributed to the stew of early fascist ideology. There are many origins of fascism. Whitaker is quite clear from the outset, “I believe [anarchism’s] intellectual influence on fascism was quite small,” on the other hand, certain readings of Stirner and certain fringe currents in the anarchist movement, “were quite influential.” No one should be under the illusion that influence is the same thing as causal blame, yet, at the same time, the specific social points of overlap and mutations of an ideological current can be critical to understanding the initial rise of fascism and continuing weak points for entryism today.

Whitaker is not particularly hostile to anarchism or its individualist currents, but at the same time is very clearly ignorant of it; his understanding of anarchism as a philosophy seemingly stems entirely from reading George Woodcock, Max Stirner, and a couple haughtily ignorant liberal commentators in political science journals clumsily trying to categorize anarchism within their discursive frameworks. (More on how badly he butchers Stirner later.) Unsurprisingly his ideological contextualizations are often impaired as a result. But Whitaker also appears to be a sincere historian and his book is still a treasure trove of references to interviews, letters, and articles nowhere else translated to English. Of course I’m not fluent in Italian, and was limited in how much I could verify via google translate and via other sources, but together the book’s references reveal a deeply dysfunctional anarchist scene, undermined by toxic personalities, powerful patriarchs, and horrible edgelord takes that it’s unfortunately quite easy to see contemporary parallels to.

Again I must emphasize that similar specialized historical accounts can and have been written of Fascism’s parallel origins in liberal, communist, and conservative circles. The question that antifascist anarchists should zero in on is what can we learn from this?

The standard defensive take is that every sort of person can take a reactionary turn. If fascism can win converts from every ideology that just goes to show such conversions have non-ideological or pre-ideological motivations. But this is a plainly spurious defense. Anarchism, Communism, and Liberalism have won proponents from every single ideology under the sun, including the ranks of fascists. This does not mean that there are not specific things that can be said, specific dynamics or tendencies that can be analyzed, about how a specific ideology most often wins converts from another specific ideology, to what degree it is successful, and through what arguments or conceptual dynamics. Moreover ideologies and movements are not homogeneous, that anarchism, communism, and liberalism may each have corners or failure modes particularly conducive to corruption in specific ways is all the more imperative to examine such rather than sweeping everything under a rug.

Nothing is more inane and anti-individualist than defensive closing of ranks. Why should it remotely matter if a communist or liberal might attempt to utilize factoids about the individualist anarchists who joined fascism as some kind of rhetorical cudgel against us? Why should we care more about what liberals or communists think and say than we care about finding the truth for ourselves?

Whitaker’s historical account focuses on four individuals – Massimo Rocca, Maria Rygier, Torquato Nanni (a socialist politician with some anarchist inclinations), and Leandro Arpinati – and traces their personal trajectories around and through the Italian anarchist scene and the early fascist movement. It’s important to note that each of these figures had a rocky relationship with fascism as it developed and ultimately felt jilted by certain developments, but it is just as important to note that their objections were not grounded in anything like anarchist principles. These were not hybrids of anarchism and fascism, but straight up fascists, even if they occupied contentious sub-positions within fascism. And sadly they were not isolated wingnuts, but important and influential individuals with supporters. Rocca and Rygier were internationally respected and published anarchist voices. Arpinati served as Undersecretary to the Minister of the Interior where he acquired his title as “second Duce of fascism.” Rocca pushed Mussolini into his pivot to a pro-war socialism. All were friends with Mussolini.

While their individual reasons and arguments differed in some ways, in broad strokes there was a subsection of the egoist anarchist scene in Italy that embraced participation in the First World War and used their printing presses and clandestine distribution capacity to disrupt the Italian Left and strengthen Mussolini as a champion. Partially as a result of this defection of individualist printmakers & distroists, between 1915 and 1920 no significant anarchist journals were published in Bologna. This turn to warmongering was a conjunction of a fetishization of violence among some individualists and a broader populist perception of Italy as a poor nation revolting against the rich through the medium of national conflict in sections of the wider Left (particularly among syndicalists). Mixed up and loosely cited Nietzsche and Stirner were leveraged to defend a haughty elitism of the ubermensch while the charisma of militancy brought prestige and followers.

In some cases the mutations and contortions were clearly venal and opportunistic, the result of specific types of rotten character that had regrettably found a place in the milieu, but in many cases it seems like certain ideological formulations ratcheted themselves.

It’s worth going through the individuals Whitaker traces with some depth, if only because there’s so little coverage of them in English.

The most important for an ideological autopsy, in my opinion, was Massimo Rocca (who went by Libero Tancredi while he identified as an anarchist but swapped back to his legal name as a fascist). This asshole’s roots as an anarchist ideologue are sharp and colorful, and show his early differences from the mainstream anarchist scene.

“In 1905 , Rocca moved to Milan to become editor of Li Grido della folla. Under his leadership the newspaper began to take on a more belligerent tone, exalting regenerative violence and chaos; referring to dynamite as “holy”; and, condemning basic legal rights, humanitarianism, and ethics. … He and others like him distributed pamphlets and put up posters which spoke of rebellion against the “myth of positive evolution in society, naturalism in science, society’s ingenious faith in progress””

Rocca was expelled from Il Grido della folla and left Milan, the heartland of individualist anarchism in Italy, for Rome to found Il Novatore anarchico.

“At the 1906 anarchist congress of Monino, near Rome, supporters of Rocca’s newspaper, the novatoriani, started a massive fistfight during which pistol shots were fired and at least one person received knife wounds.”

The novatori proclaimed that “a war today is more fatal to the bourgeoisie than the proletariat and is a favorable occasion for starting a revolution.” And Rocca declared that “anarchism in the truest sense of the word, is the revolt of the ego against altruism.” (Abele Rizieri Ferrari, who a little later came to be known under the pen name “Renzo Novatore,” would have been 16 at the time; Rocca, his senior, was just 22.)

Despite Rocca having a militant following within the scene, he got into serious conflicts with other individualists (a far more diverse lot, including many sharply altruistic and focused on morality) and he was accused of looting funds from Rome’s Libertarian Youth newspaper to fill the coffers of Il Novatore. This was a pattern, to say the least.

“he would convince anarchist colleagues to pay for his meals in the local trattoria by railing against them during the meal with snippets of his Stirnerian-Neitzschean logic such as, “You pay for my lunch because you’re weak. I, on the other hand, am strong.””

When the outcry at his general scumfuckery built to a sufficient level, Rocca skipped town, moving to the US, where he contributed to other anarchist publications (from Paris to Chicago) and continued to publish Il Novatore. His popular notion of an elite rebellious minority, a libertarian aristocracy, seeking to elevate themselves slowly drifted over time, with the Italian race increasingly filling the role of this minority on the global stage. Similarly, as Whitaker puts it, he urged folks to

“abandon intellect and focus on instinct which, according to Rocca, leads people to think of themselves as Unique Ones, to revert to their more “natural” state, rejecting the abstract structures of the intellect.”

This reading of Stirner as a rejection of reason for nature/instinct was not the only hot take he had percolating. Achieving the union of egos, Rocca speculated, would require the inception of a truly brutal and total war of all against all, with the eventual survivors finding themselves balanced in detentes with one another. Thus: cynical egoism and violence – even on the part of conservatives and the state – is only ever good because it ratchets society towards this rupture.

And ultimately one final breach grew: Rocca fervently believed that morality was a spook, and humanitarianism or altruism particularly pernicious, but he struggled with inevitable critiques that any position one might take (like rejection of altruism) would still itself constitute a morality. And so Rocca finally came to accept that the best way to smash the most repugnant morality was to replace it with an explicitly and consciously fake, arbitrary, and hollow morality. Humanitarianism was too potent and perpetually reemergent a spook, the only way to smash it was to replace it with blind duty, with the arationality of obedience to the collective will the best possible escape from spooked thinking. Nationalism was thus a useful tool to suppress the intellect and return to instinct/nature.

If this sounds too severe a contortion to warrant any consideration besides a laugh, consider the tens of millions who praised Trump’s honesty because his flagrant lies didn’t hide that they were lies. It is sometimes argued in certain lazy currents of philosophy that reason constitutes a tyranny because it has an overwhelming and almost inescapable force in our minds. The compulsion that reasoned argument exerts on us is starkly unique, and thus unfair. Through reason we are not just forced into a single path, we are forced in the most intimate and mentally demanding way possible. Reason, once it sinks its teeth into us, never lets us go, never grants us a moment’s release, instead it ratchets in reinforcing spirals that consume our minds. Stirner uses the phrase “the rule of absolute thought.” It’s easy to see how reason is self-reinforcing. Doubt, curiosity and the care to get things right reinforce themselves; a little investigation proves how much more investigation is required. Many of us embrace this and see such reflection and vigilance as the very core of agency and freedom. But in Stirner’s language, the “labor of thought” is a sanctified spook that “misleads people into scrupulousness and deliberation.” Of course there’s many ways to read Stirner’s passages on “thought” as itself a fixed idea and few of them look anything like an endorsement of Rocca’s flight. Yet it is true that many feel a certain kind of release from the tyranny of responsibility and diligence when they embrace a self-aware lie. Every day that you renew your service to the lie, its blatant nature is inescapable and reminds you of your conscious rejection of scruples. Escaping the “tyranny of thought” back to instinct is no easy task and Rocca believed he’d found the path. What’s a little absolute authoritarianism if it allows you the “freedom” of turning your brain to goo?

And of course who would drive and sit on top of this authoritarian beast besides the elite rebels, the truly unique ones:

“It is useful to note the difference between single rebels and the great mass of subversives. It is necessary to distinguish between those who know how to be uniquely themselves… These are the only ones who have the right not to obey the law. The others… deserve the intervention of social coercion to force them to submit to the consequences and responsibility of their actions, which they do not know how to take freely,”

It was this language of elites that Rocca was able to make palatable to the existing forces of the right as he pivoted politically. What once had been a moral or rebel aristocracy of enlightened insurrectionaries could hook up with the self-legitimizing narratives of the actual ruling aristocracy. In this way the scandalously militant and revolutionary rhetoric of the left could be repackaged in ways the right could actually embrace. This is perhaps one of the most key aspects of fascism that distinguishes it from mere militant reaction or hypernationalism: the palingenesis. Fascism is not just an embrace of hierarchy and raw power, a rejection of modernism or the enlightenment project, a shrinking of empathy and care to just “one’s own”; it supercharged existing reactionary forces by giving them a revolutionary project. No longer pallid defenders of the status quo, reactionaries could finally dream about their own violent rupture to a fantastical future.

It’s important to emphasize that, despite being a complete asshole whose self-serving actions repeatedly burned bridges and whose ideology was almost as toxic as it gets, Rocca was not a marginal and isolated wingnut but a prominent figure in the anarchist movement who gave speeches and contributed to numerous journals and had a militant base of friends and followers. Rocca and Rygier existed alongside Fabbri and Borghi on a shortlist of anarchist intellectuals who debated publicly, mobilized followers, and whose words were carried across Italy.

The fact that their distros/journals were quite active and they drew crowds and speaking opportunities has been largely obscured by anarchists who have, from the start, emphasized the (also valid) degree to which these assholes were marginal. A good example of early language dismissing them can be found in the very fun Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism by Fausto Butta, where he quotes Luigi Molinari,

“It is time to end this opportunistic lie that a considerable number of anarchists support the war … Who are, then, these warmonger anarchists? Maria Rygier and Libero Tancredi! The former represents nobody but herself; she is free to contradict her noble past and abandon to their destiny those proletarians in whom she had instilled an anti-militarist consciousness. The latter has never been an anarchist, in scientific terms. His anarchism really is a synonym of chaos, and on this point he surely agrees with the bourgeois newspapers, to which he has always contributed and to which he is giving a benevolent service“

But while it’s true the overwhelming majority of the Italian anarchist movement (individualists included) sided with Malatesta against the war, it’s hardly like Rygier and Rocca had no followers or compatriots. Prominent individualist writers like Oberdan Gigli and Mario Gioda joined the pro-war anarchists and their current had a whole newspaper, La Guerra Sociale (whose director Edoardo Malusardi also went from individualist anarchism to fascism).

Rocca would eventually stray so far as to be repeatedly attacked and hospitalized by anarchists, but it’s a testament to his influence and status that he continued to get invitations to give addresses at anarchist meetings, even while his crew was increasingly socially shunned.

When the fascios were founded Rocca was one of the core founding members in Rome, and he managed to become seen as fascism’s leading economic proponent. Rocca’s downfall with fascist ranks came from his sharper elitism. He led a faction that believed fascists – not their wider base of support – were Nietzschean elites who should eliminate all others from political power, disdaining the non-mobilized middle class that merely supported the fascists rather than leading their streetfighting. This, of course, was not a politically opportune stance for Mussolini, so Rocca was pushed out in 1924. He continued to push his same line and became denounced as “antifascist” for it. But even exiled to France in 1926 he continued to push for Mussolini to return to “true fascism” and take more power for the true elites, writing multiple fascist books, grumbling about how local actual antifascists shunned him, and working as a paid informer to the fascist secret police during the occupation of France.

In seeming contrast to Rocca’s individualist anarchist arc is the socialist Torquato Nanni, one of the many, many, many state socialists who followed Mussolini to fascism, albeit one closer in many ways to certain anarchist circles.

Nanni started as a passionate anti-clerical activist and socialist leader on the border of Romagna and Tuscany who had strong associations with anarchists, particularly Arpinati. Nanni’s politics are far more muddled and there’s a case for disputing his inclusion in a book on individualist anarchists, after all he was a participant in the Socialist Party and a sitting mayor, even if he wasn’t hugely into the party. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution as a presumed horizontal direct democracy. This was a man friendly with the staunchly non-individualist Fabbri and Borghi in a period when Rocca and eventually Rygier were fighting with them. Whitaker focuses on his affinities with individualist anarchists, but I think it’s important to clarify how muddled the situation is.

It’s true that Nanni emphasized socialism as an individual faith of a noble elite few, was hostile to the reformism of the party and saw the value of socialism in “critique, disintegration, and offensive,” but all things considered he reads most strongly to me more like a modern Bookchinite, or maybe even a council communist, than anything close to an individualist anarchist. His fixation on direct democracy and the Paris Commune are hardly the markers of individualist anarchism. Indeed, as mentioned, he became the mayor of Santa Sofia with the intent of transforming the local administrative region into a true workers council.

Nanni, long more of a militant than a reformist despite his own political office, was basically at odds with the Socialist Party during the crisis about “interventionism” in the first world war, but slunk back to the party in 1918, more inspired by the Bolsheviks than Mussolini’s increasingly doomed pro-war crusade. Yet in the September 1919 occupation of Fiume he swapped right back into deep alliance with Mussolini. In no small part because Nanni wanted a revolution, any revolution. He became increasingly convinced that the Italian socialists simply didn’t have the bloodlust necessary for a revolution as successful as the Bolsheviks’, and the fascists did have that bloodlust.

This is a common line in all the characters here, and it had wide currency across ideological camps in Italy of the time. The infamous syndicalist Georges Sorel, we mustn’t forget, leapt from praising Lenin to Mussolini, because hey at least the fascists were mobilized for violence. The common valuing of militancy for militancy’s sake, on violence as an immediatist or irrationalist means without ends, was conjoined at the same time with an apocalyptic hunger for a revolution to shatter the establishment and existing order, no matter who it took to get it going. All of the figures Whitaker covers were influenced by this combination. It is also, sadly, rather timeless. National Bolsheviks and eco-fascists today continue to leverage the same sort of argument, “I’ll ally with anyone serious about smashing The Bad System and steeled for action, everything else is a distraction.” Whether capitalism or civilization is held as the ur-enemy that we must narrowly focus on defeating at any cost, fascist creep goes into overdrive. And the same sort of somewhat paradoxical conjunction of irrationalist immediatism with revolutionary instrumentalism. We see the same with folks urging collaboration with boogaloos while griping that “antifascism is just liberalism because it shies away from absolute violence; at least these reactionaries are happy to shed blood here and now.” The cult of militancy and rupture remains eternally attractive to a certain set.

If the only problem, the only thing holding us back from a revolution, is timidity and unwillingness to act, to spill blood, then even the most reactionary scumbag is more sympathetic and has more potential than the mewling handwringing of some – no doubt liberal – comrade wondering if we really need to stomp this row of infants to death to prove our militancy. And woe betide the sort of sniveling coward who asks questions like “okay but what exactly is the causal relationship between these means and the ends we’re seeking?”

Whitaker emphasizes the anarchist influences upon Nanni and I think seems confident to simply point out his revolutionary focus and belief in autonomous participatory communes, conjoined with his noises about “the individual” but while Nanni was certainly not a classic organizationalist or party man, it’s unclear to me how much Whitaker thus believes or seeks to imply he should be classified with the individualist anarchists. Every anarchist makes obligatory noises about individual idealism or individuality – as individualist anarchists know all too well, this often means very little in practice.

Nevertheless, one way in which Nanni is central to the story of the individualist anarchists who went fascist is through his close friendship with Leandro Arpinati. Indeed, Nanni would eventually write Arpinati’s biography.

Arpinati is the most central figure in Whitaker’s book, the common thread he traces to illustrate the other converts to fascism in passing. Originally a young militantly anti-clerical socialist who worked for Nanni, doing public lighting for Santa Sofia, he abandoned socialism for anarchism in 1909.

Arpinati’s mixture of Stirner and Nietzsche, or at least the popular interpretations going around, made him something of a wingnut in his initial affinity group, but he was embraced by them because 1) there were so few anarchists in his town, and 2) he repeatedly demonstrated personal militancy and bravery, like disarming a farmer threatening to murder his wife. I also can’t help but get the impression – reading between the lines – that Arpinati was quite charismatic in his streetfighter youth.

The first meeting between Mussolini and Arpinati was hostile. The anarchist-turned-socialist Andrea Costa had died and the local socialists of Civitella were dedicating a covered market to the traitor, Arpinati’s crew went to paste up denunciations while Mussolini issued the dedication and denounced them from stage, quoting Stirner at them.

Despite – or perhaps because of – these initial sparks, they grew close. Arpinati was taken with Mussolini’s political power and Mussolini wanted local allies, so they patched things up and Arpinati’s anarchist crew operated as occasional local bodyguards for Mussolini. While Arpinati’s crew had started out rather mainline-anarchist, his influence had been significant and more and more newcomers drifted to his take on individualism.

But, after his father died, Arpinati moved to Bologna in 1910 and worked as a railway electrician. There he was a follower of Rygier and earned a reputation as a scab by consistently voting against strikes, rejecting them as deplorable collective action rather than individualist attack, all while he bummed around the anarchist scene for food and lodging.

When war broke out Arpinati refused to support the local railway workers in a general strike. It’s hard not to wonder if this was rooted in anything different than his contrarian rejections of prior strikes. Yet Nanni, recounting this, praised him for having the foresight to see war as a fecund site of rupture: “In a flash of intuition his spirit anticipated that revision of all human values – social, ideological, moral – which the war had brought with it.” It’s also true that Arpinati saw the union bosses as out of line with the rank-and-file on the issue of war. But whatever his strongest motivation, he radicalized harder and harder in support of the war and contrarian hostility to his comrades. This embrace of war found immediate expression in constant brawls with anti-war anarchists.

“He took to brush-cutting his hair when his head was not bandaged – so that opponents could not “immobilize his head while others punched him in the face.””

A particularly striking image amid these fights is a meeting of the anarchist union Societa Operaia where Arpinati, Rygier, and Rocca fought some two hundred members of their audience who assaulted the stage for over an hour with thrown chairs and general fisticuffs.

Suffice to say, the anarchist movement as a whole had ceased to tolerate their bullshit. And Arpinati was more than a happy pugilist in response. Amid the fighting at home he tried to sign up for the military but was rejected. This deeply undermined his standing in the facsist movement for decades. Common graffiti in Bologna later under fascism would read “Did Arpinati fight in the war? No!”

Anarchists too had a certain disgust for the pro-war non-serving Arpinati and, after joining the first Bolognese fascio de combattimento in 1919, he got a very harsh reception in his hometown of Civitella. This was basically the end of his presence in the anarchist movement.

Soon enough he and Rocca were being used as bodyguards by Mussolini. This was a period of conflict within fascist circles over right and left alliances, with the Bolognese fascist chapter veering further left than Mussolini and appointing a secretary “from the ranks of the anarcho-syndicalists.” (Whitaker gives no further details than that, being focused on the individualist currents, and my Italian isn’t good enough to go looking for the scandalous particulars.) In any case the Bolognese chapter was a disaster electorally and collapsed in numbers before it was basically seized, replaced, and taken control of by Arpinati in 1920. Militancy progressed rapidly as strikes and minor land reform stirred up class conflict and Arpinati and the fascists positioned themselves as defenders against socialist bullies (a similar note to his hostility to union bosses).

“On May Day the fascists paraded through Bologna singing the movement’s fight song, Giovinezza, and taunting the socialists. Much to Arpinati’s surprise and delight, the socialists did not respond to “the myth of [their] invincibility in the public squares of the city.” Arpinati wrote to Pasella, “The local socialists showed exasperating calm; the Chamber of Labor remained hermetically sealed all day. I am convinced they will never make the revolution.”

It’s important to note just how critical the youth and student population was to the fascist movement at this time (a far cry from the relatively aging chuds and boneheads that primarily comprise their rallies in our own era). Most members were between the ages of 16 and 26, and the absence of students over the summer collapsed the fascist fighting forces. But when the students returned, Arpinati once again led armed fascists through the streets and ended up in a gun battle with socialists, successfully killing a young worker. This victory got Arpinati appointed head of the armed squads and the ranks swelled from 20 to over 300.

Arpinati occupied a weird hybrid space during this period. The anarchist movement hated his guts, and the goals of his pro-war organizing and their anti-war organizing couldn’t be more different, but he still had a certain identification with the anarchists. He evidently conceptualized his differences primarily in terms of who was likely to actually achieve the glorious revolution or rupture, anarchists or fascists.

“On June 26th, 1920, active troops from two of the Army’s best divisions mutinied, refusing to board ships… The anarchists called a general strike in support of the mutineers and within 24 hours Bologna was in revolt… When [the socialists] refused to support the anarchists, “the Ancona rebels greeted this message with howls of indignation… When the revolt collapsed on Jun 30th, Arpinati took it as further proof that the socialists would not make a revolution.”

In short, while the anarchist movement was anti-war, its revolt in that name was far more sympathetic to Arpinati than the socialist suppression of the revolt. At least the anarchists were in favor of revolutionary action. (As is their wont, the socialists approved brutal state action to put down the anarchists, tools that the fascists would promptly turn on them.)

Bookstore burnings, gunfights and grenade throwings ensued between the fascists and the state socialists, just as Arpinati had cut his teeth trading live fire with anarchists, with the cops backing Arpinati’s fascists and the landowners, Catholic orgs, and wealthy throwing money on them. “By March, membership in the fascio rose to between five and eight thousand.” One of the successes of Arpinati’s street terror was that it largely avoided the socialist leadership to instead prioritize murdering small socialist functionaries. The socialist leadership didn’t care as much about such lower level folks and the political leaders of other parties didn’t see this as a threat to norms protecting them, so the fascists were largely free to terrorize the socialist base into hiding. Beyond the examples of murders, one particularly gruesome detail Whitaker gives is of a basement Arpinati used to personally torture opponents.

During this period Arpinati’s personal friendships managed to win him converts from the ranks of antifascists. (I’ll say nothing about contemporary embarrassments of self-proclaimed antifascists maintaining friendships and even romantic liaisons with fascists, but at least there are stronger pressures to disassociate and draw lines today.) Similarly he was involved in repeatedly intervening to save Nanni from his own fascist rank-and-file who just wanted to kill a socialist of any stripe. But within a couple years Arpinati himself was outmaneuvered in power games by a syndicalist also climbing the fascist ranks and he briefly declared himself done and ran off to Libya, before inevitably returning and once again clawing his way up.

By 1924 he was once again the official leader of the Bolognese fascists and he turned his attention to systematically building support for the fascist regime, stealing control of nurseries and summer camps from the socialists and pouring money into sports projects and leagues. If you check Arpinati’s wikipedia page today practically the bulk of it is about his ties to various sports.

In 1929 Mussolini appointed Arpinati Undersecretary to the Ministry of the Interior, removing Arpinati from his very strong regional powerbase to try to undermine him. But he only grew in power, becoming the “Second Duce” of fascism by 1932. It’s easy to see how this heralded his fall, accusation of “antifascism,” imprisonment, and internal exile in 1934, but his stances within the fascist milieu were increasingly out of line with the necessities of state.

Arpinati was obviously centrally attracted to the violence and the revolutionary potential of fascism, to be valued in-themselves, happily chucking any socialist ends. But he also saw nationalism and street violence as “antiauthoritarian” because they broke the status quo and allowed the suppressed natural elites like him to claw their way up. He continued his prior fight with syndicalism from within fascism just as he had fought it within anarchism. His focus on natural elites (he published Evola naturally) made him hostile to attempts to build a wider base and bring people into the party.

Arpinati kept some power and popularity and as the second world war dragged on he refused entreaties by Mussolini to help him restructure the government, instead trying to make a play to fund the resistance movements and place himself on Mussolini’s throne after the Allies ousted him. There’s a neat little anecdote about how the deluded fool felt sure the anarchists would hear him out and, lol, of course we didn’t. He made other plays, hoping the monarchy would rise against Mussolini and install himself; he also personally helped evacuate British generals trapped behind lines, in hopes of winning standing with the Allies. Thankfully, Arpinati and Nanni were assassinated together in April 1945 before he could regain footing in the post-war era.

In contrast to Arpinati and Nanni, and more in keeping with Rocca, was the saga of Maria Rygier, who we already saw betrayed and attacked by the patriarchs of the anarchist milieu.

Her break with organizationalist ranks greenlit widespread misogynist attacks on her, with Borghi attacking her femininity, dress, figure, sanity, etc. But even as she repeatedly went down for others and sealed her lips behind bars, the organizationalist left spared no sympathy for her. Syndicalist leaders even rejected prison reform while Rygier was a quite prominent recurring prisoner, stating:

“prisons, except for extreme cases of political persecution, are not for conscientious workers, but for the dregs of society!”

Leading Rygier to furiously rejoin:

“syndicalism, when it is not union action… is reduced to a single passive exercise: write, write, write, with presumptuous dilettantism, insensitive to the fervor of battle”

It’s hard not to read this onto her parallel narrative arc from staunch anti-militarist to nationalist warmonger. The syndicalists and scene patriarchs no doubt deserved her absolute hatred, but one can see in the above passage this hatred mutating to focus on their lack of militancy. Where she went to prison and proved her commitment, so many of her abusers and detractors sat relatively comfortably at home and pontificated in abstract sneers. Of course commitment is not the same thing as militancy, to say nothing of making a fetish of violence, but the slippage between those ideas sure is perennial. When a detractor has never risked their own skin, has never applied their fists, it’s hard not to fixate on that division between you. Of course, certain people like Fabbri and Borghi absolutely did take personal risks, but it’s easy to understand Rygier seeing things differently from her position.

Obviously Rygier’s plight in the scene is sympathetic, yet no amount of persecution by your “own side” can ever excuse or justify pivoting to evil for friends and/or revenge. What’s morally correct doesn’t become fungible just because you face abuse and the enemy offers community and means of retaliation. It’s actually quite easy to give one’s life for anarchy in a single moment of bravery and pain, but the true test of commitment is whether you’re willing to shoulder pain and isolation over decades, to be constantly betrayed by “comrades.” A shallow violent militancy is often the easy way out compared to saying the unpopular thing, resisting the popular or mythologized abusers, and sticking to it through all the backlash.

Today we regularly hear people whine that they had no choice but to become a tankie, or proudboy, or ecofascist, or work for a liberal organization alongside cops, because some folks were mean to them and the monsters were nice. I can think of nothing as spineless and craven as making your values so un-fixed as to be dependent upon whether they get you friends.

Rygier unfortunately sought allies not just with vile scumfucks on the edge of the anarchist milieu like Rocca, but by March 1917 she had also joined masons and sitting politicians in forming The Committee of Public Safety to force Italy to more deeply commit to the war. This included a plan to “execute the king and hold the royal family hostage” to ensure a dictatorship. They planned and advocated mass repression and imprisonment of Germans and anti-war activists (including virtually the entire anarchist movement).

Mid 1920 Rygier’s commitment to fascism wavered, as Mussolini declared war on Masonry. She threw herself in the opposite direction and got attacked and her place ransacked by fascists. Throughout all of this she continued to loudly assert that she had proof Mussolini had been an informant for the French secret police and that it was this evidence that provided her with insurance and was stopping Mussolini from imprisoning or killing her. Nevertheless, eventually she realized that bragging about blackmail diminishes its effectiveness and she fled to France.

Whitaker doesn’t cover much of Rygier after her departure and there’s even less available online. But it’s important to note the opportunism and lack of principle to her supposed “anti-fascism” and critiques of Mussolini. Basically her argument was that Mussolini was a blackmailer and opportunist (pot meet kettle), as well as a stooge of France to undermine Italian national interests. Like Rocca, Nanni, and Arpinati she was shunned by actual anti-fascists, although unlike Nanni and Arpinati she didn’t catch a bullet for her sins. She died a monarchist.

Although Whitaker centers four figures in his history, no one should walk away with the impression that these were the only examples of fascist creep in anarchist ranks.

I already mentioned the individualist anarchist newspaper editor turned fascist, Edoardo Malusardi, but there was also Mario Gioda, an individualist-anarchist and follower of Rocca who became the leader of the Turin fascio and slaughtered eleven workers in December 1922. Gioda came to be seen as an urban elitist and eventually marginalized within fascist ranks. Whitaker mentions Mammolo Zamboni, another anarchist turned fascist seen as heretical by other fascists, because he was protected by Arpinati.

And there was Leo Longanesi, an anti-conformist who explicitly sought to blend anarchism with conservatism and who represented an agrarian populist wing within fascism. Longanesi gets the best quote in Whitaker’s book:

“[fascism was composed of] ruffians, violent people, married people, braggarts… vaguely fanatic people who agitate for no particular reason against all that they do not understand, more than anything else from a natural need to exalt themselves and rail against something: unable to clearly formulate their own ideas, they condemn those of others: in continuous personal rivalries, yesterday anarchists, tomorrow police informers, today individualists, tomorrow communists… readers of pamphlets, debtors, eternal idlers and inventors of systems for winning at roulette, living in perennial and confused fanaticism.”

I list these other individuals to push back against the inevitable attempts to dismiss and minimize all contact between individualist anarchism and fascism.

While liberals, syndicalists, state socialists and communists each have a vast array of members who jumped ship for fascism – anyone thinking of using these details as indictment of individualist anarchism should think long and hard before throwing stones on this – and the vast majority of individualist anarchists in Italy obviously did not become fascists, there was undeniably a lot of crossover in the early days.

While nowhere near as much as he was tied to the socialist movement (see the copious praise that Lenin and Trotsky heaped on him) or the liberals and conservatives that flocked to his promises, Mussolini was astonishingly deeply enmeshed with anarchists. His father was part of Bakunin’s anarchist international. He was personally close with the infamous muslim individualist anarchist Leda Rafanelli in Milan. He knew Carlo Tresca, praised Gaetano Bresci and Malatesta, collaborated with Luigi Bertoni and translated two of Kropotkin’s books. He praised Stirner and Nietzsche and quoted them at his adversaries. Mussolini even appealed to (individualist) anarchism openly as justification of fascism: “To us, the doomed ones of individualism, there is nothing left for the dark present and the gloomy tomorrow but the ever consoling religion… of anarchism!” Mussolini even supported Sacco and Vanzetti and complained privately to his friends that American fascists didn’t side with them.

Running away from this history will get us nowhere and provide no useful antibodies against the resurgence of fascist creep in the worst fringes of our movement.

Yet I certainly wouldn’t recommend Whitaker’s book as a corrective.

The ideological analysis in The Individualist Anarchist Origins of Fascism is just all kinds of shoddy and I’ve done my best to strip it out in relaying the preceding historical accounts. It’s hard to exactly peg where Whitaker is coming from in terms of his own ideology. At many points he seems to be condemning individualist anarchism from a socialist perspective, at other points from a liberal perspective, but there are a few distinct points in the book where he even seems sympathetic to his fascist characters. He clearly finds individualism somewhat suspect (or at least alien), thinks the extrajudicial execution of Nanni and Arpinati is self-evidently bad (a crime!), and bemoans that Arpinati has been written off as a fascist rather than recognized for his accomplishments in good government. But even that shocking and disgusting sympathy gets nuanced with something that looks like a critique of the ways that historical narratives have pretended that fascism was completely wiped away and wasn’t part of contiguous traditions through modern Italy.

Whitaker claims he wrote the book to push back against historical accounts that flatten or homogenize fascism’s internal ideological diversity and also cleave it from all prior and following history. That’s certainly well and good, but the end result is a book certain to mislead liberals and socialists, or, even worse, provide grist to actual fascists. It’s a useful book for anarchists, but for anyone not already fluent in anarchism there’s a serious danger of his warped accounting doing lasting damage.

As I’ve mentioned, in (barely) trying to understand anarchism, he pulls heavily from really unqualified liberal academics and from Woodcock’s infamously problematic summary of anarchism. A lot has been written critically on Woodcock’s 1962 Anarchism, its influences and resulting influence. Woodcock was a pacifist with snobbish literary focuses, and while he was involved in anarchist circles before the war, he was also rather representative of the survivors that flourished in the post-war period. He was running from the legacy of violent direct action and concerned with social legitimacy, desperate to write off figures like Bakunin as evil firebrands and to reframe figures like Kropotkin in terms of his own perspective. His book was strongly slanted to reproduce that analysis as well as to characterize anarchism in the rear-view mirror as a failed project and historical episode. For anarchists like my father that came up in the 50s and 60s it’s an incredibly apt summary of their zeitgeist. But Woodcock’s Anarchism is not the place to find a charitable or even fair reading of individualist insurrectionaries.

Woodcock was also writing to an audience of post-war liberals, whose reference frame was very different from that of anarchism. The academic liberals that Whitaker cites are all in this frame and to them anarchism is not just a deludedly utopian artifact of lost history, but also a deeply strange one that they are preoccupied with trying to fit into their own notions of individualism and communitarianism. Since neither they nor Whitaker really bother to read beyond some surface selections, they do a lot of strawman inference to try and resolve how anarchism solves the problems most pressing about it in their paradigm.

There’s also a belief that anarchism is centrally defined by the belief that human nature is good. This – as I’ve repeatedly tried to emphasize to contemporary anarchists – was the widespread takeaway for decades after Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (one of the few anarchist texts to survive in influence and circulation in the US after the Palmer raids). It wasn’t just the warped takeaway of liberal critics, but it was also sincerely what much of the rank-and-file movement came to believe over these decades. Watch documentaries of old anarchists that persisted through the 40s and 50s and you hear repeated explicit references to this. Humans are essentially good in our core nature and we’ve lost sight of that and been warped by social institutions. This generation of the movement took very strongly to Wilhelm Reich (silly orgone and all) because he was a prominent figure pushing this same simplistic perspective. Even if Kropotkin had a more nuanced view, what was printed in Mutual Aid and in Ethics didn’t do much of anything to counter such beliefs and on-the-ground popular mobilizing narratives; movements don’t do nuance. This widespread appeal to nature as good directly coursed into the creation of green anarchism and primitivism. Even if there remained minority currents in anarchism that objected or didn’t formulate their perspectives in such terms, “nature = good” is indeed reflective of the mainstream in this era.

But where Whitaker and the liberals he cites go wrong is in reading this perspective backward into the anarchist movement in the 19th century and early 20th. Certainly there was some presence around the milieu of the occasional appeals to human nature (and nature more widely) as good and the ground of anarchism’s values, but it was hardly hegemonic the way it became during anarchism’s midcentury retreat and eclipse. Indeed much of anarchism at this time was a fiery prometheanism, believing fanatically in progress through science, reason, and technology, with the radical new technologies of revolver and dynamite as unprecedented levelers that would enable the transition to a society never before enacted. This was not the narrative of Rousseau or Lewis Henry Morgan that liberal discourse is familiar with. The movement was a point of intersection between quite varying currents that all had similar conclusions about the rejection of domination, and that mixed, hybridized, innovated, and drew in wildly varying influences. Figures like William Godwin were utilitarians who believed in a long struggle towards human perfection until everyone was so individually enlightened that coercion would become a distant memory. Such was absolutely not a perspective that humans were naturally good but corrupted by social institutions, but that rather humans could, with some work, recognize and come to change ourselves towards what was good (like freedom), including in our bodies (Godwin and the cosmist currents both endorsed radical self-alterations to cure involuntary death). There were many other currents of course, I emphasize the promethean ones as strenuous counterexamples to this midcentury liberal notion of anarchism as an appeal to nature.

Because Whitaker and his liberal sources are reading things through that lens they radically misunderstand and misrepresent the whole of anarchism and the messy diversity of individualist anarchism, finally characterizing Stirner in such nature-worshiping terms:

“Stirner, too, sanctioned the authority of nature, presupposing in his Union of Egoists that each of the Unique Ones was at heart good. Like other nineteenth-century anarchists, therefore, even Stirner fell back on the notion that some natural authority would be “invoked spontaneously by each person,“ despite the “massive tension between each individual and the society in which he was ensnared.” “ (Whitaker internally quoting from Fowler’s The Anarchist Tradition of Political Thought)

Meanwhile, actual Stirner:

“Owner and creator of my right, I recognize no other source of right than — me, neither God nor the State nor nature nor even man himself with his “eternal rights of man,” neither divine nor human right.”

Whitaker’s reading of Stirner goes on to create a funhouse narrative whereby Stirner is a moralist of The Natural and focused on Logic & Reason, as a “disciple” of Hegel, and as a mere proto-Nietzsche he is later surpassed by Nietzsche who embraces true moral relativism. There’s so much askew with this account it’s staggering.

There are many ways to read an author and exegesis of Stirner is almost as completely boring and fruitless as exegesis of Marx, many a brain has curdled pursuing either. I have no interest in excavating or defending The Real Stirner, but some reads are just laughably divergent from anything close to reality.

I think the more interesting question is: did figures like Rocca happen to misread Stirner partly in the same way that Whitaker does?

And it seems very clear from his own words that Rocca did see Stirner as advocating a rejection of thought and return to natural instinct. Indeed this seems to be one of the weird instances where we can actually see some evidence that these fascists actually read Stirner rather than just picking up “the gist” from social interactions where he at best served as a cartoonish meme. And not just The Ego And Its Own! It’s in Stirner’s Critics where he rambles at length about rejecting thought for its own sake, valuing it only in terms of its capacity to to dissolve one’s scruples. There’s a bit of a leap necessary to go from there to worshiping natural instinct, and there is text of Stirner critiquing being dragged along by one’s hungers, but inveighing against thought itself is not the sort of 101 level canard most people opportunistically pick up from Stirner at a glance. Granted, it’s quite at odds with Whitaker’s framing of Stirner as Logic & Reason bro, but we can pick out a kind of coherent arc where thought is the realm of spooks intervening over and distracting from the physical base of your impulses and instincts.

While, again, words cannot emphasize how dreary and wasteful I find arguments over what constitutes The Real Stirner, this is not such a rare reading. I’ve encountered it among green anarchists and even neoreactionaries. It has a certain kind of gravitational pull because it avoids the perpetual goalpost moving of simply declaring every single conceivable sentence one could offer up within language as just another specter of reified thought. The Natural thus provides a ground, a clear goal, an explanation of what all Stirner was on about that many people find comfortingly clear. Of course even these Stirnerites wouldn’t capitalize it as an abstract concept “The Natural” but they would nevertheless emphasize that the point is something like listening to your body or more directly flowing from its desires rather than getting lost in a tangle of cognition and social concepts.

Whether collapsing desire construction and mutation down to a direct connection with one’s base instincts can be really extended into a general endorsement of “the authority of nature” is less interesting than whether folks repeatedly feel an attraction to such leaps.

Certain currents of fascists have repeatedly embraced Stirner, not as in an attempt to claim something popular for themselves, as many egoists have dismissively assumed, but because they clearly and explicitly find personal resonances with Stirner. You’ll often find Stirner right beside Evola on fascist reading lists in 8chan or the like, not because they’re consciously trying to steal Stirner – the vast majority of their audience has never even heard of him – but because those recommending him have their own connection to and sincere fondness for him. These fascists see themselves as individualists par excellence and it’s vital that we understand fascism as not necessarily the exact opposite of individualism but often as a perversion or specific form of individualism. This requires going beyond the inane boomer mis-definitions of fascism in mere terms of totalitarianism, collectivism, or homogeneity. And it requires us to kick off from a defensive posturing that dare not concede any rhetorical ground.

In particular we must understand that nationalism has two sides, not just the construction of a flat and illusory solidarity with one’s countrymen, but the stripping away of empathy and identification with the foreigner. And of the two it is the latter that is the graver mistake and more deadly poison. The mistake of nationalism, nativism, etc, is most centrally about reducing one’s circle of care. When fascists scream that an American or a White life should be worth more to you than a Korean life, they are not demanding you elevate your compassion for some average American, they are demanding you decrease your compassion for every Korean. And when they justify this by appealing to some supposed natural or inherent pull to value one’s kin over strangers, the proper retort is not to litigate whether or not you are truly “kin” with every other American. The fascist wants to get around to reducing that circle of care too! Contemporary fascist movements have embraced the micro-scale and hyper-local. Ask a fascist today if he thinks there should be border controls between US states or counties and he’ll often smirkingly answer in the affirmative. From neoreactionaries to national-anarchists and countless other currents, the evolution of the fascist movement has been to collapse the already small number of individuals you are allowed to care about. To characterize fascism in terms of a drive for some vast homogenous and totalizing society is to miss that fascist movements have always positioned themselves as defending a diverse patchwork of isolated islands against the (supposed) homogenizing effects of global connectivity. The Third Reich explicitly positioned itself as the champion of local culture against the corruption of global civilization.

The fascist project is in no small part to shrink your identification with others, to remove all sense of a common spark of creative brilliance, emerging and situated in different contexts, different lives, and to instead suppress this identification ultimately even in yourself.

The creative nothing was probably meant as a non-concept, a kind of topological defect or singularity in our language that formal conceptualization cannot capture. The sort of beyond the horizon where Wittgenstein thought everything important laid. I am, in my old age as a cranky ideologue, a notorious criminal many times over convicted of scientism, not particularly sympathetic anymore to the usage of non-concepts of any kind. In my mind they’ve long since revealed themselves as a cheap trick, a rug to sweep things under, a shell game for folks running scams in the back alleys of philosophy. But even those who embrace or accept the appeal to such non-concepts must still admit they have a certain tendency to get immediately replaced by concepts. What fits into the hole? A mere phenomenological experience of almost cartesian remove and immanence? An anti-reductionist vitalism? A collapse to bare pre-conceptual biological instinct? A self-reflective loop of conscious integration? The array of things folks have implicitly or explicitly stitched into the ‘creative nothing’ is vast and quite varied.

Some provide a springboard for empathic blurring of identification, in this sense the stripping away of arbitrary conceptual scaffoldings and historical happenstance allows for a very humanist move from identifying as a thing or a set of things (just more inert chains) into identifying with all fountainheads of the ‘creative nothing.’ This replicates the core premise of anarchism: your freedom is my freedom, because what matters is freedom, not the arbitrary particularities of some given context in which it is expressed. We are not our various social or physical identities or some clotting of memetic parasites in our brains, but the motion underneath, and that motion is itself the same motion in my brain and yours. The same underlying characteristic or property. This, in various languages, is a common conclusion of some different concepts that get plugged into “the creative nothing.”

But in many other approaches the stripping away does not arrive at a common freedom but at an even more particularized and isolated last twitch of the mind. This is the place that Rocca went by embracing natural preconceptual instinct as the antithesis to “thought for thought’s sake.” It is also how fascists use Stirner to this day. In their hands Stirner is a tool to strip away, to reject any recognition of commonality. Why should you care about the stranger under the bombs in another country? If they are your property to be used, they are at best not particularly ready-to-hand, and at worst something more like a tool abandoned to the weeds at the edge of your farm. Indeed what could conceivably move you to care about their plight but some alien parasite, some Humanist Brainwashing? To care about the abstraction of people far away, laboring under the terror of the drones, is surely to fall prey to the God that is the abstract “Man.”

Long ago, in the era before fascism was discovered by liberals (so prior to 2017), I happened across a small brand-new blog of right-libertarians mocking C4SS. The thrust of their critique was that mutualists clearly hadn’t read Stirner because they still did cringey humanist shit like care about foreigners. I laughed and rolled my eyes even further to discover they’d registered a .biz domain – an affectation that had just gotten popular among right-libertarians. There was no way this “therightstuff.biz” would ever draw an audience, just another shitty wordpress by two random dudes. …Later, of course, they would start a podcast on that site called “The Daily Shoah.”

Now obviously their usage of Stirner was rather mercenary. I mean they also had posts up at the same time praising tradcath shit. It should not be contentious that if you weld Stirner to Catholicism you’re gonna have to strip away some of Stirner. But we can recognize that while also recognizing that what would become the most popular nazi podcast wasn’t citing a then still quite obscure figure like Stirner to gain points, but because they actually sincerely found value in him. And that value was precisely in stripping away compassion for others. Mike Peinovich and Alex McNabb had been attracted to right-libertarianism because it provided justifications to dismiss the suffering of those without their privilege and a narrative that let them see themselves as elite. But they chafed at libertarianism’s strict morality and occasional concern with the oppressed, as well as the implicit globalist cosmopolitanism of markets. In Stirner they found an escape, a way to renounce those fetters and embrace the callousness they actually felt. And while Stirner does not share the inextricable essentialist elitism of Nietzsche who despairs of a world drowning in sheeple, the reader is still invited to an elite circle of the few brilliant souls who cast themselves free of specters. Casting off the “fixed idea” of caring about others from the apex of a hierarchy of enlightenment has obvious resonances with fascistic frames, although the boys would quickly discover they could get even stronger highs mainlining anti-semitic conspiracies and racial pseudoscience.

Now obviously this example of neonazi usage of Stirner requires them to scratch off more than a few things and certainly requires ignoring the absolute nuclear bomb of his line, “I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one.” But let’s be frank: Stirner wrote very much in the way of snarky critique, and very little in the way of positive argument. He emphasizes tearing down fixed concepts or memetic complexes, and gives only the most tepid excuse or even appeal to not be a massive prick. He’s strong on “I will not be ruled” but relatively fleetingly and barely makes any substantive case for the other half of anarchism: “I shall not rule.” Why should we love? Stirner’s avoidance of positive ethics, leaves him to functionally duck the question “I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me.” But what if loving isn’t natural to you? What if you were born feeling no sense of solidarity, empathy, or compassion, and find happiness in torturing animals? And wait just a minute: how is anything “natural” to a creative nothing? Why should arguments of what is “natural” matter to a creative nothing? Is Rocca right that the ego boils down to a return from the compounding loop of reflective thought to natural instinct?

In every choice of one value or identification over another there are mechanisms of causation and reasoning that are always inherently at play. Everyone has a morality and ethics is innate to the very process of weighing any choice. Those who never joined us in explicitly plugging conceptual mechanisms into the hole of the creative nothing are free to drift loftily above any consideration of this tangle; a lack of awareness can, of course, serve as a sense of freedom. If you’re not aware of the actual causal mechanisms by which one choice tugs at you more than another you can treat the happenstance flicker of feelings across your life as a kind of fountain of randomness or even wildness. But nothing is really left to object to the “Stirnerite” who simply happens to feel flickers of sadism and a lust for power. And even less is able to be objected to when the fascist argues that caring about strangers is unnatural, because their distance from immediate stimuli and instinctive responses, to say nothing of continual social entanglement, makes it impossible to be tormented by their torment or refreshed by their refreshment without requiring the adoption of the dread conceptualization.

I do not mean to imply that answers cannot be given, and some self professed “Stirnerites” have indeed given various answers. My point here is that these are non-trivial issues and fascists or other reactionaries coming down on the other side of them are not simply reading “don’t do a collectivism” and doing a collectivism anyway. They are diverging in ways from Stirner’s own trajectory, but they are often still sincerely reading him and being influenced by him. Even if they end up running with him into absolute batshit scumfuckery like Rocca and Arpinati.

For decades Sidney Parker was one of the most prominent individualist anarchists and Stirnerite egoists in the world, certainly the anglosphere, ruling as editor of Minus One and EGO, writing the introduction to a popular print of The Ego and Its Own, and generally being a thorn in the side of the British anarchist scene. In 1993, Parker finally abandoned anarchism, writing:

“Anarchism is a creed of social transformation aiming at the ending of all domination and exploitation of man by man. Its adherents seek the creation of the Judeo-Christian myth of a heaven on earth. The central anarchist tenet is: Dominating People Is Wrong. It is based on the belief that all, or almost all, individuals are, or can be, equally capable of taking part in decision-making.

I no longer accept these propositions.

As a conscious egoist I can see no reason why I should not dominate others – if it is my interest to do so and within my competence. Similarly, I am prepared to support others who dominate if that will benefit me. “If the condition of the State does not bear hard on the closet-philosopher, is he to occupy himself with it because it is his ‘most sacred duty?’ So long as the State does according to his wish, what need has he to look up from his studies?” (Stirner) Sometimes, indeed, I may behave in an “anarchist” fashion, but, by the same token, I may also behave in an “archist” fashion. The belief in anarchism imprisoned me in a net of conceptual imperatives. Egoism leaves any way open to me for which I am empowered.”

And of course Parker endorsed racial hierarchy and emphatically embraced Ragnar Redbeard, the inane “anarchist” writer constantly endorsed alongside Stirner by fascists, whose book Might Is Right has had many republications literally covered in swastikas. Countless other more personal and intimate examples of such turns exist, although it’s beyond the purview of this book review to laboriously list them all. This is adamantly not to say that every or even most egoist anarchists become fascists or such outright scumbags. But if being an anarchist and respected egoist for decades like Parker still isn’t an inoculation against such heel turns today we can’t just write off Rocca and Arpinati as strange historical anomalies and continuing fascist and reactionary endorsement of Stirner a completely illiterate opportunism.

While I found value in Stirner in my youth, I must admit I have never been able to fathom the people who defensively cling to him, who identify with him as some kind of flag. I suppose if you are too weak to stand in the face of sneering collectivists it may help to have something else to throw in front of you as a shield. Some external authority to prop up your voice and draw the fire of responses away from you personally. Some shared idol to rally a tribe of dissidents. And, of course, if the outgroup comes for this token, the ingroup must always circle the wagons lest they be picked off one by one by the hordes of moralist communist bureaucrats all around. But I dunno, surely folks understand that an actual fiery individualism wouldn’t feel the need to remind everyone of one’s asserted individualism or to immediately form and cling to some new tribe?

I am, to say the least, disappointed and vexed by the incessant shallow dismissal that “Stirner opposed collectivism and nationalism is collectivism, they’re exact opposites, fascist Stirnerites are a complete contradiction from which nothing can be learned.” Of course, Stirner would have laughed at the nazis. Of course, he personally had passages at odds with some of their specific positions. But the idea that there’s an ideological complete contradiction is simply not true. No one spontaneously explodes upon emphasizing some parts of his texts and ignoring others, much less in rearranging and reconstructing things, or just using him as a loose springboard for what arguments they find personally compelling instead.

The actual living person Johann Kaspar Schmidt who got the “big forehead” nickname Max Stirner, was, like any other person, of such vast complexity as to defy compression into any set of texts, much less the few we have from him. He might have had a somewhat unified and coherent philosophical project, where each piece depends critically upon every other piece, he might even have had radically different intuitions, ideas, and responses than are implied within the few scant and highly contextually-bound texts we have, but this is not how texts work. Texts, for better or worse, end up existing as an assortment of arguments placed alongside one another.

I’m not suggesting that, for example, Rocca’s endorsement of a worldwide war of all against all as the path to a union of egoists is some kind of intelligent development on Stirner, nor anything that Johann Kaspar Schmidt would have recognized. Rocca and Arpinati were bloodthirsty scumfucks, Rygier a vengeful opportunist. They clearly drew at best very loosely from Stirner’s texts and it’s not at all clear that they had any real love for anything else that might be called anarchist theory (and recall that Stirner never identified with the term or the movement).

But even though Whitaker whiffs completely on understanding the ideological elements in play, his book nevertheless documents an anarchist scene annoyingly similar to today’s. We don’t shoot each other with pistols at bookfairs, but the scumfuckery of some noxious egoist wingnuts and the abusive power of some red scene patriarchs will have immediate resonances to anyone who’s been an anarchist for more than a day and seen the worst corners of our scene.

This is the most chilling thing about The Anarchist-Individualist Origins Of Italian Fascism: it reads like a friend at a potluck dishing scene drama about one edgelord or another today. Even as the majority of the Italian anarchist movement lies just out of focus, occasionally throwing a chair or a rock at the protagonists and introducing an interlude of hospitalization, you can’t look away from the fuckery, you already know it so intimately.

This is the frank truth, for all our heroism and angelic exemplars, the anarchist milieu has always had a problem with a fringe of militancy-worshiping shits for whom the attraction of “anarchism” is a promise of getting away with whatever they wanted. A “might is right” sort of attitude often tied to a fetishization of criminal/warrior aristocratic elites in the name of militarism. The spine for “action” is substituted for the spine for values. Who cares if that dude abused his partner, he went to a tree sit once so nothing can be done.

The recruitment of such is an inevitable byproduct of how anarchism frames itself and the struggles it is engaged in. Failing to address these little shits – as well as allowing much of the mainstream of anarchism to be captured by centralized power structures – leads to a false dichotomy between tepid manipulative gatekeeping organizationalists and bloodthirsty scumfuck “individualists” where both sides reinforce the other. If you’re not in favor of breaking glass in motel pools to cut up children (because “social war”) you must therefore be with the pacifist lib grifters and identity politicians.

I started this review with Borghi and Fabbri’s medical rape of Rygier mostly because it’s a shocking lost fact that should damn well be at least a footnote on every goddamn thing about either of them, but also because I know damn well that this review will be screamed about and relayed to people as some outrageous outsider hitpiece on Stirner, egoism, or individualist anarchism. And at the exact same time many opportunist communists will salivate to link it as some kind of proof that Max Stirner secretly lived another century, grew a mustache, and renamed himself Adolf Hitler.

But I think Rygier’s turn to fascism is fascinating because we can appreciate that she was no doubt motivated by her extremely fucked up adversaries in the anarchist movement. You can’t learn just how far Borghi and Fabbri went in their struggle for popularity and influence against her, as well as their allegiance to their bro, and not fucking loathe them. And we can absolutely lay some of the blame for her pivot to fascism at their feet while relieving her of not one iota of responsibility and agency. Blame can overlap and multiply! It’s not zero-sum!

Too often the worst sort of abuse or misbehavior is covered up by “the other side is worse!!” Just as fascist creep is cultivated by a failure to recognize and excise it, it is also cultivated by failing to handle other problems. False binaries are created by inaction against or tolerance of different flavors of fucked up shit. Green reactionaries take root in part by pointing out how bad the bureaucratic reds are. Nazbols take root by emphasizing just how bad the capitalist libs are. Ranks close, political identities become mutable flags of convenient counter-coalitions rather than anything consistent.

The Italian individualist anarchists were absolutely right to take issue with the organizationalist currents that dominated the scene, that often pacified and attempted to control or centralize anarchism (and thus give space to corruption). But there wasn’t a strong base of options beyond Fabbri and Borghi (I would kill to learn Malatesta’s complicity or ignorance of events), so Rygier sided with Rocca. This sort of thing could have been partially derailed if the individualists who didn’t go fascist had the spine to stand simultaneously against both sorts of rot early on.

It would obviously be a mistake to read Whitaker’s book in isolation; just as there are Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Fascism, there are also Bolshevik Origins of Fascism, Socialist Origins of Fascism, Liberal Origins of Fascism, etc. Whitaker focuses on Nanni’s supposed individualism, but let us never forget that the vast majority of fascism’s initial origins were with the state socialists. And in particular, the creeping mistake of “left unity,” the bizarre but ever popular delusion that “we’re all on the same side,” is no small part of how an egoist streetfighter like Arpinati could end up best friends with a literal mayor like Nanni and then a prominent politician like Mussolini.

The dangers of circling wagons and accepting or overlooking problematic allies to defeat a specific enemy are eternal. In both left-unity or individualist-unity, it was on display throughout the sordid rise of fascism, in almost exactly the same way they’ve continued to be a problem in the last few decades. When you’re under siege and someone shitty offers you friendship, it takes far more spine and courage to burn that friendship than it does to merely throw more punches against your common enemy.

Italian anarchists took way too long to settle on deplatforming and ostracizing the protofash egoists. Yes, streetfighting and attacks on protofash egoist talks were common (although the Novatori started it by starting pistol fights at conferences). But one of the most shocking things in Whitaker’s book is that venues and conferences continued to give them a platform basically until they were openly at war with the entire anarchist movement as explicit fascists. Further, Arpinati was able to recruit from anarchist ranks well into his reign of terror on the anarchist movement because he maintained personal friendships with specific individuals. Anarchists didn’t successfully (if at all) apply pressure to stop those friendships and so he was able to court “antifascists” into flipping sides. Similarly, much confusion was clearly had before folks recognized that there can be insurgent or revolutionary threats that must be studiously opposed simultaneous to our opposition to the ruling establishment, never downplaying one threat to focus on the other, much less allying with one against the other. And of course, we can’t afford to ignore how the allure of bravery and militancy can obscure invalidating downsides.

The absolute necessity of enforcing No Platform, pressuring disassociation, Three Way Fight, etc. are lessons folks have obviously learned the hard way again and again in different subcultures and scenes as fascist creep sets in, but it’s really arresting to read the particulars of the very first anarchists to struggle with these dynamics at the literal dawn of the fascist movement.

Sadly, while antifascism – as a specialized project, discourse, and milieu – has been pretty much defined by the recognition of these lessons, this perspective isn’t a given in every circle that anarchists operate in.

It has been frequently said that, “every anarchist is an antifascist by definition so focusing on antifascism is a dangerous distraction.” And, as the populist traction of the Trump era wanes, much hay has been made once again about antifascism as implicitly liberal. Something that focuses on minor enemies to the benefit of the status quo. Identical things have been regularly said about “feminism.” In some real sense anarchism is trivially feminist by definition, but while those two concepts should ultimately converge, they clearly haven’t fully in practice. Feminism and antifascism can be appropriated by liberals to serve the status quo, but this is no reason to reject them. It’s long been my contention that the anarchist movement needs a specifically antifascist line of consideration, of focus in analysis and practice; it cannot simply assume that antifascism follows trivially from anarchism (or egoism or whatever).

If today – in a world of eco-fascists many of whom who sincerely want to collapse civilization, initiate a race war and return to closed small tribes, or national-bolsheviks sincerely committed to war on the existing capitalist class, to say nothing of myriad other strains – it is self-evidently absurd to cling to old marxist analyses that fascism is merely a stage of capitalism, or that fascists are pawns of the capitalists. We laugh in the face of boomers who still grab at claims that fascism is literally defined by “cultural and ideological homogenization” in contrast to virtually every fascist ranting about preserving cultural diversity from globalism. But these absurdities were once quite popular in no small part because studying actual fascists, tracing the potency of their ideological appeals, or remembering knowledge gained in struggles against them was dismissed as unimportant, or even a threat.

It was not that many years ago that “antifa” was a widely hated word in anarchist spaces and the most basic sorts of campaigns, to, for example, deplatform Death In June, provoked sneering if not fervent hostility. It’s literally impossible for that dude to be a fascist, he’s gay. My favorite of such takes to this day remains, ‘um killing people for sport is obviously the least fascist thing, it shows they have a liberated libido.’

Yes, this is a collectivist sort of wagon-circling, but it also stems from dismissively approaching fascism as purely a social or even institutional phenomenon rather than an ideological movement. Or, even as merely a substitute word for “the bad thing.” In this context a book like The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism can only be treated as an infuriating attack.

How can the good thing be in any way tied to the bad thing except through spurious and tenuous associations, a tiny spattering of nonsensical contradictions!

Yet, I actually do think there’s something to the instinctive understanding that fascism is just the polar opposite of us. Even if that doesn’t mean that everyone on the opposite side of us on any issue is therefore a fascist.

I’ve long emphasized a two-tiered description of fascism: not just as the macroscopic politics of palingenetic ultranationalism, but also an underlying philosophy of power beneath it that stands as the exact opposite of anarchism. This philosophy of power is hostile to reason and all about shrinking one’s circle of care and identification. Intellectual arguments for compassion and truth must be discarded as pointless or unsustainable via moral and epistemic nihilism, but it’s not enough to dismiss them as specters, the continuing pull of reason and empathy requires an active resistance lest it corrupt the fascist. Thus violence becomes a purifying loop that sheds off compassion and reason. The self-evident lie of the nation, race, etc (virtually all fascists admit such collective abstractions are a lie, from Anglin to Spencer), is a useful lie not just because it provides a way to mobilize social power, but also because it helps secure one’s own head against the ever threatening spiral of reason and compassion.

In this sense fascism is a project defined not just as one pole in the eternal conflict of power vs freedom, but by its evolved resistance to the anarchist creep, that is to say the dangerous infectiousness of our perspective. Not just through cultivating a continuous loop of violence that burns away the weeds of higher thought and empathy, but also through creating social pressures to vice-signal. Even when the fascist cannot engage in daily physical violence, he can still make a combative public show of his lack of concern for others. He can sing “nuke em till they glow” or speechify about stomping the skulls of immigrant babies or defend the cannibalism of raider societies or make memes treating Assad’s gas attacks like Nickelodeon goop. As the infectious processes of reason and empathy broadly ratchet towards certain social norms and common values, the fascist finds a thin “freedom” in his rupture with them, creating an opposite community with opposite values of hardness and shallow instinct.

There is, I believe, a substantive sense in which fascism really did emerge from (individualist) anarchism, and that’s as our antithesis. Yes, the socialists, liberals, and conservative influences upon fascism were vast, and counted for the overwhelming bulk of their numbers. In comparison, the number of “individualist anarchists” who joined them was a barely visible dust mote. But what our presence contributed was a crystalizing clarity that catalyzed and reshaped those long-existing reactionary elements.

In this sense, while both anarchism and fascism are modern ideologies, we are at the same time purifications of eternal tendencies throughout history, the modern dimension being our self-awareness.

It is frequently marveled that anarchists and fascists often agree in our models of the world, but pick completely different values to fight for. Where liberals, socialists, communists, libertarians, conservatives, etc embrace delusions of some kind of compromise, some middle path between freedom and power, anarchists and fascists both tend to understand the actual landscape.

What matters is the values we align with.

For this reason, “I will not be ruled” on its own is not a half-step to anarchism’s “I will not be ruled and I will not rule” but sometimes a move in the completely opposite direction.

Partition And Entanglement

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:16:50 +0000

“The entire, eons-long practice of human movement into new places was pushed out of our imagination — or, perhaps more accurately, was reimagined as a national security threat. In the process, stasis was glorified as the normative way of being human.”

“Only after the death of the national liberation project can we renew our commitment to decolonization.”

Many years ago a latinx friend of mine designed stickers that simply read “Migrants Welcome, Against Borders” (versions in English and Spanish) under a circle-A and the two of us covered the Bay Area with hundreds of them. Amusingly, this provoked the ire of a prominent white anarchist who denounced the phrase as pro-gentrification. She emphatically preferred “Refugees Welcome” because it distinguished those who are coercively displaced from their proper homes by various forms of western imperialism in contrast to those who voluntarily choose to migrate, like (her example) those moving to the bay for tech jobs.

My friend found this preposterous; we already have lines of critique to deal with the privileges of the gentrifier class and the negative structural mechanisms of gentrification. Virtually no one in the American context calls white tech bros “migrants” — the term has almost exclusively valences of brown skin and manual labor. The average American who runs across a “Migrants Welcome” sticker knows immediately what it means (and gets mad about it), whereas the term “Refugees” is much more sparingly used and in many cities is far less contentious or even that meaningful. This isn’t an abstract sense, but something empirically visible: in San Francisco and Portland white yuppies would ignore “refugees welcome” stickers my friends ordered from European antifa distros, but frequently tear down “migrants welcome” — sometimes even leaving racial slurs scrawled in their place.

Further, my friend argued, surely as anarchists we support the freedom of individuals to move for whatever personal reason, not just when they are formally categorized as “victims.” The response was sharp, no, she emphasized, neighborhood communes should have the power to democratically decide who is allowed in.

Nandita Sharma writes from the context of a different intersection of struggles. Sharma is an anarchist, activist, and academic whose family was shaped by the traumatic partition of India and their immigration to so-called Canada. In the dedication to Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants, she relays her mother’s dismay at the suppression of a Mohawk revolt: “Us and them, same, same.”

This is the central focus of Home Rule: to ruthlessly criticize and deconstruct the migrant versus indigenous conceptual dichotomy rather than ignore it. Whether such categorical distinctions come “‘from above’ or ‘from below,‘” from the right or from the ostensible left.

It is not a rejection of specific claims or a sweeping leveling of complex differences in historical injustice. Struggles for land and liberation, for the defense of culture violently suppressed, in response to the traumas and particularities, are obviously vital and important. But Sharma is not tip-toeing around, timidly qualifying statements so much they say nothing, as so many writers in this space do. Her target is all nationalism, and ultimately all parochialism, all regionalism, explicitly including the nationalism of the oppressed, and her argument is that for all the leftist discursive trappings, such a framework reproduces the structures of an existing postcolonial order that has simply laundered power and domination, rather than abolishing it. To truly break the legacy of colonialism we must break entirely with the frame of nationalism and the idea of discrete peoples each inherently “of some place,” cultivating instead, a more complex global commons.

Central to Sharma’s argument is that notions of nativeness do violence to the complexities of the actual human tapestry — to fix some people as being “of a place” and others as aliens to it — is a simplification that benefits power and hierarchy. While the mistaken frame of sovereignty has spontaneously emerged in various places for thousands of years (to inevitable damage and horror), today’s global interlocking nationalist order is a direct continuation of the imperial and colonial process of legibility construction.

Home Rule is a book that refreshingly says something, not just with hyper-particularity, but with general conclusions.

This has been a hard review to write because I unabashedly love this book and have spent over a year urging every academic anarchist I know to read it — to universal followup thanks and praise. There are plenty of merely good books that merely retread or repackage important positions and critiques, the activist press is filled with them. Perfectly enjoyable books that get consumed on a monthly subscription basis by thousands to little fanfare or impact. Rare is the book like Debt: The First 5000 Years or Caliban And The Witch that become lasting centers of gravity in the left. And rarer still is the book that doesn’t just meet the radical left where much of it already is, but pushes it further. I am not given to hyperbole in praise, so let this serve as a high water mark in a decade of lengthy reviews: Home Rule feels like a worthy sequel to The Many Headed Hydra.

This may seem a little non-sequitur given how directly Home Rule leans on a lot of established work in postcolonial studies, but thematically and ideologically, it’s plain throughout the entire text that Sharma is tightly aligned with Linebaugh and Rediker. And while their famous collaboration developed over a series of engaging historical anecdotes or studies weaving together into a broader picture of universal struggle for the commons and against power, Sharma’s is more of a meticulously broad weapon, rigorously covering a sweeping global history of empire and the rise of various nationalisms over the last two centuries. Entire eras in the development of individual nations are sometimes given merely an incisive paragraph. Sharma strings the reader along with as many engaging examples and detailed contrasts as she can, but her need to provide exacting scope leaves much of Home Rule a ratatatat of globetrotting examples and citations as she presses her general point. Yet the passionate universalism, the sense that the struggle against domination is one timeless struggle at the heart of humanity, fills your chest in a way few other books even bother to attempt.

Sharma’s approach in Home Rule is to demonstrate 1) How historically useful the divisions of nationality, of foreigner and native, were to the European imperialist project. 2) The complex ways that settler colonial ideology is parasitic on this framework and reproduces it. And 3) how the modern paradigm of a checkerboard of nations covering the planet was the continuation and — in many ways — intensification of the logic of prior imperialist horrors.

Today there’s widespread interest in either painting nationalism as a timeless reality of human nature and innate community structures, or in overly distinguishing the particular norms of the westphalian nationstate system as some kind of totally unique phenomenon. Sharma is clear that nations in the broader sense have an unfortunately long legacy reaching back thousands of years, but at the same time European imperialism played a significant role in deepening the poison. Virtually all the modern associations we have with borders as well as the repulsion of non-natives, have their genesis in the administrative needs of empire.

In the US context we often forget or ignore historical developments beyond our borders, turning the slave trade into an entirely US-centric story, for example, and ignoring worldwide phenomena that we weren’t central to. But Sharma draws out how, on the global level, the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire led to a calamitous decline in the productivity of centralized capital intensive projects like plantations, as former slaves focused on efficiently satisfying their interests as small farmers or paid laborers. Since these decentralized forms of economic activity are both less taxable and less legible and more facilitative of resistance and power erosion… as always, the misfortune of high-capital projects means the misfortune of the state. And of course, low-capital projects like small farmers have little capacity to capture political power for themselves to stop the state from recoiling.

The replacement of slave labor with “coolie” labor from India and China filled the same boats, and served the same economic niches, and was conditioned and controlled through indenture and immigration controls. It was an explicitly racialized system that in many cases amounted to contract slavery, but added token paperwork (a contract in an alien language stamped with your fingerprint and an early passport) and shifted around (de facto) slave flows to benefit British interests.

Essentially: first you conquer the world, then you slice it up into little prisons and refuse to allow people to seek economic opportunities across your new prison walls unless they have certificates that are only given to those with indenture contracts. Since people have always moved to seek opportunities, you have a base population of workers, but since it’s always nice to keep the labor market completely desperate, you also implement policies of vicious enclosure, dispossession, repression, and famine-making.

This is the essential thing to understand: even as Americans we live in the continuation of a global system created in large part by the British Empire. A system that became so globally encompassing it could do away with the traditional focus of states or nations on limiting exit and instead shift to now limiting entry between subdivisions of the empire. Through systematic dispossession almost every region produced displaced and desperate workers for the global benefit of the empire, but rather than have their origin region administrate their distribution to other regions, it was recipient imperial regions that oversaw admissions.

To be clear — the British themselves didn’t need to cover literally every square inch of the planet, merely a sufficient fraction of it so as to crystalize a new world system, partially of imitators and partially of regimes around the periphery who — still focused on preventing the exit of their own populations — saw the benefit. So, for example, the nominally independent Chinese government actively collaborated with this new immigration control system since it offset the costs of preventing its population’s escape.

Moreover, paternalistic liberal reformism reinforced this new system, taking the existing (racialized) internal barriers to movement and strengthening them. The liberal imperialist declared that Indian and Chinese migration must be stopped for their own good, so the systematic dispossession and immiseration of colonial occupation continued, but now even sharper constraints were put up against rational relocation. Liberals found the new immigration-regulatory state form quite amenable to these reforms because it served state and capitalist power.

Sharma emphasizes that these practices of imperialism weren’t confined to contexts like India where partition makes them blindingly apparent, they were also critical to white settler states like the US, and liberal paternalistic reformism (intersecting with state needs) likewise played an important role, although with some limited inversions.

Since local populations (often with access to commons, ecological knowledge, wider community support, etc.) were at least perceived as distinctly resistant to work and thus obliging the importing of various forms of coerced and dispossessed labor, and because their existence threatened certain mobilizing narratives, a distinct approach was taken with them. “Definition, segregation, protection, and immobilization” were repeatedly shepherded by liberal paternalism, flattening the complexities and dynamism of pre-columbian societies into a fetishized place-bound ideal of stasis. Notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’ were leveraged to patronizingly preserve ‘tradition’, in ways that systematically suppressed the native to extremely limited means or modes of engagement, while stripping anyone who wandered outside those borders of native status. So for example in Canada,

“Indians needed a permit from a government Indian agent to sell, trade, or barter (Opekokew 1980; Sluman and Goodwill 1982). Obtaining a university degree or voting in a Canadian election was declared to be “un-Indian” and, if practiced, would, until 1960, result in the loss of “Indian” status.“

Meanwhile across settler states it was generally decided that a woman who married a white man lost her legal “native” protections. “Protection” meant segregation, and “tradition” meant deprivement of wider mobility, solidarity, and economic access.

This suppression of potential market activity no doubt helped monopolistic ambitions of white capitalists, but it’s a stark comparison to the forced entry into labor markets going on elsewhere. Sharma roots the explanation in terms of legitimization processes distinct to white settler societies.

If the arc in the surrounding British imperial world started with forced assimilation and then transitioned to the construction of nativism, in general terms the US and other white settler states went from the construction of nativism to forced assimilation. These divergent paths were related to the need of white settler states to construct their own nationalist sovereignty and identity to bind disparate whites against the migrant labor being imported. As the pivot from empire to nationalism took place globally, with for example the US revising its self-perception into a nation rather than aspiring empire, the white dominated colonies focused on constructing whiteness as a native identity (erasing prior complexities and divergences in origins and motivations).

“what makes White Settler colonies distinctive is not that, from the start, imperial states wanted to extinguish Native life in order to gain territory to populate with Europeans. Instead, what is unique about them is that the Whitening of one portion of the working class sowed deep and long-lasting divisions between workers… Arguably, the success of strategies used to Whiten workers was an initial moment in the imperial turn to biopower and informed all subsequent “define and rule” strategies of indirect-rule colonialism across the empire.”

This inevitably meant championing not just the nationalistic and native paradigms, but also a framework of extermination, assimilation, and “preservation” that framed prior populations as static snapshots and objectified them in terms of identification with place and history — to be treated as museum curios on the side of the road — rather than agents capable of an active conflicting claim to nativeness. White settlers could then be constructed as uniquely native and migrant by removing the agency and presence of existing native populations. And insofar as those populations were to achieve agency or capacity for self-alteration they were to be forced into whiteness.

Thus a major byproduct of constructing white settler national identity as “natives” was the construction and reinforcement of national and native frames in actually native populations. Some of these dynamics are well known. Policies like the Dawes Rolls incentivized deep alignment towards the state’s notion of “indianness” by tribal leaders and many individuals. Blood quantification and discreteness of “membership” were but part of a wider array of incentivized dynamics in the construction of identity.

And this followed imperial and colonial patterns worldwide:

“Colonialism was now portrayed as necessary, not to change Indigenous-Natives (e.g., to “civilize” them), but to preserve their (often invented) traditions and customs as they encountered the “modern” world”

Reservations confined survivors to remove them from attention and facilitate cultural extermination, but they also reinforced and even created identifications of peoples with place. Imperialist and settler-colonial practice thus shaped and constructed indigenous subjectivities. This is both a trivial and a sharp claim, and Sharma leans into the latter.

The forcible crushing of cultures and knowledge erased much, but it also imposed opportunity costs. What is lost to western imperialism is not just what was, but what might’ve grown on their own or in varying degrees of collaborative contact with distant cultures. The pathways of exploration and creation — the consensual syntheses and wildly divergent children — that were made impossible. Such is also the legacy of colonization.

This is an image of colonialism not just as imposed contact, but actually as violent segregation. This picture of colonization is the suppression of meshing networks, instead violently affirming simplifications and removals. Anything to stop hybridization and complex cyborg flows or diversifications of agential currents. White settler society could only hold itself together if it removed all fluidity and activity from those it wanted to steal “nativeness” from. Ratcheting up the definition and immobilization inherent to any construct of nativeness, hoping to impose such to the point of rigor mortis.

The Third Reich would infamously later take up this ideological drive into an explicit institutional crusade for the ‘preservation’ of local cultures against the ‘imperialism’ of global culture. Such hyper-paternalistic reduction of diverse, mobile, and fluid populations into fixed eternal peoples with similarly eternally fixed traits and behaviors was, we must remember, cast as a noble struggle of resistance. Part of what made national socialism so potent was its self-narrative as standing up for the little guys worldwide. Germany sincerely saw itself as defending the indigenous nations of Europe against globalism, universalism, and foreign corruption. And, just as in the settler states it took partial inspiration from, this meant concentration camps and mass murder.

It’s important to highlight however, that such define-and-rule paternalism wasn’t just the invention of some happenstance global norms or conventions constraining the arrival of immigrants, it was also bound up with the wider imposition of capitalist dynamics that incentivized the perpetuation and reinforcement of these new norms even once the regional prison administrators had autonomy.

The imperialists put the system into place but could then, in the twentieth century, step back and let it perpetuate itself.

To put it in more concretely theoretical terms: it took the genocidal engines of imperialism to push most of the world into a profoundly suboptimal equilibria state. A new configuration that resisted transformation and pulled anything nearby into its own destructive form.

Indeed, having brutally reshaped the world into this new norm of states policing entry, the ruling imperial powers increasingly found it advantageous to remove their own administrative overhead once a region had been integrated into the new global system.

That the project of imperialism became constructing these discrete “nations” was explicit in many ways. The League of Nations openly framed the role of Empire as the development of nations, the “tutelage” of populations into becoming distinct “Peoples” and then nations.

Of course FDR used British desperation in and after World War 2 to strong-arm the UK into effectively turning their empire over to the US, but this wasn’t a change of the foundations. The US model was a decentralized next step in the British approach to administration: where discrete national prisons were administered through the UN and brought to heel via one-sided open trade with the US — the last standing industrial and financial powerhouse — but retained enough independence to resiliently keep the whole system afloat. It was the intensification of the British policy of getting Natives to continue the process of empire themselves. Struggles of resistance, having now aligned with US power and aspirations, were then able to create a checkerboard of postcolonial nations.

This escalated processes of enclosure and suppression because local rulers had local knowledge and were now embedded in more totalizing and resilient wider incentive structures.

When U Nu, the nationalist first prime minister of Burma, described the UN charter as “one great mutual security pact” he was not speaking of the security of nations against one another, but of the security of power in the face of that which would dissolve it. In this sense the interlocking national structure was not a matter of securing peace (wars continued unabated), but of securing domination itself from the spectre of revolution, insurrection, and revolt.

Power embraced decentralized fragmentation (according to a fixed logic) to avoid dissolution.

Natural systems, left to their own devices, will generally entangle. When ink disperses into water the result is a dissolution of simplistic discrete categories and structures. This is the opposite of nationalistic fragmentation which continues the construction of legibility started by Empire. If the preservation of “order” requires a fractal subdivision of humanity — the forced relocations and dispossessions of countless souls in endless partitions — then all the worse for any actual living breathing individual human beings. Humanity must be fed into the meatgrinder of simplistic abstractions.

Sharma is quite clear that, in her mind, the term “imperialism” poorly characterizes the US-created postcolonial system. The US was a hegemonic locus of power that extracted absurd concessions and material wealth from the rest of the world, spread its bases everywhere and bombed civilians, but the global nationstate it built was significantly different from all prior empires. Sharma is without mercy in her description of the machinations of the US (and USSR), but it’s still deeply unsettling to read a leftist author put “US imperialism” in scare quotes, so deeply has the anti-imperialist frame of analysis become hegemonic. In Sharma’s insistent frame, neither the US nor the USSR were “empires,” they were rather postcolonial powers, a classification which she seeks to give equivalently negative valences.

Sharma is concerned that the “imperialism” frame centers foreigners invading and controlling natives, an analysis that both misses critical dynamics of the Postcolonial New World Order and reproduces the nationalism it is dependent upon. In her ideal world we would recognize the “postcolonial” system as a distinct and arguably worse evil.

I am, it must be said, not sanguine about this rhetorical strategy. Whatever our ideal language might be, activist usage largely does not follow academic invention, but is shaped by and responds to pragmatic needs and pressures, constantly collapsing to the most succinct frame that makes intuitive use of existing language. Complex formal definitions rarely win against general resemblances. And it is simply a fact that capital flows continue to be centralized in imperial metropoles. Why shouldn’t we speak of the US, USSR, and PRC as empires and imperialist projects? Their economic as well as political centralization and direct military domination has clearly followed longstanding imperialist patterns. Comparisons to imperialism are inherent because the term has widespread negative cachet in general populations. There is no feasible pathway to establishing similarly potent valances for “postcolonial” on its own; we struggle mostly within the language we are given.

Sharma confidently claims that global inequality is worse today than in the age of empire.

“Between 1960 and the late 1990s, a significant widening of world income distribution took place. Indeed, the extent of the disparities surpassed those during the Age of Empires”

But I find such quantifications suspect. One can point to all manner of depredation and slaughter today, but can anyone really say with any certainty that today’s world is more unequal than when the Belgians were chopping off hands and feet in Congo? This is not to entirely foreclose the possibility, but it seems like the sort of claim that’s impossible to establish. In short it collapses tangles of complexities much the same way nations collapse the complexity of our social relations. Never mind the discontinuities of measuring wealth over a period where the fine-grained legibility of title itself has changed, or the incomensurabilities papered over by “inflation adjusted” figures. Even pointing out the enclosure of the dark parts of the map sweepingly described as “commons” proves very little about relative degrees of access and power within said old commons. I simply can’t imagine a single unified measure of “inequality” or any bundling of an aggregate measure that could even remotely establish this claim. (Much less by way of citation to Samir fucking Armin, a Khmer Rouge and Putin defending wingnut.)

This is not necessarily to push back on the idea that the creation of postcolonial national regimes made things overall worse, when examined within a certain window, but as an argument it’s a quagmire. What sort of time window should we be using to evaluate this? From one side someone could make the argument that national liberation struggles led to a gradual weakening of imperial power long before flags formally changed on a map, from the other side the nationalist ideologues could just as easily say “undoing imperialism is just really hard, we need another five centuries before things get net positive, but then things will get truly good.” There’s no winning once we get bogged down into arguing over which timescale and period to measure over.

It’s certainly true that many things have gotten worse in the postcolonial era. For example, where colonial administration hadn’t managed to implement border controls, the newly “liberated” nationstates acted quickly to create them. This meant that the transition from colonial rule to postcolonial rule in for example much of Africa saw the sudden creation of constraints on movement that had been free throughout prior history. In this respect Sharma is correct in identifying the postcolonial system as even worse than the imperialist system, intensifying its logic of domination rather than breaking from it. And similar analysis can be made in terms of the formalization of new property regimes and the intensifying legibility of claims at the cost of the old support mechanisms of the commons.

But this doesn’t necessarily prove an overall devolution.

Regardless of whether national liberation was a net advancement or a net escalation of horrors, I am frankly quite sick of common leftist rhetoric that dismisses things like the abolition of chattel slavery as an irrelevant trick of smoke and mirrors. Radicals often feel we have to pretend we live in the worst of all possible worlds because if people feel there’s any advantages to our present order they might not want to risk toppling it. This is a path by which radicalism perversely ends up generating reactionary frames at least as noxious as nationalism. The sloppy leftist dismisses the immense suffering under for example monarchy and slavery and the awe-inspiring, hard-won social transformations away from them, declaring instead that all progress so far has been illusory, even that things have gotten worse. It is true of course that power has gotten more dextrous, more insidious, and its function more complex. But that retreat to complex mechanisms is itself a sign of power on the back foot.

When the mechanisms of power are forced to adopt greater internal complexity they lose efficiency and either become more brittle or open up more space for erosion. Power may survive in the face of resistance by mutating and trying to co-opt or misdirect that resistance, but that is not necessarily to say it ends up on a stronger footing. Merely that the strategic landscape changes.

The Left spent the last half of the twentieth century in a tizzy about insidiously complex systems of control like advertising and the construction of desire that end up being largely paper tigers. It convinced itself that progress was impossible, that Moloch had perfected titanic systems to generate false consciousness, even while progress was being made in myriad places, often without the help of leftist or radical theorists. This is not to suggest that nationalism of the oppressed is a necessary step towards progress, nor that no one knew better — many anarchists at the time certainly did and far too many paid with our lives for the sin of correct prognostication — but I do think we can’t afford to ignore or discard the positive currents and improvements that got mixed up in the noxious morass of national liberation struggles.

A significant aspect of Sharma’s argument is that no nation escaped neoliberalism because in fact nationalism and neoliberalism each imply the other. In her account national liberation states didn’t “sell out” to western imperialists, rather they continued the logic of nation building, that is to say building infrastructure and exclusionary power systems necessarily provoked positive sum (for capitalists and rulers) collaboration between nations. Sure the Washington neoliberal institutions profited immensely, but so too did the “national liberation” projects, once you realize what nation building means. And Sharma’s right that in many contexts the most supreme and omnipresent power in people’s lives was national.

Indeed one of the ways national liberation states benefit from the horrors of global apartheid is by externalizing costs: the rule of autocrats depends upon exporting the unemployed and dissidents they create. That those people are made desperate by immigration restrictions in other countries and at best become a deeply policed inferior class helps maintain order at home. Obey and stay or else get thrown into a meatgrinder. Submit to the prison at home, or else become a prisoner completely without rights or even voice in the global system. The project of national control is only stabilized by the ability to eject, to make alien or immigrant, those in the fuzzy areas (which are ultimately almost everyone). The nationalist and the capitalist both need the dispossessed underclass inherent to the construction of borders and national identities.

Sharma drills down in particular on how the specific term “neo-colonialism” was invented and theorized by Kwame Nkrumah who ruled Ghana and served as a major figure in the Non-Aligned Movement. Nkrumah only wrote and publicized his theory after he had already destroyed the homes of tens of thousands for a dam to power a smelter for Kaiser Aluminum, a U.S.-based corporation and then created permanent economic catastrophe by nationalizing much of the economy into a command system. Every step of the way Nkrumah’s ruling circle enriched itself while exacerbating inherent state dysfunction. The national liberation regime sweepingly tried to do big things with the blunt instrument of the state, externalizing the costs to the people, while profiting from the asymmetries. The analysis of “neocolonialism” thus emerged from the outset as an apologia and deflection by those in power.

In contrast to this theorizing-from-above, Sharma emphasizes how the rot of the entire postcolonial system was focused on and critiqued by theorists-from-below like Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah as having always been lying in wait in the national liberation project.

In short, our postcolonial hellworld isn’t perversion or undermining of national liberation, but its natural culmination.

Under the postcolonial order all legitimacy lies in being a discrete People “of place.” Such Peoples can make political claims, declarations, demands, but the same is virtually unthinkable for migrants, those “out of place”.

“while the “human rights” of many National Citizens were not recognized, respecting such rights for foreigners was always out of the question”

Further, the power structures, the lines of domination that persisted under or were necessary for the “nation” were framed as “peoples’ power.” The very possibility of abolishing power itself was thus made increasingly unthinkable. Rather, the fascistic philosophy shared from Engels to Schmidt became hegemonic: ‘there is nothing outside domination, only questions of who wields it.’

The paradigm of national liberation thus is the paradigm of postcolonial apartheid, not of actual decolonization.

In Sharma’s account the postcolonial period of nationalization was necessarily a ratcheting of the violent hierarchies introduced or intensified by colonization. By splintering the world into competing nations every nation was forced into a “development” arms race that intensified processes of enclosure. If imperialism had partially dispossessed a subsistence farmer the nationalist project only furthered this suffering. Just as capitalism depends on simplistically slicing up collectively managed commons into fungible and alienable parcels, the entire paradigm of “the nation” works to slice apart different natives, and create a fungible underclass out of everyone too entangled to fit in these boxes.

Migrant labor is thus the gasoline that drives the world power system, while native labor helps structure, condition, direct, and control it. The global patchwork of discrete nations necessarily creates migrants by their existence, slicing up (violently simplifying) the inherently more complex network that is humanity as well as obviously stripping options and agency from individuals.

All this has deep implications and insights with regard to the turn to patchwork micronationalism intensifying among most currents of reactionaries and fascists since the 80s. Obviously a strategy of fractal secession would only further deepen the creation of oppressed migrant classes. The micronationalists frequently act like the problem with existing nationalisms is that they encompass too much complexity and so the logic of nationalism should be pushed further to the point of every town, every neighborhood a nation. The fractal checkerboard of Iraq and Syria emphasizes that this doesn’t bring peace, it brings displacement and more directly attentive gang rule. And, of course, a mass refugee crisis.

Today’s reactionaries often fetishize “exit” on the premise that folks can vote with their feet and thus minimize the harms of governments, but the incentive structures of nationalism at the margins, as economists say, don’t work that way. Rather, constructed minorities are targeted and pushed out of one region on the premise that they have less legitimate “claim” to belonging and then no other region has incentive to provide them full citizenship. Elevating a stranger to equivalent political power and rights as you is rarely worth that person’s marginal economic contribution to your nation. Thus the global ratchet is towards intense hierarchies of Nth-class noncitizens. A patchwork of democracies or populist dictatorships thus rapidly converges on arbitrary class ladders with the enfranchised few shrinking and the base of exploited or just suppressed constantly expanding.

It’s easy to lose legitimacy as a “native” but almost impossible to gain it.

Of course it should always have been trivially apparent that a patchwork of states would be inclined away from freedom. A market with 200 hundred competing buyers and seven billion competing sellers is always going to be skewed to the buyers. When what’s being sold is labor and the system iterates constantly the emergence of essentially slavery conditions is a foregone conclusion. Even if there were two million buyers the asymmetry in bargaining power will remain pertinent.

This authoritarian ratchet of the inter-national system was what we opposed in the streets of Seattle fighting the WTO, a system of “globalization” that used national barriers to reinforce power globally. The only way to stop the race-to-the-bottom enabled by the interlocking system of “nations” is to abolish them entirely. Sharma is quite clear that reinforcing borders doesn’t protect local workers, it is an essential component of the overall downward spiral.

If we start from the perspective that the world is an irreducibly complex network, then it’s preposterous to think that such a network can be decomposed into a set of discrete villages or cliques. Rather, with every subdivision forcibly sliced through the tangled knot of humanity, lives are cut short and single threads cast loose. Fractal secession or subdivision is thus the most damaging, most harmful, strategy possible. It looks at the harm caused by nationalism, by borders slicing up the world, displacement, genocide, and war, and thinks the solution is to double down.

Instead of framing things in terms of a “right to exit” we must realize that the modern nation paradigm is predicated on a claimed “right to eject” that is to manage populations by violently subdividing them, by the construction of “the inside and the outside.” The nationalist takes the nation as given but there is no such cohesive simplistic discrete set of people. Not even a “family” has an a priori inside and outside, lines of connection and association are always graduated and intermeshed in complex ways that defy simple accounts. The nationalist’s given is not a reflection of reality, it is an idol he is asserting, an idol whose “rights” inherently require human sacrifice.

It’s beyond critical that we emphasize this, because the fact that a structure emerged out of a specific historical context doesn’t mean it wouldn’t and hasn’t emerged in other contexts. An intellectual fascist, upon reading Sharma, would no doubt see her argument about the historical roots in imperial bureaucratic management as beside the point.

The specificity of “nationalism” as a word and ideological history has become blurred out in popular perception to virtually any and all projects of usness versus themness. The modern proponent of nationalism would look at two germanic tribes warring with one another thousands of years ago and see two “nations.” And it is not clear to me that such a wider definition is “objectively” wrong. For what it lacks in congruence with the historical emergence of the term, it can be argued the more generalized definition does a better job at cutting reality at the joints. Beyond the relevance of popular usage, to achieve the generality and universalism of a truly radical analysis, our words should arguably try to pick out perpetually emergent dynamics, rather than exclusively tracing out particular usage within a specific historical context.

William C Anderson reminds us of all this in general terms in his critique of Ashanti Alston’s sympathies for black nationalism, writing in The Nation Of No Map, “some of us are descended from the enslaved because of the betrayal of nations, one group of people pitting themselves against another for dominance… our past is a cautionary tale.” [emphasis added] While many horrible particular norms of the present postcolonial nationstate system were created by Empire, that system itself had roots in the generalized logic of nations and division. The pull of simplicity driving clustering dynamics and closed communities aren’t a cure for Empire, they’re what gave rise to it in the first place.

Sharma doesn’t deny the widespread tendency to chauvinism, but she doesn’t directly address that in Home Rule, being instead at pains to undermine our current reception of Native and Migrant conceptual categorizations as timeless, putting their present use in historical context as products of specific power systems and interests. And, as a correction Home Rule can at least emphasize that the particular potency of nationalism and native identification today is overwhelmingly propped up by a specific history of power. But, while the problem posed by human inclinations towards clustered communities and simplistic cognitive abstractions of groups (in-group or out-group) is an eternal threat that can obviously reproduce territorial barriers and the like on its own, the history that Sharma highlights has clear general implications.

Even in those cases where a nationalistic tendency is not carrying a legacy of imperialist managerial needs, the fact that managers love the nation form and that such can only be cleaved out of humanity’s tangles via systemic violence is relevant. While there may be a cognitive laziness in humans that eternally pulls us towards the mistake of nationalism, this is not at all to say that nations are natural or good, any more than a common illusion or confusion is.

Common fantasies of a return to perfectly uniform and closed communities of fixed traditions are motivated by fear of complexity and a hunger for the abolition of thought and responsibility. This is not to suggest that complexity is innately good, or truth not often quite simple, but nations are the product of valuing simplicity as an ends almost unto itself. They’re not about accurately mapping what is true, they’re about imposing a reduction of complexity. This is the common goal of would-be slaves and rulers, and so the historical equivalence and ever-more-deepening ties between nationalism and various forms of authoritarianism is unavoidable. The imperialist and post-colonial leader obviously share in a need to impose simplicity to build power structures, but so too does a certain type of revolutionary or insurgent have an investment in making the battlefield simple.

Today if it is said that we can no more envision the end of capitalism than the end of the world, we can even less envision the end of nationalism. The only alternative to European imperialism folks can imagine under its spell is often just European feudalism, re-baked as a kind of voluntary micronationalism. But the manors of feudal Europe — with their aspiration to operate villages as closed social universes in ways wildly different from how bands and sedentary communities have emerged in other societies — are not some natural configuration emergent from free association and personal preference. They were, themselves, the historical product of imperialism and maintained through immense violence, serving the ends of power.

And this is a critique that can be turned back, to some degree, on Sharma’s appeal to and valorization of the commons.

There’s a broad metanarrative in circulation, especially among Marxists looking for a way to ditch their historical materialist baggage by focusing on the end of the first volume of Capital, that once upon a time “the commons” provided freedom, security, and community, only to be brutally sliced up at the onset of capitalism, dispossessing and creating the working class. As an account of the enclosures this is certainly quite accurate. And it’s easy to see the congruities between this aspect of capitalism and what Sharma focuses on in the construction of nationalism. Similarly the core of her argument that the postcolonial nation system is worse than imperialism is that it has enabled more dextrous enclosures. Distant imperial bureaucrats couldn’t dream of incentivizing and handling the construction of modern property norms to the same extent as local rulers shouting about national honor and growth.

Libertarians tend to treat Lockean property titles as unalloyed positives, arbitrarily selecting a thin slice of possible property norms as the most ideal, in no small part — even when they hide such consequentialist roots to this position — because it facilitates fungibility and investment and ideally thus rapid “development.”

Part of what is glossed over is the cost of such imposed orthogonalization in property titles. Whereas while every society has a property system of some kind, claims are usually far more entangled than anything like the cleanly separable ones of Lockean norms. As claims of ownership originally emerged in bottom up processes of widely or mutually useful detentes, they kept all sorts of artifacts of their context. Someone’s title to their house might not be exclusive or apply in every dimension. This impedes selling property, staking it as collateral, etc, if only because one person’s title claim is not something entirely in one’s own hands, and is also ultimately dependent upon the aggregate acceptance of countless individuals in one’s community.

Further, sure, this entanglement in conventional property impedes rapid “development,” but when the state violently slices through those entangled connections to impose one universal and fungible map it can only assure “development” in a similarly slapdash and unilateral form. Instead of distributed weighing of every individual’s context and desires, these violently “optimized” market processes can only serve the hamfisted ends of power. That is to say: there are very different directions and branches of “development” possible, serving very different interests.

But this brings us to some frictions in the popular “lost commons” narrative. Firstly, many societies do not have commons in anywhere near the same sense as the feudal villages often treated as prototypical. Even the egalitarian !Kung San hunter-gatherers traded overlapping titles to regions of land and all their benefits within their gift/debt system. While their specific individual ownership system and market norms are quite foreign to our own, they said they found the concept of “collective ownership” particularly repugnant and hard to conceptualize, even finding much of the current global norms of property and market exchange liberating. This is in no remote sense to minimize the repression that the !Kung San have faced as a minority and the shittiness of the capitalist dynamics many have been forced into, but the point is that our world does not have a uniform history and cultural inheritance.

One huge lurking danger to the valorization of the commons is that to many the takeaway is always that everyone was at least better off in subsistence farming villages and should have more or less remained there in some kind of essentialistic and static natural relationship. Of course that so many people dig their feet in there is understandable if the only other pole is to uncritically embrace more or less the exact infrastructural norms of dominant modernity and say “look destroying thousands of villages for some dam is obviously a net positive.” If these are our only two options then we are indeed in trouble. Hence why a crucial response to the claims of national liberation states that they promoted development is to contest what sort of development in what direction, at what cost. To specify which pathways were available and which were derailed, by whom. Just as nationalism erases all other modes of resistance to imperialism, collapsing our options into just replicating a unified state or “people” with a military and economy that fight with (eg interface with) foreign ones on their terms, so too does it erase all pathways to material abundance that are not in the interest of power. The problem isn’t that infrastructure and property relations changed after independence, it’s how they were changed. Just as we must defend the right to move and freely associate globally we must defend the freedom to evolve, hybridize, and reconfigure ourselves.

Another danger in popular narratives that focus on the enclosures is to view complexity and illegibility as ends in themselves. In this frame the commodification eating the world is a matter of increasing precision and detail in our map of things, going from a lackadaisical commons where no accounts are kept, to a stressfully overly quantified world where every single individual grain of rice is indexed, tracked, and purchasable with a personal loan for a low annual rate. Yet, there is value to clarity, reconfigurability, and material capacity. Elinor Ostrom emphasized that not only is the tragedy of the commons a real danger that communities around the world have long been quite familiar with, but people solve such in bottom-up ways through a diverse variety of often overlapping means, including strategies that increase clarity and even parcel out the commons. Further, being able to extract oneself from social contexts, to sell one’s stake in a clean manner has clear liberatory aspects. Sharma mentions urbanization in the list of effects of national “development” and neoliberal reforms, and there’s a serious danger here of building a narrative against urbanity itself. We must not pretend that every dynamic driving urbanization was violent or created by imperial interests, the interconnection of a globalizing world was in part facilitated by voluntarily adopted technologies and individuals embracing exit from parochial communities closed as a result of their own power structures and material constraints. Choice in one’s social relations has been an incredibly liberating experience for many and is deeply related to why migration isn’t just an inextricable component of human existence, but a freedom to be encouraged. And part of having choice is knowing what the choices are. Legibility and even simplicity can thus be liberating, in the right contexts.

This is why I’ve emphasized a focus on positive freedom and a network lens. While I have no doubt Sharma would not embrace any of the nefarious takes above, she has certainly gotten fastidious about the dangers of myriad language choices like “global south” and so I must interject that talk of a global commons does carry its own dangers. There has never been a true global commons, because we have never been as strongly and directly connected to one another. Every historical instance of “commons” was inherently, and usually quite explicitly, partially closed and parochial. Historically access to the commons of a village is usually tied to membership within that village, or even one’s property title within it. We have never had a global commons in anywhere near as direct a sense and so the concept is a cipher that people will take different assumptions and priorities into.

Sharma looks back to the radical aspirations of the Diggers and Ranters, enormously influential seventeenth century precursors to the modern anarchist tradition who conjoined a fight for land with grand aspirations for a world without exclusion or territory. For the Diggers, “an essential aspect of this freedom/mobility was the ability to change or shift one’s identity” and for the Ranters “the people in England, France, and Turkey [must become] one people and one body, for where the one lives there liveth the other also.” I have long shared in a deep admiration and love for these proto-anarchists who emerged endogenously within the belly of European empire at the dawning of capitalism. For two decades have I teared up while belting “this earth divided / we will make whole” but the devil is in the details.

My concern with Sharma’s framework is that while it correctly objects to the forcible creation of markets and the forcible creation of dispossession and enclosures, as well as the construction of titanic industrial infrastructure along a single innovation pathway, her narrative risks empowering reactive or clumsy rhetorical corrections. Choice is not quite the same thing as commons, although they can be allies. In some contexts it can be useful to disentangle local knots so as to enable more global connections. I have no sweeping answers or blueprints for property norms, but I know that orthogonalizability is not always evil. The broad strokes of the historic enclosures at the dawn of capitalism were surely quite evil in most means and consequences, similarly the followup processes of enclosures that were applied beyond Europe by imperialists and then postcolonial nationalists, but these broad strokes eclipse the people from below who sincerely and for good reasons pushed for changes in their existing property norms in ways that included dividing and individualizing some things. That they didn’t get the direction and types of reforms they wanted nor the results, trammeled over by the powers who orchestrated and profited from enclosures, doesn’t mean they should be erased from our understanding. I don’t think we have to pose their struggle for liberation against the liberatory aspirations of the Diggers. The truth here is more complicated. To shift identity and context, to sincerely struggle to step into alien perspectives, is at the core of building a better world and resolving the wounds that have been sliced into us by empire and nation alike. But such individual mobility can require slicing us free of inherited community, picking up our things and departing, and in so doing can be quite at odds with many venerations of “the commons.”

To connect globally, to build the tower of Babel that Sharma so resonantly speaks of and quotes Toni Morrison on, should not involve the flattening or smothering of diverse experiences and views, but the integration of them. And that includes those who want independence, or, perhaps better put, a different and more far-reaching type of interdependence than that provided by the commons of old.

These are of course very broad points, about very broad narratives and concerns, but the most refreshing thing about Home Rule is the degree to which it audaciously embraces radicalism, which, lest we forget, is not a synonym for extremism or coolness but is about getting to the root.

Sharma’s book contrasts with for example Harsha Walia’s recent Border & Rule, which, while powerful in its lists of horrors, avoids comparably “abstract” discussion of underlying roots to instead focus on relatively more particular associations and mechanisms. Where Home Rule traces how underlying ideas, identities, policy orientations, and narratives came into being, Border & Rule focuses more on the myriad examples of how specific border policies functionally interface with or reproduce patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, etc. — the long menagerie of formal oppressions we already instantly recognize as bad — and generally function as part of a control apparatus to brutally manage the global workforce. This is certainly valuable, and Walia is a rightfully beloved figure in the movement, but her words at points reveal, I think, a difference in philosophy between the two books:

“I align with a leftist politics of no borders, since the borders of today are completely bound up in the violences of dispossession, accumulation, exploitation, and their imbrications with race, caste, gender, sexuality, and ability.” (emphasis mine)

Walia is seemingly not foreclosing support for borders in some other context, merely our own. Similar arguments and lines have been used by Marxists to endorse “all cops are bastards” and “prison abolition” solely in our present historical and social context, and not universally as anarchists do. They align with those politics here, today, but make no promises about tomorrow.

Arguments that critique cops, prisons, and borders, solely because of their present genealogies, affinities, and structural role leave open the door to schemes to implement them in the future, “beyond capitalism,” “beyond settler colonialism,” etc. The anarchist project, however, is not to critique the symptomatic expressions of power in our time, but the lines of underlying rot that inexorably drive new expressions as contexts change.

Sharma on the other hand is repeatedly very clear that the logic of nationalism and borders is rotten not just today, but inherently, “national liberation did not result in decolonization, nor could it have.” (her emphasis)

If Walia’s case is that borders are today interwoven with the function of capitalism and that the displacement of migrants is coerced by war and economic exploitation, Sharma’s argument is more that borders arose as a symptom of an underlying viral way of thinking: of cutting the world up into discrete regions with distinct “natives,” castigating and often enslaving the exceptions to this schema as “migrants.” It is a nuanced historical picture that traces the complications of white settlers dancing back and forth between categories as need be to keep their domination. But Sharma is interested in pushing a point that is unfortunately novel and contentious in the wider left: “nationalism from below” cannot offer us a break with the horrors we struggle against, indeed it can ultimately only ratchet up those horrors.

Much structural violence is obviously involved in the displacement of many migrants today, but Sharma warns against implicitly taking for granted that people are or should be of some place.

Resistance to imperial domination and struggles embedded in specific histories of trauma, genocide, and dispossession do not require ceding to a fixation with collective priority and origin. We’ve repeatedly seen, from the horrors perpetuated in Côte d’Ivoire between groups with conflicting claims over who was more “native” to the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya as supposedly “illegal Bengali immigrants,” that such frames are a fountainhead of oppression.

And it must be emphasized that “being of place” as an ossified collective identity is quite distinct from active knowledge and love of the land you work or a bioregion and a painstakingly built web of ecological relationships. To liberate land, air, and water from those who would control, monopolize and/or despoil them is not the same thing as a struggle for territory and sovereignty, concepts inherently tied to fixed relations, social discreteness, and functions of authority (whether collective or not).

Sharma’s rejection of the former is sharp and motivated by a deep concern that firstness and of-placeness are subsuming the radical imagination and erasing or placing themselves before all other ethical considerations. Worse, this replacement of other driving values is happening in ways that places itself beyond discourse or consideration.

“All mobilizations of national autochthonous [nativeness] discourses… view indigeneity as a first principle of political action… autochthony is usually represented as “ ‘authentic,’ ‘primordial,’ ‘natural’ and ‘self-evident.’”

While it’s understandable that people leverage what claims are fecund within an international liberal Wilsonian legal context, we must undermine the supposed incontestability of this principle of nativeness and origin. As such legitimization criteria is increasingly accepted as the starting point of movements of resistance, to engage with critiques of it increasingly verges on unthinkable. Nevertheless we must think it. And say it.

We exist in a global discourse and community. Backing a generalized muddle of autochthonous narratives and implicit first principles in Turtle Island, for instance, has spillover effects that can hurt migrants in Europe. For the first principle of nativeness applied generally has quite noxious implications. Let me be very clear: no European should ever have a nation, there is no amount of reparations for the atrocities of imperialism that might “reset the clock” nor excuse Fortress Europe’s exclusion of migrants. Fortress Europe is not bad because of a specific history of European colonialism that they owe reparations for and invalidates their nations, it’s wrong because fuck nations, everyone has a right to migrate. While reparations and liberation in the face of dispossession and oppression is essential, our goal is not to restore some prehistoric balance wherein an indigenous “Frenchness” can live alongside a checkerboard of other national identities but to abolish all such discrete categories. To grant wider and deeper options to everyone and escalate the dynamic swirling complexity of humanity.

In land projects across North America and Europe it’s common to hear ecofascists and green reactionaries speaking of seeking, reestablishing, and defending an “indigeneity.” This can come either in the packaging that “the first people colonized were whites by the Romans” (recasting whiteness as a gateway to oppressed class status) or it can emerge from a supposed imperative to land-based spirituality (implying that constructing abusive mysticisms is a valid path out of white guilt).

The most facile response is to merely critique the absurd bundling and recent lineage of “whiteness.” But rarely are the speakers already unaware of such, nor would grounding one’s identity in some resurrection of a more specific lineage and tradition (eg “viking-ness”) necessarily avoid anything important. Nor is the important fact that these “land projects” are often on stolen land and facilitating continued settler colonial dynamics a sufficient response. One shouldn’t wish ecofascist communes on the people of Denmark.

This is not merely two distinct uses and definitions of “indigenous” in various languages — for example the chauvinist “here first” usage by mainstream right-wing political parties in many countries versus a philosophical or spiritual notion of “ecological relationship to the land” usage increasingly pushed by younger activists across a subset of colonized peoples — but in fact a more complicated matter of bleed, appropriation, and opportunistic mutation. When many white scumfucks, like infamous political prisoners Sadie and Exile, leaned into fascist blood-and-soil mysticism they did so draped under the stolen language and signifiers built up by indigenous activists, not beer-soaked Trump chuds. And part of why so many US white radicals had trouble identifying and expelling them was an increasing treatment of “indigeneity” — even the pagan playacting of white settlers doused in fascist iconography — like a third rail. A first principle or apex value that automatically vanquishes all other considerations, removes all critical thinking and turns people’s knees to jelly.

This is to say that while “lanes” and epistemic humility can have value, we should not render ourselves completely useless in some performative surrender of our minds and thus responsibilities. If white radicals fail to recognize clearly dangerous invocations of “indigenous” we will be of no use to anything or anyone. Sharma covers examples of intensely reductive ideologies of indigeneity, from Patrick Wolfe declaring that, “The fundamental social divide is not the color line. It is not ethnicity, minority status, or even class. The primary line is the one distinguishing Natives from settlers—that is, from everyone else. Only the Native is not a settler. Only the Native is truly local.” to Métis scholar Bonita Lawrence (and self-identified “Asian settler Colonist” Enakshi Dua) arguing that because non-indigenous people of color are functionally settlers “antiracism is premised on an ongoing colonial project.”

It is, however, important for anarchists to challenge ourselves and read charitably. Sharma focuses in on various examples of language like “We must be the ones who determine who is and who is not a member of our community, based on criteria accepted by our people,” but while the inside-outside hierarchies of any sovereignty are inherently abusive and unjust and it’s trivial to point to examples of First Nations governments who have wielded access to tribal membership as a tool of power or exclusion, it warrants emphasis that one of the most pressing motivations for sovereign control over tribal membership is precisely to make them more inclusive than settler governments allow. There is little more universally reviled than the blood quanta system that essentializes indigeneity as a matter of genes rather than culture and heritage. I most commonly hear calls for sovereignty over tribal membership invoked to resist various limits and restrictions imposed by settler governments. The motivation of settler states is straightforward: not only do they wish to see tribal membership ultimately evaporate, they dare not risk a situation where tribal membership expands like a corrosive acid of more complex overlapping jurisdictions.

I want to be absolutely clear that competitive governance is no grand improvement, especially when territorial restrictions on scope remain in play. But it’s easy enough to imagine an enlightened future where the US faces a crisis of legitimacy and jurisdiction with mass settler defection into the ranks of strong and expanding first nations. Where various clear territorial claims break down into more complex and overlapping communities. This would be far from anarchist ideals, but it is not quite the same thing as nationalisms of territory and blood. Of course virtually no one is proposing radical expansions of first nations ranks divorced from cultural heritage, and unfortunately what Actually Existing First Nation governments have focused on is quite different from the idealism of those radical indigenous activists focused on inclusion.

Sharma zooms in on examples like the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke stripping major rights from citizens who married non-citizens and evicting their partners from tribal land, and — of course — the infamous Cherokee exclusion of Freedmen. These are obviously horrifying and reflective of real dangers, but it’s worth noting that many decolonial indigenous activists who fought against such did so in the frame of “nationalism,” however awkwardly. For example, Ellen Gabriel’s aghast statement on the evictions of families in Kahnawà:ke over what amounts to miscegenation correctly emphasizes that such constrained or blood-based notions of identity were imposed by colonizers to whittle away tribal membership, but she, at the same time, frames inclusion as necessary to “rebuiding our nations from colonial genocide.” Of course we might wish that statements like “For over a hundred years the Indian Act has coercively indoctrinated Indigenous peoples into believing that the colonizers definition of identity was true.” would also be applied to the concept of nations too, but still language usage here can get muddled and contradictory.

Of course, even if we were to cede that certain activists mean nothing more than a sense of community with their usage of “nation” — there’s little reason to think this personal or local redefinition will survive and flourish. As I pointed out against Sharma’s attempt to change our language around imperialism, history and popular usage creates certain gravitational effects on words. The least complex, most intuitive, and already familiar definition in a language tends to win out. Someone could, for instance, try to reclaim or redefine the term “fascism” to only mean “solidarity,” but the net effect of their particularized usage is almost certainly going to be the legitimization of actual fascists and actual fascism. And that’s hardly an extreme comparison. “Nationalism” is pretty much politically interchangeable with “fascism” (modulo a myth of palingenesis), with an even wider umbrella of atrocities it has historically covered. There is no conceivable universe in which nationalism pivots in its associations. As such, attempts to gain standing within a wider dominant discourse of nationalism (and imposed legal context where it has salience) are doomed to only legitimize such, with all its baggage.

But sadly many in indigenous spaces of resistance don’t mean merely community by their usage of “nation” and aren’t merely opportunistically exploiting loopholes in the ideological framework of the colonizer, rather struggles within the nationalist framework have in many cases taken to heart the logics of national sovereignty, discreteness, exclusion, and territory.

“Self-defined anarchist Taiaiake Alfred (2005, 266–267), for instance, argues that supposedly distinct and discrete “nations” can and should “move from colonial-imperialist relations to pluralist multinational associations of autonomous peoples and territories that respect the basic imperatives of indigenous cultures as well as preserve the stability and benefits of cooperative confederal relations between indigenous nations and other governments.” This vision is, of course, the core of the Postcolonial New World Order.”

Again, such ghastliness isn’t to imply that there aren’t far more enlightened, original, complex, and probing perspectives in the impossibly complex expanse of varied experiences and positions thrown haphazardly under the umbrella label of “indigeneity” (and Sharma cites a wide array of literature across the board) but it does sufficiently highlight that instances of mistakes exist. One need not point to unquestionable fascists leveraging both their tribal membership and frameworks of “indigeneity,” from the national-anarchist Vince Reinhart to the neonazi Serafin Perez, for the general point about conceptual and rhetorical dangers to be pressing.

“the differences posited between autochthons and allochthons—Natives and Migrants—is a fundamental political, as well as ontological and epistemological, challenge we must address to achieve something that can live up to our aspirations for liberty.”

It is always hard to critique an ideology that has not yet widely taken power or begun to implement its vision. When anarchists attacked Marx for the coming catastrophic failings of his framework we were absolutely right, but it still took decades for the mounting bloody evidence to become overwhelming. Sadly, anarchists have not always had such foresight, and those who participated in national liberation struggles or made common cause with nationalists have always come to regret it. Many Korean anarchists today denounce prior generations as fake anarchists and embarrassments for even temporarily tolerating Korean nationalism, nevermind how intense and pressing the boot of Japanese Imperialism was.

While compassion, humility, and attention are extremely warranted when navigating the complex and fraught complexities of situations of oppression, I have long since renounced the lefty Irish nationalism I grew up connected to and have no doubt that in the view of future generations nationalism-from-below will always prove a grave and harrowing mistake. I think a lot about Korean anarchists I’ve met who grimaced in reference to their predecessors. I wonder how long it will take us to truly learn our lessons.

I have already praised Home Rule as a thematic sequel to The Many-Headed Hydra, but I worry that it will also take the place of Statism and Anarchy as a text clarifying emerging fractures and perfectly predicting mistakes to come, but trapped in the Cassandra gutter anarchists must so frequently retreat to. Some warnings are as unpopular as they are — consequently — necessary.

Since publication Sharma has caught some unfair and plainly dishonest attacks that present her as unattentive to indigenous scholarship and attempting to fight some kind of battle on behalf of migrants against natives, when everything in Home Rule seeks to dispel that dichotomy.

“Us and them, same, same.”

This is not a cloak or defense for settler fuckery or a sameness that erases differences, histories, lines of power, and important lessons. It’s a call for solidarity with teeth and audacity. A swirling hurricane of possibility, rather than a fractal landscape of micro tailored prisons. Or at least enough audacity to see past lazy simplifications and the limited imaginary bequeathed us by feudal chains and genocidal empires.

If nothing else, many of the arguments in Home Rule at least provide a counter to those who declare that the desire for mobility and wide connection, thinking in abstract or universal terms rather than place-based, etc, are all imperialist constructions. Maybe! But the same can be said about the ideological elevation of local parochialism, particularity, and fixedness. So let’s just clear out claims of historical false consciousness and just make direct arguments for a given value or approach.

The white anarchist who years ago denounced our oh-so contentious “Migrants Welcome” stickers because she couldn’t imagine a world without closed territorial communes of democratic tyranny and who couldn’t see modes of resistance to yuppie fuckery that weren’t grounded in territorial claims is a perfectly fine human being, sincerely trying her best, her mistake was reflective of a widespread atrophy of our imagination. And this is one of the worst crimes inflicted by our rulers. We do not have to turn to fixed, simple models.

Imperialism and colonialism violently, unfairly, and inanely crushed immeasurable knowledge and culture; healing that damage and tearing down the power structures that perpetuate it is overwhelmingly in the interest of all humanity. But ultimately no abstraction or set of practices has value in and of itself, people matter, actual individual human beings in all their rich complexity, their agency, their freedom, is what we’re fighting for, and an ideology or a technology or a practice or a belief or even “community” is only valuable insofar as it furthers that. Healing is not the same thing as preservation. As some indigenous anarchists have taken to saying a “tradition” is something static and dead “that sits on a shelf,” in contrast a lifeway is something that evolves and dances, intertwined and inseparable from the knot of humanity and nature around us.

As Sharma puts it powerfully for anarchists, “an origin of “state” is “stasis,” or immobility.”

Anti-Engels (or Anti-Anti-Duhring Aktion)

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 00:16:50 +0000

This text is available as a zine formatted for printing.

Recent years have seen a resurrection of a Great Man Of History Marxist scholasticism that fixates on some (easily accessible) Original Core Texts of supposed genius and discards all the complicated stuff afterwards, certainly everything in recent decades. This impulse is the product of a mass flocking to radical leftism wherein new recruits have little interest in assimilating to existing discourses. A “return to the masters” thus serves as a run-around of various gatekeepers and a shrinking of required reading lists. It also enables people to use online historical archives on their own, without much social immersion. Onboarding to the tacit knowledge, prefigurative experience, and diffuse zine-based discourses of anarchism has always been a many-years long process. The onboarding process to academic Marxism — while more hierarchically structured — is likewise similarly involved. Thus building up the immortal relevance of early historical figures is the only option for those seeking to quickly establish themselves and bypass the living, to say nothing of the last century. If Marxism was always prone to an embarrassing cult of personality and exegesis, this has been supercharged.

I care little about the internal problems of Marxists, but it has put anarchists in a weird spot. While there are similarly dusty texts like Statism And Anarchy we might turn to in response, and countless texts primarily responding to the Bolshiviks, few modern anarchists have written direct textual responses to Marx and Engels. Anarchist criticism of Marxism over the course of the two camps’ long conflict is a vast galaxy, but even narrowly focused examples like Alan Carter’s book On Marx inevitably contend with the wider diaspora and churn of “Marxism,” much of which is irrelevant to those deliberately discounting anything that their living elders might be into. Similarly, even well-worn fights about the LTV and the particulars of Marx’s surplus value analysis rarely seem to interest this new crop. Critiques by Graeber as well as Bichler & Nitzan, reformulations by Carson, even the critiques of analytic Marxists like Roemer are dead on arrival. Instead we’re left with a dogged bible-thumping that demands we respond line-by-line to texts that have been outdated for a century and a half.

The trap has two parts: the first is that the canon of Marx and Engels (less so Lenin, et al) is vast, and so any directly textual debate dissolves into a fruitless back and forth of bible references and tortured interpretations. The second is that Marx has somehow been transmuted into the original godhead and definer of leftism, communism, socialism, etc. To object to Marx, without at least the appropriate paragraphs of genuflection and in-group signaling, is thus to object to The Good Thing. Never you mind how wildly ahistorical this is, Marx’s self-branding has stuck. He’s become a totemic figure for class struggle, equality, liberation, etc. Anything that’s not Marx is, by definition, liberal. While anarchists happily discard Proudhon and Bakunin as deeply compromised and limited figures of their time, Marxists can do no such thing for Marx. And so any direct critique of Marx invariably stirs legions of defenders to overwhelm by sheer volume of responses — even if those responses contradict one another. Suffice to say that standard anarchist takes like ‘it would’ve been great if Marx had been assassinated’ are certainly non-starters.

How can we reach these people? How can we even begin to enliven or enrich such a broken conversation, how can we catch these people up to the last century and a half? It’s on us to find a crack in this armor. A way to address these core texts directly and in more or less their same language and style while avoiding as much of the blowback from the wider Marxist universe as possible.

Thankfully it’s generally acknowledged in at least genteel Marxist circles that Engels was an incompetent fool, Marx’s blundering himbo sugar daddy, who served as the source of rank-this and vulgar-that, the Paul who corrupted and derailed the immaculate messiah’s word from inception.

In this way Engels has operated on occasion as a kind of pressure valve in the longstanding war of anarchists and Marxists. The enlightened erudite Marxist who wishes to pretend that the projects and traditions of Marxism and anarchism aren’t fundamentally at odds, gently takes the young anarchist at the union meeting by the arm and whispers “have you had a look at that fellow over there? he’s been talking shit about your mom,” in hopes that a good thrashing of On Authority can direct attention away from Marx the snitch-jacketing racist wannabe-tyrant whose studiously-point-missing critiques of Proudhon and Bakunin are hard not to laugh at. No, Engels is a safe scapegoat. It’s not called “Engels-ism” after all, the whole affair doesn’t hang on his reputation. Why he’s basically a Kautsky! Just a groupie! Heck, I heard Marx was never into Morgan, never even met Dialectical Materialism! All was just that dastardly dopey Engels!

But they say never to deny your enemy a line of retreat. Direct critiques of Marx are an existential threat to “Marxists.” And so, by democracy of noise and chaff, any critique of the Messiah is doomed to be drowned out in endless bloviating essays and snarky dismissive drive-bys — when it does not mobilize studiously silent blacklisting. Moreover there’s a veritable galaxy of “Marxist” content taking every possible stance on Marx in preparation for any kicks — to make available respectable retreats and tut-tutting that you didn’t address their particulars. By transmutation Marx becomes the entirety of Marxist discourse, or whatever corner of it is needed, from analytic marxist to materialist ecofeminist to Deleuzian to value theorist. And of course the discourse can be transmuted back to the Godhead, again as needed.

The Marxist trying to redirect the anarchist to kick Engels actually opens the door to a more effective way to have a go at Marx. Comparably few will tell you that Engels “doesn’t really mean X.” Engels, the crude popularizer, the hype-man, the scientifically illiterate builder of grand teleologies, can only be expected to put his foot in his mouth, to say directly or explicitly what Marx was too deft to say without deniability or too lost in the clouds from the practical space of ideas to even consider.

Engels’ On Authority is the classic text anarchists dunk on, but it’s something of a rorschach test because for example red anarchists have a tendency to focus in on how some particular form of democracy or another isn’t authoritarian or at all like a state (usually patent nonsense) and green anarchists have a tendency to reject the foundations of the examples Engels poses by throwing out technology (so much for freedom as options). The more consistent anarchist approach is to recognize that technology can provide us with more options, or that is to say more physical freedom, but the forms of technological production can and must be decentralized beyond the need for any sort of collective command; proper technological development leading to more artisanal production with more individualized fluid relations and away from clumsy factory mass production.

But this focus on the limited managerial examples in On Authority tends to bypass often more salient issues between anarchists and Marxists over what the state is and what power is more generally.

In many ways I think Anti-Duhring is a more relevant text for anarchist criticisms because Duhring himself, while certainly no anarchist, centers on questions of ethics and force. Anarchism, as countless observers have noted, is a discourse on ethics and the micro roots of power, whereas Marxism is a discourse on politics that starts in terms of sweeping macro structures or forces. And the anarchist critique of the state is not the tepid Marxist objection that it’s presently a tool of the capitalists, but rather the far more fundamental critique that an institution of centralized violence creates perverse incentives to intensify both the centralization and the violence.

Naive revolutionary or insurrectionary anarchists are often quickly pressed into a bind by Marxists who want to collapse all possible forms of revolutionary violence into the same thing and suggest that anarchist critiques of the state in terms of its force must corner us into an irrelevant pacifism. Similar pressures are applied where causal influence and domination are conflated. Lost in this is the content of non-strawmanned anarchist moral critiques and our bottom-up analysis of power.

Thus Anti-Duhring, with its sneering dismissals of concern with morality and force, provides probably the best opportunity to narrowbeam in on some core differences of analysis between anarchism and… that dismissible dirtbeat hack Engels, definitely not Marxism as a broader tradition.

To begin teasing out these differences I want to single out the claim, stated most directly in Anti-Duhring, that the establishment of capitalism wasn’t rooted in force or political power, but was inherent in property and exchange. This is the recurring tension Engels had with anarchists:

“While the great mass of the Social-Democratic workers hold our view that state power is nothing more than the organization which the ruling classes-landowners and capitalists-have provided for themselves in order to protect their social privileges, Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state. As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Do away with capital, the concentration of all means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall of itself.” [ Letter, Engels to Cuno, January 24th, 1872]

And anarchists have been more than happy to meet these terms. As Carson succinctly responded to Engels’,

“They say ‘abolish the state and capital will go to the devil.’ We propose the reverse.”

Exactly.

At obvious stake is the question of whether it’s even dreamable to have widespread markets (networks of exchange of titles to the usage of things) without capitalism (massive concentrations of wealth and economic control giving a small class of owners huge leverage against a dispossessed class of wage laborers with no alternatives, all framed by a host of very skewed norms around property, exchange, etc). But, beyond mutualist interests, what’s also at stake is the so called vulgar Marxist focus on material economics as a base prior to the political and cultural, to say nothing of the ethical. And more broadly it will allow us to cut to questions of power, coercion, and the “authority” that Engels so infamously shits himself over.

THE NECESSARY ORIGINS OF CAPITALISM IN FORCE

Speaking of the shift to capitalism and the emerging supremacy of the bourgeoisie in Anti-Duhring, Engels writes,

“The whole process can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary.”

Much can hang on how contorted a notion of ‘explanation’ one wants to go with. One motte-and-bailey retreat to inanity is to chicken-and-egg the interplay of force and politics with “economic causes” so that in every step in the infinitely regressing chain you gloss over the particulars introduced by that iteration of force and emphasize the presence of any remotely economic prompt or context.

But Duhring’s core thrust is that capitalism could only come into existence via political force. And there’s no question that actually existing capitalism involved loads of it — you don’t have to take an anarchist’s word for it — Marx and many Marxists recognized that the shift to capitalism involved the application of immense institutional violence and pointed out examples of it. The enclosures, dispossessions, enslavement, and all other measures for the creation of a destitute and desperate class of wage laborers worldwide were systematically backed by violence. A huge chunk of the end of Capital: Volume 1 is just surveying this, including a very amusing footnote in turn quoting Molinari whining about stray examples of a free market eroding capitalist wealth, as in cases in America when slaves are freed without the state introducing new forms of violence to bring workers to heel:

“Simple workers have been seen to exploit in their turn the industrial entrepreneurs, demanding from them wages which bear absolutely no relation to the legitimate share in the product which they ought to receive. The planters were unable to obtain for their sugar for a sufficient price to cover the increase in wages, and were obliged to furnish the extra amount, at first out of their profits, and then out of their very capital. A considerable amount of planters have been ruined as a result, while others have closed down their businesses in order to avoid the ruin which threatened them”

Another sweeping account of capitalism’s blood-soaked foundations from a Marxist (albeit more anarchist-friendly) perspective is The London Hanged which goes into far greater detail on the violence necessary and consciously applied to create a class willing to work for peanuts on infrastructure they didn’t own or have any say in.

To frame all this massive and systemic violence as an unnecessary epiphenomenon is to create a truly blinkered account with dangling epicycles.

But Engels is forced into implying that the systemic violent upheavals that by all reasonable accounts launched capitalism were themselves unnecessary light shows, and that there would have been a transition to the economic norms of capitalism without such.

In the most direct version of this, we are required to consider a counterfactual timeline in which the catalyzing market activity in the free cities or burghs of medieval Europe never got its massive helping hand from the state, but still inevitably developed capitalism through some kind of inevitable logic baked into the pre-capitalist commodity form, or more particularly a slow accumulation of capital through imbalanced trade and other feedbacking dynamics by which the rich got richer before anyone was getting a wage at a factory. This possibility is not without some remote plausibility, but there are strong reasons not to think it a foregone conclusion.

Very briefly: Markets have been around for thousands of years in both stateless and statist societies (from unregulated town markets to stateless civilizations at the scale of the Harappans), and to varying degrees of integration with or separation from formations of political violence. Often markets are sites of resistance to political violence, providing sites of complex illegible cooperation that bypass the state’s capacity to surveil and control. Communities and individuals can retreat to the market to resist taxation, to secure options and means of survival and flourishing that are otherwise outlawed, or to develop lines of connection, trust, and flight beyond parochial communities. Stateless markets deal with certain unique risks and thus tend towards more profit sharing and complex measures to build trust. This is not to say that examples of force didn’t occur endogenously in some markets, or that there weren’t some dynamics of wealth concentration that didn’t bootstrap off of the consequences of systems of force. But when the effects of violence weren’t skewing the scales, and particularly when robust decentralized societal or cultural antibodies suppressed violence, there was never wealth concentration anywhere near that of capitalism from mere commodity trade itself.

This empirical relationship isn’t magic. There are several specific dynamics that severely constrained the positive feedback of wealth as well as eroded it. Firstly, most historical market transactions weren’t anonymous, and as a result the woman with a stall in the town square knew if money meant less to you because you had more of it and would charge the rich more dearly. Secondly, there were many severe diseconomies of scale that saw diminishing returns or even negative returns past a point of investment, wealth, reach, marketshare, etc., from internal-transaction, maintenance, management costs, etc. Thirdly, insofar as robust competition could emerge and thus lead to price-taking, profit margins would shrink to near zero. Fourthly, without force to impose market and property norms, and to assign ‘objective’ title or value to things like the theft of thousands from a rich man as more of a crime than theft of a penny from a pauper, norms of trade of title can only emerge and stabilize as mutually-beneficial detentes. A community that recognizes titles whose broad terms everyone has a stake in can, in contrast, just refuse to recognize the title claims of a monopolist whose claims are cancerous. This is a more fluid dynamic to ownership and titles that Engels never even considers, assuming that property titles emerge fixed and universal. These various wealth-eroding dynamics permit some perturbations from complete “equality” of distribution for the sake of incentives, but (unless externally perturbed or severely overwhelmed by systemic violence) can stabilize in orbit around an equilibrium point of rough equality.

Now it is the case that, over a thousand years of feudal Europe, traders and the market-using folk of the free cities built up wealth contra other classes. But the initial seeds of the burghers’ victory over the gentry and aristocracy was, insofar as it was market-based, a matter of efficiency benefits plus a relatively quickly mobilizing complexity that exceeded the capacity of more conventional powers to parse and contain. Engels, hater of anything unruly or lumpen, snottily describes them as originating in “all manner of serfs and villains” and it’s certainly true that early traders and merchants were often a grubby sort of hustler. Those that could escape from fixed feudal relations and into the limited market space could exploit serious efficiency gains because markets provide computational, informational, and connectivity benefits. Pre-capitalist markets saw overall profits not off of “unequal” exchange (such would average out to zero net profit in the overall market sector), but off more efficiently routing goods between varying distributed agents with complex desires and benefiting from the arbitrage opportunities, the positive sum aspect of the market. Engels largely ignored the question of routing, but you can see routing itself as a form of labor if you’re particularly welded to the LTV. It’s this overall wealth generation in the burghers that is a far better explanation of the rising status and capacity of their class. And it was the myriad violent exclusions of the serfs from these markets that meant these profits weren’t evenly shared.

This is all not to suggest that the burghers’ market dynamics were particularly advanced, to say nothing of morally praiseworthy or entirely clear of wealth accumulation (in particular, as Marx pointed out, the order in which individual serfs escaped their bondage to the cities created a hierarchy of prior access and thus wealth disparities), but the point is they could still grasp efficiencies that had been locked up in most of feudal Europe. This mattered all the more when energy reserves (from the peat of the lowlands to the coal of Britain) enabled rapid technological development — markets excelling at general adaptation in contrast to feudal power structures.

Markets in much of the feudal context were often more like what “grey markets” denote today, not quite outright black markets, but not beloved by formal powers either. The fact that the benefits of market activity were somewhat unevenly distributed into the hands of a few is partly to blame on insufficiently developed market/social norms and strategies (as a consequence of state limits) but it’s also the direct result of the state creating barriers to entry in the market. To give hopefully a universally salient example, when modern states banned weed it escalated the degree of risk in the weed market and thus the inequality of resulting wealth distributions from punitive impacts, but another factor was the cost to getting established as a hustler in the first place. Similarly, in far older times, greater wealth concentrations in the market were an inevitable result of the political struggle, the feudal powers had to constrain and contain the potentially ungovernable exception or line of flight the market presented to their power structures. Even violence exercised by the burghers to enforce guild monopolies or curtail women’s rights to property were enforceable in large part because of the pressures of the wider feudal context that left relatively isolated marketplaces amid a sea of manors. Sporadic distributions of wealth within the maroons of the free cities was thus the product and reflection of the immense sea of violence they were surrounded by.

The same is true with economies of scale more broadly within these island marketplaces. Whole communities had to band together to protect sites of flight from ossified feudal relations to timid markets, precisely because they needed to scale up past a threshold to survive and counter-weigh the barriers to entry in the market. This centralization into communal structures helped propagate what inequality there was within local markets.

Yes, the market provided material efficiencies that eventually overwhelmed the feudal power structures, but this wasn’t due to wealth accumulation by mere fact of capital ownership. The wealth differentials of the pre-capitalist market were totally insufficient to spawn a class of dispossessed wage-laborers with no real bargaining power who would settle for a measly fraction of profits from an owner class. No, the bourgeoisie had to use the state — a preexisting site of power in a social context where antibodies to power had atrophied — and the bourgeoisie could only emerge as a distinct marginal class with enough wealth to influence the state because of that state’s suppression of market competition and creation of sharp arbitrage possibilities.

Were it not for the existing power structures capitalism would never have been a thing.

Engels must desperately avoid this because in his account the capitalist owned factory with wages a small fraction of profit is an inevitability baked into exchange and property itself. But the workers largely had to be forcibly made to work in the factories, and across the board made desperate enough to have almost no bargaining power for wages actually balanced only against whatever actual labor and risk the capitalist invested.

The bourgeoisie were able to leverage their increasing economic wealth and efficiencies to wheedle their way into existing power structures, but what Engels calls the “decisive advantage” of the economic in this context was not and is not a universal advantage. First off it’s worth noting there are plenty of cases throughout history where various forms and dynamics of power trounce or ignore market efficiency, especially because the efficiency of markets is in routing goods between diverse decentralized desires, which is often the opposite of the centralized efficiencies the state wants. But there are also cases where anything remotely economic (in the limited sense Engels is using of material goods) is trumped by differing interests of power. More on such in a minute.

Engels has to write off these ‘exceptions’ as averaging away by virtue of the need for states with greater economic advantage outcompeting other states. It’s certainly the case that with two exactly equal states the one that can’t produce machine guns will likely get conquered by the one that can, but there’s a couple important things to note…

Firstly there are different ways by which power can relate to economic productivity other than enslaving it within itself. Marauders, raiders, and total-war armies often found workarounds whereby their economically simple force could exploit and conquer powers with immensely complex or ‘developed’ economic forces. Nice impregnable city wall you’ve got there, be a shame if us oh-so-simple chucklefucks just surrounded you and starved you into surrender. Technology and economic productivity isn’t some linear ladder whereby those higher up necessarily win, or even win on average. A few thousand insurgents with antiquated weapons can bring the most economically developed empire in history to its knees. This reality of asymmetries and exploits is in no small part a matter of complexity dynamics and the informational limitations of certain systems.

Secondly there are many dynamics that can be far more important to the success of a power system than material productivity or even physical force. A state that is better able to control and subjugate its own population will have an advantage, and there are myriad ways to do that without depending on material productivity.

What’s more in this vein, allowing for material productivity in some forms and contexts may hinder the self-perpetuation of a state. A form of material productivity might contribute nothing to comparative war efforts between states but instead increase the illegibility of its own population. So for example a state dependent upon grain taxes is threatened by the cultivation of alternative crops that are more efficient at providing nutrition and calories per labor, but are not countable or seizable by the tax man. The incentives of power here are to burn and outlaw the new crop, lest the state collapse as a result of its propagation.

Productivity is not linear because there’s always the question of productive at what for who? Similarly, efficiency is always directed. There are different directions of material productivity and different directions of economic efficiency. Engels implicitly takes the state as the judge, the deciding perspective on whether something constitutes progress or not. He smuggles in the centrality and relevance of force through the backdoor by making it such an inherent assumption as to be invisible.

If force is innately given, then one can look at a long interplay of economic and state effects, and always say for any state effect upon the economic that this in turn was driven by the economic. Given that there are states competing with war, economic changes that provide advantages at state warfare will emerge, even if a given state for some period rejects such changes. Given that there are states.

Of course Engels — clumsy lout and pale afterimage of the One True King that he is — doesn’t stay at such an airy distance and directly takes the bait on Duhring’s claim that the root of capitalism’s emergence was in political violence, not an economic form or exchange value itself. We’ve seen how untenable that is. But one could patch the poor buffoon up, and reassert the dominance of the economic over such violence by cutting things down to the claim that, sure violence is part of the mix, but such violence itself is always itself a consequence of economic realities. The emergence of the feudal power system had many motivations and causal influences. And was fuedalism in turn not an advancement in underlying economic production over slavery? Engels spends a lot of time on more distant history precisely in order to preserve this fallback.

POWER AND PRODUCTION IN THE OTHER TRANSITIONS

But this misses that feudalism emerged in the collapse of the Roman empire not as any clear “advancement” in modes of production and productive force, or even by following some inevitable internal logic or ratchet (or thetan dianetics) in some economic plane.

Rather, changes in the dynamics of political power drove changes in economic organization at the sites of production. The Roman state and its ecosystem of tributary power structures maintained great record keeping; as the state collapsed politically so too did the administrative capacity of estate holders. Combined with increased transaction costs that impeded specialization and promoted resiliency in localism, there was neither the capacity to handle complex exchange, nor much benefit to it.

The collapse of political power led to a collapse of technical managerial capacity, which led to a change in social and technical relations of production, which also hampered or at least dramatically restructured the material infrastructure.

Now you could try to say that the slave model of Rome gave way to feudalism because the feudal model ultimately embraced the use of technologies like the water mill the Romans avoided, but the problem is that the popular adoption of such tools only happened centuries after the slave economy had collapsed to the feudal mode. Was the economic world-spirit somehow consciously collapsing the Roman empire with the magical foresight that it would eventually enable productivity centuries later?

And this raises the deeply troublesome question of why the Romans avoided certain labor saving technologies for centuries. Almost as if folks placed value in the social relations of domination in-and-of-themselves. Almost as if material productivity wasn’t always as relevant to the perpetuation of power structures as other dynamics.

I’m not saying hard technical dynamics can’t influence political power, we might, for instance, talk of the transition from ancient Rome to feudalism being about the adaptation of power to computational constraints on its operation over vast regions and peoples. The Roman state faced diminishing computational capacity against the complexities it was trying to eat, and so the feudal system was the reformation of power on a more decentralized level, as lords seized the dynamics of surveillance and taxation previously limited to the Roman state proper, in effect the state power dynamic adapted to its limitations by subdividing into a patchwork of microstates. And it was very much in the interest of those microstates to constrain connectivity, lest their imprisoned peoples grow more complex or escape. That is until one class of escapees built up a positive feedback loop whereby connectivity reinforced connectivity. But you see the danger, not only are these “non-material” questions of complexity operating directly in the realm of political power rather than economic production… the idea that there are complexity constraints on things like decision-making and knowledge-gathering has pretty grave consequences for the entire dismissal of the “anarchy of production” to say nothing of dreams of unified collective planning.

Of course Engels is free to brush off something as particular as a thousand years or two, declare the whole “other transition” between the ancient form to the feudal form as merely a minor perturbation or epicycle in the golden mechanism of the materialist dialectic.

Yet the trap that Engels is in is that the first instance of power doesn’t seem to be a very direct product of the material/economic, it’s not like one person invented and built swords and chains to enslave everyone else. And that’s a big deal because it poses the problem that whatever those primordial sources of power are, they could still be relevant today and lend the political and social distinctly emergent relevance, crushing the world historical Copernican revolution of Our Messiah.

And here’s where Engels’ infamous concept of authority creeps in…

“In each such community there were from the beginning certain common interests the safeguarding of which had to be handed over to individuals, true, under the control of the community as a whole: adjudication of disputes; repression of abuse of authority by individuals; control of water supplies… They are naturally endowed with a certain measure of authority and are the beginnings of state power.”

We might call this the managerial account of the rise of political power.

In this there’s the faint spark of an understanding of the importance of information and computation, but at the same time there’s the lurking faith in the unlimited cognitive capacity of the central planner or at least a cavalier dismissal of the challenges they face. Rather than seeing the centralization of adjudication or planning as an emergent inefficiency, Engels sees it as the inverse. Again, this is the perspective of the tyrant and what’s efficient for his interests, not some objective perspective or the perspective of ‘the people.’

Freer societies endorse decentralized adjudication and mediation systems to integrate distributed information and viewpoints as well as to avoid power concentration and use competition to ensure decisions don’t become biased or otherwise skewed. The suppression of abuse by individuals inherently requires decentralization, agile whisper networks, etc., because centralization poses inescapable misincentives.

Any child quickly learns the dangers of appointing one person as a central coordinator and in the rare situations where such might be found useful independently re-invents things like rotating roles. The idea that our distant ancestors stumbled into political power structures because they somehow needed one planner or adjudicator is just foolish as hell, sure Engels didn’t have all of modern anthropology to contradict him, but a little thought should have sufficed.

Of course, to be fair, Engels somehow swallows the liberal claim about the state that having a central planner provides social benefits, and further that political power hangs on providing economic value, or, at very least, not impeding economic productivity:

“the exercise of a social function was everywhere the basis of political supremacy; and further that political supremacy has existed for any length of time only when it discharged its social functions. However great the number of despotisms which rose and fell in Persia and India, each was fully aware that above all it was the entrepreneur responsible for the collective maintenance of irrigation throughout the river valleys, without which no agriculture was possible there.”

Yet, as previously noted, people can hold social power in ways hostile to engineering and productivity, destroying and stopping productivity is in fact often critical to maintaining power.

We look at the police and politicians calling for the abolition of the internet and 3d printing and laugh, but history and even very recent social struggles are filled with situations of political power successfully suppressing inventions and more productive implementations or infrastructures. The maintenance of intellectual property was early on declared an impossibility, the math was against them, the technology was against them, there was no way to hold back the massive productivity and efficiency gains of pirating. And yet, after a brief spurt of progress and a few stray later exceptions like scihub, the struggle has broadly been in retreat for decades. A major part of this was a cultural push of narratives that convinced much of a new generation that they were temporarily embarrassed future creative class success stories, giving them an irrational investment in the overall institution of IP. About a third of US GDP today derives from the intellectual property regime, so while its abolition would mean vast improvements in productivity across the board, existing power is dependent upon the constraint of productivity, and there is a vast global apparatus of force, infrastructure, and culture built specifically to keep it from blossoming.

Capitalism itself, as the suppression of markets, is yet another example of the war of power against efficiency. Capital concentrations aren’t the transition of the market into the superior efficiencies of socialism, they’re the choking out of market efficiencies by power in order to create more power. Power thrives on inefficiency, depends on it. Specifically inefficiency at satiating the diverse and distributed desires of the many, and this happens through a variety of strategies.

POWER BEYOND THE ECONOMIC

Let’s revisit why Engels is fighting so desperately to reduce the foundations of capitalism to an economic base that drags power along.

Because his target Duhring is focused on physical coercion — from which he views economic dynamics as secondary — Engels must of course sneer that this isn’t new and in turn evangelize for the totally amazing, totally new Marxist theory which is framed as saying the exact reverse. Structures of social power — and specifically force — must flow from and be shaped by the economic. The tail wags the dog.

But isn’t power just about material interests? This is another Engels claim:

“Subjugation has always been — to use Herr Dühring’s elegant expression — a “stomach-filling agency” (taking stomach-filling in a very wide sense), but never and nowhere a political grouping established “for its own sake”.”

And we’ve seen before Engels zeroing in on the comparative advantage that more efficient production gets you. But he goes further, how can you even dream to primordially enslave another person, much less multiple people, without having physical instruments to coerce and chain them? And we might reformulate this central question as, “How does the first instance of power emerge?” Specifically considering situations where physical capability, distribution of access to resources, etc., are functionally equal.

There are two issues here: 1) what motivation could anyone actually have for social power in-and-of-itself or simply to ends other than material ones? 2) what even are ways of acquiring and wielding power except through material tools gained through economic advantage?

Now, let’s quickly get out of the way that “stomach filling” in the broadest possible sense could be taken as the satiation of any desire, or action potential function in a neural network, which then can be applied trivially to almost anything. Because we live in a material universe and thought itself is a material process there is an absolutely trivial sense in which everything is “material.” Every thought in our head has some causal path, every instinct some biological basis. But of course this would also be inclusive of the social, political, ideological, cultural, etc. A program running on a computer is ultimately comprised of electrical states in a circuit, and in that sense someone’s ideological or moral orientation is a physical and material reality. But this is clearly and trivially not the distinction between materialism and idealism that Engels (or the prophet himself) is using to establish an explanative primacy of modes of production over political power.

If we restrict this to material desires in the more limited sense of Engels’ context, then subjugation is trivially often established for the sake of other things. To give an example everyone should be intimately familiar with, many people dominate children and pets not for their labor or any material benefit from them, but to help reinforce one’s own internal narratives and emotional experiences. Pretty sure everyone experienced at least one teacher who desperately wanted to re-do high school as a popular kid and who leveraged their institutional power to achieve some cringe simulacrum of this. Even if certain human instinctive needs for connection, belonging, identity, etc., have biological origins in the general evolutionary fitness they provide, these are decidedly not about filling one’s belly and can incentivize societies to be inefficient at economic production.

Further, one of the core dynamics of power is that it has its own emergent ideology or perspective; power is a means that rapidly becomes its own ends. It presents itself as a universal or near-universal means, a gateway to every other possible desire (material or not), and then through slippage in the human mind the instrumental desire becomes elevated and calcified as a terminal desire. We seek social power as a universal currency, and then we gradually forget the other ends, so fixated on power as a gateway. This habituation of instrumental goals into terminal goals for-themselves is a core part of how the human mind works and a byproduct of how it escapes crises when its ontology needs radical revision.

We’ve seen Engels’ account for the rise of the state in terms of managerial value where the managers capture the surpluses of economic production and use this to acquire winning physical force. But let’s examine some other pathways power can bootstrap from dynamics that have nothing to do with instruments from economic surplus or even necessarily with force. Specifically two classes of exploits: 1) the accuracy and inaccuracy of people’s models of reality, and 2) dynamics of trust and obligation in social context.

On first glance it’s obvious that a set of epistemic strategies that’s generally better at figuring out the joints of reality, predicting whether a tiger will attack, etc., is going to triumph over a set of epistemic strategies that’s not. But there’s a complication: strategies that reduce other people’s epistemic accuracy will grant you power in relation to them.

In the most simple example, you lie about or withhold information about the options someone has so they don’t take certain options, and sometimes take specific others instead. Typically this involves leveraging some things you know they know in combination with failing to divulge certain other things, so as to lead them or skew their analysis in a specific direction that you know (or suspect) is incorrect. Lying about having your tubes tied or being free of STDs might lead someone into evaluating having sex with you as the better option than not, whereas if they had a more accurate picture they would make the opposite decision. This is very clearly and indisputably an act of power that does not involve most notions of violent physical force. Similarly, selling someone a product you know to be rotten while obscuring or misleading about that fact.

Now there’s often the quick response that in a wide enough body of people the liars will be exposed and people will gravitate towards the full truth tellers, thus making individual lying impossible to bootstrap into massive power, but this assumes a lot about a social context. Societies are networks of actors who instantiate varied mixes of strategies. Such strategies can be at varying scales of complexity or contextual fitness. In repeated interactions between given individuals, it is generally on average optimal to play a tit-for-tat approach that is slightly skewed towards mutual aid. But in a society with a large number of simultaneous players there’s space for a mix of strategies, and even if an overwhelming majority of players stabilize in tit-for-tat with slight mutual aid, there is often an uneliminable minority who trend to a more exploitative strategy. If the minority grows too large it suffers diminishing returns, but if it shrinks too small then any shift of strategy to scumfuckery is rewarded. Similarly there’s pressure for more complex metastrategies by individuals to evaluate when it’s a good idea to get up to fuckery.

Further, actually existing societies are irregularly connected, and this can involve extreme variations of social topology. These social links between individuals can range from things like who listens to who, who trusts who, who owes who, who will assist who, who is invested in cultivating a stronger or specific relationship with who, etc.

Social strategies for power involve highly connecting yourself and weakening the connections of others. But this can involve more complex network structural dynamics. So e.g. a) placing yourself in arbitrage positions at network flow chokepoints and maintaining those chokepoints, b) lumping up the network so that information doesn’t flow as rapidly. If you get cancelled in one circle you can just reinvest in another circle, while doing what you can to avoid the two circles communicating.

Individual epistemological dynamics of course interplay with social dynamics and in some sense give rise to them. For example, you can mislead someone into only considering a subset of possible social strategies. Indeed this is how most social strategic contexts bootstrap, via path-dependent tactical actions that build up into network asymmetries. On the other hand social conditions can be created that punish certain types or directions of rationality, inquiry, etc., likely to give them more complete or objective pictures. You create social conditions wherein the best strategy is to avoid rational deliberation and diligent investigation, defaulting instead upon simple heuristics, and over time this can influence one’s deepest priors away from engagement. Most abusive parents do this to children, punishing them for thinking, so that they grow up rationally evaluating that rationality itself is a bad strategy.

Another example, a site of power genesis in band societies to say nothing of medieval guilds, is to capture critical knowledge within an exclusive club. Only initiates of the 42nd order are allowed to see the critical step to making the special ink. Only the elders hold the oral knowledge necessary to do a thing, and certain amounts of deference and indebtedness must be built before they induct you. Sometimes the captured information is encoded in a format specifically built to be esoteric or obscure, requiring all the more costly displays of commitment and sacrifice. This exclusion is maintained socially because each knowledge keeper has strong incentives to maintain their social advantage via withholding. And in small-scale intimate societies, it’s much easier to identify and punish defectors who liberate elite information. This pattern of social enclosures of information (and production of information asymmetries) can of course be found in academia, but also in activism where 90% of the work is dependent upon knowing people and the remaining 10% is dependent upon craft and tacit tactical knowledge that isn’t in general circulation.

Material conditions can and do intersect with all these, reinforcing or weakening a given dynamic, but the existence of these power dynamics is orthogonal. These dynamics are relevant in a world of scarcity and a world of superabundance. Suffice to say that it is nowhere near sufficient to, for example, have material abundance with equal access to all, to abolish power. Combatting power requires combating dishonesty and various impediments to the sharing, flow, and processing of information more generally.

In the above I’ve focused on power as a constraint of others’ choice, because that’s the only coherent and useful definition, but there’s a notable Marxist-derived tradition that tries to cast power as “productive.” This tradition primarily treats the word “subjectivity” as essentially a perspective. So “subjects are created” in this conceptual schema and vernacular. It shouldn’t be surprising that this tradition tends to deny freedom is a coherent concept. In contrast I follow a modern economics perspective in treating subjectivity as a cognitive constraint. The bounds of our skulls, the limited bandwidth of our input and output channels, the finite resources of our brains, constrain our ability to have perfect knowledge of the universe. This constrains our ability to choose and thus overall freedom.

In this lens it’s not so much that power creates a specific possibility, it inherently curtails overall possibility. Power is about limiting and constraining, slicing away at the possible to select an arbitrary subset. And, in turn, freedom is about widening the overall expanse of what is possible, in no small part by connecting rather than disconnecting. As Bakunin said,

“Liberty is… a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection.”

In the far more fixed lens of those who see individuals entirely created by their social contexts there is no choice, because the loop of reflection is thought to be preconditioned by external causes. What is lost from this is an understanding of the complex connectivity involved in the brain, where vast fields of causal inputs are tightly integrated and processed over. This iterative process and density of connection creates novel structures and behavior not predictable from the causal inputs without something comparably complex to a human brain.

And because the available bandwidth of information flow between individual brains is dramatically limited, the individual is always more complicated than the social pressures that can be transmitted to them (and what broader social structures can be built above them). As social scale increases, the average speed of internal information flow is basically the speed of bits conveyed by language or writing, which is ridiculously slower than the speed of neuron-to-neuron bitflow. Thus, whatever the initial causal inputs that flow in, the twists and turns inside an individual’s head can dramatically outpace and disrupt control mechanisms operating at the speed of social organizations.

This much should hardly be contentious. Anyone who’s ever been to a meeting knows the dystopian horror of your thoughts racing faster than the sluggish pace by which ideas can be expressed in language, much less verbalized, every party trapped together in a mutually-constraining molasses.

Individuals and the ideas that take root in them, their motivations and strategies, cannot be handwaved away. While social context, like institutions and tendencies, of course influence the individual, they cannot reduce the individual to the same cog.

As a consequence, any hazy patterns we discern and name in macroscale society are always going to be rough simplifications or reductions imposed over an impossibly complex tapestry of individuals and their thoughts.

This is part of why schemes relying upon such notions inevitably fray and fall apart in the face of unpredictable individual deviations — the source of many diminishing returns in various strategies of control by the state and other institutions. Whatever top-down account or schematizations you give will have to plaster over particularities, and when those particularities are the incredibly dense and fast singularities of individual human brains, there will always be unforeseeable horizons beyond which your framework breaks down.

Of course, on some level, Engels explicitly recognizes this. The dialectic is precisely supposed to account for the inability to ever describe the relevant dynamics of society entirely, in all possible configuration states and times. A minor dynamic that seems irrelevant today and fine to gloss over might yet emerge in the attention of some future society as a critical or central dynamic. Engels is not focused on a true radicalism that gets to the universal absolute roots of all things, but rather a rough-and-ready framework that is geared towards a goal within a context and admits its probable breakdown beyond that context. At best this sort of dialectical framing looks like “everything is dependent upon everything else and is in a state of interaction and that’s all rather complicated,” to crip snark from Michael Heinrich, and thus any statement you make can preempt its own eventual irrelevancy or contradiction. This is a flippant and deflective humility. It is designed to provide ammunition to ignore Engels’ critics — “all your ideas are just products of your historical context, whereas my ideas are the only ones that fully embrace that!” — and then, riding that self-congratulatory wave, immediately pivot into new sweeping universalisms with even less justification. So Engels can sweep up all of history — even hard scientific questions of nature — in terms of his grand dialectic framework. At places this involves truly silly interpretations of scientific ideas through bad philosophy,

“Motion itself is a contradiction: even simple mechanical change of position can only come about through a body being at one and the same moment of time both in one place and in another place, being in one and the same place and also not in it.”

And Engels is hardly limiting himself to a humble evaluation of a tiny sliver of human history, like Jesus’ disciples desperate to assert that their dead bro is totally coming back with God’s army behind him any day, the whole fucking game is to proclaim the inevitable development of a timeless and universal communism that functions as the end of history. The contradictions in capitalism are not being claimed to be merely one more fleeting example of social contradictions like countless other configurations and tensions throughout thousands of years. No, these contradictions are the contradictions. The final and ultimate ones that will determine all history.

It never really occurs to Engels to probe beyond the frame in which he is operating, to evaluate its limits, the things it is papering over or consigning to the margins, and consider how these could resurge to fuck over his grandiose universal proclamations. Of course not, because the main function of “historical contingency” has always been to license Engels to opportunistically compose and flog theory as a political cudgel as he and his buddy cop wrangled for personal power within the revolutionary workers associations of Europe. Indeed, when Bakunin points out obvious and trivial problems with things like the seizure of the state, he must be aggressively cop-jacketed as a czarist spy and the anarchists run out.

But what fun you can have with incoherencies when you feel no obligation to have an honest go at constructing anything like a timelessly rooted theoretical framework! As a poor analytic Marxist tasked with making sense of the bible, Jon Elster said of the messiah, “it is difficult to avoid the impression that he often wrote whatever came into his mind, and then forgot about it as he moved on to other matters.” Truly, a poster’s poster!

MORALITY AND RESISTANCE

The central sneer through Anti-Duhring is that Duhring believes in morality — the daft dinosaur — failing to grasp that any moral values are obviously just social norms and thus artifacts of Duhring’s historical context.

And here is where Engels really delights in edgelording it up at length to deliver lines like, “Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism.” and then cleaning up with what he assumes is a knockout argument:

“It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and similar things in general terms, and to give vent to high moral indignation at such infamies. Unfortunately all that this conveys is only what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine.”

But does all moral objection really amount to nothing more than a statement of present conditions and resultant social norms? Engels is revealing himself a moral nihilist who sees morality as a social construct resulting from economic context rather than anything emergently reachable upon individual reflection.

Certainly this tension between flippant Marxist nihilism and a studious anarchist focus on moral questions is a recurring and much commented-on feature of the century and a half of conflict that followed, but I’m less interested in covering or relitigating those galaxies of discourse than exploring how this take helps props up Engels’ whole frame.

Engels doesn’t really bother with any sort of engagement with ethical philosophy, he takes the standard pothead bypass route and thinks that because there was no full instantaneous and simultaneous convergence everywhere upon the exact same details of ethics, the whole project is obviously bunk. This is actually interesting, because for all his historicism I’m pretty sure Engels would cede that there are a priori facts of reality that are independently discoverable upon reflection by independent observers. At least when we note that these facts are the structural relations and entailments involved in mathematics. Seems weird to not even respond to the diverse array of philosophers who see ethics as an a priori question similar to mathematics. That little has been resolved universally seems of little relevance as a response. Few people on the planet grasp the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, only a small crew have successfully worked through it. Moreover there are myriad unsolved questions in mathematics of incredible importance to the world. Few would confidently claim that there is no solution to whether P=NP, it’s simply the case that no human has yet captured that solution beyond hazy graspings and general suspicions.

Now one can retort that whatever self-consistent formalizations one makes (comprising various branches of or approaches to ethics), there’s still a sense in which breaking symmetry between them, or even believing that there are other conscious ethically-relevant entities in the world, requires some dirty empiricism. And granted when we get to the a posteriori, Engels’ has streettcchhhed quite a bit to frame even physics in dialectic terms. No modern scientist (and few of his contemporaries) would take that shit even remotely seriously, and I’m not going to waste breath engaging there either. And Engels could retort that my derision is akin to his discarding of every philosopher who thinks some moral claims can be established a priori, — and fair’s fair, I suppose, no one can take the time to respond to every argument. But let’s posit for a moment that modern physics does in fact reflect universal patterns and structures, however partially, and that therefore convergently similarly structured encapsulations to our own can be reached by alien minds in alien contexts upon some sufficient degree of reflection and material engagement. It seems quite weird to simply deny from the outset that no similar convergence would happen in the space of individual desires, values, and strategies.

One very minimal and protean example can be trivially stated: a mind that values not thinking above all other values is very soon no longer a mind and thus that precise value configuration is constrained from the space of emergent value configurations. It’s a triviality, but note that it’s something we can in a quite meaningful sense evaluate prior to particularities of social, cultural, and technological context.

Engels wants to treat ethics/morality as a cultural formation pressing economic conditions down upon the individual, rather than an emergent matter of individual cognition intruding and pressing out upon the social. Now certainly, different given social or material contexts will facilitate such self-development and its expression to varying degrees, and institutions or even classes can develop pressures to alter or skew popular notions. But the same is of course true for science; the fine-structure constant is what it is, regardless of what a regime manages to convince the broader populace. Whatever pressures a society might bring to bear against an individual with an emergent idea, the emergent idea presses back. Cognitive dynamics constrain society.

The trick here is that humans are not undifferentiated clay infinitely molded by our social context, but rather sites of generalized cognition. Our reconfigurability is itself a firm constant. This is how we are able to independently access mathematical or physical relations in vastly different contexts, with different prompts. And just as a processor capable of general computation is still constrained and directed by certain emergent laws of general computation, so too are we. Our inability to, for instance, violate constraints of computational complexity within our brains is not a product of socio-cultural conditioning, although it has immense consequences for social formations. A king (or gosplan bureaucrat) is constrained in his ability to process and control.

Whether one classifies these constraints of mathematics, etc., as “idealist” or “materialist” in origin, the fact remains that they can press upon the individual’s mind in ways that then affect society at large.

And — without getting into the full extent of ethical philosophy and its dynamics that might be relevant to the social, economic, and historical picture Engels is interested in — here’s where we can examine some bare discussion of the bottom-up emergence of mutual aid, from individual values and strategies to general social patterns.

Domination is an example of a value and strategy that often catalyzes: In some nasty situation a single individual might seek to dominate others and as a result those individuals are pressured to change their strategy to act likewise. As the conflict ratchets, those for whom domination of others is not their ultimate goal may find themselves at a disadvantage. They don’t want it badly enough, they have other occasionally conflicting values or interests. Without fully internalizing the drive to dominate they may simply not spend comparable time scheming as their adversary. Thus are they incentivized to change their core value. Perhaps only gradually, a little bit here and there, but eventually it’s all but a done deal.

But this is of course an incomplete picture. There are many strategies that can push in the opposite direction, against domination. Some examples are: disrupting the mechanisms that underpin means of control, introducing cataclysmic means of retaliation to force detentes, and increasing complexity/illegibility so as to diminish the capacity for anyone to control.

One of the most classic catalyzing strategies is “sacrifice everything to counter those who dominate and also to sanction/banish those who defect from this strategy.” For example, those who snitch to the cops get jumped and those that assist or defend those who snitch do as well.

This is distinct from a strategy like “always fight back” or “seek revenge no matter the cost.” That base strategy is very good (on repeat interactions) at carving out respect for boundaries, which can dissuade those who would seek to subjugate. But it’s not particularly viral.

Stateless egalitarian societies are not characterized by the mere absence of catalyzing domination strategies, they’re characterized by the presence of catalyzing anti-domination strategies. The ones that last lock that shit in culture, habit, practice, (decentralized) law, etc.

To give a contemporary example, “believe survivors” as a personal strategy alone is toothless, an eyedrop against an ocean, it takes “believe survivors and ostracize defectors” to make it into a catalyzing strategy and — more importantly — a distinct movement or congealing social space. Because “ostracize abusers and their defenders” creates spaces more concentrated with those who sincerely care, it enables the testing of strategies that atomized and besieged altruists would have no time for, like more nuanced assessments of claims re abuse. These strategies get tested more frequently and there’s horizontal transmission of successful strategies. This means that while “believe and follow survivors and punish defectors” is not particularly detailed as a starting strategy, it creates the conditions to cultivate more complex and nuanced strategic particulars towards the same ends (rather than deviating all over the place). We might say it unfolds into a more complex strategic framework increasingly better able to integrate complexities and parse nuances.

You might think that this specific example would never accomplish much beyond breaking a community into coalitions of old boy abusers and insurgent survivor-defenders. This is true enough for some contention points, but not others. While both coalitions punish people for associating with the other coalition, in this example the abusers (and loyalists) are largely self-interested and the anti-abusers in contrast are willing to self-immolate for the greater good. So the anti-abuser coalition can collectively punch harder.

This is all a matter of game theory, and it’s also mutual aid in the very literal evolutionary systems sense meant by Kropotkin and other scientists. It’s also how antifascists win against nazis. Any specific individual anti-abuser partisan might get crushed, jumped, or run out, but the overall strategy wins. Sacrificing for one another can grow from a few individuals – or even one – into a hegemonic strategy.

In this way, individual values and choices can absolutely change the world via catalyzing bottom-up transformations of social relations. Some of the most impactful folks have been anonymous or isolated individuals who were willing to light themselves on fire to stop fucked up shit.

Of course the strategic context can get really complicated, as with institutions.

CONFLICT, INCENTIVE PROBLEMS AND THE STATE’S ‘WITHERING’

Marx, at his best points in Capital, crawls out of the Hegelian mud and tries to examine the economic patterns of his time in plain terms of individual incentives (albeit largely preempted in most important respects by Smith, Proudhon, the Ricardians, et al.). But in privileging the economic he applies almost no such microscope to the state, which is basically just taken as captured and shaped for the benefit of the bourgeoisie as a class. Our target Engels — suddenly reentering the stage to cover for his master like a squawking clown — infamously doubles down on this to the point where it opened the door to that hack and sociopath Lenin:

“The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour)… As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.”

The holes in this are large enough to drive a genocidal state-capitalist empire through.

Putting aside the absolute absurdity of redefining “the state” in terms of who “runs” it… Without class tensions there’s nothing left to repress? There’s no incentive to repress?

Why shouldn’t a specific proletarian hero, upon seizure of the state administrative apparatus, seek to gain influence over some corner or aspect of it so as to increase their own personal gratification in some way?

Putting aside for a second how the magical “socialization” of the state to just be an administrative apparatus without coercion might happen, we’ve already talked about sources and dynamics of power outside physical force. Even if all trace of centralized coercive force evaporated, centralized administrative dynamics still create chokepoints of information flow and social relations that enable abuse and power more generally. Taking the case of just a newspaper with democratically recallable editors, it’s easy to see myriad ways such roles can be leveraged with the centralized infrastructure for power and catalyzed into relative immunity from any democratic action or sanction.

Of course one can postulate that the abolition of class — the supposed engine of all prior history — and the solidarity forged in proletarian struggle, might radically transform individual motivations to the point where everyone’s desires are in harmony and no one can even imagine seeking the advantage. This would be a bit awkward of a causal flow after emphasizing the ways that material desires and conditions determine social structures. But hey, slap some invocations of “dialectics” on that and then never consider the causal messiness of an arbitrarily proclaimed transition period whereby social dynamics, for the first time ever in Engels’ picture, start substantively overwriting the previously dominant material drives of individual agents.

Or maybe what makes the proletarian revolution and onset of communism unique is that it conquers material needs, and with one’s material needs met can a transformation of individual perspectives, values, etc. finally take place. And yet this depends upon a cleaving of “needs” and “wants” that is inescapably arbitrary, or at least social rather than raw material or biological fact. Do you need to live to see old age? What age specifically? Do you need food more complex than nutrition paste? How about fruits laboriously grown in other climes and shipped at great environmental cost? Any ‘common sense’ notion we might use to draw particular lines between need and want immediately reveal cultural conditions and norms that themselves demonstrably shift. And wherever you draw the lines there seem always to be individuals quite motivated by material “wants” far beyond their “needs.” This is to say nothing of resource-costly art projects or the like. In any case, Engels seemingly cuts off this line of retreat for himself by explicitly using the phrase “means of subsistence and of enjoyment.”

Any presence of such individual interests derail the picture of the socialized state apparatus as irrelevant to anything beyond managing universal interests.

Politics involving competing interests will continue and indeed have all the more impact. The managers of the ‘former’ state can’t simply dispassionately calculate “true needs” from a godlike vantagepoint outside human society.

Note that we don’t have to hypothesize the construction of a specific bureaucratic class for this worker’s state (or “socialized” managerial institution) to go nasty. Domination frequently exists outside class patterns, often quite sharply. The mere existence of a centralized bottleneck in social relations and information communication provides opportunities for power. It doesn’t matter if the managerial function is overseen by universally inclusive direct democracy, there are still numerous exploitable dynamics; from who is involved in formulating the propositions put to vote, to who has what level of participation in committees or the like. And of course majoritarianism itself is a form of domination; if one is to postulate “checks and balances” within this institution to protect society from, for example, deciding to ritualistically murder the least popular person every week (or just sharply skew production away from their needs), one is obligated to lay out a political theory of how checks and balances can prevent abuse, corruption, the runaway accumulation of power, etc. Particularly in light of there being absolutely zero cases of such schemes ever working in the long run with any existing state.

This all is to say almost nothing about the inability for an individual’s one vote to reflect the degree of their personal stake in an issue, or the degrees of inefficiency introduced to getting things done by having them talked out and politically decided. The neighborhood assembly met today to evict you for having painted your house a color a majority finds garish and afterwards the vote on grain transfers was held up with procedural maneuvering by Karen who is keeping everyone hostile until she gets even more things her way.

In all this I’ve been charitably reading Engels’ description of the socialized state, but of course, by “the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production” it’s important to note that Engels has not avowed an institution of centralized violence. He has merely asserted that in a classless society the state would not be “repressive” and thus not technically meet a boutique definition of “state” basically conjured on the spot.

It’s a similar kind of twist of language as that he pulls in On Authority, “Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours” which might seem reasonable for a second before you realize he’s working to reduce questions of domination to questions of causality. And thus to bypass the question of overall choice as well as conflate the act of resisting and disrupting systems of constraint of one’s agency with any influence upon the wider world, including tyrannical net-constraint of others. Since everything is causally bound to everything else, Engels can thus call, for example, being gay in public an authoritarian imposition on others. Lost is whether one has choices, how many, of what depth, and what they are. To say nothing of aggression and self-defense.

Someone persuading some friends and broader community to contribute in certain ways to a project through conversations might well be “imposing their will” in a causal sense, but it’s worlds apart from having no other option but bringing a proposal on the project to be voted up or down by a crowd at the homeowner’s association meeting. And if you give that homeowner’s association all the guns?

Because the state is not merely any social structure or association, nor is it even equivalent to the centralized organization form Engels seems to take as default and inescapable in On Authority. The state is a social institution of centralized violence. Whether a gang, chiefdom, private security firm, or westphalian nationstate, states severely warp the landscape of options and reduce net possibility and agency.

Once a state exists it’s easier to accomplish some goals via simply winning control over the state and its capacity to sweepingly impose violence — which means that all other approaches to problem-solving wither. This compounds until there’s no resiliently diverse solutions OR bottom-up consensus reaching for any goal. Not only does this reinforce the state’s monopoly on means of doing anything, but said increasing monopoly also warps individuals’ perceptions of what’s possible. Sunk-costs of specialization encourage continuing to fight over the state rather than choose different means.

States can accomplish some goals fast (particularly if the goal is simplistic economy of scale like “produce a billion nails”, and all the more so if years of state violence have subsidized structures of capital that are similarly centralized). But states are at the same time incredibly inefficient at integrating complex distributed information like diverse subjective individual desires and their local particulars. And, beyond taking in information, the state is a complete clusterfuck applying responses to particularized contexts. The centralization of the state simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to solve complex problems in complex ways. As information needs to go towards the center (whether a supreme leader or the agenda board of a general assembly) it needs to be collected, compressed, and parsed. This is notoriously hard and inherently lossy.

All this skews what the state can accomplish, but it also skews the imaginary of those preoccupied with the state as a means. Those who specialize/focus on state-capture and state-direction begin to think entirely in terms of only the goals the state can obtain. First the state replaces other means regarding a set of problems it can actually solve, then, with other means weakened and marginalized, it becomes a more immediately useful tool by comparison for an even wider set of things — even if less efficient than said other means used to be. Finally, as the state becomes more and more of a monopoly on means to any given ends, the other social means become not only not readily available, but increasingly inconceivable, so people don’t even think to create alternatives when still more efficient.

The state allows social or political power to function as a widely fungible currency — and increasingly perceived as universally fungible. To accomplish any ends, one must first go through the matrix of the state. And so it increasingly makes sense for individuals to drift into elevating the occasional instrumental goal of capturing state power to a universal instrumental or even root goal. People have limited cognitive capacity so they prioritize effective strategies in their context, which, in the context of a (state) society where social power can get you anything, means power.

This doesn’t just incentivize prioritizing the fervent pursuit of political power, it incentivizes individuals to preserve (and expand) the state’s capacity. Why put away or whittle down an army or police force when you might need them in a few years? Why tolerate this check on state power when another person in power later might have a similar opportunity to remove it?

Beyond the ratchet of inexorably growing state power, other asymmetries build up in state policy around how hard it is to skew the state in one direction versus another as a consequence of external asymmetries. So, for example, those with more concentrated power, wealth, popularity, information-flow-capture, or whatever, can mobilize more resources than more diffuse actors, and so they win political contests for the state’s power. The state thus reproduces general accumulative tendencies beyond the state, deepening inequalities in not just wealth (if any sort of property titles exist) but also in myriad other things like popularity.

Because the state can impose a sweeping universal conclusion, it allows for the outright suppression of competition in ways otherwise not possible. In capitalism, this looks like e.g. conglomerates shutting out small firms or capital winning in its competition with labor. Under state communism, it looks like those with the right connections shutting out those outside their patronage networks. For example, captured state power allows one to shut out scientists not part of the social capital network, weakening necessary competition and diversity in science.

None of these processes can be stopped by “making a law against them” or writing some constitutional document. Pieces of paper don’t magically stop the cops from realizing they hold all the guns and can just threaten to murder the mayor’s family. Even if you can get wings of government to fight one another, they’re rarely balanced forever and there are so few competing wings of the state that collusion or centralization is the inevitable direction. Moreover, no law can ever be structured with the particularity necessary to handle the complexities of actual social life. Every law, by nature, generalizes in ways that regularly inflict pain. And, of course, every law needs an escalatory mechanism for those that entirely disregard it and its enforcers.

The state is, in short, a runaway collective action problem. Centralized institutions of violence impose clumsy edicts — whether through democratic, technocratic, or dictatorial means, it does not matter — which drives out problem solving via building consensus or finding ways to diversify.

The state interrelates with the economic, but is not reducible to it. Nor would abolishing class conflict remove the opportunity and incentive for domination via the state, even if it’s renamed as some mere managerial assembly.

There are ways to impede, erode, exploit, and sometimes collapse states, but these methods of resistance are obviously quite hard. It takes an extraordinary amount of energy to stop a state once it’s been started. In the longest-term perspective for all humanity, it’s worth investing in stopping the state and setting up robust social antibodies (normalized individual strategies, etc.) against its reemergence. But the barrier to accomplishing this is high. The thing about incentive traps is it can be quite costly to eventually get out of them.

So it matters quite a lot when someone is trying to seize influence in revolutionary circles, but hasn’t got the slightest fucking analysis on the table of how to avoid catastrophe, and is also aggressively hostile to anyone who actually does.

WHY ALL THIS MATTERS

When it comes to power dynamics in general, we must, as Engels writes of the productive forces, “grasp their action, their direction, their effects.” This is certainly not a novel task and so it may be understandably uninteresting to a middle class PhD seeking to establish a personal brand in a revolutionary movement. But it is nevertheless a task countless throughout history have focused on, and one that anarchists, since the advent of our modern movement with Proudhon’s declaration, have singled in on.

By the time tanks had rolled through the workers of Hungary, most of the messiah’s followers outside the gulag regimes grudgingly admitted the problem of the state, but they were loathe to acknowledge the grubby anarchists had gotten anything right, much less by anything other than dumb luck.

As their ideological legacy spawned corrective epicycles upon epicycles this no doubt provided a lot of ink for academics who found the sweeping aggregate social abstractions, conceptual demarcations, and general pretensions of Marxism useful in cranking out papers, but what is useful for activists seeking to radically change the world is not necessarily what is interesting or “novel.” The truth is often plain and pedestrian.

The core sin analyzed in all of the above sections on Anti-Duhring is a drive to establish The Prophet as providing a uniquely novel account of the world that went dramatically beyond the anarchists, Ricardian socialists, and popular layman analyses of exploitation by the factory bosses.

To defend his bud’s crown — and as a consequence his own stature in the socialist movement — Engels embraces rhetorical bombast that cannot frame Marx as merely extending existing discourse by degree, but must instead frame the situation as a complete and total break, a conceptual revolution on par with that of Darwin or Copernicus. Marx is therefore not performing merely an immanent critique and minor combative reformulation from within the classical liberal political economy discourse he is fascinated with, nor is an account of how material infrastructure and economic norms influence social patterns to be brokered as merely a matter of degree of emphasis. No, to completely demolish Duhring it must become a totalizing grand picture of all world history. A quick bit of rhetorical flare in the Manifesto must be defended to the point of establishing universal laws that turn all of history upside down.

Anti-Duhring is primarily remembered for Engels’ passage on the proletarian capture of the state, but what I’ve tried to draw out here is how so many other topics he covers all serve to build blinkers around that passage. All of (European) history must be rewritten to reduce the question of political power to ultimately nothing more than something entirely determined by the economic. Issues of complexity, distribution, calculation, knowledge, etc., must be dismissed to both keep this historical revision afloat and, inevitably, to duck the managerial questions of the post-rev ‘not-state.’ With this must go all broader analysis of power, even though a sincere analysis here might’ve generated an actually useful response to Duhring’s focus on force. And so too must questions of moral values, motivations, and strategies be handwaved away, so that no actually radical, actually bottom-up analysis can be made of incentives and actions with regard to state (and managerial) power.

It’s beyond the scope of this text to lay out in exhausting detail the complex and varying strategies by which people seize power within political (and ‘community’) institutions, hopefully the quick sketches above should be sufficient to prove the point about the relevancy of politics and the paucity of handwaving appeals to the term “democracy.” Some may object by way of an overly-narrow focus on solving the illustrative examples given, but I am disinterested in writing out a modern variant of The Prince for democratic assemblies and managerial committees. Disingenuous Marxist entryists ruthlessly scheming and seizing what power accidentally exists are a staple around the margins of activist spaces, they need no pointers, and the messiah and Engels’ own behavior in the IWA shows they haven’t fallen far from the tree.

Those taught to dismiss ethical questions of values and strategies in favor of clunky accounts of causality in society inevitably teach themselves the same things they desperately avoid putting in explicit words. Since the only true causal force comes from material conditions, there can be no interrelation of ends and means; lying, obscuring, and ruthlessly socially positioning is thus written off as entirely neutral, simultaneously necessary in day-to-day scheming, and also irrelevant to the formalized doctrine of The Immortal Science.

While I wrote this in hopes of providing a one-stop collection of correctives that many recently-converted Marxists repeatedly express ignorance and bewilderment of, they are certainly, to many, blindingly obvious. And this is the source of many a sneer, that anarchists — with our attention to the genesis and mutation of moral values, the dynamics of interpersonal and political power, and concern with the centralization not just of political power but technological infrastructure — are not saying anything new or novel. Indeed what we’re saying is often just the common sense of oppressed people resisting, plus a little radical consistency and long-term extrapolation. “There is no poison as deadly as power.” Never mind that this has set us against the entire existing order, in a fractal opposition that leaves nothing unexamined (from factory farms to bedtimes). In much of the Marxist tradition, like old elite lodges of esoteric knowledge closed to the wider world, nothing could so repulsively mark someone as part of the wider status quo, so basically liberal.

And sure, from a perspective that sees the state as a mere secondary perturbation or epiphenomena of the economic, any critique of that perspective is necessarily “liberal,” but, from the anarchist perspective that puts social power first, what primarily characterizes liberalism is its naive theory of the state as neutral democratic site and managerial apparatus.

Although Engels recognizes that the states of his era are entangled with the interests of the capitalists, his assumption that the state will change in character (so as to not even be classified as a ‘state’) upon a change of its wielders and class interests is the absolute height of liberal naivety. Thus in the most important sense of the term, Engels is just a liberal.

Anarchists have long grouped state socialists and liberals together as essentially the same thing. When someone is ripping your mask off in front of the cops it matters very little what pins they wear and what books line their shelves. This is part of the reason that the Bernie revolution so smoothly took millions of people from a liberal progressivism to bible-thumping stale Marxist texts; the gap is actually not that wide, the conceptual reformulation not that deep.

The real work is to examine power at every scale, in every flavor and guise. Historical materialism studiously avoids this, as Engels is forced to make apparent in Anti-Duhring.

But again, totally just hitting that dopey cad Engels here. I’ve critiqued not one holy word of Marx here and so who can really say how much this critique applies to him. Your fave is secure. Perhaps even strengthened by this pruning of a hanger-on. What we do know is that after the messiah’s death, Engels burned many of his letters from Marx. No doubt because the Messiah agreed with me (but a lowly scribe uncovering and preserving his eternal genius) entirely and Engels just couldn’t live with the shame.

The Psychological Economy Of Inaction

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 03:19:14 +0000

It became briefly popular for a while to focus on our limits to process choice – decision fatigue, “spoons”, etc – and to promote a kind of economizing around such. But I think it’s also illuminating to do the opposite: to economize around our limited capacity to deal with a lack of agency.

One of the central motivations of insurrectionary anarchism is the insight that not only can reproducible attacks inspire further acts of resistance, but that inaction breeds inaction.

Every time you defer making a choice or otherwise taking an action you habituate that deference.

Human neural nets are just imperfect that way. We innately train ourselves on a variety of meta-levels, in ways that unfairly conflict with our conscious self-narrative. Moving something to a “to do” column rather than doing it here and now feels like a self-contained action, but it isn’t.

Our very agency itself isn’t a binary force that leaps into existence with our consciousness, but is a process of thinking & acting that can be present to various degrees and likewise habituated or repressed.

We can be constructing a narrative of consciousness without also engaging in the process of agency – reflection cohering into a resolution that is applied externally in action. As so many experiments show, consciousness isn’t the same thing as agency.

This is not quite the same thing as the lag often found in consciousness creation, where the narrative we end up congealing on re the mechanism behind our actions demonstrably doesn’t precede them or in fact is clearly false. Choice clearly exists and our conscious deliberations influence and pave the way for it, but the internal causal jockeying that leads to one action or another are distributed in simultaneous many processes with conscious experience merely one process congealing amid all of them, and somewhat out of sync.

Consciousness is related to the singularity of action. The processes within our brains may be distributed and simultaneous, but the actual action our bodies can take is singular. We either crack open a beer or we do not, we cannot live in a superposition of states. This forces unification upon the distributed simultaneousness of our thinking: many circuits or flickers can fire within the network, but they must congeal, converge, or combat to some level of unification.

Consciousness is a process that helps facilitate persistent coherence generally. This is not the same thing as the process of choice that leads to any given action, they’re both matters of emergent coherence, but consciousness is given the far more involved task to cohering with one’s history. Varying circuits of choice resolving disparate processes can flicker in and out; consciousness has to persist in a linear coherent narrative.

Consciousness may not decide whether you throw a punch in a given situation, but by having access to the memories it stores in its own vernacular, it can statistically influence the construction of habits of thought that will directly influence future pugilistic choices.

All of which is to underline: just because you’re conscious doesn’t mean you’re agential. Agency is – perhaps unfortunately – habituated.

Depression is such an obvious example it seems insulting to point it out. One might be fully conscious, one might have intense and quite intelligent thoughts spinning around, and yet no congealing into action. No substantive emergence of choice.

While there are many possible causes to depression, the simple habituation of inaction can be one of them. If we’re not using the muscle of congealing disparate impulses and proto-thoughts into a resolved choice that muscle withers and becomes less instinctive. And that meta-level instinct is the only way that choice happens. Not through consciously making a chore list or whatever.

The naïve response to this is to embrace action for action’s sake, to reactively despise and fear inaction. Better to take a wrong action than to slide into zombification. This is trivially a bad strategy and listing examples where more reflection and hesitation are intensely called for instead of action is left as an exercise to the reader.

Various contexts require various levels of agency, and for the more historically-informed process of consciousness to be able to efficaciously influence the meta-choice of inaction versus action it is often helpful to cultivate some balance of instinct.

Sometimes it’s ideal to instinctively choose action, other times it’s ideal to instinctively dissuade the congealing of proto-thought into action. We can habituate distinct tendencies in distinct contexts, but there’s always the problem of slide and creep. If we’re habituating inaction in most spaces in our life that can start to affect things in other spaces.

This means that we must consider the economy of inaction in our personal lives. Are we choosing situations, contexts, struggles, etc. that overall habituate inaction and a general lack of immediate agency or choice?

Some level of such is unavoidable. We are not phantoms of immediacy and have aspirations across time that sometimes require the deferment of immediate choice. The ultimate reach of our agency out into the universe always depends to some extent on the limiting of our immediate congealment into action.

The opposite direction – habituated immediate action – leads to the collapse of persistent structures in our minds. We become all instinct, and what is knitted together in the immediate process of ‘choice’ is inferentially shallow. Instead of barely moving corpses we become predictable crude robots.

If you constantly put yourself in situations where immediate action is required you will lose your capacity to reflect and abandon the richness of internal complexity that can make us illegible or at least insufficiently predictable to institutions of domination.

But far more common in today’s world is the proliferation of experiences where immediate action or choice is a really bad idea. We condition ourselves not to act, not to choose, and certainly not to explore or experiment.

Standing at the hot griddle, checked out, while your manager berates you is perhaps a necessary evil in your life. But there are myriad other moments and experiences in your daily life. We can consciously make broad choices about at least some of the situations we put ourselves in.

There is, in short, an economics to our daily lives: a balance sheet to be constantly evaluated of situations habituating inaction and those habituating action.

And this cuts to some extent against the paradigm of an economics of attention wherein we are constantly being fatigued by too many choices. (Which, note: is quite different from the axis of habituated action or habituated inaction.)

There is cognitive fatigue or fraying that can set in from evaluating complex and stressful choices. This is partially a matter of things like mere blood sugar and oxygen. It can also be a matter of increasingly jumbling apart once productive distributed processes of proto-thought, or of simply reaching diminishing returns in the building of some extended circuit or cognitive project that needs to be reset and rebuilt in different directions. This broad sort of cognitive fatigue is largely a product of the complexity of the task or problem being sorted and the still limited raw resources of human brains.

The problem of habituated inaction is, in contrast, a problem of the very structure of cognition in neural nets.

Partisans of authoritarianism often argue that because homo sapiens presently happen to be rather limited in our raw cognitive resources immediate choice (and ultimately general agency as well) is not something to embrace and maximize but a painful hurtle to our well-being that should be minimized. Instead of the psychic trauma of picking a toothpaste, a grey authoritarian state, perhaps reskinned as a degrowthy community, should do us the pleasure of taking that choice away from us. The lack of commodities in Cuba that Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers so memorably fawned over is a great example.

But taking away choice isn’t a path to happiness, it’s a path to depression. Freedom from stress or fatigue, perhaps, but certainly not a freedom to influence the wider universe. This is not to praise the shallow causal depth that a choice over mere toothpaste has, but to emphasize the often overlooked degree to which even small situations of immediate choice in our lives help habituate our capacity to act.

Capitalism, of course, recognizes this in its limited feedback capacity – everyone who has ever worked a grey and immiserating job without any real choice knows full well the relief of small choices in buying lunch or a snack, even when that act of choice is financially costly in a way that outweighs its resulting pleasures. The vending machine at work is a pressure valve, a very tiny restorative fix, so we don’t habituate inaction beyond all function as workers. We need opportunities for immediate choice just to keep functioning above the level of complete depression.

We are often quite conscious of the need for repair from fatigue. The sapping of physical energy or cognitive traction is immediately apparent. Zoning out in front of a tv show while a body recovers. Reseting an overextended brain with the small death of an orgasm. Retreating to the known-unknowns and structurally fenced-in complexity of a video game to rebuild our frayed mental circuits. Such conscious strategies for recuperation from the happenstance limits of homo sapiens are widespread. And most people quickly become old hats at consciously evaluating the balance sheets of such considerations.

But rarely do we talk or even explicitly think of how many situations we put ourselves in where we have choice, where action is habituated instead of inaction.

One problem is that today’s shallow choice becomes tomorrow’s routine or video game. Weighing options at the vending machine eventually slips out of something that actually takes disparate distributed processes of cognition congealing together into action and becomes itself just another pre-determined ritual with, perhaps, some limited value in how it destresses with certainty, but no real exercise for one’s cognition-integrating muscles.

Insofar as the necessity of this exercise reaches us we tend to treat it clumsily in terms of things like “self-actualization” or “artistic expression” or the like. But these obscure the core of what is going on: we need agency in the world and that agency depends upon the habituation of the process by which disparate thoughts resolve into singular action (before consciousness does its own transcription).

I have long worked on a shifting array of long-term projects that I believe are of sharp importance but often aren’t designed to see immediate consequence. Usually they necessitate a great degree of instrumentalization of myself over extended periods. In a certain vernacular this is described as “self-alienation” – the civilized modernist turn away from the immediate wildness of true anarchy. I dissent on such fetishization of immediacy as itself liberation, but I have also a longstanding respect for the need for regular immediate action and the dangers of habituating inaction.

Sometimes the greatest value of an attack isn’t in its direct consequences, but in reminding yourself how to act. How to resolve.

We are not magical cartesian ghosts that can pivot any which way upon the input of some mystical ‘willpower’ – and thinking so is a path to depression. We are distributed processes that must practice bottom-up unification to accomplish anything.

Contextualizing Introversion

Wed, 19 May 2021 03:19:14 +0000

Humans can think far faster than they can speak. This is the root of so many things, not the least of which is part of how meetings feel so stultifying and oppressive to most folks. But there are people who like meetings and who profess that they find them of benefit to their own thinking. What does this reveal?

An ex of mine constantly ridiculed these people, seeing meetings as the rule of the “lowest common denominator” where the slowest thinking (and most ignorant) person in the group sets the pace of the whole.

I do not deny that this can occur to some degree, but I think that analysis is mostly rooted in a mistaken assumption of great variation in the default speed of human brains. For a variety of reasons I doubt genetic dynamics give rise to such postulated stark variations. Human cognitive hardware is largely fixed across and within populations, the largest source of variation is overwhelmingly a matter of software – that is to say what cognitive strategies do we adopt and employ.

The answer is thus basically that humans can consciously think at the slow speed of language, and that many traditional communities probably encouraged and normalized this, so that most of the brain’s activity was used in supplemental activity: perceiving and mediating cultural, emotional, interpersonal cues, etc in constant feedback loops. But with modern societies came not just a metabolic break but a cognitive break. We reallocate cognitive resources to problem solving techniques and pathways that are not conversational. Consciousness and analytical thought becomes a kind of runaway tendency that eats up more and more brain power, and we become more individualized as a result.

People who like meetings (not all meetings, but at least some types) tend not just to say that these meetings help them clarify and become more conscious of their ideas but also that they find the social enmeshedness valuable in-and-of-itself. They’ve optimized their brains for conversational processing, the collective is the agent, and they’re relatively happy to be pieces within it. Meanwhile the rest of us who see meetings as instrumental chafe at the bit, constantly wanting to scream “yes-yes-yes-yes we all get where this is going let’s fucking SKIP AHEAD” or “THIS COULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL.” Because we see the meeting as a clumsy attempt to solve a series of technical problems that we’ve built tools and instincts to solve alone in our heads, so that on some issues we’re done with the homework while everyone else is still excruciatingly going through the first problem on the board.

But this doesn’t just play out in big ol centralized meetings, it comes to bear in informal conversational settings as well. Often “introverted” folks can step into a gregarious or charming socializing mode that passes as extroverted for a period of time but find themselves “drained” by this. I don’t think we have to appeal to handwavey conceptions of “psychic energy” to account for this. Another word I like to use for the sensation of oversocialization is “frayed” because it feels like your mind is falling apart. There stops being a stable locus of self-aware studious reflection – what some call the self – and one starts to feel increasingly like a distributed random assortment of reactionary responses. You’re not in control of your responses, the tight feedback loop of self-aware choice in your actions starts to dissolve. Someone says something and you just say something back, bypassing any sort of central knot of consideration, detached from a tree of values stemming out from a consistent core. One begins to act and respond in less considered and more contradictory or incoherent ways. Worse, someone will emote something and there won’t be any sort of studious reflection on what to feel, you’ll just instinctively feel something in response and emote it – turning everything into a hellishly mechanistic tic-tac-toe of emerging emotional tangles & conflicts.

There is no worse existential terror.

The operative term in all this is “shallow inferential depth.” Agency is a tightly wound feedback loop that allows for predictive modeling. An internal structure is built to preemptively navigate some external structure. Instead of doing a thing we imagine ourselves doing it, we pick apart ‘doing it’ into processes, components, relations, so that we can predict a solution rather than finding it via trial and error. The further out we can predict or infer when it comes to consequences, the more choice we have to make before acting.

As daily aspects of our existence became more and more technical – and as we decoupled from the slow aggregation of tradition – individuals have gravitated more and more to specializing in extended predictive mapping, more involved or more deeply rooted models. Competitive pressures plus more complex and increasingly novel environments leads to generalized individual aptitude.

Instead of optimizing for a stable consistent social and environmental context we’ve optimized for more fluid reconfigurability.

When you can’t depend upon consistent environmental conditions tradition and reaction become less fit strategies than more autonomous thinking and modeling. And when you don’t grow up in a fixed and limited social network, but a graph of relations that is always changing, bouncing you between cultures, expectations, and norms, you have to go searching for deeper consistencies in the world, finding tools that you can work with on your own, regardless of social situation.

It’s not that people who like meetings are stupid, they just haven’t built their minds to solve the same sort of problems the same way as more autonomous individuals.

It’s my suspicion that the two cultures war between STEM and humanities, and the tension of technical versus social, arises from the same underlying dipole that gives rise to the introversion versus extroversion tension. Markets versus communism. Modernism versus primitivism. Obviously loosely overlapping ven diagrams with many individual/etc exceptions, but nevertheless each a dichotomous tension that arise in part from the same underlying tradeoff in where cognition gets assigned.

A processor can focus on better meshing with other processors or it can develop internal depth that puts it out of sync.

In the debate over anarchist economic systems I’m prone to talking about the unknowable complexity of individuals and their desires – which resonates immediately with roughly half of folks, but meets completely flat responses from the other half. The most honest among them will even explicitly talk of wanting to strip away the desire creation and diversification of the modern world. They say they wouldn’t feel like they were drowning on a simple land project with simple chores and simple dramas, they would feel “in harmony.” They wouldn’t feel bogged down by endless socializing and drama considerations, but engaged, finally free from the oppression of inhuman autonomous technical work. Less crafting, more touchey feely.

And I think introverted nerds often ignore that there is a kind of complexity going on such situations. There are myriad feedback loops happening, lots the brain is taking into account, it’s just doing so to return to an equilibrium, to keep the broader net knit together. A lot of people consider this kind of enmeshedness a kind of freedom.

In a sense it kills conscious choice and inferential depth, spreading out cognitive tasks from active complex modeling and choice into small little predictive and responsive subconscious processes. But I think it makes sense a lot of people built themselves in ways where find the singularity of analytic consciousness painful.

Analytic thinking is a kind of centralism and isolationism. It rips one’s brain out of sync with the surrounding network, and it subordinates the otherwise distributed processing of the brain into one singular conscious line of query. Every subconscious sub-agent flows towards the central conscious project, delivering insights (associations) and handling tasks, all to further one self-reflective spiraling hurricane.

The singularity of consciousness – of self-aware analytic thinking – is a cartesian break. By severing itself and turning inward it can model and thus make leaps ahead of immediate stimuli or reaction, it can avoid energy gradients sloping down into traps, it can jump out of suboptimal local equilibria and leap to better ones.

But comes at two costs: 1) fragility and 2) responsibility. Attempting to modeling the root dynamics of the world around you means taking the risk that you get the model wrong. Models are lossy, individuals are ignorant and limited. Radicalism is the hubris to think a little analysis can get a better result than tradition and instinct. Radicalism can see absurd successes, but it can also go terribly wrong. A radically new strategy, tool, or social order can fail to horrific effect. And so radical thinking contains within itself a ratcheting logic: once you start trying to solve problems by modeling, you’re statistically likely to create at least a few new problems, which (because they’re new), traditional or instinctual responses can’t really help with. So you use more modeling to solve them. You are suddenly burdened by responsibilities. Eventually nothing can be left to instinct or tradition, and you risk diverging entirely from anything like a human baseline capable of communicating with other humans.

The primitivists and other reactionaries phrase this broad tendency as attempting to solve problems with the same sort of thinking that created them. Technology and science create problems, so we use technology and science to try and solve them. Thinking about whether Alex would be into dating you creates new problems, that you solve by thinking more about The Alex Situation.

This reflective spiral can burrow pretty deep, but to sustain that kind of depth requires imperialistically appropriating the whole of your brain, killing or redirecting the kind of minor swirling little cycles that once maintained the status quo and meshed with your environment into drones all contributing to the greater whole. Birds flying in a giant collective whirlwind.

This is fragile in a number of ways. You may be focusing on a brushstroke in your painting and someone suddenly talks to you, derailing the whole fucking project in your head. To keep the great spiral of analysis, of self-reflection, of consciousness, going starts to require certain external conditions. A quiet room. A forest retreat. A consistent driving musical beat. Whatever.

And once you normalize to such conditions – forget even how to slow and decentralize your mind – you’re less tolerant of normal human conditions.

It’s excruciating sitting in a meeting where the only thing of interest has already been solved in your head an hour ago. Where you’ve already coldly evaluated the desires in competition around the board table and mapped out the inexorable conclusion of their debate. Where even when you try to speed up the goddamn process you’re left drowning in the molasses of how fucking slow your own voice is. Conversations feel like prisons. Dialogue chains you down into the thudding slowness where you can’t just go off and fully solve another problem while you’re getting another syllable out in the excruciatingly slow sentence because you are being forced to keep track of time and other people and where the glacial conversation is currently at.

Because if you allow your side thoughts to spin out productively in the eternity between syllables you’ll lose track of the script you were mouthing, maybe forget a word.

Personally I conceptualize “all the language stuff” as a cantankerous jalopy in my brain, sputtering and kicking off smoke, barely held together, segregated off in a corner. It’s so far away from where I live, who I am, and what I do. But it’s a necessary gateway to much of the external world. And sometimes I have to crawl inside it, get those social pathways and heuristics all connected. Run it for too long, however, and it’ll fall completely apart, leaving you trapped digging yourself out of the remains. The distinctness of your conscious knot unravels, the threads pulled apart in the wreck.

Conveying this is sometimes hard, for much the same reason that some folks can’t grasp that people can still speak while incapable of breathing. “I am oversocialized, I am incapable of processing language,” seems to contain a performative contradiction. The speaker is, after all, processing language in a sense, but the distinction is in the depth of processing.

I’ll be gregarious and highly social for hours and hours, but then suddenly realize I’ve reached my limit. Which is to say by which point I’ve become re-emersed in the social fabric, more immediately responsive and rapidly approaching a total collapse of analytic thinking where I cease to be coherent, the once distinct tight feedback loop of self-awareness nearly entirely unraveled.

Trying to maintain the conscious loop and the analytic distance it requires necessarily conflicts with maintaining the re-expanding language and social subroutines. So I desperately have to kill my language functions or – in a very real sense – be killed myself. And I have to get away from interruptions or even the possibility of interruptions.

Rebuilding myself after such fraying at first often looks like a lot of zoning out or working in a simple domain or problem space. Often for hours and hours. The subroutines dedicated to better meshing with my social environment start to recede, and the shattered disparate parts of my mind end up being forced back into coherence as the problem-solving loop expands, eating up more and more.

Finally the brain is unified, a singular self-aware loop again, all rogue noise cleared away. At this point the loop can change focus from the simple task I’ve put it to. If I can mark out clear priorities I can start knocking them down or I can spiral out in investigation and unified play. If I don’t get derailed in this process and have enough time to go between different focuses in different domains I eventually rebuild the mental armor surrounding my central loop of consciousness. Every subconscious process rebuilt and studiously purposed towards the central conscious flow.

Why do this? Why not live more immediately, without the self-mediation of the conscious loop? Why not just get drunk?

Well I think the reason I personally fear this is that I’m a novelty hound that really likes empathically modeling and taking certain perspectives or strategies for controlled test drives. I contain multitudes of values and tools, which need to be ordered. Understanding how to harm other people, empathically modeling monsters, having a catalogue of naively persuasive bad arguments, is fucking dangerous. You can’t afford to ever fall asleep at the wheel and let one of the experiments grab control.

To contort a computer analogy it’s one thing when you have a clear hierarchy of nested virtualized operating systems, but what happens if during a bad reboot there was the possibility of the tiering getting shuffled so one of the containers gets root permissions?

In middle school I kicked a chair out from underneath a friend of mine who was leaning back. I did it just to see what would happen. A cold frame of mind. Granted this friend was generally kind of a prick, but that hardly warranted that level of aggression, and also it wasn’t why I did it. I was just in a “kill a man in reno just to watch him die” frame of mind. I fell into it. Happenstance motivation that drifted into prominence while my mind was particularly frayed. In a fog I saw the opportunity and the motivation. There was no self-reflection, no conscious loop, no hierarchy of desires and values, no unification across all the parts of my mind where some routines emerge into consistent dominance. Just happenstance.

Similarly I think we’ve all experienced a situation where, whether drunk or socially frayed, we reached for the wrong social tool, embracing a subroutine dedicated to sharp quips because that mental subroutine works and it just happens to be right there.

Of course the vast vast majority of the time when I’m frayed it looks more just like stumbling over words or forgetting a bit of consideration pertinent to a person or situation.

But the sharper your weapons, the more responsibility you have to use them appropriately. To keep your mind together as one unified system with ordered values and a tight knot of reflection.

Again, the cartesian analytic frame perpetuates itself. One’s insular disconnection creates internal abnormalities that oblige further disconnection.

And it’s worth emphasizing the dangers of the far limit of this. Isolation is catastrophic to human brains. Without exercising the various subroutines for social integration they atrophy, we lose the capacity to communicate. But, worse, we can spin off from reality. Humanity is a distributed processing system, and the limits of a single vantagepoint can be sharp. We need other minds to inspire us, to check us, and to download packages from.

The loop of self-awareness is necessary for radicalism (modeling root dynamics and jumping out of locally stable equilibria) and it can be instantiated at any scale, but human brains form faster circuits internally than between brains. This is why radicalism tends towards introversion and reaction towards the abolition of conscious agency. We often see reactionaries fetishising extroversion, from fratboy “Chad” archetype to the “natural and immediate community” to primitivists like Zerzan tilting at symbolic or reflective thought itself, but all extroversion/introversion happens in degrees and extroversion at varying intensities is not only reconcilable with radical tendencies, it can be deeply facilitative of them. Everything has a situational use.

If agency is a looping phenomenon that integrates external stimuli and churns on them, you can’t speak of expanding agency without expanding networks and bandwidth between nodes. Radicalism thus requires both strategies, whereas reaction embraces only one.