The dice are loaded. You can’t win. Because when the skeptic says “society,” what he really means is “state,” even “nation-state.” Since no one is going to produce an example of an anarchist state—that would be a contradiction in terms—what we’re really being asked for is an example of a modern nation-state with the government somehow plucked away: a situation in which the government of Canada, to take a random example, has been overthrown, or for some reason abolished itself, and no new one has taken its place but instead all former Canadian citizens begin to organize themselves into libertarian collectives. Obviously this would never be allowed to happen. In the past, whenever it even looked like it might—here, the Paris commune and Spanish civil war are excellent examples—the politicians running pretty much every state in the vicinity have been willing to put their differences on hold until those trying to bring such a situation about had been rounded up and shot.

This really is just what happens all the time. Perhaps one should try to crowbar separate the concepts of 'state' and 'society', forcing people to argue from the positions they very much are willing to ignore.

So we’re back to the original problem. There is assumed to be an absolute rupture between the world we live in, and the world inhabited by anyone who might be characterized as “primitive,” “tribal,” or even as “peasants.” Anthropologists are not to blame here: we have been trying for decades now to convince the public that there’s no such thing as a “primitive,” that “simple societies” are not really all that simple, that no one ever existed in timeless isolation, that it makes no sense to speak of some social systems as more or less evolved; but so far, we’ve made very little headway.

I think what this highlights is that people refuse to give up their racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism. This should also be particularly enlightening when we work with non-anarchist people (who are otherwise leftists). If they are unwilling to engage with things that are “primitive” or “tribal” or “like peasants,” then they aren't our allies.

I disagree that anthropologists aren't to blame here. This neglects the history of the field and its persistent weaponisation within the state. Many anthropologists are, indeed, responsible for this simply based on how they present their information and engaged with the people they were researching; they are also responsible for working with the state and giving their research to people who could use it to further oppress the peoples they researched. That cannot be ignored. (It's also weird to see Graeber say this somewhere when he was a student of Marshall Sahlins and also worked with him; Sahlins notoriously was vocal about his disdain for the NAS doing research for the military.)

This kind of rhetoric is only possible because the commonplace definition of revolution has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply. It is this which makes it possible to, say, claim that the modern world is derived from two “revolutions”: the French revolution and the Industrial revolution, despite the fact that the two had almost nothing else in common other than seeming to mark a break with all that came before. One odd result is that, as Ellen Meskins Wood has noted, we are in the habit of discussing what we call “modernity” as if it involved a combination of English laissez faire economics, and French Republican government, despite the fact that the two never really occurred together: the industrial revolution happened under a bizarre, antiquated, still largely medieval English constitution, and nineteenth-century France was anything but laissez faire.

This makes me wonder what the etymological reasoning is for 'revolution' in things like the Industrial revolution. Is it that one of the two would benefit from better terminology?

Also keeping this to look into Ellen Meskins Wood.

If there is one logical error underlying all this, it rests on imagining that social or even technological change takes the same form of what Thomas Kuhn has called “the structure of scientific revolutions.” Kuhn is referring to events like the shift from a Newtonian to Einsteinian universe: suddenly there is an intellectual breakthrough and afterwards, the universe is different. Applied to anything other than scientific revolutions, it implies that the world really was equivalent to our knowledge of it, and the moment we change the principles on which our knowledge is based, reality changes too. This is just the sort of basic intellectual mistake developmental psychologists say we’re supposed to get over in early childhood, but it seems few of us really do.

Putting this here to come back to it, too. Both for the developmental psychology aspect and also the rest.

I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that humans never really lived in the garden of Eden. Knocking the walls down can allow us to see this history as a resource to us in much more interesting ways. Because it works both ways. Not only do we, in industrial societies, still have kinship (and cosmologies); other societies have social movements and revolutions. Which means, among other things, that radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history.

I like this, and I especially like that he doesn't discount anarchists from benefitting and not doing enough to knock down the walls that enable this.

Peter Lamborn Wilson has produced the brightest of these, in a series of essays which include reflections, on, among other things, the collapse of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures through much of eastern North America.

Couldn't restrain himself to just one citation of this creep, I see.

Paul Lafargue, Marx’s West Indian son-in-law and author of The Right to Be Lazy

Reminder for myself again.

In fact the threat of that man with the stick permeates our world at every moment; most of us have given up even thinking of crossing the innumerable lines and barriers he creates, just so we don’t have to remind ourselves of his existence. If you see a hungry woman standing several yards away from a huge pile of food—a daily occurrence for most of us who live in cities—there is a reason you can’t just take some and give it to her. A man with a big stick will come and very likely hit you. Anarchists, in contrast, have always delighted in reminding us of him. Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.

This is actually a good point and also something I want to come back to. Much like the rest of the section.

Such a theoretical emphasis opens the way to a theory of the relation of power not with knowledge, but with ignorance and stupidity. Because violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.

Contrary to popular belief, bureaucracies do not create stupidity. They are ways of managing situations that are already inherently stupid because they are, ultimately, based on the arbitrariness of force.

Ultimately this should lead to a theory of the relation of violence and the imagination. Why is it that the folks on the bottom (the victims of structural violence) are always imagining what it must be like for the folks on top (the beneficiaries of structural violence), but it almost never occurs to the folks on top to wonder what it might be like to be on the bottom? Human beings being the sympathetic creatures that they are this tends to become one of the main bastions of any system of inequality—the downtrodden actually care about their oppressors, at least, far more than their oppressors care about them—but this seems itself to be an effect of structural violence.

A lot of this might actually give me a direction to go with the project I want to undertake on why people will believe things that are just wrong, especially because the literature available (cognitive dissonance, in-group/out-group, indoctrination from childhood) don't seem to have answers to other questions I have. Why is it that people won't unlearn something? Why is it that it's possible for some to unlearn but others just won't?

After all, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that a considerable chunk of the hours worked in America are only actually necessary to compensate for problems created by the fact that Americans work too much. (Consider here such jobs as all-night pizza deliveryman or dog-washer, or those women who run nighttime day care centers for the children of women who have to work nights providing child care for businesswomen...not to mention the endless hours spent by specialists cleaning up the emotional and physical damage caused by overwork, the injuries, suicides, divorces, murderous rampages, producing the drugs to pacify the children...)

So what jobs are really necessary?

Here we can see the beginnings of Bullshit Jobs, but it also has one of the problems that I routinely recognise. There's a lot of inherent ableism in Graeber's own work, whether he acknowledged it or not. This also plays into his “what jobs are necessary.”

All-night services are good for people who do not exist on the 24-hour time, like people with N24. There are people for whom our schedules simply do not match what the social expectation is, like people with DSPD.

The assumption that the world should work on one standard time is an inherently ableist structure, and it's also worth noting that most (not all) people with sleep disorders that impact our waking times wouldn't be as impacted if our world accommodated them with having 24-hour availability of many things (and you know who could run those things? people who are awake at that time).

Part of what keeps people with these sleep disorders from getting rest is the rest of the world.

Some people need help with washing their dogs (do all dogwashers hate their job? I'd rather be a dogwasher than a tutor, tbh).

Childcare is a thing we all need to think about and in better ways, but even Graeber ignores this and his points barely explore any of the issues related either for children or for the women/parents... He only goes so far as to highlight its uselessness in a capitalistic sense.

The elimination of radical inequalities would mean we would no longer require the services of most of the millions currently employed as doormen, private security forces, prison guards, or SWAT teams—not to mention the military.

Doormen feel like an odd-one-out sometimes. They are context-dependent, as I've lived in buildings where the doormen lived in the building and were there primarily to help take care of package delivery and (in one case) helping residents sort their trash and also learn about where they could take things to recycle or ensure their reuse. Their job was occasionally mixed with “grounds keeper” or “building manager,” so they were frequently problem-solvers that you could go to if you had a problem (locked out? they know the best locksmith to help you! pipe leaking? they often knew where to go for repairs). If we removed the 'security' aspect from their job and also ensured that they lived in the building they worked in (and also shared responsibilities with others in the building), it'd still be a helpful role.

Not quite like the SWAT teams and prison guards and security forces. This is the same problem in Bullshit Jobs, but it's interesting to see him quite literally rehash his own work from here.

All in all we might discover that if we identified the work that really did need to be done to maintain a comfortable and ecologically sustainable standard of living, and redistribute the hours, it may turn out that the Wobbly platform is perfectly realistic.

The irony of this is that there are enough people on the planet to deal with even what we're dealing with now, despite a good chunk of it being pointless bureaucracy or absolute nonsense. We could easily have these hours being realistic without changing anything (and that's part of why Wobbly work gets co-opted easily, especially since it's less an anarchist union now than it ever had been prior).

This of course brings up the “who will do the dirty jobs?” question—one which always gets thrown at anarchists or other utopians. Peter Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallacy of the argument. There’s no particular reason dirty jobs have to exist. If one divided up the unpleasant tasks equally, that would mean all the world’s top scientists and engineers would have to do them too; one could expect the creation of self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots almost immediately.

This is nonsense? I mean, the end of it is nonsense. The beginning is fine. Also, if people just... cleaned up after themselves? It wouldn't take that long. And if we all had to figure out what to do with the waste, well... It wouldn't take long before “Wow, landfills are gross” would suddenly drive people back into learning things like composting.

We don't need self-cleaning kitchens and coal-mining robots (do we necessarily need coal-mining? even in 2004, this sounds weird). If we could live in ways where we help take care of each other, we'd all be able to get this shit done. And probably have less waste, too.

The real reason for the unwillingness of most scholars to see a Sulawezi or Tallensi village council as “democratic”—well, aside from simple racism, the reluctance to admit anyone Westerners slaughtered with such relative impunity were quite on the level as Pericles—is that they do not vote.

Finally?! Like, yeah. It's mostly the racism.

I’ve talked a little about the radical inclinations in much early twentieth-century anthropology, which often showed a very strong affinity with anarchism, but that seemed to largely evaporate over time. It’s all a little odd. Anthropologists are after all the only group of scholars who know anything about actually-existing stateless societies; many have actually lived in corners of the world where states have ceased to function or at least temporarily pulled up stakes and left, and people are managing their own affairs autonomously; if nothing else, they are keenly aware that the most commonplace assumptions about what would happen in the absence of a state (“but people would just kill each other!”) are factually untrue.

... Because most of them are uh... still agents of colonialism? And imperialism. Like, that much was obvious to me when I was doing a BA in Anthropology in the early 2000s. Even the “progressive” anthropologists I encountered still failed to recognise their own bigotries, with some often falling into the fetishising and co-opting of cultures (rather than the actual appreciation for or understanding of).

Then there’s the question of politics. Most anthropologists write as if their work has obvious political significance, in a tone which suggests they consider what they are doing quite radical, and certainly left of center. But what does this politics actually consist of? It’s increasingly hard to say. Do anthropologists tend to be anti-capitalist? Certainly it’s hard to think of one who has much good to say about capitalism. Many are in the habit of describing the current age as one of “late capitalism,” as if by declaring it is about to end, they can by the very act of doing so hasten its demise. But it’s hard to think of an anthropologist who has, recently, made any sort of suggestion of what an alternative to capitalism might be like. So are they liberals? Many can’t pronounce the word without a snort of contempt. What then? As far as I can make out the only real fundamental political commitment running through the entire field is a kind of broad populism. If nothing else, we are definitely not on the side of whoever, in a given situation, is or fancies themselves to be the elite. We’re for the little guys. Since in practice, most anthropologists are attached to (increasingly global) universities, or if not, end up in jobs like marketing consultancies or jobs with the UN—positions within the very apparatus of global rule—what this really comes down to is a kind of constant, ritualized declaration of disloyalty to that very global elite of which we ourselves, as academics, clearly form one (admittedly somewhat marginal) fraction.

This paragraph really needed to be hit with a “just because you are like this and are labelled an anarchist anthropologist... doesn't mean the others are.” Again, if anthropologists have a disdain for the elite classes, why are they consultants to the UN? Why are they working for intelligence agencies? Why are there anthropologists who weaponise their knowledge in marketing and PR, especially when it comes to being against those who most need support (and in favour of that elite oppressor class)? Why are they hiding their research in universities? Why aren't they fighting for more open sharing of information?

This whole thing is like he's trying to avoid what the field really is, even as his mentor literally was fighting against Napoleon Chagnon and the NAS... because they willingly worked with the military. It ignores the history of ethnography being done in the name of empire! How could a field that invaded the most vulnerable aspects of a people and then turned around to hand it off to empire to help them destroy those people... ever truly be against the elite? That's rubbish.

It’s not that different on the political level. Lauren Leve has recently warned that anthropologists risk, if they are not careful, becoming yet another cog in a global “identity machine,” a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and assumptions that has, over the last decade or so, effectively informed the earth’s inhabitants (or at least, all but the very most elite) that, since all debates about the nature of political or economic possibilities are now over, the only way one can now make a political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions about what identity is (i.e., that group identities are not ways of comparing one group to each other but constituted by the way a group relates to its own history, that there is no essential difference in this regard between individuals and groups...) established in advance. Things have come to such a pass that in countries like Nepal even Theravada Buddhists are forced to play identity politics, a particularly bizarre spectacle since they are essentially basing their identity claims on adherence to a universalistic philosophy that insists identity is an illusion.

Come back to this. Especially figuring out who Lauren Leve is.

Many years ago a French anthropologist named Gerard Althabe wrote a book about Madagascar called Oppression et Liberation dans l’Imaginaire. It’s a catchy phrase. I think it might well be applied to what ends up happening in a lot of anthropological writing. For the most part, what we call “identities” here, in what Paul Gilroy likes to call the “over-developed world,” are forced on people.

Same here. Kept for my own reference.

Largely, it seems, a collection of teenage anarchists in Europe and North America, who soon began besieging the summits of the very global elite to whom anthropologists maintain such an uneasy, uncomfortable, alliance.

Bullshit on the uneasy, uncomfortable alliance. This is so annoying.

Why are there so few anarchists in the academy?

I mean, the basic assumption would be that the principles of free association and non-hierarchical have something to do with it. Anarchists aren't typically found in places where they'll be stifled to death.

So are academics just behind the curve here? It’s possible. Perhaps in a few years the academy will be overrun by anarchists. But I’m not holding my breath. It does seem that Marxism has an affinity with the academy that anarchism never will. It was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D., even if afterwards, it became a movement intending to rally the working class.

I mean, Marxism lends itself to an institution where people organise themselves hierarchically and believe that they have the answers to pass downward to the masses. Anarchism doesn't.

At the very least, one would imagine being an openly anarchist professor would mean challenging the way universities are run—and I don’t mean by demanding an anarchist studies department, either—and that, of course, is going to get one in far more trouble than anything one could ever write.

Which is also why I don't really trust most anarchist academics. Many have no intention of dislodging themselves from the comfort to do the necessary challenging. While this was published in 2004, it's going to be interesting to see any of the folks at the Anarchist Research Group (ARG) in Loughborough challenge the fact that their university is working with the UK's Ministry of Defense.

But they won't do that, at least not most of them. Because they're too fucking comfortable and 'anarchist' is an aesthetic or niche to study for them.

Pierre Clastres

This is a note to self to possibly come back to him. This is because:

He insisted political anthropologists had still not completely gotten over the old evolutionist perspectives that saw the state primarily as a more sophisticated form of organization than what had come before; stateless peoples, such as the Amazonian societies Clastres studied, were tacitly assumed not to have attained the level of say, the Aztecs or the Inca. But what if, he proposed, Amazonians were not entirely unaware of what the elementary forms of state power might be like—what it would mean to allow some men to give everyone else orders which could not be questioned, since they were backed up by the threat of force—and were for that very reason determined to ensure such things never came about? What if they considered the fundamental premises of our political science morally objectionable?

Is interesting to see included, and I don't know much about Clastres. (Though, he was apparently naive about the power wielded against, for example, women by men.)

... This pamphlet has a lot of errors in sentences. It's kind of annoying.

In typical revolutionary discourse a “counterpower” is a collection of social institutions set in opposition to the state and capital: from self-governing communities to radical labor unions to popular militias. Sometimes it is also referred to as an “anti-power.” When such institutions maintain themselves in the face of the state, this is usually referred to as a “dual power” situation. By this definition most of human history is actually characterized by dual power situations, since few historical states had the means to root such institutions out, even assuming that they would have wanted to. But Mauss and Clastres’ argument suggests something even more radical. It suggests that counterpower, at least in the most elementary sense, actually exists where the states and markets are not even present; that in such cases, rather than being embodied in popular institutions which pose themselves against the power of lords, or kings, or plutocrats, they are embodied in institutions which ensure such types of person never come about. What it is “counter” to, then, is a potential, a latent aspect, or dialectical possibility if you prefer, within the society itself.

Interesting that Peter jabs at part of the book that discusses a vague notion of nonviolence, but Graeber doesn't show a diminished view of actions seen as violent. He openly discusses them as options (seen here as “popular militias”).

I find it interesting that Peter routinely neglects anarchist works that would support his theory in this “anarchist” book, but he will take on a liberal professor who is entirely anti-violence in every way because she says things he likes about how to deal with patriarchy. It's kind of telling.

Of course, in later contexts, what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls “the Clastrian machine,” that set of mechanisms which oppose the emergence of domination, what I’m calling the apparatus of counterpower, can itself become caught in such apocalyptic fantasies.

... Is there a point where I can read one fucking anarchist text without someone neutrally or positively citing some pederast piece of shit? Ever?

If a revolution is a matter of people resisting some form of power identified as oppressive, identifying some key aspect of that power as the source of what is fundamentally objectionable about it, and then trying to get rid of one’s oppressors in such a way as to try to eliminate that sort of power completely from daily life, then it is hard to deny that, in some sense, this was indeed a revolution. It might not have involved an actual uprising, but it was a revolution nonetheless.

I would argue that it's... not, much in the way that I don't see the Velvet Revolution as a revolution in anything but name. In neither case have they rid themselves of their oppressors; they're still there, and they can still come back.

If anything, they're both 'revolutions' in the way that we consider the 'agricultural revolution' or 'industrial revolution' to be a thing. It's a (noticeable) shift in thought or practice, not a shift in removing the oppressors. This is also clear by the next paragraph:

How long it would last is another question; it was a very fragile, tenuous sort of freedom. Many such enclaves have collapsed—in Madagascar as elsewhere.

This doesn't make it feel revolutionary, in the sense of removing oppressors and maintaining autonomous structure.

Mujeres Creando

“We are here because nobody is listening to us. These people are showing the typical hard-heartedness of bankers. We are here because we cannot pay our debts.” Their words echoed loudly from their fifth floor position, accompanied by insults and songs directed against the bankers.

Peter, like men before him, doesn't use this kind of... contextualisation to people's actions.

For three months thousands of debtors have been coming to La Paz from all parts of Bolivia to stage daily protests. These had pacifist beginnings but later became more radical, going as far as attempting to burn banks. During the conflict, because of the misery and desperation surrounding them, more than six debtors have committed suicide. Many have been forced to give up all their belongings and live in the street. Meanwhile, the government favors the rich by pardoning their debts and granting them immense sums of money.

He also doesn't engage with this, when it would actually help is point. It's rather strange that the more interesting parts of this that exist are the parts he skipped over.

An Interview with Mujeres Creando

Mujeres Creando is a “craziness” started by three women (Julieta Paredes, Maria Galindo and Monica Mendoza) from the arrogant, homophobic and totalitarian Left of Bolivia during the ‘80s, where heterosexuality was still the model and feminism was understood to be divisive. It’s not really a new design in a society such as ours. So we had already been developing this kind of criticism. The other part of our criticism of the Left is toward what has been a constructed social practice; that is, it was unethical, dishonest and it had a double morality.

He quotes this part but doesn't engage with it in any capacity allows for a proper contextualisation. This happens when people discuss well-known women's groups. We get this kind of lip-service statement that skips over what that contextualisation means. Here's Peter before he quotes Julieta Paredes (Mujeres Creando) and Sylvia Rivera (and then just lists a bunch of examples of women's groups and individual women):

Whether militant or pacifist, nearly every tactical or strategic discussion I have participated in was attended and dominated overwhelmingly by men. Rather than claim that women and transgender people are somehow unable to participate in a broad spectrum of tactical options (or even discuss them), we would do well to recall the voices of those who have fought-violently, defiantly, effectively — as revolutionaries.

And a lot of it reads as if he's just copy-pasting shit without analysing it.

Like, c'mon. We all know we should listen to women and trans people (basically, listen to people experiencing the shit you're talking about and be fucking diverse about it). We didn't need that shit said in 2008, and we don't need it said now either. We fucking know.

So why not analyse why it is that it still happens? Why not point out how women are often forced to drop out of anarchist groups and start their own? Because that shit's more than just nonviolence protecting the state (and also that analysis would help here).

It's like when people talk about the Mujeres Libres and gloss over why they started and why shit like that feels like it's still needed. There's no analysis of why that separatism feels like a requirement to be heard and to do the things you need to do to survive. Never. Not here, not fucking anywhere.

I can make my own list. We've had lists for decades, even before Peter wrote his shit book. He could at least look at the examples and analyse them, but he doesn't. He only does it in other chapters (and not great there, either... but at least he does it).

To be a feminist in our society means to fight against neoliberalism and its ideology; for us, being a feminist means denouncing racism, machismo/sexism (in the Left and within anarchism, as well as feminine sexism), homophobia, domestic violence, etc. It means denouncing the sexist, bureaucratized, technocratic women of this generation (for us, those women that have fallen into neoliberalism and are administrators of the murderous politics of the World Bank, IMF, etc.) Here’s the difference between us and them: they use power and are within the system, and therefore they always control the forces (military, economic, social, political) against those who oppose what they say.

Here's another point that would've been able to synthesise all of these shit chapters into one coherent piece. Julieta Paredes clearly states the interconnections between them all, that there is no feminism if we're not fighting neoliberalism, racism, etc.

The book could've been an essay, and it would've done a better job at discussing most things if he didn't just turn it into a fucking list and tried to copy Ward Churchill. I don't even know why Churchill likes this book; it's practically his essay word-for-word with random and somewhat meaningless additions.

Women have sympathy as well as fear. The sexist women are much more stubborn and violent than macho men. These men are careful about having sex with us; they’re afraid, it’s some kind of complex… but in the end they have a certain kind of respect toward us because we have been fighting for ten or eleven years. At first, most women have sympathy, and later they’re afraid because it’s a demanding and radical proposal, but that’s the only way to build a place where everything is not superficial and diluted. And the men that sympathize with us follow us if they’re interested in everything, but they keep wanting us to be like mothers, feeding them; they’re a little lazy because they don’t want to accept the challenge of making their own group.

This is a single paragraph and is a better analysis (not perfect, but better) than anything Peter attempted to regurgitate about how some feminists are pacifists and want a pacifist feminism.

It would've provided him a template for the kinds of discussions that we're already having, especially if he wanted to introduce it to the machismo of his audience (but I don't think he cared, tbh—he'd rather quote reactionary aspects of bell hooks's unevidenced self-help nonsense).

Whenever we’ve gone out to do graffiti, we have been afraid, and we’re always afraid. But we’ve thought about our right to do it… Coca-Cola pays and paints, Repsol pays and paints, so why can’t we paint without paying? The problem isn’t that the walls are painted, the problem is that it’s not paid for. If we must pay for public space, then it’s a big contradiction in democracy. What’s public and what’s private?

Streets are public space, the whole city’s courtyard, not a jail hallway, where you go from the jail of your house to the jail of your office job… if it’s public, then everybody can use it. But if you pay for public space it becomes private. Public space doesn’t exist. Let’s start this discussion.

What’s dirty? What’s clean? “You’re making my walls dirty!” Oh, so when Coca-Cola contracts a painter, it doesn’t make the wall dirty? That’s an aesthetic concept. It seems to me that it has made the wall dirty in a disgusting way. And what we have done, our graffiti, that’s beautiful.

This is just a good reminder.

The Creative Force of Bolivian Debtors

From table to table, I distributed our leaflet, scolding, shouting and pestering them. I described the terror of children when lawyers brought eviction orders. I said it was impossible to extract another cent from the debtors. I called the bankers inhumane bloodsuckers.

What’s the point of such direct action? It’s fun. Insolence and mockery are indispensable for our movement. Without us, the luncheon would have been a warm reception for the superintendent. With us inside, the event became scandalous, shameful and profoundly unpleasant.

This essay is also in Quiet Rumours, and Peter noticeably ignores much of what they do and say here. Interesting.

We shouted but, despite cowardly claims to the contrary by the bankers and their columnist friends, we didn’t attack or even insult them. We are humane, and we know that social change comes not from hate or violence, but from hope and creativity.

I disagree with this line, but I think it's probably because they say this that he ignored this essay... despite the fact that he claims we have to deal with sexism without violence. Racism can be dealt with violence, statism can be dealt with violence, violence makes a movement effective...

... but sexism? No. Sexism probably not, Peter says:

From another angle, nonviolence seems well-suited to dealing with patriarchy. After all, the abolition of patriarchy in particular requires forms of resistance that emphasize healing and reconciliation.

There's also the implication that it will be one of the few systemic problems that we have to deal with individually and that we can't really fight against people who hold power:

Because the distribution of power within patriarchy is much more diffused than within the state or capitalism (for example, a male general who also sits on the advisory board of a major corporation holds significant power within the state and capitalism, but does not derive much more power specifically from patriarchy than any other male, except perhaps as a role model of manliness), fighting against power holders or those most responsible plays a much smaller role. Instead, people must build a culture that allows everyone to self-identify in terms of gender and that supports us as we build healthy relationships and heal from generations of violence and trauma.

Which isn't what most of the essays in this collection state. Even the ones I find troubling are far more incendiary than he is.

This essay includes the use of “wimmin,” and it's hard not to look at it as being a transphobic dog whistle when a lot of transphobes love those alt spellings of 'women'. I don't assume this to always be true of someone, but it's hard not to considering how frequently the two overlap. You can thank things like the trans-exclusive Michigan Womyn's Music Festival for a lot of people being hesitant around people using alt-spellings of 'woman' or 'women'.

Which is frustrating because a lot of alt-spellings come from somewhere else ('wimmin' was apparently seen in Black American English on occasion, 'womyn' was used Scots) and were co-opted by predominantly transphobic cis white women.

Anyway...

Red Zora attacks predominantly patriarchal institutes, companies, and persons representing and building up a male sexist society, which is oppressing and exploiting wimmin worldwide. They are conducting campaigns against porntraders, sex shops, international traders of wimmin (those who profit from importing Asian wimmin as “brides” for West German men), doctors who are carrying out forced sterilizations, the Doctor’s Guild (“We see the Federal Doctor’s Guild as exponents of rape in white trenchcoats”), drug companies (notably Schering who produced the birth defect causing drug Duogynon), as well as computer companies such as Nixdorf and the multinational Siemens.

... Don't think I'm far off because the immediate first action they list is... anti-sex work (an overlap with transphobia). There are criticisms of the porn industry to be made, but the bougie white cis women who went full-on for things like discussions of exploitation without consulting sex workers? Or focused purely on trafficking (which happened but they always ignored what kinds of trafficking were most common, and they still do)...

This may have a history behind it that we can learn from, but goddamn if it isn't problematic as shit and perpetuates the same bullshit we saw from older women's groups (like Mujeres Libres or groups of the Paris Commune) when sex work was discussed.

It's also interesting that they mention “doctors who are carrying out forced sterilizations” but don't even mention who was being forcefully sterilised... because it largely wasn't able-bodied cis white women in Europe.

Interview with Rote Zora

These people were such second-wavers. There's no consideration for so many things: actual trafficked people (and where most trafficking victims end up), refusal to understand immigration, blanket-attacking porn shops and sex work institutions without regard for any of the women working in those spaces...

Even if they've got other good ideas, most of this shit sounds like paternalistic bullshit.

I have very little to say about either Charlotte Wilson's essay or the two Emma Goldman essays... They're interesting historical pieces, but I can't say that I get much from them at the moment that I haven't already had as a thought myself or recognised on my own.

Emma's first one is interesting for discussing citizenship and borders, though it appears to awkwardly handle countries.

It does strike me deeply that we never get anything other than Emma for anarcha-feminism, even from publishers who could help create systems that would support more diverse writing (and categorically never do).

Make Your Own Tea

In the early years of Class War, the attitude was that feminist demands did not go far enough. We said why call for equal pay? Equal rights under capitalism was putting out a begging bowl for equal gender exploitation and was spectacularly unambitious. Class War were calling not for equal pay packets but for the abolition of money. The feminist fixation with voting rights was another half measure. Why choose between two evils when there’s so much more to be had? Class War tried to support the principle of gender equality while disagreeing with the reformist tendencies of established feminism.

This is something that I find infuriating about so many “liberation” movements. Rather than actually think about any kind of alteration to the world we exist in, they always sit at the same places. Equal pay (equal exploitation), ability to vote (for a government that will never represent you)... In the case of queer liberation, the assimilationist cause for marriage (rather than the dismantling of marriage entirely).

Every single time, people push for the most mundane reforms rather than actually pushing for real changes...

This essay has some issues, but it is largely interesting and at least worth a skim.

So far, I don't think I've found this collection that interesting.

Untying the Knot

Ironically, despite the fact that these were long-term concerns of the anarchist movement, it took feminists to show how libertarian organisation could look. “Feminism is what anarchism preaches,” wrote Lynne Farrow in 1974. A little simplistic, perhaps, but it was certainly true that the feminist practice of small, leaderless groups was an anarchist ideal.

Perhaps ironically, I have never gotten the feeling that most of the feminist organising was intentionally small or leaderless. If you read between the lines of most of these essays, you quickly start recognising that a lot of people who started small groups did not want them to be leaderless (and in fact, wanted to be leaders). I'd say, rather than being simplistic, Farrow was overly idealistic.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, and the “structureless” rap group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

Or, and this comes from being part of small groups, some people overtook the groups and the time meant to be working on certain things (whatever those things were). I have tried working on numerous projects, scheduled meetings to be held to work with interested members, and have had people overrun them with their own needs while ignoring others.

And while I do not mind providing support, some people do intend to use themselves as a way to create a wedge within the group. This is not the fault of “structurelessness” (though, it is a misnomer and an intentional piece of disinformation to say that horizontally organised groups are without structure, as... horizontal is a structure), but it is a fault of people not recognising the situation around them or asking for permission. This has most often happened with people who attempted to trauma-bond with someone in the group, which has created an ally who excuses their behaviours.

Wanting support for trauma is fine, but using your trauma to supersede everything or everyone else? Isn't. It's an intentional distraction, a form of manipulation.

If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organisation and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these.

Yes, but mistaking “no leaders” or “temporary leaders for certain goals” with “having no structure” is a basic category error.

These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don’t.

This is a thing that I've seen, but I've also seen it in formally organised institutions. This, again, isn't just a problem of leaderless groups with horizontal structures.

In horizontally organised groups, this is something that I admit people need to be prepared to dismantle and recognise on their own. I have seen this in numerous anarchist spaces, particularly with regards to newcomers (and also definitely weaponised against immigrants).

But I've also seen this in workplaces where managers will prefer people who've befriended them over people who've just got on with their work; we've been watching it with electoral parties for ages, as the conservative old guard refuses to let anyone new with more “progressive” values participate.

This is something to perpetually watch out for and to unlearn in ourselves; our friends can be wrong and can do wrong. This is something that has been well-known and well-trodden in abuse support networks, which are often small and leaderless groups.

(Joreen acknowledges this point, and it really kind of renders her essay moot. Like, what's the point of talking about the tyranny of (perceived) structurelessness when you admit that these are behaviours that are enacted in other spheres of life and are... still problematic there, too? It's sort of like a refusal to engage in the actual systemic elements at play, which aren't going to magically disappear in groups responding to systemic bigotries and rights.)

While many of these things are found in anarchafeminist organising, I'm not sure why Joreen's essay is one that people took inspiration from... especially when anarcha-feminists definitely produced critique of the groups they were in that were far more specific to what was happening... and also recognised that the status quo happens within our spheres all the time.

Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women’s liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.

... So society coerces groups to maintain the structures that people are fighting to not use... And in order to not use them, we have to use them because interfacing with the public requires it.

Makes no sense, tbh.

This is part of the unlearning process. But if anarchists are reading this and going “Yeah, makes sense,” then I have to wonder to what degree they are prepared to fight for anarchic ideals rather than move into social democracy.

This has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women labeled “stars.” First, because the movement didn’t put them in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press will continue to look to “stars” as spokeswomen as long as it has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives at all.

First: Those women can (and should) abdicate their apparent stardom. If they had learned anything about horizontal organising, they would've done this rather than continuing to speak for others. They would push the media to other people and continue refusing to speak until the (presumably mainstream) media either leaves them alone or moves on. The simple fact that they did not do this highlights an issue with them as well as with society at large.

If those women do not step down as “stars,” the movement can speak over them. They can (and should) shut them out until they actually engage on the terms of the (presumably) horizontally organised group. Ostracisation is a useful tool, and it can be applied to public speaking as long as reasons are given.

Groups splinter over things like this, and they should. It's unhealthy behaviour, and it's something that we all need to recognise as something to unlearn. Spokespeople are not necessary.

Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously attacked by their sisters. This achieves nothing for the movement and is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly alienated—or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her “sisters.” She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the “star” system in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic non-responsibility that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a “star,” the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she has been accused.

This reads like every “why I left the Left” essay I've ever read from someone who became a right-wing grifter, if I'm honest.

It also requires asking a set of simple questions that will help people figure out how to behave: “Why is she being attacked? In what ways? Is she actually being attacked or is she being criticised and refusing to take the critiques seriously?”

If a person can answer these questions with functional answers (“She is being criticised, not attacked, because she keeps setting herself up as a spokesperson and is doing nothing to deflect or redirect it”), then you know that this person is not really being attacked by her “sisters.” (I hate this form of solidarity; it's ludicrous and abusive.)

If you can't answer these questions (“I don't know”), then perhaps you should reflect on your own values and engage with people around you (“Do you know why?”) and then decide what feels most proper. Usually, if I can't answer this question, then I can recognise that the attacks are attacks.

But we don't learn these skills; we have to figure them out. Just like we don't learn to actually take critique from our peers, and many people take it as an attack even when it's constructive criticism.

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done.

Right, all the highly structured groups are very effective at “getting things done.” /s

The Tyranny of Tyranny

Small groups, on the other hand, multiply the strength of each member. By working collectively in small numbers, the small group utilizes the various contributions of each person to their fullest, nurturing and developing individual input, instead of dissipating it in the competitive survival-of-the-fittest/smartest/wittiest spirit of the large organisation.

Well, at least Levine correctly points out the difference between small groups and large organisations that Joreen was loathe to acknowledge.

These perennial pitfalls of movement people, which amount to a bottomless pit for the movement, are explained by Joreen as part of the “Tyranny of Structurelessness,” which is a joke from the standpoint that sees a nation of quasi-automatons, struggling to maintain a semblance of individuality against a post-technological, military/industrial bulldozer.

This is just a well-written line. I'm not sure I entirely buy it, but the writing is good.

Why has the Left all but ignored anarchism? It might be because the anarchists have never sustained a revolutionary victory. Marxism has triumphed, but so has capitalism. What does that prove, or what does it suggest but that maybe the loser, up to this point is on our side? The Russian anarchists fiercely opposed the very revisionist tyranny among the Bolsheviks that the new Left would come to deride with sophomoric callousness, before their old Left parents in the ‘60s. Sure, the old generation of American Leftists were narrow-minded not to see capitalism regenerating in Russia; but the tunnel vision with which we have charted a path of Marxist-Leninist dogma is not something to be proud of either.

Ouch. But also, this is still a very real thing that is very felt.

The style, the audacity of Emma Goldman, has been touted by women who do not regard themselves as anarchists… because Emma was so right-on. Few women have gotten so many men scared for so long as Emma Goldman. It seems logical that we should study Emma, not to embrace her every thought, but to find the source of her strength and love of life. It is no accident, either, that the anarchist Red Terror named Emma was also an advocate and practitioner of free-love; she was an affront to more capitalist shackles than any of her Marxist contemporaries.

Yes, but it's also ironic that she is the only woman most people ever know. And also that she wasn't exactly seen as a threat, unlike Lucy Parsons (whose library was stolen by US intelligence after her death).

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.

Starting with “Anarcha-Feminism: Two Statements” (by Red Rosa and Black Maria, Black Rose Anarcha-Feminists)...

While we recognise important differences in the rival systems, our analysis of the evils of the State must extend to both its communist and capitalist versions.

Yep, yep! The number of people who some years later ignore the way the State functions under so-called communism are... astounding.

Anarchism is not synonymous with irresponsibility and chaos. Indeed, it offers meaningful alternatives to the outdated organisational and policy-making practices of the rest of the left. The basic anarchist form of organisation is a small group, volitionally organised and maintained, which must work toward defining the oppression of its members and what form their struggle for liberation must take.

I still don't see a problem with chaos if you try to co-opt the usage of it. What, exactly, is wrong with all chaos?

Feminism as Anarchism (Lynne Farrow)

Feminism practices what anarchism preaches. One might go as far as to claim feminists are the only existing protest groups that can honestly be called practicing Anarchists; first because women apply themselves to specific projects like abortion clinics and day-care centres; second, because as essentially apolitical women for the most part refuse to engage in the political combat terms of the right or the left, reformism or revolution, respectively.

... This is probably one of the whitest things I've read in anarcha-feminist literature, lmao. Which apolitical women are you even talking about?

And while feminists do these projects, they still teach non-anarchic principles of hierarchy (against children) in places like daycare centers.

What an opener.

The first impulse toward female liberation came in the 1840’s when liberals were in the midst of a stormy abolition campaign.

And here it is. You think this is the first impulse toward the liberation of women? You think women of the past were just passive about their situations, never wanting to escape them? Absolute horse shit.

Anyway, I'm now reading about the American (and sometimes British) Suffragette movement(s), and I'm not seeing how any of these people are anarchists at all... or doing anything anarchic, as they are clearly working towards involvement within the existing system.

If they had learned that they should destroy the system, that'd be one thing... They were working to become a part of it.

(As Germaine Greer has suggested, since women have no power to threaten, they cannot be castrated and therefore no one sees their powerlessness as anything but natural and no one’s going to lie down for women to kick.)

Reminding me that Greer needs a kick in the face.

Essay was... meh. It ignored its own points and then forgot it was even talking about anarchism, unsurprisingly.

Anarchism: The Feminist Connection (Peggy Kornegger)

Eleven years ago, when I was in a small-town Illinois high school, I had never heard of the word “anarchism”—at all. The closest I came to it was knowing that anarchy meant “chaos.” As for socialism and communism, my history classes somehow conveyed the message that there was no difference between them and fascism, a word that brought to mind Hitler, concentration camps, and all kinds of horrible things which never happened in a free country like ours. I was subtly being taught to swallow the bland pablum of traditional American politics: moderation, compromise, fence-straddling, Chuck Percy as wonder boy. I learned the lesson well: it took me years to recognise the bias and distortion which had shaped my entire “education.” The “his-story” of mankind (white) had meant just that; as a woman I was relegated to a vicarious existence. As an anarchist I had no existence at all. A whole chunk of the past (and thus possibilities for the future) had been kept from me. Only recently did I discover that many of my disconnected political impulses and inclinations shared a common framework—that is, the anarchist or libertarian tradition of thought. It was like suddenly seeing red after years of colourblind greys.

... Damn, aside from not knowing who Chuck Percy is, this was also my experience in the fucking 2000s. It's like school has a reason to exist, and that reason is indoctrination.

Although I call myself an anarchafeminist, this definition can easily include socialism, communism, cultural feminism, lesbian separatism, or any of a dozen other political labels.

No. But also, lesbian separatism has often included elements of political lesbianism as a core belief, and that is antithetical to a queer anarchism.

Anarchism has been maligned and misinterpreted for so long that maybe the most important thing to begin with is an explanation of what it is and isn’t. Probably the most prevalent stereotype of the anarchist is a malevolent-looking man hiding a lighted bomb beneath a black cape, ready to destroy or assassinate everything and everybody in his path. This image engenders fear and revulsion in most people, regardless of their politics; consequently, anarchism is dismissed as ugly, violent, and extreme. Another misconception is the anarchist as impractical idealist, dealing in useless, Utopian abstractions and out of touch with concrete reality. The result: anarchism is once again dismissed, this time as an “impossible dream.”

Again, we get the misconceptions... I find it interesting that Peter doesn't even engage with the constant framing of anarchism as being “not violent” in his own book (especially considering he used that awful Ashen Ruins essay).

Belief in both spontaneity and organisation. Anarchists have long been accused of advocating chaos. Most people in fact believe that anarchism is a synonym for disorder, confusion, violence. This is a total misrepresentation of what anarchism stands for. Anarchists don’t deny the necessity of organisation; they only claim that it must come from below, not above, from within rather than from without. Externally imposed structure or rigid rules which foster manipulation and passivity are the most dangerous forms a socialist “revolution” can take. No one can dictate the exact shape of the future. Spontaneous action within the context of a specific situation is necessary if we are going to create a society which responds to the changing needs of individuals and groups. Anarchists believe in fluid forms: small-scale participatory democracy in conjunction with large-scale collective cooperation and coordination (without loss of individual initiative).

And here, Peggy at least pushes back against the fear of being seen as chaotic. Perhaps I shall write that essay after all. Time to collect my bits and bobs.

Unfortunately, this did not occur. Authoritarian politics and bureaucratic methods die hard, and most of the major French workers’ unions were saddled with both. As in Spain, the Communist Party worked against the direct, spontaneous actions of the people in the streets: the Revolution must be dictated from above. Leaders of the CGT (the Communist workers’ union) tried to prevent contacts between the students and workers, and a united left soon became an impossibility.

At some point, we really need to learn that communists ruin everything. Communism is fine, but communists keep attaching themselves to the State and State power... and then they ruin everything for their own ability to take that power, which isn't very helpful for collectives and communalism.

There are two main reasons why revolution was aborted in France: (1) inadequate preparation in the theory and practice of anarchism and (2) the vast power of the State coupled with authoritarianism and bureaucracy in potentially sympathetic left-wing groups.

This is about the strikes and riots in 1968. But also, see point 2 and the above comment.

In Spain, the revolution was more widespread and tenacious because of the extensive preparation. Yet it was still eventually crushed by a fascist State and authoritarian leftists.

See above again!

It is important to consider these two factors in relation to the situation in the United States today. We are not only facing a powerful State whose armed forces, police, and nuclear weapons could instantly destroy the entire human race, but we also find ourselves confronting a pervasive reverence for authority and hierarchical forms whose continuance is ensured daily through the kind of home-grown passivity bred by family, school, church, and TV screen. In addition, the U.S. is a huge country, with only a small, sporadic history of anarchist activity. It would seem that not only are we unprepared, we are literally dwarfed by a State more powerful than those of France and Spain combined. To say we are up against tremendous odds is an understatement.

I'm just going to point dramatically at SCHOOL because a lot of anarchists keep ignoring it as a site of indoctrination.

I have not touched upon the matter of woman’s role in Spain and France, as it can be summed up in one word—unchanged. Anarchist men have been little better than males everywhere in their subjection of women.

Again, reading this essay would've helped Peter to actually understand what is meant by people critiquing certain kinds of violence and the propensity toward violence as masculinist or macho, but. Reading is so hard, so you have to write a book instead.

The current women’s movement and a radical feminist analysis of society have contributed much to libertarian thought. In fact, it is my contention that feminists have been unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice for years. We now need to become consciously aware of the connections between anarchism and feminism and use that framework for our thoughts and actions. We have to be able to see very clearly where we want to go and how to get there. In order to be more effective, in order to create the future we sense is possible, we must realise that what we want is not change but total transformation.

I think more people should be directly linking their movements to anarchism because only anarchism can support the liberation of all.

The radical feminist perspective is almost pure anarchism. The basic theory postulates the nuclear family as the basis for all authoritarian systems. The lesson the child learns, from father to teacher to boss to God, is to OBEY the great anonymous voice of Authority. To graduate from childhood to adulthood is to become a full-fledged automaton, incapable of questioning or even thinking clearly. We pass into middle-America, believing everything we are told and numbly accepting the destruction of life all around us.

Basically, yeah. And for some reason, a lot of people think that the questioning they're taught to do in school is helpful. It isn't. It's guided questioning, with assumptions built in.

In actual practice within the Women’s Movement, feminists have had both success and failure in abolishing hierarchy and domination. I believe that women frequently speak and act as “intuitive” anarchists, that is, we approach, or verge on, a complete denial of all patriarchal thought and organisation. That approach, however, is blocked by the powerful and insidious forms which patriarchy takes—in our minds and in our relationships with one another. Living within and being conditioned by an authoritarian society often prevents us from making that all-important connection between feminism and anarchism. When we say we are fighting the patriarchy, it isn’t always clear to all of us that that means fighting all hierarchy, all leadership, all government, and the very idea of authority itself. Our impulses toward collective work and small leaderless groups have been anarchistic, but in most cases we haven’t called them by that name. And that is important, because an understanding of feminism as anarchism could springboard women out of reformism and stop-gap measures into a revolutionary confrontation with the basic nature of authoritarian politics.

I actually agree with this, and it's why I think all liberation movements should see their inherent connection to anarchism.

If we want to “bring down the patriarchy,” we need to talk about anarchism, to know exactly what it means, and to use that framework to transform ourselves and the structure of our daily lives. Feminism doesn’t mean female corporate power or a woman President; it means no corporate power and no Presidents. The Equal Rights Amendment will not transform society; it only gives women the “right” to plug into a hierarchical economy. Challenging sexism means challenging all hierarchy—economic, political, and personal. And that means an anarcha-feminist revolution.

Still agree.

To think of sexism as an evil which can be eradicated by female participation in the way things are is to ensure the continuation of domination and oppression. “Feminist” capitalism is a contradiction in terms. When we establish women’s credit unions, restaurants, bookstores, etc., we must be clear that we are doing so for our own survival, for the purpose of creating a counter-system whose processes contradict and challenge competition, profit-making, and all forms of economic oppression. We must be committed to “living on the boundaries,” to anti-capitalist, non-consumption values. What we want is neither integration nor a coup d’etat which would “transfer power from one set of boys to another set of boys.” What we ask is nothing less than total revolution, revolution whose forms invent a future untainted by inequity, domination, or disrespect for individual variation—in short, feminist-anarchist revolution.

I also agree with this, and it is something that has bogged down a lot of our anarchist infrastructure. Our few publishing houses have a tendency to refuse to help build more, to help create a wider infrastructure that could help support more people in their survival. They maintain a lot of hierarchical thinking and structures to our detriment.

So, what I’m talking about is a long-term process, a series of actions in which we unlearn passivity and learn to take control over our own lives. I am talking about a “hollowing out” of the present system through the formation of mental and physical (concrete) alternatives to the way things are. The romantic image of a small band of armed guerrillas overthrowing the U.S. government is obsolete (as is all male politics) and basically irrelevant to this conception of revolution. We would be squashed if we tried it. Besides, as the poster says, “What we want is not the overthrow of the government, but a situation in which it gets lost in the shuffle.” This is what happened (temporarily) in Spain, and almost happened in France. Whether armed resistance will be necessary at some point is open to debate. The anarchist principle of “means create ends” seems to imply pacifism, but the power of the State is so great that it is difficult to be absolute about non-violence. (Armed resistance was crucial in the Spanish Revolution, and seemed important in France 1968 as well.) The question of pacifism, however, would entail another discussion, and what I’m concerned with here is emphasizing the preparation needed to transform society, a preparation which includes an anarcha-feminist framework, long-range revolutionary patience, and continual active confrontation with entrenched patriarchal attitudes.

Wow, it's like Peter could've read this and actually gotten what most critiques of violence being masculinist are about. Jesus fucking Christ, he had the book with the essays... Why not actually engage with all of the essays? They were right there.

The boycott can also be a powerful strike or union strategy (e.g., the boycott of non-union grapes, lettuce, and wines, and of Farah pants). In addition, it can be used to force economic and social changes. Refusal to vote, to pay war taxes, or to participate in capitalist competition and over-consumption are all important actions when coupled with support of alternative, non-profit structures (food co-ops, health and law collectives, recycled clothing and book stores, free schools, etc.). Consumerism is one of the main strongholds of capitalism. To boycott buying itself (especially products geared to obsolescence and those offensively advertised) is a tactic that has the power to change the “quality of everyday life.” Refusal to vote is often practised out of despair or passivity rather than as a conscious political statement against a pseudo-democracy where power and money elect a political elite. Non-voting can mean something other than silent consent if we are simultaneously participating in the creation of genuine democratic forms in an alternative network of anarchist affinity groups.

This is less related to Peter and more to all the fucking anarchists who get a bee in their bonnet and pretend voting for one war criminal over another is “harm reduction” (for whom?). Not voting can be a form of boycott, especially if you work on other things like the aforementioned law collectives and also collectives that support immigrants or whatever else keeps being stolen from us by politicians on all sides.

I do believe that what we all need, what we absolutely require, in order to continue struggling (in spite of oppression of our daily lives) is HOPE, that is, a vision of the future so beautiful and so powerful that it pulls us steadily forward in a bottom-up creation of an inner and outer world both habitable and self-fulfilling for all.

While I want the bottom-up creation of a self-fulling world, I don't have hope. Like at all. Hope doesn't help me, but seeing people working on shit and not blocking it does. Hope gets nothing done for me; it makes everything feel delusional. Being able to work with people? That makes things feel tangible. Feeling a possibility is not the same as feeling hope.

As a side note for Peggy Kornegger's essay, I hate how binary it is. I don't think “female politics” or “male politics” are really a thing, and it often comes off with “women are better” even though many women support the same garbage we're fighting against. Patriarchal politics are 100% a thing, but I'm not here for the binary thinking of female-things-good and male-things-bad. It feels exclusionary of multiple trans politics.

I also find it disappointing how often she cited Murray Bookchin, lol. When did he stop self-describing as an anarchist? Was it after the '70s?

The women’s workshop began with a coherent supportive discussion in which we tried to clarify the links between our anarchism and our feminism. On the whole we were in agreement on the need both for an autonomous women’s movement and to develop feminism within the Anarchist movement. These feelings were not shared by some of the men in the conference who saw no evidence of sexism in the anarchist movement and attached little importance to patriarchal oppression. At times throughout the conference women were belittled and even insulted, and their ideas trivialised—often by men who claimed to be ‘insulted’ by our allegations of sexism...

The foreword includes this quote (in a bigger chunk of quote) that comes from the report from Zero No 5 Feb/March 78. They use this to discuss the ways in which anarcha-feminism was not welcomed into the movement at large.

I'm not sure if the foreword was part of the original text (I can only access an expanded edition from 2012), but I have no reason to believe it wasn't. Had Peter read this and actually cared, he'd realise that this is the vein that a lot of critiques of violence takes place. It's not just that it's violence happening; it's the kind of violence and the way it happens.

Introduction (Roxanne Dunar-Ortiz)

With this important collection of and about anarcha-feminists over more than a century, stunning female anarchist heroes are restored to our collective memory. And this collection is only a sampling that should lead readers to other foremothers of anarcha-feminism, such as Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, Jessie Bross Lloyd, Hortensia Black, Sarah Ames, Lizzie Swank Holmes, Johanna Greie, Kate Austin, Helen Keller, Louise Michel, Azecena Fernandez Barba, and thousands of other historical figures and contemporary feminist anarchists.

Whew, Roxanne has a tendency to say one thing and then shove you in another direction. As I was reading these names, I was like “Sorry, since when was Mother Jones an anarchist?” But then she hits you with the “other historical figures” bit, which sounds weasely. Whatever.

Just like today, men find it difficult or unthinkable to not only give up their male privileges but also their sense of supremacy. Independent radical women often live lonely lives if they expect equality. Our task as anarcha-feminists can be nothing less than changing the world and to do that we need to consult our heroic predecessors.

Hey, another sentence that Peter could've read to contextualise the kinds of critiques he engages with. It's almost like he cherry-picks bits and pieces of anarcha-feminism and ignores everything else. What a surprise!

Why Anarcha-Feminism? (Revolutionary Anarcha-Feminist Group Dublin... or 'RAG')

Sometimes defined as libertarian socialism, the ultimate aim of anarchism is total democracy—for each person to have a direct say in issues that affect their lives, not rely on government to represent them.

Nah. That's not what democracy means. Democracy and anarchism cannot happen at the same time, and it's because of the “rule by the people” aspect of democracy. There are better ways to define anarchism, but this ain't it (and wasn't it, either).

Anarchists are too happy to cling to democracy despite the fact that whatever form it's taken in our history, it has never served everyone. And can't.

This requires the destruction of state, hierarchy and class society, and the construction of non-hierarchical bottom-up systems of organisations such as local councils and unions to replace these.

And if people in local councils don't want to participate? And what's up with this thing about the persistence of unions? What kind of unions? Workers' unions? And have we thought about what that means for the world we'd be living in? Like, shouldn't we be anti-work?

Anarchism also suffers from negative connotations, for example the misassociation with chaos and violence.

I think there are two things that we've missed. First is the redefining of chaos. People have been taught so much that 'order' is necessary that they believe that 'chaos' isn't acceptable. I think we need to revisit what 'chaos' means and how not everything that is 'chaotic' is inherently bad. (I also think we need to point to how the people defining us as chaotic are more involved with creating negative chaos; the democratic institutions we live under enforce multiple kinds of negative chaose through their violence.)

Also, I wonder why Peter didn't use RAG's essay as an example of discussions around violence. Hmm...

Although there is some acceptance by wealthy capitalist countries of difference with regard to gender and sexuality, ultimately it is acceptable only as a lifestyle choice, not as a revolutionary force, which it should ultimately be. The destruction of the systems of capitalism, state and patriarchy would lead to an explosion in different ways of being—sexualities, gender identities, family structures, etc.

Yep, yep. This book should, at least, have some good lines and better takes than any of the other anarchist nonsense I've been reading recently.

This part, in particular, is not sitting well with me because I feel like it overlooks the very obvious things that Peter doesn't want to really deal with (and it feels very much like bell hooks's supposed “I support victims” victim blaming:

Likewise, whose notion of freedom does not include women’s being able to defend themselves? Responding to the presumption that women can only be protected by larger social structures, activist Sue Daniels reminds us, “A woman can fight off a male attacker by herself....It is absolutely not a question of who is physically stronger — it is a question of training.”

I think Peter is conflating critiques of violence-first and violence-only strategies (things that are inherently manarchist) with the above. No one has ever said that women cannot defend themselves (ironically, for his entire time in the spotlight, he has done nothing except speak over anarchafeminists who have repeatedly championed KYLR—if KYLR isn't self-defense, I don't know what it is).

Very few (actually... none?) of the things that he misreads state that “women must rely upon larger social structures.” If they support nonviolence, that nonviolence is universal (which means it applies to everyone); if they critique violence, it's a specific kind of violence.

This Sue Daniels quote comes from a personal email and is, as a result, unverifiable. It also means that we can't know what the full context of that quote is and what aspects she was being prompted to respond to. Since we know how Peter behaves, we have to wonder what he was discussing with her. (Also, according to the footnote that comes with it, she recommends that we read Martha McCaughey's Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense... which I'd go out on a limb and say that Peter hasn't read. I might add it to my reading list, but I'm so exhausted of his bullshit rhetorical flourishes and ignorance of the things he refers to that I wish I could burn at least one copy of this book out of frustration.)

“The Will to Win! Women and Self-Defense,” an anonymously authored pamphlet, adds the following:

“It is ridiculous that there are so many counseling and support organizations for women who have been raped, attacked, and abused but hardly any that work to prepare and prevent these things from happening. We must refuse to be victims and reject the idea that we should submit to our assailants to keep from arousing further violence. In reality, submitting to our assailants will only contribute to future violence against others.”

This is a pamphlet put out by the Jacksonville Anarchist Black Cross, but I cannot find it. It'd be interesting to read it, though. However, I can only guess the full context of this quote. (Searching for it only leads me back to Peter's book.)

I think it's a fair quote in that it is absurd that we have some (not “so many” because they aren't as easy to access as this sentence would insinuate, and they often ignore queer victims). There really aren't that many counselling or support organisations for abused women; there aren't even ones that support immigrant women when they want to escape their abusers, since they often try to coerce a desired outcome on them.

There are a lot of critiques of these counselling services and support organisations, but the fact remains that we need more of them along with being able to engage in supported self-defense. However, we know that even anarchists are loath to support women and people of marginalised genders who fight back, so maybe it'd be nice to also see these attitudes shift... But considering the number of sources I've managed to link back to a notorious anti-feminist “anarchist” in Peter's own work? It's interesting to say the least.

The entire idea that violence is masculine, or that revolutionary activism necessarily excludes women, queers, and trans people is, like other premises of nonviolence, based on historical whitewashing. Ignored are the Nigerian women occupying and sabotaging petroleum facilities; the women martyrs of the Palestinian intifada; the queer and transgender warriors of the Stonewall Rebellion; the innumerable thousands of women who fought for the Vietcong; women leaders of Native resistance to European and US genocide; Mujeres Creando (Women Creating), a group of anarcha-feminists in Bolivia; and British suffragettes who rioted and fought against cops. Forgotten are the women from the rank and file to the highest levels of leadership among the Black Panther Party, the Zapatistas, the Weather Underground, and other militant groups. The idea that fighting back somehow excludes women is absurd. Not even the history of the pacified white “First World” bears it up because even the most effective patriarchy imaginable could never prevent all transgender people and all women from militantly fighting against oppression.

This is flattening a critique. All violence is not inherently masculine. However, some ways of engaging in and utilising violence are. A lot of white manarchists do not like to engage in communication with the people around them and will often make decisions and expect people follow them. Why? Why should we? Why should we take risks that we weren't even consulted on, even in the spur of the moment? For someone who wanted to, as it usually happens, start shit?

And I don't have a problem with people antagonising oppressors, but I do think they need to be more considerate of who is around them and that they should have strategies that acknowledge other people.

That's largely what all of those groups that Peter brings up do, but this book is him getting mad at people because either they're made into strawmen or are people who he failed reading. Most of those groups? They actually engaged in strategic violence with an understanding of who was around them. Some failed miserably, but most of them knew the risks they were taking and made it known to the people around them what those risks were and that they were doing it.

This meant that people could decide if they also wanted to take those risks or provide support in another way. I'm so tired of him conflating strategic violence with violence-as-default.