Entry 4 – From BC to MI

On the essay denouncement

The author of one of the three recent denouncements of nihilism that I am at least partially culpable in lives in the city of Vancouver (or so they say in the essay). My presentation there was pregnant with the possibility of a public face-to-face with this critic. Sadly, though not surprisingly, they did not make themselves known to me and I had to make my remarks about the bad faithedness and religiousity of their essay in front of an audience that didn’t seem exactly dialed into the details.

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Using an essay to work through issues, rather than meat space or a letter or even an email, is an interesting proposition to me. On the one hand I totally get it. Interpersonal shit can get gnarly quickly. Trying to engage with ideas without necessarily making them personal is hard and worthwhile work. And it’s a lot easier to work over the perception you have of other people’s perspective than their actual perspective. Bad things are bad after all, it’s all we know about them!

But it seems like a pretty rotten thing about the anarchist space to normalize this behavior.

Big travel

Vancouver was nice but I do stress a bit about leaving my bike, laden with bags, out in the public in big cities. In two short days I was able to hang out with an old friend, do a presentation, hang out with a new friend, and meet up for an interview. Finally I left V and headed back south to have someone look at my motorcycle who was smarter than me.

The next leg of my tour (after the social BC leg) was a solo leg. I first traveled to Yellowstone (originally I was going to Glacier AND Yellowstone) without realizing that at the end of April it was still fucking cold there. As in, snow line at about the level of altitude where I was camping cold and say what you will about riding but even I will not ride in the snow! This meant my two days of adventure in Yellowstone got cut short to one day before I bailed but here is what I saw in that brief time.

– A running battle between a bison and an RV
– about 30 feet of empty space between me and a pissed off bison after the RV got away
– Yellowstone annual staff act like they were about to have a kick-ass summer
– Cold canned food
– Mud pots
– Scary motorcycle parking

The next day I woke up and decided to hit the road. I’m thankful I did because otherwise I would have had to do a lot more miles in a single day than I would have liked (I’ve been trying to keep it to about six hours max) and I ended that day staring at this.

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After a slow ride through SD I landed in Minneapolis and the kind of loving embrace of my people there. Then an excellent ride through the UP of MI and a short trip through my childhood.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

I’m at about the half way point of the trip from the perspective of miles. I’m about to enter Canada for the last time on this trip. I am struck by endings. Some, if not many, of the people I have visited are from my past. Our time together was when we were both looking towards a future. Today, as I sat with an old (20+ years) friend they said to me that I have not changed much in the past five years. I’m working on a project that excites me. I’m with the same people as I was five years ago. I’m fully adulting, even if that doesn’t look all that adult. I don’t dwell all that much on the past.

As I head into the next context I am reflecting on that. Is it possible to be fair to new people you meet, who enter your life, while also respecting the memory of the relationships that come before. Don’t most of us choose one or the other? When framed that way I’d like to think that I choose neither. That I don’t live in a headspace dominated by the past or the present but with a type of simulflow.

A few days ago I was sitting with someone and talking about a personality trait I have that involves unconscious cruelty. I emphasized how my meanness isn’t usually intentional and they emphasized how many people despise me for it. One of my lessons from this trip is that both ways I pay a price. When I am intentionally nice I feel a falseness and like the resultant isn’t true. When I am honest I feel unliked. It’s easy to be pat about either approach but the lesson is that neither satisfies. There isn’t a right way to do this and the fact that I don’t get to be friends with everyone shouldn’t bother me half as much as it does.

Next up: Ontario, New York, Boston

How not to burn bridges

At some point I became exhausted with the process of making new friends. This is perhaps telling sign of aging but I no longer feel like the honeymoon period of a relationship is the most important one anymore. It used to be that the first three hours, three weeks, three months of a new person, getting to know them, to love them, to obsess about them was the ultimate social experience. This corresponded nicely with the fact that I ended up making a new set of friends every three months, seemingly whether I wanted to or not.

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The first sign of change was not, surprisingly, that it became more difficult for me to find new friends. Even after my decline from the cute plateau (age 16-24) I was still able to find new people. All of a sudden though I was no longer capable of being completely interested in all the things that people do. I blame radical politics for this, especially radical theory. I was so obsessed by my own self-education and the truth that I was finding the deeper I went down the rabbit hole theory that people who did not share my particular obsessions stopped being particularly interesting to me. You cannot balance a hunger for newness along with an obsession for depth.

I spend the next five years learning and relearning this lesson. Then I planted my feet and went deeper and deeper and deeper.

I recently had a recent post-cute plateau person, who I’ve known for at least five years, remind me that when I first met them I told them that they basically don’t exist for me until they’ve been around for years. Basically they asked me if they existed to me now, full well knowing that they had existed for some time. Although probably not the way that they wish that they had.

Lesson one: pick a piece of ground and stay there. It more or less goes without saying that if you come to the long haul in 10 years on a Tuesday evening I will be there also. Obviously I understand why people don’t like long haul, don’t like the ASG, or don’t like crowds but I’ve made a choice. Until something traumatic happens (which is obviously possible) I will be at this singular place having conversations about the things that I love with strangers and other people who at that point I will have known for two decades.

Lesson two: find some good people. Obviously I hate good people so here what I’m getting at is that I have spent way too much time having stupid conversations about bands, movies, and other people. Finding people who are interesting, compelling, interested is a serious fucking challenge. Don’t take it lightly. Don’t worry about the fact that it will not happen easily or quickly. Don’t take it too hard that you may not be as interesting as they are. That happens over time and will never happen if you surround yourself with the mundane.

Lesson three: find a mentor. Mentors are not elder wizards who are going to teach you alchemical wisd from a huge volume of recipes. One mentor might teach you to love better. Another by the martial art or an approach to martial arts. Another might just have a great attitude towards life. These people are your future comrades in arms. They are going to show you how to connect to others with the same interests as yourself. They are going to show you the extent of their abilities and vision which damn well better inform your own.

Lesson four: have patience.


This is a very busy time for us. In three weeks we will begin our annual eight days of anarchy celebration. This is our chance to spend a series of days and evenings together conspiring, gossiping, and decompressing. I have more to say but it is closer to the events but it goes without saying that I will be happy to see everyone come and happy to see everyone go.

The last few months have been filled with what I’m calling the 10 week death march. Eight projects in 10 weeks. We are just about done with all of the projects so I will list them.

  • Stirner’s critics
  • defacing the currency – new writings by Bob Black
  • between predicates, war: theses on contemporary struggle by the Institute for Experimental Freedom
  • anvil number four
  • The 2013 LBC catalog
  • Anarchism and violence – Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina
  • Feral Revolution
  • let’s destroy work. let’s destroy the economy

Fuck. The volume of content just in this list is enough for a year of reading and engagement. I’m going back to sleep.

How to burn bridges…

and not end up living a life of lonliness and desolation

I am a known bridge burner. This means that on several opportunities throughout my life I made choices that meant I lost friends. Not lost friends in that I got to pick them up again later, but lost friends in the sense that people who used to like me and want to be around me no longer wanted to be around me. When I say I have burned bridges I mean I have been entirely responsible for ending friendships that didn’t have to end.

burning-bridges

This used to be a point of pride. I took commitments to too many things like a type of oath. A type of modern demonstration of an old value system. An extension of this system was the idea, to put it tritely, that I was willing to draw clear lines: between good and bad behavior, between healthy and not healthy, and between me and others.

Obviously at some point I had developed a reputation. It was and is a deserved reputation. Terms like arrogant and asshole have plagued me for well over 20 years. These terms have made it easy for people to watch the bridges between us burn to cinders. But we’ll get into that in a bit.

The worst of this whole phenomenon has to do with loss and the fact that I am currently experiencing a great loss. One that I cannot share because everyone who I should be able to share it with his on the other side of the bridge. A burned out, irreconcilable, devastating bridge.


I briefly met Sara (nee Mike) Kirsch in the late 80s and became close friends, or at least friends, in the early 90s. I lived with Sarah for several years in the mid-90s. We stayed close or “urban close” for the next few years and more or less lost close contact with each other about 10 years ago. We would still see each other a few times a year but due to a major conflict having nothing to do with he and I haven’t seen each other in five or so years.

Like many other people, my relationship with Sarah was a relationship with hardcore music. Sarah always represented the peak or the greatest intersection between politics and hardcore music. Around Sarah, and to a looser extent the HeartattaCk scene, was the West Coast equivalent of what I imagined was the rich and mature political hardcore music scene of Washington DC.

I traveled for a few weeks along a similar set of cities with John Henry West during their 1993 tour. During that time I fell in love with the conversations, music, and the people of this imaginary place that, as it turned out, I was only a visitor in. Sarah was central to this place. He represented somebody who totally disavowed their bourgeois background and meaningfully demonstrated what living for and in political music could be. Living with him for the two years that I did was an important rite of passage in my own life.

Sarah was also deeply important in terms of how I understood veganism. How it related to straight edge, is related to a political practice, and is an intentional act of eating delicious food. My own transformation away from veganism was largely possible because I no longer had access to interesting, engaged vegans who didn’t repulse me.

An equally important rite of passage for me personally was leaving the 20th Street apartment that I shared with Sarah (and others). I didn’t enjoy the Mission enough to turn down the opportunities that became available to me in the East Bay. More than that though, I was ready to challenge what I was beginning to understand as a form of orthodox thinking by members of the hardcore scene, including Sarah. Although I didn’t understand it that way at the time.

The great success of the political hardcore scene was the linkage of subculture to something bigger/greater. The sense that our potlucks were also an expression of a political practice, that shows weren’t just about music, was a deep challenge for me personally. Seemingly the next level of this challenge was a sort of dropping out from the capitalist system. Of course it wasn’t, albums were still purchased, rent was still paid, shitty jobs were still worked, but the idea that we were part of an underground and that meant being broke, all the time, was pervasive. But this wasn’t as important for me as it was for people who grew up in the suburbs. People like Sarah and the vast majority of the hardcore scene.

I was challenging the idea that the best/only way to fight capitalism was to do it as a destitute victim of capitalism. Obviously this is an overblown statement but the nature of radical politics is that subtle complicated personal issues tend to become bumper stickers by way of communicating them to others. As I was getting skills with the intention to use them also get a paycheck I was bumper stickered, not at first, not brazenly, is a sellout. This shallow understanding of how to live in this world and how to fight against this world confirmed that I had finally, painfully, outgrown the hardcore scene.

I wasn’t able to attend Sarah’s memorial. To do so would’ve hurt one person who really didn’t deserve it and probably would’ve ended badly generally. That bridge is gone. There are still people who don’t realize how much I miss them, how much I miss hardcore praxis, and how this burnt bridge is not about them. They probably expected to see me at the memorial but it was impossible.


I used to burn bridges and was proud for doing so. While it’s too late for my childhood, for a few hundred friends I’ve had over the years, I have more-or-less stopped burning bridges. They almost never represented the clear line, or the transversal of a line, to anyone else other than me. At great personal cost I have finally got it through my thick skull that I don’t have to sacrifice personal relationships every time I want to make a principled stand.

Today my life is filled with people. On a weekly basis I talked to more people than I used to talk to in a month. My life is no longer constrained by job, house, Facebook, or family. I have the kind of relationships I hoped to have when I was young. My friends and collaborators are interested, engaged, and critical, by which I mean lovingly hostile, towards me and my projects. I used to burn bridges because I believed that principled behavior required it. Now I realize that things are not that simple anymore and neither am I.

If only trolls are cruel what’s left for us?

A self-criticism. I find terrible, mocking humor to be enjoyable. I laugh at others expense and find the foibles and flaws of my rivals and political adversaries to be particular amusing. I will, in all engaged interest, sit for hours detailing flaws and imperfections in others, hopefully to comedic effect. I am not going to attempt to caveat this trait by saying that I will laugh just as hard when the flaw being exposed is mine, although this is true. I just find, and I don’t love this about myself, that cruel humor is my favorite.

But I don’t take it seriously. My actual feelings about rivals, myself, or flawed activity is complicated by all of the qualities that ones feelings usually are. I am as likely to despise an adversary as I am a so-called ally. The qualities that I like in others is not related to my own particular preference towards cruelty.

In this sense I understand a lot of the motivation of trolls and troll culture. When we are powerless to impact the world in such a way where we can see the impact of our blows it makes sense to attack things that get injured. We are curious creatures that deeply desire to see our experiments flourish. The cruelty we inflict on the world is unrelated to the humans we inflict it on. This disconnection has obviously been exacerbated by the Internet and the seeming lack of consequence for cruelty but we (as in humans) have long since been disconnected and done horrible things (to the world & each other) as a result of this social unpluggedness.

 

While I still find considerable pleasure in a similar type of cruelty I have to acknowledge that I have the incredible privilege of not ever having to do it online. I have people who find the same things funny as I do around me all the time. I have constructed a life where these pleasures feature centrally. But the corporealness of them is most important. Cruelty in isolation would have long since twisted me into the ineffective pathetic creatures I host on various websites and blogs. I understand the troll and despise them because they are what I could have been if not for a combination of luck, will, and being just a bit too old to have become trapped by the Internet for my social self-understanding.

 

Is all PR good?

 

I recently have been alerted (thanks everyone!) to an actual IRL troll of me. Correction. This is not a cruel attack done for the lulz (or whatever) but someone who believes they are doing what they are doing in the name of anarchist activists (TM) everywhere. Putting aside the very sad (and real) story of this particular individual the difference between them and a troll, between cruelty and activism, between attack and denouncement, is a central concern for me right now.

Perhaps this is a statement of our time but this is also a way to orient our conflictual capacity in real terms. We can not reasonably talk about movements of the liberation of humans against the oppressors, or perhaps we can but we don’t. Instead our fights are microscopically small and our victories are even smaller. We talk about abstractions that we oppose and our actions in regard to them is very small (aka break window, write manifest). We have an IRC argument with someone and in turn hack their email, delete their memories, and publicly advertise their home address (true story) and call our victory total. Our capacity to hurt individuals is inversely proportional to the importance of doing the same. Bad people, especially bad radicals, have little to do with the condition of the world, the problems of daily life, or our incapacity to do anything about it. Or perhaps the opposite is true, perhaps bad people are directly related to capacity.

In a related story I recently corresponded with someone who is being publicly trolled and they turned to me as someone to fix the problem. The inappropriate mention of their name was a source of concern and they feared that the deceit would be taken as truth. This is real. It is also false.

I’ll try to break this down a little bit more. Assuming the context of an open web forum (which are understandably becoming less common or perhaps more self-selecting) there are a number of concerns about bad information. One is the fact that a (self-selecting) reader might confuse the bad information with truth. They might think that X is a criminal (as a neutral way of discussing everything from the smashy to the genocide) because someone says as much, signs a post admitting to such, or is accused of being one by a convincing story. Two is association. If X is put into the same frame as criminality, in a web forum, then future discussions about criminality could very well include X as a related topic. Third is the idea that X and criminality may have a relationship but as presented is either a misrepresentation or a slander. Finally is the idea that outside of the discussion itself is the future. Search engines are forever. If X is associated in whatever way to criminality (or an open web forum) it means that X doesn’t have control over their own story. This has implication in everything from legal cases (or the States research interests) to jobs.

While this is often much ado about nothing it does put the power of representation into the hands of people who often don’t have any skin in the game. I, for instance, haven’t used my full legal name in any anarchist contexts but I have an old friend who used it to advertise for an event I participated in in the 90s. Several mentions of this event still linger on the front page of a search for my full legal name. I have attempted to contact, and resolve, this concern for several years to no avail. The people who get the emails associated with the top level domains just have no motivation, or interest, or process to protect my desire to not have my legal life associated with my anarchist life. In my case I have had to start the slow, ambivalent, process of changing my legal name as the only real way to sever my future (hostile) relations with employers or stalkers with my oh-so-naive past.

For younger people, for Facebook users, this problem will only get worse.

You may ask what my decision was regarding the trolled person? The other side of this discussion for me relates to the role of being a public person (a “personality”). I realize that talking to reporters, writing a book, or doing presentation shouldn’t necessitate the signing of some sort of unstated contract but for me, it kind of does. It means that you are choosing to associate yourself publicly with something. In my case it is anarchy, in another persons case it may be poetry, or Pokemon, or whatever. If you are public it means you have to accept the fickle, fickle love that the public has to offer. For some people this love means being accepted as a respected public intellectual or activist, for others it means being pilloried and reviled. As far as I’m concerned there is a choice, a willful act, that moves you from a private person to a public person. I am on the public side of this choice, as are many of my friends, but as a result I have had to suffer indignity and attack along side the (positive) attention and respect. I think it is disingenuous for other public personalities to think they should only get the pluses without getting the minuses so I refuse to coddle this kind of behavior. I think this is grist for the mill (see 1-3 on the list above).

But, and this is a big but, I don’t think it should last forever. I think a scandal, most every scandal, should last for the five minutes (or ten seconds) that it deserves and then that we should all move on. Search engines don’t allow for this so my decision regarding the trolled was to remove all mention of them after the scandal (such as it was) was aired.

This whole situation was a useful exercise for me because I much prefer my policy decisions to hinge on a different axis (or two if possible) than just “this is the policy” so putting the temporal axis into this decision was helpful. It also helped that the trolled came in good faith AND that I got good advice from an adviser… but this is how small decisions often times end up being big ones.

I’ll wrap this up. The earth is filling up. Many of the horrific things I despise about the existing order are, from the perspective of capital p Power, crowd control. There are too many of us, we are anonymous, and becoming invisible is most peoples alienated reality. Trolling, and the cruelty of the troll, is a kind of care too. The troll is paying attention, it may be a negative attention, but can you blame them? The troll is the most reviled of creatures in a world filled with the despised, the despicable, the tortured, and the lonely. It’s a funny way to end this but this is one of the few times where I believe in the healing power of the sun, by which I mean not only fresh air, exercise, and being outdoors but the brightness of people in a room, disagreeing and sharing a mammalian moment or two.

The Four That Should Not Be One

After my trip to Europe I came back to a couple of different existential challenges. This was put succinctly during a conversation with T in Greece who responded to my question “What was your biggest criticism of American Anarchists?” by saying simply “You all act like you are in High School” and as unfair as this is, it is also dead on. We are the Columbine Kids in the worlds largest high school (I doubt even China has this issue to the same extent). We are by-and-large lost & confused by the scale of our national identity and the smallness of the people around us who even seem sane. Who understand that being a dick waving winner doesn’t mean anything other than you scored the last touchdown. The scale of this place, of the engine that won WWII, of the military that still polices the world even though our debt burden is, per capita, among the highest in the world is daunting. We are daunted.

As far as my people are concerned, I think a useful first step to addressing this problem would be to stop considering that we (US nation-state residents) are even in the same country (cultural unit) at all. Instead we are in four different countries. We could call them West Turtle, East Turtle, Middle Turtle and South Turtle (with the place above us probably being broken up into NW, N & NE Turtle itself).

To come at this from a straight anarchist-who-travels-around-alot perspective this makes a lot of sense from a sectarian perspective. To be wholly unfair the East is Red@, the West is Green@, the Middle is practical @ & South don’t care about such things (although, tbh I don’t know the South nearly as well as I know the other 3 countries). This might be a confusing shorthand for anarchists, as we despise the Nation-State (aka countries) and would work towards the abolition of the entire political entity called the US of A if we had the power to do so. But if we had that power would we create a United Federation of Anarchy that was contained by the same boundaries? I think not. I think the scale of another world, without nation-states would be much, much smaller. Probably smaller than the broad cultural units I am implying here, perhaps much smaller (as I am not sure I live in the same place as Los Angeles).

Short that power, we can at least admit that our region (the West) experiences Anarchy in distinct ways from the other regions. This is demonstrated by the General Strike of Oakland, Occupies on the West Coast, and our general attitude towards Federations and the like (as seen from a several decades out perspective).


I’ll end with a pet peeve of mine. This is not to criticize one person or project in particular but the general attitude of some if not most anarchists who start high profile projects. Usually they start their project with an announcement to the world “Here we are, we are going to do EVERYTHING better than what came before” that is also cloaking a desperate plea for help from others. That help doesn’t come, the capacity to DO everything isn’t possible so the clock starts ticking (visible to no one other than people who have been around for a long time), finally when it strikes the project either disappears from sight or flames out.

Before you take on a (public) project you should first figure out what emotional or organizational intelligence is going to be necessary to actually DO it. Talk to others who have done the same one. Have these chats respectfully, because even if your project is 1000x better than what has come before (and it’s not) the past will not disappear in a moment. The past sticks around and does turn out to be the shoulders you step onto if you survive, which you probably will not.

This is particularly resonant for me because when I started a particular “kill your parents” projects I did not publicize it (or my involvement) widely for years. I also didn’t (publicly) damn by elder for being first (and wrong). I did what I did and, over time, I demonstrated my consistency, attitude and ability and the project became what it became.

But What About the Vegans!?

Consider this post my farewell to veganism. I am writing it so that there is a single place to put down my ideas about the change and, I hope, the last place I’ll have to talk about this again. At the end of the day my change from being vegan has as much to do with the fact that I think that diets (and many other identities) just aren’t that interesting of a conversation as they seem to be to many people. Not to be entirely dismissive but I don’t really give a fuck what you do with your body. It is yours and is a major joy but it is your joy. The confusion about the difference between what is a personal thing and what is a political thing has long been a feature (not a bug!) of American radical politics. There are some other things to say too but all of that in its moment.

Twenty Years Later

Nine years into the future and we’re still counting the dead and the dying
…I’ve got to wonder what the fuck it’s going to take can it be undone
-Born Against

I was a vegan for a long time. Nearly half my life. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t attracted to the extremism of veganism. I was, especially in 1991 when I started. While I didn’t really know anyone associated with the Hardline scene until a few years later (and then only in passing and when they were on their way out) the idea of drawing clear lines appealed to me then. More or less it still appeals to me but it looks so different now that it isn’t really fair to call it the same thing. I liked the idea of taking the extreme position and abiding by extreme living-values (beyond just talking-values), but at the end of the day content matters.

Animal rights advocates are basically right. The animal farming industry is a horrific murder machine that has turned humans into receptacles of garbage.

The problem is that they are only partially right. It is far more than the animal farming industry that has done this thing to us: animals & humans. I am going to nod my head in the direction of JZ because I don’t think that the real problem here is capitalism. I don’t believe capitalism gives a fuck whether we eat animals (more on that later). This is where I disagree with Murder of Crows and other post-vegan ideologues.

I believe the reason (or rather what includes the reason in such a way that I can accept) that humans have turned all life into a factory is civilization. Here I think of civilization as the ideology of humans that states that it is good & right for us to control the rest of the planet. Mostly we control the earth by putting cities on top of it but for the rest of the land we have created factories that serve cities. Civilization is the process by which we separate the technics (which provide us food, tablet computers, and plastic crap) from the nice cups of coffee next to bike paths. It is the particular way we have chosen to separate life as a statistical, mechanical, and political problem from life as what we do in the world. It is the massification of systems so that seven billion people can roam the land. Civilization is humanism on steroids.

Veganism talks about this problem in the same way that a blind man talks about an elephant

  • It is horrible that animals die, even more terrible that the vast majority of animals are raised purely for the dinner table.
  • Many more people could be fed if we were more efficient about our land utilization.
  • Veganism would save the environment (and much, much more) by decreasing the bad things and increasing the good things…

It has been well over a decade since I moved away from this kind of a vegan-outlook. About as long as it’s been since I’ve really associated with vegans and their potlucks, cute little shops, and adorable outfits. But I continued to have a vegan practice long after my departure from vegan(ism) for the same reason that I do many things, I am very stubborn.

Naming and subjects

Naming a root cause, be it human cruelty or Civilization, does very little to rectify the situation, even if it feels like a radical pursuit. Similarly, subjectivizing the problem perhaps makes you a more interesting person (or, as likely, a very boring one) but it doesn’t externalize a solution. Here is where capitalism comes in. Capitalism loves subjective problems, as it always has a solution to them. Guess what it is?

Veganism was always a partial solution (to the problems of industrial animal production) but in the past 20 years I have seen it become something else entirely. It only even slowed down factory farming if you accept the premises of boycott politics. Even if you accept the most positive premise that Veganism was direct action against a system of domination, it merely demonstrated how meager and small individual acts are. Actions in isolation are always isolated and rarely understood as statement (“Against the death machine”) or implementation (“and we act against your system which we burn to the ground”). This is not a plea for a set of mass actions against the animal industry (which would be a partial target that will crumble with the fall of the petro-economy anyway) but a reason to pause in the story as we understand it now. Moreover even if Veganism was a radical act at some point in the past it is more (and less) than that now. It is also an identity, with all that that implies.

I have a close friend who has been vegan even longer than I was who is also very sick. I just saw a short video of her on her sickbed talking about life in the hospital. Every time she talked about food she also mentioned the food’s veracity vis a vis veganism: “Vegan chicken”, “Vegan Ravioli”, etc. This is boundary checking behavior. It is similar to how bats echo locate the world as they navigate. The world responds with an echo and the bat knows themselves through their flight through space. This form of identity-checking makes sense when you recognize yourself in the echoes. But what happens when you no longer hear a response?

It is self-evident that veganism has become a consumer choice on a field of exotic choices. In many ways it has paved the way to a variety of niche markets that have fueled the growth of companies like Whole Foods, Herbivore, et al. and phenomena like soy & gluten free diets, the predominance of “cruelty free” HABA products, etc. It goes on and on. We have, by making life choices as simple as what we buy, participated in a transformation of capitalism from mass to boutique. From “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black” to “An Army of One.” Hurray us!

What is radical about you?

One of the hardest questions a radical1 can ask themselves is what exactly differentiates them from the dominant culture they are differentiating themselves from? Perhaps the larger existential question is why exactly does having radical politics also entail a differentiation at all? But the problem of how we put our ideas into practice is a more serious one than the particular social problem of why we have to be seen doing it.

My political arc isn’t unusual, especially among my age group. I started in punk/hardcore, and gravitated over time towards the political(esque) DIY hardcore scene that talked all the time about the link between politics and practice. In hindsight I realize how preachy, pedantic, and unsophisticated it all was but, to be honest, I was too.

Then, I had to wear my flag all the time. I cared so much about what strangers and future frenemies thought of me that I always played dress up. Today, I don’t care. The fact that it took me so long to grow (the fuck) up is related to the same stubbornness that kept me a vegan for all of those years.

For years I argued for veganism as one of the few ways that a person could put the Beautiful Idea into practice. I was wrong. The Idea is just that. We can do anarchistic things, we can attempt to break the cycles of terror and violence that comprise nearly every aspect of this world, but nothing we do is pure. Every person has to draw their line and the sad part about that is how lonely and isolated that is. I sincerely wish that my process of thinking about veganism, from pre to post, wasn’t alone. But it was.

I do not relate to the idea that the world will be changed by the conscious acts of the oppressed. This is not because I ignore the history of the struggles that have come before, but because the compromised victories of these mass struggles were always immediately superseded by the monsters. Whereas the mass celebrates, the monsters prepare for the next fight. They change the terms of engagement. The only form of mass culture that maintains memory and unity is on the side of the dominating class. More education, purer activities, or better people aren’t going to change the fact that individuals can be (and are) bought off, that the kind of organization that won the 40 hour work week isn’t even going to achieve the (meager, pathetic) goal of full employment ever again.

The individual act of rebellion does not make a radical. Radical was just another rock-and-roll fantasy. Late 20th century counter-cultural (aka boutique) capitalist methods were effective at convincing naïve mid-western children that we could make a difference. We couldn’t. Not in the way we thought. What we are capable of is smaller and more interesting than the lyrics of Soulside or Dead Kennedy. The process of working through the apparatus of illusions has taken me to a place I haven’t heard much about from former peers. I don’t want bumper sticker politics any longer but I also don’t want to be an existential “used to be” either.

Where does that leave us

Perhaps I began this with the idea of presenting a cogent argument about why I am no longer a vegan. But it isn’t an argument at all. Arguing about stupid shit is exactly what I have wasted far too much of the last two decades on. Veganism is at this point the representative characteristic of those stupid fights, of that wasted time.

At the end of the day my actual diet will not change all that much. I live with a vegetarian and am not so starving for a meat diet that I’m going to chase down a different situation. Moreover I don’t want to eat the offal of factory farming.

Leaving veganism behind is more about leaving behind my relationships with the thousand moralists who I have met over the years, obsessing about food-as-product, basing my self-understanding on an identity that is synthetic, shallow, and unsustainable. In many ways my criticism of veganism is similar to the reasons why I rarely socialize with anarchists. I want to build something social but I don’t want to rely on tradition, identity, or laziness to do it.

Farewell veganism. You helped me be aware of how I inhabited the world and how the world inhabited me. You are still a big part of the life of some few people who I am fond of . You probably kept me honest in a way that I needed in my twenties and kept me sincere in my thirties. I will always remember the potlucks, the restaurants, and the health of certain vegans as being directly inspiring to me. I don’t blame you for my weight, unhealthiness, or bad teeth. I don’t blame you for my stubbornness either, but my future goals just don’t include you and it took a lot of thinking to give myself the space to walk away. I am not an ex-vegan or a post-vegan. I am a fellow traveler who goes a different direction with no acrimony or regret.

1 I’ve always hated the term radical but almost every other general term to describe a position-that-stands-against-the-existing-order-but-isn’t-as-specific-as-my-particularly-nihilistic-anarchist-position is even worse.

The problems of opinions & wealth

I want to wrap up my out loud thinking about my time in Europe (I’ve been back for three weeks but it doesn’t feel like it since I am now traveling so much) with some conclusions but first some thoughts about other problems that feel specifically American but perhaps are more general.

US radicals are right to criticize ourselves for American exceptionalism. The idea that the US is at the center of the world has, sadly, been how all of here in this forsaken place have been raised. Our Civil War was a fight over big principles. So too was our entry into WWII. The Cold War was noble, just as our struggle against (whom again?) racism which we won with civil rights legislation. It is useless to argue against these facts with most people in this country. We honestly believe it, on the right and on the left.

This is why most anarchists wish a pox on both of their houses and why we have such a hard time finding ourselves out of the mess of liberalism, false oppositions, and the belief that somehow we are truly and goodly on the side of… right. We are not, of course. Not just because no such thing exists but because this belief is so shallow, so deeply uninformed, that it exposes itself all the time for being a matter of faith not of reasoned thought1. But we are from this primordial ooze and it is in us, like it or not.

Americans are opinionated. They have strong opinions about politicians, Muslims, the flag, recycling, soy, parking, taxes, etc, etc. The radio waves are filled with people who have a lot of true emotion wrapped up in every detail of mundanity. If there is any possible way to turn an issue into a simple one, stripped of context and complexity, Americans will do it and fight any comer.

Sadly this particular American trait still appears in those residents of this country who are the enemies of the country itself. American anarchists are filled with stupid fucking opinions2 and that world wants to hear them. This is particularly true if they never plan on doing anything real (material, outside of their heads) with them.

Perhaps this is related to the strangeness around American wealth. Most everyone I met in Europe was quite open and honest about how much money they had, made, and came from. In the US this is almost never the case. Experientially anarchist milieus always riff poverty with the primary difference being (in my experience) that Americans are broke but have enough money to eat out at restaurants whereas Europeans only eat street food (like €2 souvlaki) if they eat out at all. But the silence around money & origins is one of the creepiest things I run into time and time again with people around this place.

I don’t think this is entirely because all of my comrades are secret princes and princesses waiting for their trusts to vest before they return to their castles in the sky. I think that the flip side to wealth isn’t just poverty but shame. We fear association with our associations.

But everything is not bad in this home of mine. This land of fear, hate, wealth, and moralism. The reason that I am glad I left here for three months was because I could see from a distance, for the first time, that there are things that I love about the people I know and places I am from. Our eclectic vitality isn’t sharp but hacks through most things just the same, only requiring several swings. I am not more hopeful about the future but I have a lot more ideas about how I want to practice anarchy with my mongrel pack. Now to find them.

1 Not that I am a particular fan of reason but I do react to the religious devotion to God, whether it is called J-dog or Amerika, with something… cold and calculating. But I already covered this.

2 Opinions in this context means not facts, not defensible positions, but habitual simplistic perspectives that actually interfere in critical thought.

A story of a Greek Assembly

Ever since I saw the Void Network give their presentation on the “Greek situation” I have wanted to seriously think, and put into practice, my understanding of what they meant by “an assembly”. Since I am in Greece now (updates of my Amsterdam trip will have to come later as I don’t want to lose my way regarding this topic) and have attended my first significant assembly I feel far more informed about what is possible to transfer from my Greek experience and from the several conversations I’ve had with different people on the composition of their model compared to what we do in the States.


Asocial @ vs the pigs at the Polytechnic: Photos by Insurgent Photo

Preliminary sidebar: What is broken in US meetings

I have taken a generally hostile stance towards meetings, particularly with people who have a different political center of gravity, for over a decade. I tend not to go to them, as I believe many others do also. This deep ambivalence towards “working with others” has a couple different sources.

One, multi-tendency meetings tend not to be about anything. This isn’t to slight the necessity of people sitting in a room together as part of their individual and group growth process but in terms of actually getting anything done, it tends to happen intra-tendency not inter. A harsh example is to discuss the summer 2010 attempt at an assembly in the Bay. This was an incredible opportunity missed as it ended up being a general directionless gripe session rather than a place where people (outside of a few specific Statist Marxist types who were there) could articulate either general proposals or examples of the kind of work their particular tendency or affinity group believed was appropriate. Here is an excerpt from the call out that exemplifies the problem.

Although any actions that come out of this assembly will be on people’s own initiative – whether they do so alone, through small affinity groups, or in more formal meetings – we should all feel compelled to make a mark on the world we inhibit and not passively let history pass us by!

The intention here is fine. It implores something be done, puts the onus of that something on the participating groups, but leaves the action delightfully vague. Who is going to try to measure our groups initiative with the flow of history?

Two, multi-tendency meetings in the Bay Area (or any other US city) have a life-stealing/soul sucking tendency toward creating ridiculous Manichean mission statements that serve as statements of purpose and/or litmus tests for participation. Here is a particularly egregious example from the brand new call by UA in the Bay for an upcoming quarterly General Assembly.

We’re asking anyone who agrees with the following to attend:
– A rejection of all forms of hierarchy, including capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, heterosexism, colonialism and party based politics
– Organizing on a consensus based, non-hierarchical basis, that promotes autonomy, solidarity, and the agency of those most affected by each decision
– Embracing a diversity of tactics based on practicality, regardless of legality
– Working actively to build relationships and institutions that are based on equality, self determination, and sustainability

This is a laundry list of loaded terms that is, or should be, entirely unnecessary if your goal is to have, or to call for, an Anarchist General Assembly. At some point we either assume that we are dealing with units-of-active-agency (aka adults) and stop treating each other like children, or worse like people who can’t be trusted, or we just stop dealing with each other. I can tell you that even if I was in town this passive-aggressive checklist would make me seriously doubt that this event would be worth my time or would be capable of resulting in (meaningful, interesting, potential building) activity.

Three, multi-tendency meetings in the Bay Area have a proven track record of bringing out the worst kinds of behavior in people, this includes lack of respect, bad faith, general wingnuttery, and unending evil eyes. I, for one, don’t enjoy going into a room where it feels like everyone in the room hates each other, speaks entirely in (historically loaded) jargon, and can’t pull their heads out of their asses for long enough to accomplish more with more people than resentment and enmity. I have enough hate in my life dealing with people who absolutely hate the idea of anarchy to waste my time with my frenemies who will not actually work with me anyway due to misunderstandings and half-knowledge.

Four, multi-tendency groups tend to confuse friendship with politics. Especially in the Bay Area where the groups with the strongest political disagreements also do not socialize with each other (I often refer to the Bay as have 4-6 different anarchist scenes that do not talk to each other) this is a particularly thorny problem. We do not see eye to eye politically but we don’t really know that because we don’t really know each other. When we do experience each other it is in an atmosphere of hostility. This is a chicken-and-egg problem.

We begin: What I saw in Greece

This is a time of incredible tension in Athens. After the general strike on May 11th an anarchist comrade was hospitalized by an attack by the police (putting him into a coma by blunt force trauma to the head). In the days following the informal nationalist/fascists forces attacked immigrants (including a mass stabbing incident with over a dozen victims) and have made serious violent incursions into the public space (with a square next to long standing squat Villa Amalias being a particular target). At the same time some “asocial” anarchists attacked the Exarchia police station with molotovs to disasterous effect. The following day included an attack on the Skaramanga squat (which I happened to witness first hand and it was 1) terrifying and 2) intense for its political consequences) and then a mass arrest (the next day) of residents of the same squat.

To the extent to which there is a central body (which is in no way a central body) of anarchists that would even discuss the incredible week and series of events it is the Assembly of the Polytechnic. The Polytechnic is on the edge of Exarchia and, from what I’ve seen so far, the rumors of it are true. It (it is an architectural school) is a “free zone” from the police. It is the location from which young anarchists stage hit-and-run attacks against fascists and the police. It is a meeting space that is also a place of occupation. We cannot imagine such a place in the US today as nothing even a 1/4 of it has ever existed in my memory.

The Assembly met there on Wednesday night to analyze the events of the past week and to discuss what action makes the most sense to take as a result. The meeting went on for three hours with very few pauses (more on them later). The meeting was smoke filled, multi-generational (mean age: 30), packed by US standards (60 down to 40 by the end) but supposedly small by Greek standards, and totally respectful and productive (even when there were disagreements which there were a number of serious ones). This was a focused serious meeting about what to do in crisis.

Structurally it began with a person introducing the Assembly and then one person after another speaking. There was no structure to the event other than particularly long winded speakers being cut off for talking too long (and at least 8 people talked for 10+ minutes at a go). At the end of the event the proposals (that would be finalized next week) were fairly specific (orientation wise) and agreeable/disagreeable along lines that would cross most political lines. They were different plans along strategic, not ideological, lines.

We end for now: Conclusions

Before we end a note on the interruptions of the Assembly. The day of the Assembly also happened to be the day of student elections at the Polytechnic (which, remember is a university). Traditionally (?!) the anarchists (some faction or another) attack these elections and… they did. Obviously I was inside a meeting room (and none of the @ in the room were involved) but it was clear that at least 4 bombs (bigger than M-80s smaller than a cluster bomb) were thrown, sticks (and helmets) were deployed and the area outside the meeting room (but inside the Polytechnic) was a standoff of mostly leftist (meaning Statist Communists) students in a paranoid stance against the anarchist interlopers of their election. Fucking crazy.

I will end this write up with a few cautious conclusions about what I have seen from Greece that I think is directly transferable to the American context.

1) Treat each other like adults. It makes a substantial difference in the attitude of the participation and, I believe, makes a long term difference. This means no lifestyle restrictions, no “stacks” or “vibe checks”, and freedom of expression of the participants (especially insofar as they demonstrate that they are doing as well as talking)

2) Leave labels and group identification at the door. While it is important to have participation of people from many concerned parties at your event it is not important for everyone to end every sentence with “class” this or “insurrection” that. It is also important that our rooms look more chromatic (and that doesn’t just mean red and green).

3) Our ideas can be communicated without jargon or loaded terms.

Cheers from Athens

The Great Lesson – VI

A review is in order.
I read Letters of Insurgents as a great work on how to do criticism: a humane story about two sharp people cutting each other to size in appropriate, if harsh and perhaps mean-at-times, ways. This criticism ranges far beyond the tome of Letters of Insurgents or the dynamics between two writers on either side of the Berlin Wall. Each of us is confronted with a great isolation in modern society that we are unable to speak to or from due to lack of tools, models, or closeness to others. The critical model provided by Letters of Insurgents has been personally influential in its demonstration of each of these elements. In the first few weeks the focus was on criticism (by which I also mean closeness). Now we are discussing the tools and models by which we could break down the colossus of the existing order.

Y6 begins with a firm rejection against S5’s expression of love.

all that is gold does not glitter

love

I’m embarrassed by your declarations of your love for me. I can’t honestly tell you that I feel or ever felt a similar emotion toward you. I failed to make this clear to you at the very beginning of our correspondence, at a time when I was nothing more to you than a one-time friend you hadn’t seen in twenty years, a stranger to whom you hadn’t yet bared the secrets of your life…

By vomiting up the repressed experiences of your life, as you so vividly put it, you set off a similar process in me, in Jasna and in Mirna, not only by your example but even more by what you brought up. We didn’t respond to your letter with our minds but with our stomachs, with everything that’s inside us.

-Y6

If you will forgive me a generous sidebar I appreciate Sophia far more in this discussion than Yarostan. This isn’t merely because I am a romantic at heart or battle the same gendered demons as Yarostan. It is because Sophia’s expression of love, even a cheap American love, is generative. It is a sign-of-life when circumstances can be terrorfying. The impulse to take the terror of existence in a reactionary direction has become the standard operating procedure for most people, which is a great tragedy. Instead, and I’ll follow Bataille here, I believe that there is an incredible abundance of energy. Life energy. Love energy. The energy to act in ways that have yet be circumscribed by the pedants and legistators of reality.

Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation. On the one hand, mechanized warfare, producing its ravages, characterizes this movement as something alien, hostile to human will. On the other hand, the raising of the standard of living is in now way represented as a requirement of luxury.

-“The Accursed Share” Georges Bataille Zone Books p 38

The process of love & vomit, expressed here, leaves both participants better for it. We don’t have a finite amount of love that once spent is used up, leaving us dessicated and passionless. Similarly there aren’t enough ways to express our disdain and disgust with… well just about everything. Both are true. Neither are enough. Nothing is enough. The rich tapestry that should be woven with acquaintences, partners, friends, and lovers has been unravelled by Abrahamic moralism and romance shaped by Victoria and Industrialism. Whats left is barely worth vomiting OR having love on.

repression today

Althougth the point is simple in this essay from Peter Gelderloos, it is salient. “Capitalism is based on cognitive dissonance, on trained self-betrayal.” This is an echo of Society of the Spectacle the sign post directing the traffic of modern radicals from historical re-enactment to something akin to a new start. But Peter’s point can also be seen in today’s headlines about failed (and never attempted) strikes, slowdowns, and even in the way that information has become a substitute for meaningful conflict (which is not to say that wikileaks isn’t fighting the good fight but that a headline is a tragic distraction from issues closer to base need). Hell, keeping to the insanity of just today’s headlines, it appears that even our own self-monitoring will soon be outsourced as paying the military wing is becoming too expensive.

“That’s all that counts in my philosophy. The strikes are only the first step; if they don’t lead to what you’re describing, they’re nothing. In a strike we only announce that we’ve had enough of this repression of life, this non-life; we express our refusal to continue being chained to machines and cowed by police. But it’s obviously not enough to announce that we’re coming to life; we have to do what we’ve announced, we have to find the nerve to live, to dance on the tomb of the repressive apparatus.”

These repulsive headlines make sense when it’s become so easy to become crushed by the apparatus of poverty and prison. When the few who step out of line (again the recent headlines around the Oscar Grant verdict protests come to mind) are vilified as some sort of paramilitary agent of chaos when all “we” want is a “community response” led by politicians and other agents of order. None of this has changed since the writing of Letters of Insurgents when Detroit was still in shock (from which it has never recovered) from the riots of 1967. The neighborhood at the center of counter-cultural life for Letters of Insurgents (and the office of Fifth Estate for many years) was the Cass Corridor which was literally chopped in half by the insertion of freeway 10 after the riots, arguably to sever the counter-cultural area from the major housing projects on the west side of the freeway. What is true in Detroit is true in Oakland.

the devil

Mirna tells a story about her relationship with the devil that is likely to resonate with most readers. The part of the story that I enjoy is the richness of the mythological framework. It is a classic one (devils playing a leading role in most monotheistic religions), that is in high contrast to the needs of industrialized society and that continues to resonate far beyond its expiration date. We still sing of devils, dress as devils and, at least in the west, have a pretty clear understanding of what the devil is capable of and interested in.

“My whole life’s meaning is built out of such coincidences!” Mirna snaps, and then proceeds to silence me definitively. “Marbles experience coincidences, Yarostan. People experience meanings. Don’t you know the difference? I knew what I had done, and so did the boy. He was terrified; death itself couldn’t have frightened him more than I did. He avoided me as if I carried the plague. Not because of what I’d done to him in the clearing but because of what we had both done to his father. If he were here now I’d make you ask him! His fear made me afraid, afraid of myself, afraid of that devil’s sword my mother had already seen in my hand.

-Y6

We suffer for not having other rich mythological frameworks like this one. We suffer for having belief systems that only range the desert between Darwin, Marx, Smith, and Jesus. I would rather hear talk of 9/11 conspiracy than the glory of the light of jesus or the truth of evolution. I fear the lack of new religions more than I fear the belief in things that aren’t true. Truth is not at issue regardless of protests to the contrary. Money isn’t real and yet we are ruled by it. Government isn’t real and yet we march in line to its calls. The devil is as real as all of that and I am entirely sympathetic to Mirna’s relationship to it. It is the relationship that we develop to these ideas that provide them form, and spectacular reality still trumps the world of pixies, hobbits, and dancing robots with laser beams.

the primitivist and the theorist

S5 includes some of the most common caricatures in radical circles. They are humorous but slow-moving targets.

Watch where you step; he doesn’t use the bathroom if he can avoid it; Civilization destroys Nature’s cycles and all that. But he’s afraid he’ll get lost if he leaves the path. I walked him up and down the path the first time we visited him, when I realized he hadn’t left the house since we’d taken him to paradise.”

The hermit sitting on a rock was unrecognizable to me. He was as “abandoned” as the forest surrounding the lake. Hair hung down to his chest, his face was covered by a filthy beard. As we approached him, my heart pounded and my brain incessantly repeated one and the same question: am I responsible for this?

-S6

At first I found him altogether incomprehensible; he uses expressions like “desublimation of eros” and “supersession of alienated being” as if they were part of everyday language. Gradually I realized he was merely expressing my own goals with a language he’d borrowed from a newer radical literature than the one I had read. I shouldn’t say “my own goals” so matter-of-factly, since that makes me seem terribly wise while it makes him seem unoriginal. He does express several things that are new to me. For example, he doesn’t only talk about putting an end to coercion, to external, physical repression, but also to internal coercion, self-repression, the repression of one’s own desires. Yet his behavior conflicts with everything he says about desires; he’s a perfectly proper, completely serious young man; I actually doubt that he’s ever personally experienced the desires he describes at such great length. Once I asked him if he ever thought of sex. He answered, “Obviously; erotic play will occupy a central place in the disalienated gemeinschaft.”

-S6

As entertaining as these sweeping-generalizations-made-personal are they do point towards a strong ambivalence by Perlman towards models and modeling behavior in any way other than with hostility. Whether it is a lover, believer, politician, scientist, or ideologue the lesson from Letters of Insurgents continues to be a thousand “No!’s” for every yes. A great lesson but one that demonstrates the break between a kind of possibility envisioned by Letters of Insurgents and what most of us experience as possible in our daily lives.

Letter of Insurgents: The Great Lesson V

This is the first chapter of the book that I have re-read in the book itself. Times have changed for me and now I spend 80% of my waking hours in front of a screen and so it is just more convenient for me to read the wonderful version of the text that we put together at The Anarchist Library (I helped do the OCR work for this text using the scans that the Insurgent Summer people provided me). Reading the book makes a big difference: I am so much more likely to skim when I read on the screen and I just enjoy reading lengthy material much less. I still love the feel of paper on my eyes and when I read for pleasure it will be with paper.

Either way, though, my instincts in sharing my reading with the book is the same, which is a little surprising to me. While reading on the screen, I grab chunks of text to blockquote on the themes in a letter; when I read the book I use little post-it notes and written notes to develop the themes I want to cover. In both cases I am dealing with the fact that I don’t have enough time, hours in the day, hours to work on this, to put together my full thinking on the topics at hand when I actually have them. Instead I am recreating my reading thoughts during my writing time. They are fragmented by function… but I have spent so much time on this particular text it might not be as severe as it would be normally.

If I get the time (at the end) I am also going to try to finish, housekeeping style, a couple of the remaining themes I wanted to talk about in letters 2. Actually the themes of the good life (of a politician) and generosity will probably be woven into this set of thematic discussions pretty easily since Yarostan develops this pretty clearly here.

Work

Y5 (that is Yarostan letter 5) is a strong argument against the institution of work. It is a criticism of the role of the knowledge worker in particular, and predates a body of work around these topics while maintaining a human touch around the topic. Bob Black (in)famously wrote an essay (which was also a presentation as provocation) called “The Abolition of Work”. While the author (and other people with a certain kind of fixation) might take the article as a literal argument against work, its real power is in asking orthogonal questions about the nature of labor and the project of Marxists who valorize labor itself, beyond any recognition of the (cough) use-value of the product of labor. The pro-work ideology is to assume work first of all–before the product of the work, before the worker, and before the impact (environmental, social, psychological, etc) of that work. And the reactions to the Abolition of Work gave this thesis more energy than it probably should have had.

Bob Black (like the post-left anarchist milieu he represents in many people’s eyes) took ideas that had been floating around in certain European anti-state communist circles and synthesized them into a kind of popular (as in easier-to-digest) form for the American audience. While recent post-left theory has been a bit of a Return-to-Stirner the idea of post-left anarchism has drawn heavily on the themes of the Situationists, Councilists, and even Bordigists. This idea of of opposing the institution of Work has roots in the critique of Marx’s project of universalizing humans as workers.

But Y5 isn’t concerned with making the critical argument as much as sussing out, as in talking through, the difficult question of how do we live (where living means being a rent-paying, commodity-purchasing, alienated consumer) while having issue with the consequences of what living means.

The tenacity with which you pursued your struggle, even in the face of certain repression, is something you share with Jan, not with people we both consider opportunists. Your recent confrontation with the administrative psychologist at your college, your exposures of militarism during your university years, your disruption of the war expert’s class, are clearly not opportunistic acts, and you make it perfectly clear to me that you couldn’t have derived any privileges from engaging in those acts. You’re right when you accuse me of failing to distinguish your commitment from the commitments of those around you. I did accuse you of being a carrier of the repressive fuctions of the university and the press and I recognize that this accusation was unfair. I did identify your engagements with engagements that are as unacceptable to you as they are to me. I think I did this because the contexts in which you’ve chosen to struggle are contexts in which I had thought genuine rebellion impossible. In my world the political militant, the journalist and the academician do not and cannot help establish a human community because their very existence presupposes the absence of community.

– Yarostan 5

There are two lines here that I think are worth following through, and they aren’t as clear as an argument between Y5 and S4. One line is that ideological jobs, ones that require you to “believe in” something (rather than just punching in, following orders, and punching out) are somehow impossible places for a human community. The other is the hard question about identity and work. If where we work, the kind of work we do, our qualitative ability to do that work is at all connected to our ability to organize ourselves as a fighting force against the existing regime… then we are going to have to believe in our work, whether it is as a knowledge worker or as an industrial proletariat.

Both of these lines lead me, as someone who has been influenced by the anti-work ideas presented earlier, to understand that personal happiness and a strategy toward general liberation have problematized Marxist categories and libertarian desires. Instead of Either/or we are now faced with Neither/nor.

But of course Yarostan is wrong. It is possible to develop something that subjectively feels like a human community just about anywhere. He makes the case that it is possible in prison, S4 makes the case that it is possible in the knowledge factory, a dozen Russian novelists (and a thousand stories about the Holocaust) make the case that moments of horrible repression and terror are also moments of great human kindness and community. But obviously this fragmentation, the very partialness of the kind of community that is possible in these places is what Yarostan is lamenting. It is what all radicals lament as they struggle for another way of living. How can a people (us!) who have never been free find our way toward freedom? How can those of us who have never been a part of a human community form one?

The strategic question remains important. The classic Marxist equation here is that the sociological group that has any characteristics of a rival to the military, entrenched bureaucracy, and political & financial elites are working people. Working people have more similarity with each other than with the other groups, we have the power to dictate terms in a society that requires them, and we have the potential to be self-aware (as a class) in a way that these other groups already are. Plus, numerically and categorically, working people dwarf all of these other groups combined.

Study after study has shown the power of working people, as expressed by unions and formal organization, has been on a deep decline for more than a generation. Whatever victories were won by workers organization in the West has collapsed. Apparent to any liberation, worker organization outside the west collapsed from within and lies in ruins today. If the rhetoric is to be believed, the kind of work represented by unions by what is called the proletarians is in steep decline (because obviously China doesn’t exist), which makes impossible the General Strike kind of social change that the Left relies on.

Corruption

When Fredy was writing Letters of Insurgents and contrasting the East’s and West’s view of work, as ideology and vehicle for social change, it is no surprise that he would develop a storyline around corruption and nepotism.

There is still a mythology about the Communist regimes that they are (and were) rife with the kind of corruption based on (familial & social) relationships that deeply rankle the competitive meritocratic American psyche. This is a myth about competing ideologies where the West is vigorous and self-correcting because every generation and every individual must prove their mettle as opposed to the lazy bureaucratic groupthink of the Communist regime. We are the beneficiaries of Ayn Rand without being assholes and they are a cross between Squealer and Napolean from Animal Farm.

Vera’s remedy follows from her own diagnosis: the system has to be cured. How? “We must find … We must create … We stand … Let us…” “We” of course means Vera Krena together with her audience, Vera together with the working population. And how will “we” cure the system “together”? Obviously the same way “we” have always done anything “together.” We the workers will do our share by remaining at our posts in the factories, while Vera will do her share by remaining at her posts in the offices of the academic and ideological establishments. In other words, we will cure the system “together” by continuing to reproduce it.

– Yarostan 5

When confronted with radical statements like “wage slavery must be abolished” or “we must smash capitalism” it is very easy to consider the speaker shallow or impossibly naive. Generally when people are inspired by rhetoric along these lines, it is before they have realized the multi-dimensionality of our repression–especially as it graphs to the ways in which we repress ourself. But the abandonment of the “high concept” of naming a complex enemy and working against it also tends to tame one’s conflictual perspective all together. If our enemy is intractable it is, perhaps, better to abandon conflicts that can be stated as simply as “us and them”…

But the struggle against this is actually very simple (if abstract). It just means ending your participation in its reproduction. A system that cannot reproduce itself dies from lack of interest in a generation or so.

Obviously such a simplistic statement is just moving the abstraction from destroying or abolishing to reproducing but I think there are specific ways that we can talk about the reproduction of the ideological apparatus that includes certain kinds of career choices, pastimes, political activities, and hobbies. I disagree with many radicals who would argue that “the best” way not to reproduce the system is to entirely drop out of it. I understand the impulse and I think it benefits individuals to try “dropping out” but I believe it is, ultimately, limiting because it speaks to the impulse of scarcity and constraint (specifically self-scarcity and self-constraint) which as expressions of Christian moralism have a historical dialectical waveform. Ascetics are seen, in this culture, as either compromised OR as intolerable (or both).

I think that reproduction can be discussed (if not measured) to the extent to which it increases ideological shifts (for instance toward participation in the Information (aka Global) Economy rather than one of human scale) toward hierarchical power. Reproduction exists in participation in the political, military, and policing apparatus (although clearly there are levels). Education, Finance, social work, and participation in NGOs reproduce this system. Most everything else, from electricians, service workers, and what’s left of the industrial working class do not.

I am reticent to give such specific examples, by the way, even as they are so clearly parallel to Yarostan’s. While I have been influenced by this book to a great extent, even to the extent of how I chose my own career, I recognize the great privilege of making such a choice. I did not read this book after having devoted ten years of my life towards getting an advanced degree that I could only apply to a “reproduction job”. While I have judgment of the set of choices one makes to put themselves in that position I am entirely sympathetic to how one would find oneself in that situation. I read this book before it was too late. I was ready for the message of what I’ll call engagement AND disengagement and against reproduction. In my own way (that ended up being a lonelier way than I anticipated) I made my choice and suffer the consequences.

Proper revolt

This is a great time (temporally and in the book) to muse a little bit about the proper way (form and practice) to revolt…

Where was Luisa when revolutionaries like Manuel were swept out of the way? Was she alongside the aspiring foreman Alberts, helping to sweep people like Ron, myself, Manuel and Jan out of the way? She virtually admitted this when she said that “such people” were a greater threat to the revolution than the militarists. I’d really like to know where Luisa stood during this purge of saboteurs. I’ve long ago become suspicious of her interpretations; your letters have made me wonder about her activity as well.

– Y5 (p 311)

On the west coast we recently had visitors from Greece. Greece has lately become a bit of a magic word on the lips of anarchists, one spoken as a place and as an incredible series of actions over the past 2-5-10 years. Greece proves that anarchists have some traction somewhere and that certain kinds of passion are expressed somewhere. The visit was great and all but there wasn’t enough of a sharing of how the theoretical and activity development could happen in Greece when it so clearly has not happened in the rest of the West. Let’s save that for another time.

One topic that the Greeks did cover fairly well was their insistence on using certain terminology to describe their activity that varies from ours or what we would call the standard way such activity should be described. Specifically they call their efforts against the system (State & Capitalism) as struggle rather than as resistance. This distinction is important as a way to place their (our) activity as proactive and willful rather than the action of resentiment or reaction. There is a kind of conservatism that you see often with Leftists that argues that whatever “they” do is bad and we should be against it (trite example: we should resist the G20) rather than that our struggle for freedom includes particular attention toward the cabal of global leaders and their machinations.

The past few months and events in Toronto and Oakland have brought the issue/question of what is the proper way to revolt back into vogue. The mainstream attention on anarchists has been hot since May (when there were actions across the US) and the environment has not been conducive to the kind of self-reflection that is long since needed since ’99 (aka Seattle WTO). I am not going to speak at great length about my own thoughts here other than to say that I relate far more to the forces of smashy smashy than I do to the responsible movement builders who sound like they come right off the pages of this book as they wave their fingers in the face of “such people” while telling them how to revolt properly. This said, my friends would be better served applying their energy toward struggle rather than toward resistance against institutions that feed off of their energy. We are giving them far more by resisting them than we are gaining from the experience.

Onto Sophia 5

This is one of my least favorite of Sophia’s letters. There is a certain amount of a situational comedy element that just doesn’t speak to me. I understand being confused and making dumb decisions under stress and that being somewhat comedic but over seventy pages of Sophia’s schizophrenic behavior, and erratic thinking about it, was just disturbing. I never enjoyed watching “Three’s Company” either.

In between the confusion and drama was a peek at a couple of the Garage characters that reminded me of people I have known.

He’s one of the few people I’ve met who knew the difference between things and people and never confused the two. He can do anything that’s ever been done with a tool, but he’ll never touch a weapon, and he’ll never confuse the two. He doesn’t step on a worm if he sees it in time, and he looks sadly at a dead fly. You’re afraid of him? Sophia, believe me, the world will end before Ted attacks you. I can’t imagine his wanting to kill you or me.”

There were two important people in my life who were similar to Ted. One of them knew the difference between people and things and preferred things. The other chose people but it didn’t matter as the people in his life weren’t enough to save him.

This particular characteristic is rather common in men, in particular in the technocrats I am surrounded by. Warm, broken (hearted) men who have more skills dealing with things than people and have grown to prefer them.

My experience with these men, and my friends before, don’t give me hope in the power of individuals to overcome their gender training, the fractured social conditions that shape them, or their own good intentions overcoming survival decisions. Instead I’ve grown to appreciate the partialness, the wave form of social time together as being as likely to amplify as to flatten. The open question of when disappointment will come rather than if. I guess this is a story of cynicism but I don’t mean it to be; it’s one of the calibrations necessary to be in reality rather than Hope-instan.

“There’s nothing to understand, Sophia, and nothing to fit into. It’s your life to do with as you will. There’s no structure. Nothing is banned. Everything is allowed. No holds are barred.”

This is that hope laid bare. I have always desired this kind of freedom. This lack of restraint, freedom to action, and to love. If Sophia 5 shows us anything it is that when confronted with even the possibility of this, our this-world-socialized brains don’t know what to do. We freak out. We behave inappropriately and erratically. This is true. Sophia 5 is a true letter. I feel like I’ve seen it a hundred times.

I’m not sure I have much more to say about Sophia 5 but there are a couple more quotes in here that are worth remarking on…

“Then tell me one more thing. What do you know about that commune some students got going?” I ask.

“Nothing much,” he says. “Some wild new `cultural radicals’ have got it into their heads that they can make a revolution without the working class, inside a university building.”

“Thanks again, Daman,” I say, climbing out of his car.

“But none of my students are involved in that,” he adds, boasting.

“Because they’re the working class,” I shout.

He shouts back, “That’s right, they’re the working class. Goodbye, Sophie.

This section is particularly funny coming hot on the heels of the activity in California in the past ten monthes. If you are interested in finding out more you could do worse than checking out a little newspaper I helped publish…

After the Fall

One last quote that I’ll leave with that, even with the layers of self-deceit embedded in it, still reads like a powerful personal indictment.

“I’m discovering it with them, Sophie. I’m discovering what it means to be in a society but not of it, what it means to be insulted, excluded, maltreated and injured. I’m discovering what it means to be a stray dog with human characteristics. And I’m discovering that everything I’ve learned is as useless to them as it is to me. These are people who are becoming themselves, Sophie, on their own. It’s a process in which neither you nor I can help them, a process to which we cannot contribute, a process we can only harm. They can only help themselves and each other; they cannot be helped from outside. I’m not here in order to guide, to help, to contribute, or to interfere or meddle in any way. There’s no room here for those who are able to give but not to receive. I’m only here to learn.”

“You don’t know me, Hugh,” I said. “That’s all I want.”

“You, Sophie,” he said, “you don’t know who you are or what you want. I’ve known you to be sincere – once, perhaps twice. Always quick-witted, at times even brilliant. Brave, even heroic. A rare companion. But please believe me when I tell you I don’t need you, Sophie. My new friends don’t need you. What you carry inside you, what surrounds you, whether you intend it or not, is all the rot we’ve started to shed.”

I turned away from him and walked to the bus stop. I didn’t shout, nor tremble, nor cry. But my heart was broken.