reportback – Aragorn! blog

Entry 1 – #lbcasual tour

About 450 miles from Berkeley, CA to Southern Oregon

First stops

I’m going to journal my trip a little bit, not so personal but perhaps over personal along the lines of what a long motorcycle trip looks like for a middle aged person. What travails and pleasantries I encounter and how I somehow relate all of the things I do to an anarchist life, one full of adventure, quietude, and, at least for the next couple months, the road.

I have decided to start my trips pretty early in the morning. I prefer to wake up with the sun and if I lived in such a way I would wake with her every morning. I left home about six in the morning and didn’t feel a need to take a break until my first fill up about 100 miles in. A motorcycle is better than coffee (although does not eliminate the need for it) and even though I did evade the worst of the morning traffic I did see it in droves heading the opposite direction.

The morning never warmed up. I have a pretty good layer system with a synth base, cotton big shirt, and finally a down vest beneath my big motorcycle jacket. It’s hard to underestimate how great the jacket it. Pockets are in exactly the right places (although a larger inside pocket for valuables would be nice). I did alright until the rain started. Off an on, bit by bit, my feet and gloves were soaked through. By the time my day ended the teeth were chattering and I was fried. That said I was very worried about all the miles on my body but with the assistance of my cheater (helps my right hand grip by not forcing me to pull the full throttle all the time) I didn’t feel injured by the end of the day. Just tired.

Presentations

I imagine I’ll post this after I give my first “away” presentation (I give the first at the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group) but I’ve been thinking a lot about the themes I’ll be covering and how to position them in such a way as to make sure that we have interesting conversations and not stupid ones. Hard stuff.

This thread has made it harder.

What is funny to me is that insurrectionary anarchism was always built on the basis of a critique of activism, and wanting to get away from simply being a subculture. Now, it seems that the American Nihilists want to now build a strawman that says that anything that isn’t “doing what they’re doing” (who knows what the fuck that is, because they spend more time talking about it than doing it) is strugglismo, aka, activism. Listen to any of the Brillant podcasts and you’ll get the general gist of it.

I agree with the above paragraph and this is why the term strugglismo came into being. I@ was a critique of boring, stale, ineffective, ritualized activity and, recently, has given birth to a bunch of stale, boring, sanctimonious projects. The term (Insurrectionary anarchists) has lost its meaning as an a priori hostility against activism. The point isn’t much beyond that but the term was an attempt to put in a way that I thought was funny, not a critique against the totality of some peoples activity.

I also have a hard time agreeing with any critique that begins and ends with “they are not doing anything.” What the hell does that even mean? They are not winning? Isn’t anything that is not entirely in ones head something? Does “doing something” really only means X (and X is defined as ABC work, IWW, and antifa) and not Y (media projects, writing, and discussion)?

Last night (at my event in Portland) I found myself referring to my projects in excruciating detail. And this is because I, and others I know are doing interesting work have a very hard time talking about it. We (and in this case I mean everyone involved in these disputes) aren’t doing a great job of making the compelling cases as to why our work/projects are compelling. As a result they are not.

I apologize for the term but I do think it describes a certain kind of sanctimonious behavior. I try to not mirror that behavior. I try to point out what I really like about the hard work that anti-prison and prison support people do. I don’t think pointing out that many of our friends are doing the same thing over again (harder) is sanctimonious, I just think it’s a waste of time.

But whatever, it’s not my time to waste and I’ll try to stop tearing other people down on their hobbies (especially if they do the same).

Beds and dogs

I pushed myself to make it to the next town after Portland and was greeted by hilarous dogs (who remembered me!) and a bed. I know that later in this tour I’ll be camping so I don’t feel guilty about taking offers of beds here at the early part. Dogs are great though. I recommend them highly.

On to Seattle.

A Reportback from the Black Seed tour

This reportback will include some thoughts about the different locations I visited in my trip around the US, highlights from my presentation, and some thoughts about where current conversations are at regarding Green & anarchist ideas. The broad project of Black Seed is to grow the audience and definition of green anarchism beyond the constrains of windmills, wolves, and wildness into a broad category of non-instrumental approaches to living, struggling, and thinking. This means fighting the allure of jargon, counter-cultural shortcuts, and sectarianism. A green anarchism can (and should) be one that is pluralist with bruises rather than righteously exclusionary.

Timing is Everything

The Black Seed tour was somewhat motivated by the desire to go to the Cleveland and NYC Anarchist bookfairs (for LBC) and wanting to make sure people who wouldn’t otherwise ask for a copy of Black Seed would still get one as easily as possible. With that in mind the tour was setup just a few weeks before it began and ended up including events in Milwaukee, Cleveland OH, Pittsburgh PA, Rochester NY, Buffalo NY, Philadelphia PA, Columbus OH, Bloomington IN, and Salt Lake City UT.

Given that (sadly) anarchism tends to be of interest to a primarily college-aged crowd if you want to speak to a larger-than-small crowd you should orient your trip around student participation. Traveling to a town a week or two after finals is therefore not recommended. Mostly, towns where there was not a standing anarchist population had nearly zero turnout.

Couple that with the perceived (or not-so-perceived) hostility between old-time red anarchists and anything not-red and I felt a little bummed in a couple towns. But turnouts that are really just become conversations rather than presentations and while I think I’m better at the latter (with strangers) than the former… context matters and acting like you are talking to an audience when three people are in the room is kind of silly.

The Presentation

Initially I was going to prepare a new presentation regarding some of my current thinking about the problem of indigeneity but the Black Seed editors reminded me of an important thing. I am not an editor of Black Seed, I am the publisher. This point, while subtle in an anarchist project where lines are often muddied and disrespected, is an important one as I am not nearly as equipped to represent the content of the paper as I am to present my own thoughts. If the stated goal was to bring Black Seed to towns… then doing that, describing the context that Black Seed came out of, reading the editorial, and calling for questions seemed to be the appropriate level of engagement. This is an especially important point given that the very small GA milieu seems particularly guilty of personalizing projects/ideas which is absolutely not the goal of Black Seed. Green Anarchism will whither on the vine again if it is about personalities (or singular projects).

Since I know this will be asked, I’ll answer it ahead of time. The difference between a publisher and editor of a project (or at least this one) is basically one of experience and money. A publisher pays for the printing and deals with the distribution. An editor collaborates with authors to make their writing as strong as possible, which can mean political, content, or copy editing work.

Here are a few bullets points from the presentation.

What is green anarchism

In one view of anarchism it is part of the divided revolutionary project in a dialectical relationship with Marxism and its branches. In that view Green Anarchism is a branch that only began to thrive as the ecological movement came into general consciousness after WWII (although it did have an earlier origin story). This isn’t my definition of GA.

For me there is one great story, one bible, of radical engagement to the world and that is Hegelianism. Those who reject this specific story, the idea that reality can be expressed by rational categories and that the goal is to reduce reality to a unity, may be green anarchists. This means that my orientation is more cautious & circumspect than declarative and valiant. It also means I don’t tend to buy “the end is nigh therefore…” arguments as I don’t think that human consciousness/will/capacity is all it’s cracked up to be. Put another way, not only am I not a humanist (by design), I don’t think humans are either. But that’s just me.

The context of Black Seed

We miss the magazine Green Anarchy. It died, to a greater or lesser extent, as a consequence of the Green Scare (aka the persecution of anarchist, earth, and animal liberations types on the West Coast). It wasn’t as simple as that, of course, but the feds set the fire and only lunatics and fools don’t run from fire.

Black Seed is the serotinous result of this fire.

The critique of anthropology

This is obviously the topic of a larger “meta” conversation but here are the stated concerns/issues/critiques of anthropology as stated in Black Seed. One, anthropology is an academic discipline that begs for a deeper analysis of why anti-authoritarians would engage in a field that uses knowledge to grow the power of the existent and not something that thrives outside of the academy. Two, anthropology traditionally “others” people in ways that can only be described as problematic (or genocidal depending on your perspective). Three, anthropology is a discipline of truth (with a capital T). If it were a form of story telling (where the aspects of truth are malleable and subjective) there would be little concern with it. Disciplines of truth are some of the arcane magicks that have summoned Leviathan.

The locations

Here are some brief notes on some of the stops on the tour.

NYC

NYC believes it is the center of the universe. It absolutely is not. Especially when it comes to anarchy. Even moreso when it comes to vibrant, exciting, searching for new ideas. NYC is where ideas and dreamers go to die.

I did get to see Jerry Koch and Daniel McGowan back from prison and back in the mix. That made my heart soar (no joke).

The Midwest

The First Annual Cleveland Anarchist Bookfair was a great first time effort by a very young crew. Bloomington always turns out an inquisitive crowd. Columbus was a really positive and engaged group of people at the new Sporeprint Infoshop. These three towns were the best attended events and most interested attendees on the tour.

The Between

The area between the West Coast and the Great Lakes is a huge wasteland of anarchist emptiness. The only exception (this trip) was Salt Lake City which was a strange mix (and included an event with me and scott crow…) that included a great group house, an utterly hostile town, and a group of people who seemed to have been passed by by time…

The conversation

Finally I’ll speak a bit to the condition of anarchy (especially green) based on my fractional view of NA@ on the Black Seed tour. First, I got the strong impression that there is an eager audience for a new/refreshed view of a green anarchist perspective that is not EF! style activism or ideological. People seem to feel that -something- green reflects their values but are really looking for an active conversation about it (rather than a fait accompli). Second, the history of even recent North American radical activity is woefully incomplete and under told. This is probably a direct result of the turn-26-and-youre-out nature of 21st century anarchism but I’ll also go ahead and blame wikipedia, the @ FAQ, and the vicious little scene that eats everyone alive who participates in it. Third, many anti-left positions no longer have to be defended. Everyone agrees on the basics and (in an all-too-american way) want to get down to brass tacks.

For future trips I would recommend an editor and an author or two to travel together with a wider variety of approaches (like skill + content, intro + experiential, etc) than my “one person show” was capable of. Plus, I’m getting to old to haul books, drive thousands of miles, and give a compelling presentation to a small crowd without getting demoralized. Which isn’t to say that I feel demoralized after the trip but that some days felt like I was only capable of reaching one or two people (rather than dozens, hundreds, or the millions necessary to shift our conversations beyond the arcane and irrelevant).

Final note. The last event I did on this tour was a public conversation with Scott Crow who, perhaps, would seem like someone from a different corner of the big tent of anarchy. The conversation was productive but only because we came into it already knowing each others jargon (ie the very different words we used to say the same things) and liking each other. I’ll say tentatively that our capacity to find common cause may indicate a possibility for many of the different clans to find ways to work together. Scott is a great contrast to the color coded sectarianism of the rest of the anarchist world and I think we can agree that a black flag is good enough.

How A Fire at the Mountain demonstrated the failure…

This is not a complete writeup of the A Fire at the Mountain (AFM) event. I’m probably going to write one at length for a to-be-announced project I’m working on. Additionally, I recorded a lot of the event (mostly the presentations during day two) and plan on discussing the event in detail (with audio) during the next TCN Radio in the next few weeks. The tagline of this not-a-reportback is that this event was the first ever “anti-colonial and anarchist bookfair” and was a very important personal and political event for me.

In the heart of so-called Security Culture

Flagstaff has a very small radical circle and the Táala Hooghan Infoshop feels as much like an extended family project as any space I’ve ever experienced. When I compare this feeling to the the Long Haul Infoshop in my town (one of the longest running infoshops in the country), the only conclusion I can draw is that something is very broken in the land of radical (anti)politics–something that relates to the connection between radicals as secret agents, on the run from authority, and the utter loneliness of urban life.

I’ll explain by way of example. There is a local family that is intertwined closely with the infoshop. The opening ceremony to the AFM included a ceremony in honor of this family. Three generations of this family came to the front of the room while people sang for them and met them (i.e. everyone there—roughly 100 people at that moment–walked by them and shook their hand). Over the weekend anybody who was paying any attention at all could understand exactly why this family was being honored in such a way; their work and presence was clearly a central part of the life of the infoshop and event. This was a clear declaration that seems incomprehensible in anarchyland (aka the milieu or the activist ghetto).

This family has a name and relationship to our project.

I often refer to the fact that the first dozen or so times that I meet a new person in anarchyland I don’t bother to remember their name. The functional reason for this is because for a long time it was perceived as good security practice to change your name frequently. To be a ghost. To fly under the radar of the system of domination and control by never touching the ground and retreating from any desire to fly to the sun. As a result every relationship tends towards a type of limited temporality or perhaps, as it’s usually said, an unlimited flexibility. A flexibility that just happens to look like an endless sequence of singles’ nights at the bar, electrons shooting pass each other, and an extremely limited capacity to help and care for each other. Of course this flexibility is totally different from the experience of the Metropolitan rumspringa who come to the city for enough time to find themselves before returning to some version of where they came from in the first place…

Part of the appeal of anarchyland, of course, is that it allows one to create distance between ourselves and the world we despise. I’m not alone in needing to draw a clear line between myself, my choices, and the inarticulate and mediocre choices of my parents. Perhaps the loneliness of cities (and aging in anarchyland) is that the fuzzy mediocrity of where many of us came from also tends to be social and warm.

A little thing called privacy

Another part of this story is the idea that we (by some definition) are waged in a type of death struggle with a system that is encroaching on every aspect of our life. They know our name, they have numbered us, put us on lists, and are coming closer to knowing what is on our mind at any given moment. While this is a slight exaggeration, it doesn’t seem so far from what our society appears to desire and is in the process of working towards.

In this Mordoresque view where there is an eye constantly scanning the fields we exist upon, it would make sense to perceive hiding from view as a prerequisite to the fight for liberation. Perhaps it is, but not really in the way one would think. Hiding from view because we talk about dangerous things or are preparing to gear up for impending conflicts is a zero-sum game. It pretends that those who write the rules, operate the police, and persecute us follow the rules of the game and all we have to do to win, is play better.

I would say that being constrained by the rules of the game, by cops and robbers, cat and mouse, us and them, means we’ve already lost. How to break systems of logic, of rationalizing and organizing human activity, in such a way that we do not also improve them for future enclosures.

Of course I’m being abbreviated and vague. All I’m really trying to do is draw distinction between privacy as a legal category, privacy as a sort of ethical imperative, and the fact that privacy has been an incredibly successful tool to keep us separated and lost.

By no means am I pining the loss of the family which, by and large, I can’t help but see as very much part of the whole. Perhaps what I’m mourning is the limited experimentation done along these lines. In what ways can our groups experiment with meaningful, long-term relationships without emulating the conservatism or expansionist attitudes of the (American) family.

A side note about the anarchist bro

I realize this report back is nothing of the sort (hence my initial caveat). Mostly I wanted to connect this very small moment to something that I think is very important. For me, right now, it’s a central problem. But I’ll end this report with an instructive closing story.

I gave a brief report on the weekend event to a small group of anarchist friends. One of the discussions was on “Spirituality, Green Anarchy and Cultural Appropriation”. Part of that discussion explicitly named activities around the Feral Futures event in Colorado and its lack of respectfulness. I was remarking that at AFM, criticism of white people was mostly done in such a gentle and polite way that it was somewhat unbelievable to me. (This didn’t stop an white ally who was in the room from getting defensive but that’s another story) That was part of the point of the story (the politeness in the face of disrespect).

The response to the story from my friend the anarchist bro was “Are you saying that they (natives) own singing, dancing, and running around naked?” And herein lies an unbridgeable chasm.

Somewhere in the minds of (many? most?) anarchists, personal and cultural boundaries are seen as totally at odds with my freedom to do whatever in the fuck I want to do at any given moment. The idea of respect(ing others) is seen as stupid. The idea that something that is sacred to someone else is irrelevant because the only thing that sacred is I.

And this is not a dig particularly on individualists BTW. In my experience the anarchist bro can have any number of labels to describe the way in which they are right and that any questioning of that fact is authoritarian. This is characteristic of the bro who just happens to wear black.

The A Fire at the Mountain event will be hard to describe to many people. It was big-town enough to have speakers like me, Simon Ortiz, and John Zerzan, but cozy and small in every other way. I came away from the event with a great sense of responsibility for what I have to do next. This includes more intentional involvement in making the Long Haul the space I’d like it to be, getting to know the local Ohlone and Intertribal folk, and talking about the provocations of the weekend that, if treated right, will become the pivot where future anarchism in North America will perhaps be non-European (or at least non-Eurocentric).