Reading: Remembering How Nonviolence Protects the State on Peter's Substack
To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
I took off over a fence and through a park with a comrade I recognized from the van. We climbed way up a tree to hide from the helicopters and snatch squads. She had a think Baltimore accent. We ended up smooching until night fell and we crept down to go our separate ways, but we kept in touch. She kept organizing and became a teacher back in her city.
It's hard to read this and not feel like it mirrors a lot of “anarchist fiction.” Regardless of veracity, it's hard not to roll my eyes so hard a migraine occurs.
There was a bit of a lull in Harrisonburg. Our first infoshop had been evicted. Food Not Bombs was still going, this was before the vegan university students in the group got mad that the houseless folks who had started helping cook and set up—people the students never spoke with—were donating ingredients that weren’t up to their dietary codes. Our Anarchist Black Cross chapter was in a nascent form, just writing to some long term prisoners, and we hadn’t started Cop Watch or the next social center yet.
I was trying to find this in the foonotes of the fucking book as I was reading it because I got confused about where I saw it, and I knew it existed... but I forgot it was here. The constant undercurrent of anti-veganism is so infuriatingly regressive. And I'm saying this as someone who isn't a vegan but eats a low quantity of meat and animal products.
The Convergence, hosted at a university building an anarchist enrolled at OU had been able to reserve, was intimidating and inspiring. The keynote speaker was Howard Ehrlich, an older comrade associated with the Social Anarchism journal.
(They were really kind to me when I reached out to them with some early writing… but then they ghosted me after they cancelled the publication of a review I wrote for a Chris Ealham book, Anarchism and the City. My review was overwhelmingly positive, since it’s a good book, but I also had a strong criticism where Ealham fudged the actual history and projected a very modern and very silly debate—mass organization vs. insurrection—onto the Iberian anarchist movement of the ‘20 and ‘30s. In the actual history, those two strategies worked hand in hand. Anyway, Ealham and some of his grad students threw a hissyfit, pressured the editors who I guess were also academics, maligned me online for good measure, and that was the end of my relationship with Social Anarchism.)
Worth recognising that one of his essays exists within the best of book for Social Anarchism. So... not sure how true it is that this was “the end” of his relationship with anyone there.
It was so frustrating, I had done so much research to prepare, and I barely got to use any of it! The other two panelists weren’t interested in solidarity or sincere strategic debate at all! They just wanted an easy chance to dunk on some dupe, reinflate their feeble dogma, and pad their egos.
This whole thing explains why it is that he had such a beef with these people, and it came through loud and clear in his book.
I had grouped my research and arguments into six different themes.
Two of which are the same thing (Ineffective and Tactically/Strategically Inferior), one of which is full of nonsensical straw people (Deluded—this was updated to 'Delusional'), one that explains why we probably can't use violence (Patriarchal), one that should've probably been the first chapter but was the third (Statist), and another that kind of misconstrued the history it utilised (Racist).
Granted, all of them kind of misconstrued the history it used, but that one was particularly egregious.
But the more I wrote, the more I wanted to develop the arguments and flesh out the silenced histories.
While silencing those histories, failing to engage with basic tenets of certain ideas (particularly in the Patriarchal chapter), and also misrepresenting a lot of those histories despite what the person he's referencing states.
So what to do with a book manuscript? Well, anarchists self-publish all the time, don’t they?
Ask a friend to edit it before you publish it would've been my go-to. But at least this explains why it's so repetitive. South End Press should've edited it better (my favourite error is a chapter title reading “Stategically”, which should've been caught on even a quick glance over the table of contents).
And then it was republished by Detrtius Books with some weird fucking edits that make it less coherent and more bizarre, including an entire reorganisation of at least one of the chapters.