Reading: Quiet Rumours (Dark Star Collective) / Insurrection and Intersections (J Rogue and Abbey Volcano), Voltairine de Cleyre: An Introduction (Marian Leighton), The Making of an Anarchist (Voltairine de Cleyre) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
First essay is “Insurrection and Intersections by J Rogue and Abbey Volcano... (This doesn't contextualise HNvPtS, but I don't want to make a separate post for it.)
Organizing within the extremely diverse working class of the United States requires that we acknowledge and have consciousness of that diversity. However, we feel it is inaccurate to conflate this with holding systemic power over others—much of the so-called middle class may have relative financial advantage over their more poorly-waged peers, but that is not the same as exploiting or being in a position of power over them. This sociologically-based class analysis further confuses people by mistakenly leading them to believe their “identity” as a member of the “middle class” (a term which has so many definitions as to make it irrelevant) puts them in league with the ruling class/oppressors, contributing to the lack of class consciousness in the United States.
I don't know that I fully agree with this because it requires actually engaging with their statement about how the middle class is defined (and that that term is often used in such a way as to be irrelevant), and that seems to be them side-stepping this issue. People of the middle class, or people who identify as being of the middle class, are capable of exploitation. They can (and often do) enact and enable policies against people who are poorer than them. This is similar to a 'managerial' class. Managers, even if they share an income bracket with the employees under them, act as oppressors (or act for the oppressors).
Ignoring the ways in which people who see themselves in these positions behave doesn't do anything beneficial for us, but it does sound like an excuse for middle-class people to speak over poorer people.
I also think that it doesn't contribute to the “lack of class consciousness” anywhere. People of the middle-class should understand their own precarity and how easy they can become poor, but they tend to refuse to do so. It also doesn't mean that people in the middle-class can't be exploited, but they do have a habit of ignoring how the exploitation they feel is connected to that of people “beneath” them (see tech workers, for instance—it is so common for tech workers to be exploited, and they still will shill for the system).
Perhaps there are better ways to have that discussion, but it's hard not to notice that people with access to the middle-class tend to want to maintain systems that keep them there and ignore how those systems maintain the precarity and exploitation of everyone else (and also themselves).
However, when interpreted through liberal frameworks, typical intersectional analyses often assume myriad oppressions to function identically, which can preclude a class analysis, an analysis of the state, and analyses of our ruling institutions.
So... I don't see why we can't both have the critiques of class and the classist society (which can be dealt with both on individual and societal levels) while also making the critiques of the state? Maybe I'm misreading, I don't know.
But it is also helpful in analysing the ways in which access to resources changes the way people behave. Being 'middle-class' isn't an identity (unless you're British, where everyone is somehow middle-class), but it is necessary to have the framework to show the common patterns that are observed in the ways people behave. Perhaps it can be removed from intersectionality, but the critique is valid and useful.
... This essay was written like it was a book report. Somewhat confusing, sort of ignores why certain things (classism) can be useful to a discussion, doesn't really engage with how we could be talking about the class components... But uses those structures even though t doesn't want to use them?
Their ideas aren't awful, but it feels incomplete and a little lost.
Now for Voltairine de Cleyre: An Introduction by Marian Leighton...
Ask an anarchist of today who he-she claims as radical intellectual forebears and, depending upon if he-she is of the left-wing or right-wing, they will reply Bakunin—Emma Goldman—Kropotkin or Benjamin Tucker—Josiah Warren—Lysander Spooner, respectively.
I guess “they” wasn't an option in the 1970s. (I hate every text that does he/she when 'they' is perfectly acceptable and was even at this time.)
This piece is getting on my nerves for referring to white people as “native American anarchists,” and it's just like... Can you not say US-born? You managed fucking “Russian-born” when talking about Ayn Rand, but you couldn't realise that “native American” had another meaning? Not that it's universally preferred by indigenous peoples within the borders of the US, but the meaning of “native American” has been around since the US government's response to the Red Power movement... which was happening in the 1970s.
Toward the end of her life, Voltairine de Cleyre came to accept “direct actionism” as a form of public protest, thus obviously revising her earlier stance of pacifist non-resistance.
Interesting that Peter didn't even use this as an example in his 'nonviolence is patriarchal' chapter. Would've been a useful example.
This essay has no sources (other than maybe two books), and it reads like someone was tasked with doing an essay about Voltairine that they didn't really want to d (and it feels that way to read, too).
The Making of an Anarchist (Voltairine de Cleyre)
Anarchism is, in truth, a sort of Protestantism, whose adherents are a unit in the great essential belief that all forms of external authority must disappear to be replaced by self-control only, but variously divided in our conception of the form of future society.
What kind of bonkers shit were anarchists of the past saying. Good grief.
Outsiders have some very curious notions about us, one of them being that anarchists never work. On the contrary, anarchists are nearly always poor, and it is only the rich who live without work. Not only this, but it is our belief that every healthy human being will, by the laws of his own activity choose to work, though certainly not as now, for at present there is little opportunity for one to find his true vocation. Thus I, who in freedom would have selected otherwise, am a teacher of language. Some twelve years since, being in Philadelphia and without employment, I accepted the proposition of a small group of Russian Jewish factory workers to form an evening class in the common English branches. I know well enough that behind the desire to help me to make a living lay the wish that I might thus take part in the propaganda of our common cause. But the incidental became once more the principal, and a teacher of working men and women I have remained from that day.
Fun to note how many teachers exist in anarchist history. Makes me wonder.
The essay was okay.